(This is the second of eight chapbooks from this collection that Keguro Macharia and I are reading and thinking about. Read Keguro on Gbenga Adesina here.) As with most chapbooks, there is a general singularity of purpose to Gbenga Adesina’s Painter of Water, a short book of poems which mostly focuses on the plague of war in northern Nigeria. That purpose—for which the speaker is the reference point—is the work of mourning which must be done, and for which—the speaker seems to fear—he will be inadequate: with some exceptions, nearly every poem very visibly struggles to make burning silences into songs, to find ways of making the unspeakable absences of loss and violation into something musical, something poetic. But that struggle comes to the fore in these poems, in a way that the pain and grief and loss itself does… Read More...

I’ve been thinking about how the most tedious “authenticity” debates are the ones demanding that writers be Africans, or whatever authentic thing they must be; I’ve been thinking about how such demands put the burden on the writer, because what’s really going on is an effort to tell writers what they can and can’t write; I’ve been thinking about how rarely we ask someone to read Africanishly, and how silly it sounds when we do. The more interesting question is: how to read this book of poems, what helps, how to help? I don’t know if it helps to read Africanishly. It helps that I met Ngwatilo, once, and we had doughnuts and coffee in a weird Vancouver doughnuts-and-coffee shop that she suggested (she made this google-map walking directions thing for me to find it; I think I had a… Read More...

Does “African poetry” exist? It’s the worst sort of question, because the answer is too easy to be interesting: Yes. There are poets who are African—lots of them—and when Africans make poetry, that poetry is “African poetry.” There are poets who are Africans, today; there have, also, always been Africans who were poets. So, yes. And yet, what is it that exists? This is a harder question, and one worth asking... even if an answer is impossible. In a way, African poetry is older than “Africa” itself, and more African. “Africa” was a term first coined by Europeans, perhaps two thousand years ago, the Latin word for the norther rim of what is now Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia. Dating back to a time when Southern Europe and Northern Africa were closely linked by commerce and strife into a single Mediterranean civilization,… Read More...

Borders are weird, bureaucratic spaces whose illogic unfolds under the sign of the Kafkaesque. Borders are an uncanny contradiction, an anarchic totalitarianism. On the one hand, a border is a frontier, a place where the nation-state ends, where the Weberian sense of “modernity” comes apart; on the other hand, borders are where the nation frays and becomes only the state, where a militarized sense of total security takes over. Because borders are so weird, words proliferate. Along with arbitrary, nonsensical violence—and strange, unpredictable exceptions—people talk a lot and lots of papers get filed, even as all of it is, in practice, evacuated of meaning. Nothing promised at the border really means anything, but it means it at least twice. Borders are tedious and boring and empty, but also you might die, you never know, anything can happen. Borders are where… Read More...

You are reading the Chilean novelist Carlos Labbé. According to the blurb on the front of Navidad and Matanza—his first book translated into English—he “begins to fuck with your head from the first page.” On the cover of Loquela, his second, you will read that Labbé “wreaks havoc on narrative rules from the start and keeps doing it.” How will you proceed? You must choose. One way to navigate these novels would be to think of this novel as part of the European avant-garde tradition. According to some of the blurbs, Labbé is “a literary descendent of Roberto Bolaño and Andrés Neuman” and also “a hybrid of Julio Cortázar and Paul Auster.” And sure, why not? But blurb writers love using these kinds of genealogies to create a sense of coherence for writers whose work leaves us grasping at straws,… Read More...

To criticize The Force Awakens for “recycling” the first three Star Wars movies—to complain that it’s “un-original” compared to that original work of genius—misses the point of the franchise so thoroughly and dramatically that this critical impulse seems more interesting to me than the movie itself. The one thing the original trilogy wasn’t was original. Similarly, The Force Awakens is great, but it isn’t interesting. The jokes are good, the action is organic and compelling, the characters are well inhabited by competent actors, and the cinematography and music is excellent and consistently inventive. But everything that puts you in the moment, when you’re watching it, falls apart as soon as you turn your brain back on. As experience, as ritualistic performance, as society-wide holiday, and as entertainment-industrial-complex, Star Wars is a strange and magnificent and disgusting enterprise. As original story,… Read More...

(1) Guilaine Kinouani France is still a country which uses the everyday expression “du travail d’arabe” (literarily ‘Arab’s work’) to refer to botched or poor quality work. A country that is so removed from the violence it inflicts onto its racial minorities that it has no qualms using this expression as the title of one of its movies whilst simultaneously denying all responsibility for the hurt, tensions and offence this causes. A country where just a few years ago, the appointment of the first ever Black newsreader, Harry Roselmack, on the national channel TF1 (the equivalent of BBC1), caused demonstrations and uproar because, wait for it… he was Black. A country that still bans all-Black cast movies. “Hatred breeds hatred”: Charlie Hebdo, marginalisation and terrorism (2) Laila Lalami What happened in Paris on November 13 has happened before, in a… Read More...

An immature, overly-coddled Yale student lashed out after feeling that his “safe space” had been violated. I’m talking, of course, about George W. Bush. Isn’t the War on Terror nothing but an attempt to maintain the safe spaces of the cosmopolitan elite? At a time when black college students are being called “fascist” and “immature” for trying to carve out a safe space for themselves on campus it seems worth while to ask this question. Both tasks are equally impossible, but one actually brought us closer to fascism by restricting our civil liberties and ensuring that we waged perpetual war for perpetual peace, while the other only brought about fascism in the minds of critics on the left and right whose minds imagined the slippery slope that would be created by taking student’s concerns seriously. As Malcolm Harris has shown,… Read More...

Every time some clever white person puts on yellow-face or uses a black name (or any variation thereof) in order to benefit from some real or imagined affirmative action benefit, the thing they haven’t done is demonstrate that the system is skewed against white people. If anything, they’ve shown that adding a situational advantages of non-whiteness to the structural advantages of whiteness can lead to success. But it’s the ability to pick and choose, depending on the situation, which makes whiteness the real advantage. Only white people can play this “card,” the ethnicity that’s there when you need it, but disappears when you don’t. (more…) Read More...

On Friday, the Duke Chronicle—the student paper—ran a story whose headline declared “Freshmen skipping ‘Fun Home’ for moral reasons.”: “Several incoming freshmen decided not to read “Fun Home” because its sexual images and themes conflicted with their personal and religious beliefs.” Freshman Brian Grasso posted in the Class of 2019 Facebook page July 26 that he would not read the book “because of the graphic visual depictions of sexuality,” igniting conversation among students.” Since then, the story has been picked up by: CNN, USA Today, Salon, The New Civil Rights Movement, the Washington Post, the Onion AV club, Inquisitr, Slate, the Daily Beast, and a variety of other newsy-journalistic-ish outlets. But as far as one can tell, Claire Ballantine for the Duke Chronicle is the only journalist who has actually seen Freshman Brian Grasso’s inflammatory words. And this is as… Read More...

"The fortress-mansion has high walls built of ashblack-brown volcanic stone, the same stone cut into large bricks for the heavy, fortified-hacienda-style architecture inside, which included a massive watchtower with arched windows, topped by a crenellated mirador. To provide access during the fortress's construction, El Indio had to carve out a new side street, which he named Dulce Olivia after the actress Olivia de Havilland, whom he had some kind of thing for. Three seemingly separate residences—did secret corridors or sliding bookcases connect them?—faced the main courtyard, which had a dry fountain in the middle. A broad stone staircase led back into the rest of the mansion, always permeated by the chill of cold stone, and filled with staircases and corridors and rooms and galleries and halls that had once held huge parties attended by Marilyn Monroe and other stars but that… Read More...

Short Story Day Africa is a wonderful initiative that was started by the South African novelist Rachel Zadok -- author of Gem Squash, Tokoloshe and Sister-Sister -- and in the three years of their existence, they've already managed to do excellent things. In the last two years, they've put out two of the best anthologies of new fiction I've read in some time (Feast, Famine & Potluck and Terra Incognita: New Short Speculative Stories from Africa) as well as a lovely looking anthology of young fiction by young people, Rapunzel is Dead, that I just purchased for $0.99 (and so can you). They're fundraising for their third anthology Water -- you can donate here -- and I anticipate it will be amazing. Did I mention that you can donate here? You can donate here. I had a chance to meet Rachel a month ago in Kampala, and interviewed her over… Read More...

Namwali Serpell’s “The Sack” stands on its own, if it must. When I discussed the story with a classroom full of undergraduates—as part of my “Global Contemporary Short Story” class—I think they found it both rewarding and challenging, which is a nice way of saying it was frustrating, but that there can be something nice about being frustrated. There is a certain formal unity to the story, in that the beginning feels like a beginning and the ending feels like an ending—leaving the middle free to feel like itself—and yet, at the same time, that narrative arc does anything but resolve. It ends up where it began, yet inverted, like running your hand along a Möbius strip until you reach the same point (but underneath) and there’s nothing to do but keep going until you get back to the beginning.… Read More...