Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is one of my favorite new novelists--see my profile of her "Let’s Tell This Story," and my interview with her, "Postcoloniality Sells"--and she's allowed me to post a short excerpt from her second novel, Nnambi, a work in progress. The novel is about a ten year old girl, Kirabo, growing  up under the shadow of an absent mother. May 1975 “Once a day came?” Kirabo’s ten years old voice cut shrilly through the chatter of the teenagers. Their heads turned. The silence that fell could have brought down trees. Two dozen eyes bore into Kirabo. For some time, because of the silence, Kirabo’s call resonated in the air. Gradually, the teenagers’ ‘how dare’ turned to sullen anger. Another child might have been intimidated by the umbrage. Not Kirabo. She stared straight, her mouth in a defiant pout. She was the kabejja… Read More...

American Snipper is so good but holy shit im tired American Snipper is a must watch film Going to see American Snipper with dad tonight. I could really regret this as I hate violent films American snipper was an amazing movie. Chills all throughout. Thank you Chief Kyle for your service. I've never been in a theatre that was so quiet after a movie like it just was after American Snipper American Snipper was hands down da best movie I've seen in a minute. Leaving American Snipper in tears. Such an amazing movie. Deffs wanna see American Snipper American Snipper is awesome. 1 of the best movies I've ever seen. How do we silence the liberals. God Bless Our Soldiers. Saw American Snipper and I am speechless. God Bless our armed forces and all the sacrifices they make. American snipper… Read More...

(a guest post by friend of the blog, Shailja Patel) Rape cartoons are funny if it's inconceivable to you that you could ever be raped. If you live in a bubble of gender privilege that insulates you from all consequences of rape culture. AIDS jokes are funny if you've never loved someone who died of AIDS. If you live in a bubble that allows you not to know that millions of Africans died, thousands of gay men died, of criminal state indifference and denialism. Because they were, after all, only blacks and queers. Comedy material, not lives worth grieving. Ebola cartoons are funny. Unless your partner is a public health doctor, forced to choose every day between treating patients without protective clothing or abandoning them to save her own life. Cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed naked, on all fours, anus… Read More...

In 2014, three little books were published by three “big” authors, and those little books have been mostly ignored, so far as I can tell, by almost everyone. Chris Abani’s The Face: Cartography of the Void has been overshadowed by his most recent novel, The Secret History of Las Vegas, the just published Letter to Jimmy will probably be the most neglected of Alain Mabanckou’s generally under-appreciated oeuvre, and if you haven’t read Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues, you certainly haven’t read her little book of her Kreisel lectures, Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home. There’s no scandal in the way these kinds of little books get written only to disappear; these are odd little books published on relatively small presses by writers who are, themselves, more widely respected than they are well-known, especially in the United States. Of course, being an… Read More...

I. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen opens with a sequence of anecdotes, a catalog of racist micro-aggressions and “moments [that] send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs.” Being mistaken for a black person by a realtor who expected the person she talked to on the phone to come to see the house; being mistaken for a black person by a co-worker who confuses the names of the two black people at the company; being mistaken for a black person by someone else on the plane. Of course, these aren’t mistakes, but they also are mistakes: Claudia Rankine is black, yes, of course, but being mistaken for a black person is the sort of mistake—the sort of “there must be some mistake”—which cannot be real, but is. It’s an accurate mistake, accurately reflecting the maddeningly absurd and… Read More...

Spoiler: at the beginning of the last episode of Serial, Sarah Koenig tells us that she’s going to have an ending. But she doesn’t. She also tells us that she’s going to give us her opinion, but she doesn’t really do that either. She says what she would do if she was on a jury — she would vote to acquit — but that’s not an opinion, that’s a refusal of certainty. In the end, she doesn’t uncover and show us the truth of what really happened, and she knows it, and says so. Which is to say, she is still basically where she was at the beginning of the series: Adnan could be innocent but maybe he isn’t. This is where we started. By the end, we have a lot more facts and information, as the story gets piled… Read More...

It may surprise you to learn that Taiye Selasi’s short story, “Driver,” absolutely seethes with class antagonism. It does so very quietly. “I am the full-time driver here,” is the first line of the story; “I am not going to kill my employers” is the second. Instead, the protagonist—Webster, a formerly college-bound young man whose ambitions were halted by his father’s illness, and who has become a driver for a wealthy Ghanaian family—writes “I will make just a few observations.” This is all he will do. He will not kill them. He will merely see them. He does not burn down his employers’ house, for example, but he does make some heated observations: the madam’s flowers are, she tells him, the “toast of all of Ghana”; some of us, he responds, do not have bread. But he doesn’t say it;… Read More...

University of Leeds professor Brendon Nicholls made a list of the “Five African Novels to Read Before You Die” yesterday, and it’s a fine list, if your best-case scenario is that literate first-world types manage to read a handful of creative works from Africa in their lifetime. And let’s be real, most Westerners are not even going to do that. So his list is fine, albeit extremely predictable: Achebe and Ngugi, of course, and let’s add Ayi Kwei Armah’s most canonical novel—because we need more than one West African male novelist from the 60’s—and, hmm, oh, shoot, we need some women, so, okay, Tsitsi Dangerembga, obviously, and Bessie Head, I guess. But not the really hard Bessie Head novel, let’s try the one that won’t confuse people. DONE. I’m giving Nicholls some good-natured sass, here (sorry dude), because, as someone… Read More...

Protests Flare After Ferguson Decision Fury Boils From Plains to Both Coasts Protests erupt in Ferguson Ferguson burning after grand jury announcement Ferguson Decision Sparks Violence Fires, looting erupt after police officer is not indicted Burning Rage Fires burn in Ferguson, gunshots heard in streets Smoldering City. Ferguson in flames: Officer cleared in teen's shooting death No Indictment: Ferguson inflamed Ferguson Burning Violence flares after grand jury forgoes any charge against officer in Michael Brown shooting Fires, violence and looting in Ferguson after grand jury decision Ferguson erupts: Officer Darren Wilson cleared in Michael Brown shooting death Chaos returns to streets of Ferguson after police officer goes unindicted "Burn This Shit Down" Mayhem and Protests Engulf Ferguson With no indictment, chaos fills streets in Ferguson, Mo. These are all headlines from major newspapers and news organizations based in the United States. Most… Read More...

Toni Morrison is delightful on Colbert, and it was a fun thing to watch. And it’s a small thing, but I was interested to note that Vox Dot Com has a headline in which they declare: I saw a few people passing that framing around on twitter, and I was surprised. I thought, huh, what a surprising thing for her to say! I'd never heard her say that. Has she said that before? A little digging around gave me this Paris Review interview, from 1993:   This is Morrison rejecting the terms of the question, the implication that one is not the other, and the demand that she disclaim being specifically African-American. long the same lines, in a 1981 Newsweek -- "Toni Morrison's Black Magic," by Jean Strouse -- it is reported that "Morrison hates it when people say she is not a… Read More...

Ever since I got my hands on the Africa39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara anthology, I’ve been stealing a moment here or there, often on the bus to work, to drop myself into the world of one or two of the stories. I haven’t even finished it yet, because I rarely read more than one at a time, and never more than two; they’re too different, too diverse, and too radically irreconcilable with each other. This is often the way with anthologies, or collections of short stories. You get so firmly embedded in the world of one story that when you have to drop everything and reorient yourself to the next story—to give up one world and take on a new one—it takes real mental work. You get attached to the first story, and you don’t want to give… Read More...

If a man assaults a woman’s body, where does she seek redress? Where does she find justice? If she stands in a public space and proclaims her grievance—or if her sister proclaims it for her—she will be told that she is in the wrong place. The public is the wrong place for such statements. She should go to a different place, the courts: There she will find justice. She should trust justice. If she goes to the courts, if she proclaims her grievance there, and demands justice, they will tell her to stop talking. We will handle this, they will say, soaking up her words with the alacrity of a paper towel blotting up a spilled drink. Give us your statement; release it to us. We will hear you--after all, we are justice--but after that, let no one hear you… Read More...

"You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions." (Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes) The idea of “the facts” has done a lot of damage in its career, but one of its most insidious effects is its ability to justify inaction. “Until we know all the facts, we can’t” is a phrase that gets placed at the beginning of many a cowardly sentence; in a world where “we may never know what really happened,” waiting for all the facts to come out is a little like waiting for Jesus to come and fix things. When we don’t want to act, it can be a relief to pretend we don’t know what we know—to arbitrarily raise the standards of proof we require—and… Read More...