R. Russell Magee
Literary Criticism
“The silence was terrible then, as tense as a bridge about to break, a tower
to fall; unendurable in its emotion, its truth bursting to be spoken.”
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (p. 347)
Jouissance, that French-inspired term reclaimed and reinvented by famed psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan during the mid-twentieth century, today remains a puzzling point of intrigue among students and scholars alike, if not an infuriatingly impenetrable critical concept to grasp. The word, in its untranslated form, refers to a kind of enjoyment, elation, excitation so great that it exceeds its metaphysical limits, extending beyond the Freudian pleasure principle and into a place of pain. It is related to a type of transgression associated, but not exclusively, with an orgasmic bliss, a sublime sensation in which the subject escapes the bounds imposed by reason, societal norms, and cultural conventions and so encounters an experience defined by a tension between physical feeling and psychological understanding, the result of which is a paradoxical pleasurable pain or painful pleasure that stands outside what can be considered solely pleasure or solely pain. In his 1966 lecture on “Psychoanalysis and medicine,” Lacan expounds on the concept:
What I call jouissance – in the sense which the body experiences itself – is always in the nature of tension, in the nature of a forcing, of a spending, even of an exploit. Unquestionably, there is jouissance at the level at which pain begins to appear, and we know that it is only at this level of pain that a whole dimension of the organism, which would otherwise remain veiled, can be experienced. (Braunstein 103)
Lacan’s remarks here convey the untranslatability of the term, how words like “enjoyment,” “elation,” and “excitation” fall short in encapsulating the concept in its entirety; that much more is needed to ground the context behind the term, context established by the complex teachings of Freud and the ways in which Lacan filtered those teachings through his own ideas to arrive at an overhauled, extrapolated concept that combines and explodes prevailing psychoanalytic approaches to desire, sexuality, and the duality between the phallic and the Other. Indeed, Lacan differentiates two types of jouissance: a male-centric “phallic jouissance” and its feminine counterpart, the “Other jouissance,” both of which are expressed and experienced in different ways. One key difference between the two is that phallic jouissance may be experienced and articulated, whereas the Other jouissance may be experienced but cannot be articulated because, as scholar Mahitosh Mandal has described, it exists “on the other side of language”:
…[T]he feminine jouissance is an experience of transgressive pleasure that is on the other side of language and that can only be experienced but cannot be articulated or represented by language. This Other jouissance can be understood side by side with the notion of “pure femininity,” truth, the Real, and the domain of “beyond the phallus” …Lacan draws attention to a certain ecstatic experience similar to the Other jouissance which is inarticulable in phallocentric language. (Mandal 283)
Mandal’s description alludes to an important aspect of the Other jouissance, that it remains outside the limits of phallocentric language, and phallogocentrism, “beyond the phallus,” denoting that the androcentric construction of language and meaning fail in the attempt to explain, articulate, and indeed, understand this specific type of jouissance, which is intrinsically feminine.
It is unsurprising, given the paradoxical uniqueness and versatility of jouissance, that other renowned philosophers, psychoanalysts, and critical theorists have used, adopted, and applied the concept in their own work. Moreover, given Lacan’s distinction between gendered polarities of the term, jouissance lends itself to feminist theory, wherein scholars such as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous have explored this Lacanian idea of the inarticulable feminine experience. Indeed, Cixous’s philosophy of écriture feminine seems to hinge upon the Other jouissance, in which feminine writing deviates from the conventional androcentric styles of writing to embrace a gynocentric strain “that inscribes femininity.” As Cixous explains in her famed essay “The Laugh of the Medusa”:
If woman has always functioned “within” the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this “within,” to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of. (Cixous 887)
To escape the linguistic bounds imposed on the feminine by traditional masculine conventions; to break out from the “discourse of man” and go “beyond the phallus” entails an experience of the Other jouissance. As Mandal writes, “the problem with feminine jouissance is that since it is ineffable and resists phallicization, it unsettles the masculine subject who happens to confront it. This jouissance may expose the phallic pretensions and threaten the dissolution and fragmentation of the false sense of unified masculine selfhood” (Mandal 284).
It is precisely this “dissolution and fragmentation” of the masculine fomented by the confrontation with the “Other jouissance” that occurs throughout the course of English author John Fowles’s 1969 third novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The novel follows an enigmatic woman named Sarah Woodruff, whose mysterious ways enchant the affections of Charles Smithson, an affluent young man engaged to his beloved Ernestina, but whom he ultimately leaves after falling in love with Sarah. Set in the English coastal town of Lyme Regis during the nineteenth century, Fowles’s novel resembles a Victorian romance; however, the narrator, a nameless character in himself, stands outside and far away from the story, his feet firmly rooted in the twentieth century with his head and pen turned backward in time. Forward his own story, the narrator imbues his narrative with the numerous elements that characterize the Victorian novel. Class structures, socioeconomic disparity, religiosity, scientific advancement, love and the role of marriage are all aspects that interweave through the tapestry of the text, adhering to the era in which the story is set. However, swirling beneath the text are the elements which inspire myriad psychoanalytical interpretations, driving the interactions, exchanges, thoughts, motivations, desires of the characters, and nowhere are these interpretations greater suggested than in the characters Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, dual characters in whose dyad Lacan’s concept of jouissance is most saliently defined.
Lacanian jouissance emerges in the dynamic interplay between the characters Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, a relationship fraught with lust, deception, and instances of great intensity. The outset of the novel sees Charles Smithson strolling down the blustery bluffs of Lyme Regis with his fiancée Ernestina, when they first encounter Sarah Woodruff, the eponymous “French Lieutenant’s Woman”:
She turned to look at him –– or as it seemed to Charles, through him. It was not so much what was positively in that face which remained with him after that first meeting, but all that was not as he had expected; for theirs was an age when the favored feminine look was the demure, the obedient, the shy. Charles felt immediately as if he had trespassed; as if the Cobb belonged to that face, and not to the Ancient Borough of Lyme. It was not a pretty face, like Ernestina’s. It was certainly not a beautiful face, by any period’s standard or taste. But it was an unforgettable face, and a tragic face. Its sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a woodland spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness. (Fowles 10)
Thus begins the tale. Sarah Woodruff is an outcast, disgraced, a “fallen woman” whose backstory explains the current sad state in which Charles and Ernestina first find her. Her story is one of tragic betrayal: she had been working as a house maid when a French naval officer by the name of Varguennes is rescued off the English coast and brought to the shore to recover under the care of Sarah. She nurses Varguennes back to health, and the two subsequently fall in love. Fully recovered, Varguennes announces his departure but vows to return for Sarah and marry her. But that promise is never fulfilled, and Sarah later discovers that Varguennes has betrayed his vow and married another woman. Sarah is forced into disgrace, tainted with a shadow in the eyes of the inhabitants of Lyme Regis, an outcast with an irreparable reputation, a woman exiled.
But Sarah is not only physically exiled from society, forced to remain aloof, distant, quiet and reserved, stuck in a state of poverty and soon subservience to the indomitable Mrs. Poulteney who hires her as a maid. Sarah is also metaphorically exiled from Victorian society: she is a woman who does not adhere to the mores and conventions of the era, a woman who wishes not to be “demure,” “obedient,” and “shy,” realizing that she will never, can never fall in line, abide by the strictures that define cultural and social sentiment. She exists in abjection, persisting in a place outside of the world in which everyone else belongs. She exemplifies the Other in relation to society. She also represents the Other in relation to not only Charles, Ernestina, and the rest of the characters, but also the narrator and even the wholistic text itself. Despite a major character with many lines of dialogue, she remains ambiguous throughout, possessing a perspective that is never unveiled except through the interactions with Charles, in the words she utters, which, as the reader slowly comes to know, do not alleviate the ambiguity at the heart of her character, if anything only exacerbating it.
Elaborating, in her formative feminist exploration into the character of Sarah Woodruff, scholar Magali Cornier Michael succinctly summarizes the obstacles that preclude a comprehensive portrait of her character:
Sarah is represented through a triple layering of voices which includes Charles,’ the male narrator,’ and Fowles’ voices. Not only do Sarah’s thoughts remain outside of the realm of the novel, but the perspective offered of Sarah is purely masculine. The novel’s failure to realize Sarah as a character and human being in her own right, whether done intentionally or not, is due in part to its exclusive use of male views. The ideological nature of any perspective is undeniable and, in this case, the male perspective, which has been and still is dominant in western culture, brings to the novel all sorts of preconceptions and myths about women. Fowles seems to be aware of the limitations of male views about women since he brings these issues to the foreground, and yet his choice of narrative technique counters that impulse of masculine critique. (Cornier Michael 225)
Cornier Michael’s remarks destabilize the ambiguity in Sarah’s character by attributing it to a matter of voice, repositioning and emphasizing the “who” that makes the claim of her mysteriousness, namely Charles and the narrator, two male voices. These two voices represent a symptom of a larger picture, that of society, who brand Sarah as the disgraced woman, a charge that reinforces and is reinforced by her mythic status. However, psychoanalytic interpreters of Fowles’s novel tend to favor another stance, one which serves to explain not only Sarah’s own ambiguity, but the incomprehensibility that dives into the depths of the symbol which Sarah exemplifies: pure femininity, or in other words, Other jouissance. Scholar Mahitosh Mandal, standing with the psychoanalysts, writes in his exploration:
…Sarah embodies what Lacan would have called an instance of “dédoublement,” whereby she attracts the attention of others only to frustrate a conclusive understanding about her; whereby she participates in the construction of phallic myth only to “unconceal” the nothingness of it; whereby she becomes the agent of fiction and truth at the same time… [T]he incomprehensibility of Sarah derives from her embodying the truth or the Real of femininity, in the Lacanian sense, which puts the Symbolic/discursive/phallic/fictional universe at a loss… (Mandal 287)
However, by combining Cornier Michael’s and Mandal’s critical interpretations, an important reading of Sarah Woodruff emerges: that the source of her ambiguity, her enigma, extends from the tension between the Other jouissance and the male-centric perspectives that strive to understand her, specifically Charles’s.
Sarah’s “unforgettable” and “tragic” face first entices Charles, the “enigmatic gaze [that] attracts Charles and sets his desire in motion…the blank look that Sarah gives Charles, a look which for Charles turns into a gaze full of mystery and in need of exploration, that sets in motion the desire and fantasy of Charles” (Mandal 289). Allure begins to give way to affection when Sarah soon confides in Charles, first asking to him to join her alone on the bluffs of Lyme Regis, to share in the silence and solitude that have become Sarah’s sole solace. Recognizing a kindred spirit in Charles, a man of erudition and culture and progressive sensibilities, Sarah soon tells him her tale of abandonment, first by Varguennes, then by society. She expounds her past with an almost purgative passion, a confessional ardor which captivates Charles, multiplying the mystery which he had first glimpsed in her and confirming his first suspicion that “there was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness,” especially when Sarah, having regaled her history, beseeches Charles not for his sympathy, but for his understanding of her reasons why. It unfolds in the twentieth chapter:
Mr. Smithson, what I beg you to understand is not that I did this shameful thing, but why I did it. Why I sacrificed a woman’s most precious possession for the transient gratification of a man I did not love… I did it so that I should never be the same again. I did it so that people should point at me, should say, there walks the French Lieutenant’s Whore – oh yes, let the word be said. So that they should know I have suffered, and suffer, as others suffer in every town and village in this land. I could not marry that man. So I married shame. (Fowles 174-75)
Sarah had traveled to France to find Varguennes, to confront him for his betrayal. But when she finds him, rather than condemning him for breaking his vow, she seduces him and the two sleep together, Sarah’s first time. Word of Varguennes’s betrayal had already got out, and when Sarah returns to Lyme Regis, she is filled with shame. However, it is this shame that Sarah uses to reclaim her sense of agency against the hostile eyes of the Lymers: shame serves as the symbolic sword Sarah selects to wield in the wake of the ruination the French lieutenant has inflicted upon her. She explains the aftermath and how shame was what had in fact saved her life:
I do not mean that I knew what I did, that it was in cold blood that I let Varguennes have his will of me. It seemed to me then as if I threw myself off a precipice or plunged a knife into my heart. It was a kind of suicide. An act of despair, Mr. Smithson. I know it was wicked…blasphemous, but I knew no other way to break out of what I was. If I had left that room, and returned to Mrs. Talbot’s, and resumed my former existence, I know that by now I should be truly dead…and by own hand. What has kept me alive is my shame, my knowing that I am truly not like other women. I shall never have children, a husband, and those innocent happinesses they have. And they will never understand the reason for my crime… Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more.” (Fowles 175)
Charles struggles to make sense of Sarah’s story: “this talk of freedom beyond the pale, of marrying shame, he found incomprehensible,” because his male perspective, entwined with the male-privileged conventions of the Victorian age which perceive femininity in terms of submission and chastity, precludes his ability to fathom a rationality that exists outside not only his own but outside all prevailing social sentiment. And yet, his attempt to cogitate and understand Sarah’s story results not in an amplification of his empathy towards her nor his ability to perceive her as a woman, a person with all her emotional and mental complexity, but rather the intensification of her mystery which has now, by this time, become intricately woven with his own sexual fantasies towards her.
…[H]e felt unbearably touched; disturbed… He saw the scene she had not detailed: her giving herself. He was at one and the same time Varguennes enjoying her and the man who sprang forward and struck him down; just as Sarah was to him both an innocent victim and a wild, abandoned woman. Deep in himself he forgave her her unchastity; and glimpsed the dark shadows where he might have enjoyed it himself. (Fowles 176)
Charles’s resulting excitation, undeniably a sexual arousal, tilts towards a jouissance boiling beneath surface of his conscious, and yet, he is unable to recognize how Sarah, in similar but contrasting fashion, broaches a jouissance of her own. The Other jouissance which Sarah’s story exemplifies, in tension with Charles’s male-centric perspective, informed and influenced by the masculine myth, becomes supplanted with his own sexual desire and the unconscious impulse towards his own jouissance. Her “freedom beyond the pale” subsequently invokes and exemplifies a freedom “beyond the phallus.”
The pleasure that Sarah receives in reclaiming her sense of agency is inextricable to the pain she receives in the ruination of her reputation. This pain and this pleasure are not exclusive; for Sarah, one cannot exist without the other. Hence, it is a kind of jouissance that Sarah experiences, and yet, that she has also extricated herself from the bounds of a society that stifles her ambition, her agency, her autonomy, bounds defined and imposed by the masculine mores and conventions of the age, also entails an experience of the Other jouissance, the type which feminist scholar Hélène Cixous has referred to as “that intense, rapturous pleasure which women know and men fear” (Gallop 114). Sarah’s early confession inaugurates a plethora of instances wherein this Other jouissance emerges throughout Fowles’s novel, but in no other instant is it more salient than the climactic scene in which Sarah and Charles sleep together for the first–and last–time.
Midway through the novel, prompted by Charles’s recommendation, Sarah leaves Lyme Regis and takes lodging in a boarding house in Exeter where Charles, returning from having met with Ernestina’s father about a potential inheritance revocation, secretly travels to meet her. At this time, Charles has reached new heights in his infatuation with Sarah, and when he arrives, he is captured by her presence, immediately taken by her, “overcome with a violent sexual desire; a lust a thousand times greater than anything he had felt…” (Fowles 347). And Sarah reciprocates his feelings. What ensues is the coital climax of the narrative, surely one of the most significant scenes in the story, though one which pales in its revelatory magnitude to that which is stored in the following chapter. Chapter forty-seven opens with Sarah and Charles lying in bed, embraced, in the wake of their act of love. Though initially “frozen in delight,” the weight of his actions come crashing down onto Charles’s conscious:
Charles – no gentle postcoital sadness for him, but an immediate and universal horror – was like a city struck out of a quiet sky by an atom bomb. All lay razed; all principle, all future, all faith, all honorable intent. Yet he survived, he lay in the sweetest possession of his life, the last man alive, infinitely isolated…but already the radioactivity of guilt crept, crept through his nerves and veins. (Fowles 351)
His pleasure has turned to pain. With guilt coursing through his veins, Charles professes how he must break off his engagement to Ernestina, but Sarah tells him not to: “I am not fit to be your wife…She is worthy of you. I am not” (352). Despite his repeated exclamations of his love for Sarah, she holds stern, decided, refusing, and when Charles continues to press her, asking if it was Varguennes who stood in her way to accepting Charles’s proposal, the grand revelation finally emerges. Sarah returns to her story of that fateful night when she and the French Lieutenant met for the final time:
When I went to where I told in Weymouth…I was still some way from the door…I saw him come out. With a woman…When they had gone, I walked away…Yes, I have deceived you. But I shall not trouble you again. (Fowles 355)
Such is the turning point in the novel: Charles realizes that Sarah had lied about sleeping with the French Lieutenant; had fabricated the whole story to inspire the shame that followed, for reasons beyond what Charles can comprehend; and that Charles himself “had forced a virgin” (Fowles 354). But Sarah tries to explain why:
You have given me the consolation of believing that in another world, another age, another life, I might have been your wife. You have given me the strength to go on living…in the here and now…There is only one thing in which I have not deceived you. I loved you…I think from the moment I saw you. In that, you were never deceived. What duped you was my loneliness. A resentment, an envy, I don’t know. I don’t know…Do not ask me to explain what I have done. I cannot explain it. It is not to be explained. (Fowles 355)
The final words of Sarah’s plea invoke and embody the Other jouissance, as her reasons for deceiving Charles elude articulation, existing “on the other side of language” (Mandal 283). Language, specifically the phallogocentric language which has structured and defined Victorian meaning, fails to encapsulate Sarah’s experiential understanding; she cannot find the words to describe what has happened, why it has happened, what she has done, why she has done it, since the resulting whirlwind of pleasure and pain is catalyzed beyond the bounds of expression and representation, beyond mimesis, beyond the Symbolic, “beyond the phallus.”
However, Sarah’s inability to articulate her feelings, reasons, and understanding reappears in the final moments of the novel, in one of the three plausible novel endings Fowles offers the reader, the one in which, after two years of futile searching, Charles finally finds Sarah and travels to London, where she is working for and living with the Rossettis, to meet her. Their reunion is fraught with the emotional intensity inspired by the revelation Charles had discovered the last time they were together; two years’ time has not tarnished his puzzlement, confusion, and his desire to understand the un-understandable. And so, a cataclysmic confrontation ensues. Charles condemns Sarah for using him, for deceiving him, accusing her of never loving him, even if only briefly. Sarah does not deny her deception but tries to explain her refusal to marry him: “I believe I was right to destroy what had begun between us. There was a falsehood in it” (Fowles 448). But Charles, resolute in his relentlessness, presses on, and Sarah, eventually giving in to exhaustion, admits her inability to understand her own reasons and even her own self:
You do not understand. It is not your fault. You are very kind. But I am not to be understood…I am not to be understood even by myself. And I can’t tell you why, but I believe my happiness depends on my not understanding. (Fowles 452)
Sarah’s admission is the fulcrum balancing pleasure and pain, knowledge and unknowing, Subject and Other, the Symbolic and the Real. It is the exemplification of the Other jouissance, an experience that cannot be articulated nor understood, and her recognition of this fact removes her from the phallic myth and symbolically places her outside the realm of Victorian society, outside a world defined by male-centric-inspired mores and social conventions. Yet, that is precisely the world in which Sarah remains physically trapped. Sarah is a woman inside and outside of her time, presiding at an edge, a precipice, suspended between jouissance and knowledge. In his study, Mahitosh Mandal offers an explanation for Sarah’s position and its relation to Lacan:
It is important how Lacan understands the relation between jouissance and knowledge. Knowledge, according to Lacan, is motivated by some failure of pleasure, some insufficiency of pleasure: in a word, dissatisfaction. Displeasure relates to knowledge; pleasure relates to the lack of knowledge. In the Lacanian R-S-I schema, pleasure of jouissance verges more on the Real (the unrepresentable) and knowledge verges more on the Symbolic (the linguistic). Sarah seems to make a striking point here by linking “enjoyment” with “I do not know why” or linking the feminine jouissance with the Real. (Mandal 294)
As Mandal’s assertion implies, the connection between the Other jouissance and the Real emerges in the character Sarah Woodruff. Here, in the final pages of the novel, Sarah becomes the nexus that not only ties together the love, passion, and sexual desire in Charles and his fractured sense of selfhood which persists into and out of the novel’s ambiguous end, but also the physical inescapability of her position inside the Victorian society founded on androcentric, male-privileging social mores and conventions and the symbolic transcendence from those bounds. In other words, Sarah, as jouissance personified, remains at once painfully inside and pleasurably outside the world whose stifling strictures strive to strangle her sense of agency. But through jouissance, Sarah is able to reclaim her sense of agency, by becoming an enigma, a “swarm of mysteries,” a woman who defies comprehension. She embodies the reasons why the word jouissance remains untranslated, a “puzzling point of intrigue,” a character whose impenetrability sources her strength, power, and ultimate fulfillment. To borrow from Cixous, Sarah is a woman who functions “without” the discourse of man, a woman extricated from phallocentrism and phallogocentrism, to exist in a state of inarticulability and, therefore, live free.
The exploration of jouissance offers a critical entryway into unearthing the mysteries that permeate John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Lacan’s concept aids to unveil the intricate interplay between desire, pleasure, and societal constraints, all of which influence, affect, and hinder both Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff. Jouissance is a prism that helps to clarify the obfuscated aspects that define these characters, especially Sarah, a character who defies not only the conventions of Victorian literature but also conventional literary methods of understanding character. Utilizing jouissance as such a prism to view and analyze her character enables the reader to untangle the psychoanalytic threads that weave throughout the text, untethering them from Victorian convention and discovering the ways in which they rend and reach beyond the text. It is in and through jouissance, in “the nature of tension,” that the interconnected polarities of pleasure and pain which persist through the novel, in constant conflict and combat, “which would otherwise remain veiled, can be experienced.”
Works Cited
Braunstein, Néstor A. “Desire and Jouissance in the Teachings of Lacan.” The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 102–115. Print. Cambridge Companions to Literature.
Cixous, Hélène, et al. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875–93. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173239. Accessed 28 July 2024.
Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. 1969. Bay Back Books, 1998.
Gallop, Jane. “Beyond the Jouissance Principle.” Representations, no. 7, 1984, pp. 110–15. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2928458. Accessed 28 July 2024.
Mandal, Mahitosh. “‘Eyes a Man Could Drown in’: Phallic Myth and Femininity in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, 2017, pp. 274–98. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5325/intelitestud.19.3.0274. Accessed 28 July 2024.
Michael, Magali Cornier. “‘Who Is Sarah?’: A Critique of The French Lieutenant’s Woman’s Feminism.” Critique, vol. 28, no. 4, Summer 1987, p. 225. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.1987.9936460.
R. Russell Magee is a reader, writer, and researcher living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with an affinity for alliteration and other wondrous word things. He enjoys long novels, modernism, and cheesesteak egg rolls. Find more of his work through his Instagram @russellmagee or subscribe to his free Substack: briefmusings.substack.com
Photo Credit: Abubakar Sadiq Mustapha is a multimedia storyteller whose works focus on climate change, displacement, identity, and culture. He believes in the power of photography and how it can be used for mental health and development. His work has appeared in the Ebedi Review, Ake Review, Lolwe, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, The Nigeria Review, The Shallow Tales Review, Libretto Magazine, Salamander Ink Magazine and elsewhere. He is a fellow of the Bada Murya Fellowship and a 2023 fellow of the Imodoye Writers Residency. He is one of the finalists for the Africa Soft Power Climate Change Photo Essay Prize and was selected as one of the overall best for the Wiki Loves Africa 2023 Photography contest in Nigeria.
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