History is neither formula
Nor science
It shall not repeat
Despite apparent echoes
and destructive desires
Learn to forget your past
Hold just the frame of learnings
Stand back you cannot know all history
You tripped the explosive trigger
And what you have done?
All goes forward
Stride and footstep
Trust is everything
Humanity is a game
We have no choice but to play
You can wash your collar
But your shirt shall still carry the odour
Senses want familiar
Corrupt, manipulated
and selfish perspective
But remember
Life’s triumph and failure is within
There are no excuses
Not history
Not science
Just constructive deeds
Audio – History is Not Science
History is Not Science vs. Nolan Oswald-Dennis’s Wall Drawing – Author’s Notes
I saw Nolan Oswald-Dennis’s wall drawing “options, 2019” at the Greek Orthodox School in Beyoğlu during the 2025 Istanbul Biennial, and its precise, looping geometry immediately impressed me. My poem, History is Not Science, written around a decade before, had for me always carried an anti-deterministic instinct about history, so encountering an artwork that visualised history through spirals, ratios, and repetitions was both arresting and thought-provoking.
Nolan Oswald-Dennis (b. 1988, Lusaka; based in Johannesburg) was described in the exhibition as a para-disciplinary artist whose practice explores the political, spatial, and metaphysical infrastructures inherited from colonial modernity. Trained in architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand and later in art, culture, and technology at MIT, he works across diagrammatic drawing, modelling, and installation to examine what he describes as a “black consciousness of space.” His Biennial piece presents history as a system that loops, resonates, and mirrors itself, almost an architecture of time.
Placed beside my poem, the contrast becomes sharp but hopefully fruitful. While his diagram suggests recurrence and patterned inevitability, my poem insists on unpredictability, choice, and individual moral responsibility. Nevertheless, I deeply respect his perspective, as the dialogue between these two positions feels unexpectedly generative. Together, I hope the artwork and the poem encourage viewers and readers to reflect on both the structures that shape us and the human decisions that continually reshape what history may yet become, especially in this age of AI.
Return to the Beginning of the Poem
Go to the following poem in the collection: “Inhuman Machine“