We almost died thrice…
A letter from Lagos by Wanlov the Kubolor. I dey lie for some hotel room in a venue called Moods for Surulere. This venue, run by a Fanti man from Sekondi who was here before the Ghana-must-go time, has everything from fast food chicken to karaoke to rooms for hire. We came by road from […]
The Bite and the Embrace
A Letter from Malabo by Recaredo Silebo Boturu. I’m writing from here in the city of Clarence, or, if you prefer it, Santa Isabel, or, if it’s more comfortable, the city of Malabo. I am here in this tiny city surrounded by greenery and filled with shantytowns and apartment buildings, entrenched and choking from the heat […]
The Face: Cartography of the Void
Chris Abani has lived in several places and been assumed to be of numerous and widely varying origins, ethnicities and parentage. In this excerpt from his memoir, he pauses to trace the map of being in the realm of “neither, nor”. Call OTHER BROTHER: Hey, G. says you’re asking for face jokes. ME: Not really. […]
A Brief History of Mapping
by Stacy Hardy. In 1921, the independent Polish scholar Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski appropriated mathematician Eric Temple Bell’s epigram, “the map is not the thing mapped” to coin the phrase, “the map is not the territory”. In The Medium is the Message, Marshall McLuhan rehashed the argument – that all media are “extensions” of our human […]
How Close Are You To This Place?
by Karen Press. Where is the heart of darkness? We think we know. It’s the impenetrably savage jungle of ‘the Congo’. It’s the depraved misery of Mr Kurtz. It’s the sweating, terrifying bulk of Marlon Brando. But for Marlow, Joseph Conrad’s faux-naif narrator, darkness begins on a boat moored in the Thames, surrounded by mists that render the city beyond the vessel […]