Portrait of the Artist as a Daughter
by Ed Pavlić. “Where material is absent, dialectics is groundless.” – James Snead, “On Repetition in Black Culture” “For me to go find my father,” writes Harmony Holiday, “has meant to fall in love or infatuation with black artists who are a lot like him. This search morphs from being about one man, to being about […]
Undoing the Spell
by Ben Verghese. Many of the dominant narratives of the partition focus on events in 1947 – easy-to-caricature leaders, the two-nation theory and the birth of Pakistan. How then do we find ways to duly speak of one land mass being forcibly carved up; of the multiple peoples displaced; of the umpteen lives lost, and uncountable, […]
The Undeveloped Intellectual in Zombie-land
by Ibrahim Farghali. This is Rakha’s second novel after his début, The Book of the Sultan’s Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars, in which he addressed the identity crisis created in Egyptian society by Wahhabism, which was imported into the country by Egyptians who went to work in Saudi Arabia in the […]
Breaking the Rules Beautifully
by Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire. “Breaking the rules attracts implications, Jennifer.” I overhear British writer and feminist Sara Maitland delivering these warning shots to Jennifer Makumbi. Makumbi has chosen to publish her debut novel on the continent and the snub felt by the publishing industry in the West has probably become more pronounced as Kwani?, a Kenyan […]
The Other Brother
by Bongani Kona. At the centre of Masande Ntshanga’s debut novel, The Reactive, are two brothers, Luthando and Lindanathi Mda, born a year apart. By the time the book begins one of them is dead. “Ten years ago, I helped a handful of men take my little brother’s life,” Lindanathi says in the novel’s unforgettable opening […]