Come On Up, Sweetheart
In an “intensely private encounter” with the personal letters of James Baldwin, Ed Pavlić uncovers various selves – writer, lover, brother, son – and the copious and conflicted record of the author’s creation over decades. “What’s happening to we?” SZA, “Warm Winds” (2015) “Incoherence” was James Baldwin’s favourite word to describe Americans’ chronic inability to […]
A Brief History of Student Protests
[hr] By Stacy Hardy [hr] “Bile bums my inside!/ I feel like vomiting! For all our young men/ Were finished in the forest/Their manhood was finished/ In the classrooms/ Their testicles/ Were smashed/ With large books!” First published 50 years ago, these incendiary lines in Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino capture the ongoing antagonism towards […]
Fighting Shadows
Lidudumalingani Mqombothi hails from a place where the game of ukuqula is part of the fabric of village life, and of the passage from boyhood to manhood over generations. Attempts to contemporise a shadow form, in the realm of organised sport in urban centres of South Africa, have failed, while the play on village ground […]
Adult Alphabet
‘R for rent, S for sex, T for evermore taxing things….’ Rustum Kozain‘s poetical dictionary (abridged) makes the traditional dictionary hiccup, divulging the sex within the standard definition and the power imbalances in the pronunciation key. A is for apple, Ava and Adam; B is for their banishment, far better than Eden. C is for […]
Sexing Africa, Again
[hr] Dominique Malaquais spins together Lil’ Kim, burkas, Muslim women, Somali Mata-Haris and the Great Female Mutilation Hoax to arrive at a veiled essays-in-fragments that confronts western fetishes, fallacies and fears around African womanhood and sexuality. Her veil is not about shrouding; it is about being alive to mourning, outrage, sadness, and hope. As she […]