#LitWednesday - Emmanuel Iduma in conversation with Lidudumalingani for the JRB
The JRB: The book is anchored by photographs, and images have a particular way of arranging and evoking memories. You also employ dreams to stretch, I felt, the extent to which memories can be unreliable and also what we think of genre. Can you tell me first how you decided on the images in the book and their arrangement, and then about the role dreams play in the book?
Emmanuel Iduma: My hope was to work within dream as genre, which has a long literary history—think of Michel Leiris’s Nights as Day, Days as Night. The real intent, however, was to make a mash-up of dreams and photography, to see if what is evoked in photography is similar to what happens in dreams. If I could do this, I imagined, I could achieve a destabilisation of memory; I could trouble the concept of indexicality. It is not just that occurrences in dreams aren’t linear, but what happens in them seems utterly believable, despite their absurdity.
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