[THE RECREATION OF YOUR FLESH HAS BEGUN]

Seven Samurai | Akira Kurosawa | 1954

Astronomy sampler. The Gate Beautiful. 1903.

[More page turning] Oh. Goldeneye maybe?

Does no one realize how racist this assumption can be? Most LLMs are trained heavily on Commonwealth and other standardized English corpora, yet now when people from Commonwealth countries naturally write in polished English, others immediately say it “sounds AI-generated.”

that said, these posts have the absolute wrong end of the stick. first of all, the very first to call this story out were -- understandably, because they were the ones most closely watching the commonwealth prize regional winners -- Black and caribbean writers and poets, like chiemeziem everest udochukwu and previous commonwealth prize winner and fellow trinidadian kevin jared hosain.

secondly, OP (and many, many people in the notes) correctly describes a phenomenon -- the way in which AI writing can resemble styles of writing common in nations that were formerly colonized by the UK -- almost certainly in reference to marcus olang's essay I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. but this phenomenon has absolutely nothing to do with jamir nazir's piece. the similarities olang' draws between kenyan english and chatgpt are strict structure, the use of specific sayings, and a propensity to use 'wow words' --

The third, and perhaps most important commandment, was that of structure. An essay had to be a perfect edifice. The introduction was the foundation, the body was the walls, and the conclusion was the roof, neatly summarising the moral of the story and, if you were clever, circling back to the introductory proverb to create a satisfying, if predictable, loop. We were taught to build our paragraphs around a strong topic sentence. We were taught the sin of the sentence fragment and the virtue of the compound-complex sentence.

whatever you might think of "the serpent in the grove", i think it is extremely safe to say that this very much does not describe it.

and now i want to get onto the reblog, which really truly bothers me because of the ways it is unintentionally closing ranks around the profoundly racist and imperialist set of pre-approved conceptions of 'postcolonial literature'. because frankly, the serpent in the grove is not thoughtful or complex--it is barely coherent, in very obvious ways. everyone who has written about it has pulled all the same quotes, but here's a few of the nonsense metaphors to illustrate:

A man who had cleared brush like a conscience

Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission

Coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all

She had the kind of walking that made benches become men

(this sort of bluntly failed similie is incredibly characteristic of ai creative writing by the by, far more than any of the elements olang' complains about being accused over, which mostly show up in technical/conversational AI material. @nostalgebraist calls it the "eyeball kick". my favourite exmaple i've seen over the years is “the moon was truly mother-of-pearl, the white of the sea, rubbed smooth by the groins of drowned brides.”)

what it is, however, is essentially an intense pastiche of all the frankly racist tropes of "prestige postcolonial literature". i mean, look at what judge sharma taylor said about it:

Jamir Nazir’s language is sublime—precise yet richly evocative—conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy. Through sharp sensory detail, he renders the Grove as a living presence, where labour, landscape, and memory are intimately entwined. Polished and confident, this is a story with a melodic voice that lingers long after the final line. Jamir Nazir’s prose pulses with a voice of restraint and quiet authority—a beautifully told and assured piece of storytelling.

writing from the global periphery, from the caribbean or africa or south east asia or latin america, is always "rich", it is always "sensory," "lush", it is always "about landscape and memory", it is always "melodic." these are exhausted tropes that have been used to describe basically all literature from ex-colonies for the last 50 years, regardless of what they're actually like

latin american writers and critics like sylvia molloy and jorge volpi have talked about the "choke-chain" of 'magical realism', this titanic sweeping label that gets applied to anything coming out of latin america, something that for a long time sreved as a measuring stick to evaluate Real Prestigious Worthwhile Latin American Literature.

there is a commonality there, and that is that literature from The Third World is meant to be about the Land, about the Peoples, about the Personal Struggles, about the Rich Fantastical Vibrant Melody History Memory--this is a mold that has been imposed first by the european and usamerican literary establishments and from there internalized and adopted in literary scenes around the world. volpi criticizes the picture of latin america that the "magical realism" wants to push onto all latin american ltierature as one of "irrationality [...] a lack of reason".

incomprehensibility--the very reaction in the reblog of "oh, i don't understand this, it must be some Cultural Element i'm not understanding" is treated as a de facto mark of authenticity. it's the mass exoticization of this literature, treating it as some endlessly mysterious Other whose incomprehensiblity gives the white literary world a look into the Mysterious Foreign Mind

and it is genuinely really frustrating after years of authors from the global periphery (and in various diaspora, because this type of ritualized Authenticty Signalling is a huge feature of prestige diaspora literature and the subject of the exact same ongoing fierce internal debate, e.g. this piece or this one) trying to escape these stifling tropes, these exotifying expectations, to have a story that--AI or not (and i don't think the 'not' is very likely)--thoughtlessly and mechanistically repeats them, drowning itself in florid incoherence, get this kind of defense from people who earnestly think they are being anti-racist.

i leave off with a couple of good pieces on the story itself and its reception:

And was like, uh, are you missing something there, buddy? Like all that red in northern Africa? Because that's a lot of red.

And I was going to give them the benefit of doubt, since I don't know much about the climate in Northern Africa, aside from Morroco and Egypt, which seem like really hot places, so you know, maybe it's normal there?

But nope, that's not the case:

Some selections from the article:

"The region has been experiencing some of the most intense heat waves in recent years, but in many cases they’ve been under-reported due to misconceptions about Africans’ ability to withstand them.

“Africa is seen as a sunny and hot continent,” said Amadou Thierno Gaye, a research scientist and professor at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. “People think we are used to heat, but we are having high temperatures for a longer duration. Nobody is used to this.”

[More page turning] Oh. Goldeneye maybe?