Some literary discoveries simply refuse to stay contained within a polite commute
Dear diary, I finally got my hands on a genuinely rare English translation of a nineteenth century Yoruba text today, and made the mistake of starting it during my Tube ride home, which meant I spent the last three stops quietly crying behind sunglasses while commuters politely pretended not to notice.
There is something genuinely overwhelming about encountering your own cultural inheritance in a language you can actually read fully, especially when so much of this particular literary tradition remains locked away in archives most people never think to look for, let alone translate properly for a wider audience.
What The Text Actually Captured
The specific passage that undid me described a homecoming, written with a precision and emotional honesty that made a century and a half of distance feel genuinely irrelevant, the actual feeling described sitting exactly where I recognised it in my own chest.
Why This Kind Of Access Matters So Much
I moved to London from Lagos years ago now, and I think there is a particular kind of hunger that comes with living between two places, always slightly reconstructing a home you carry mostly in memory, and finding a text like this one feels like discovering a fuller, more textured version of that memory than I had access to before.
A Small Reading Break Once I Got Home
I caught up on some genuinely sharp contemporary satire about African political coverage in Western media, a useful contrast to the century old text I had just spent the evening with, reminding me how much and how little has genuinely changed.
More literary discoveries and London life always documented at my page.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/author/junglepussy/