What could the curriculum be – if it was designed by the people who dropped out of school so that they could breathe? The latest issue of Chimurenga provides alternatives to prevailing educational pedagogy. Through fiction, essays, interviews, poetry, photography and art, contributors examine and redefine rigid notions of essential knowledge.
Presented in the form of a textbook, Chimurenga 15 simultaneously mimics the structure while gutting it. All entries are regrouped under subjects such as body parts, language, grace, worship and news (from the other side), numbers, parents, police and many more. Through a classification system that is both linear and thematic, the textbook offers multiple entry points into a curriculum that focuses on the un-teachable and values un-learning as much as it’s opposite.
Inside: Amiri Baraka waxes poetic on the theoretics of Be-Bop; Coco Fusco flips the CIA’s teaching manual for female torturers; Karen Press and Steve Coleman instruct in folk-dancing; Dambudzo Marechera proposes a “guide to the earth”; Dominique Malaquais designs the museum we won’t build; through self-portraits Phillip Tabane and Johnny Dyani offer method to the Skanga (black music family); and Winston Mankunku refuses to teach.
Other contributors include Binyavanga Wainaina, Akin Adesokan, Isoje Chou, Sean O’Toole, Pradid Krishen, E.C. Osundu, Salim Washington, Sefi Atta, Ed Pavlic, Neo Muyanga, Henri-Michel Yere, Medu Arts Ensemble, Aryan Kaganof, Khulile Nxumalo and Walter Mosley amongst others. Cover by Johnny “Mbizo” Dyani.
In this seminal novel of conflict and attempted reconciliation, we follow Kitso whose father had expelled him from the family home in Soweto on account of his youthful homosexual encounter with Themba, a local friend, but who returns for the first time since that trauma to attend his father’s funeral. The background to all that happens is the family’s membership in the Jehovah Witnesses church and its very strict and exclusivist interpretation of human relations, particularly its repressive control of sexuality. Kitso brings his young son, Ntokozo, on the trip, but practically abandons the boy to the care of his brother’s wife for the few days that he is home. Overwhelmed by the shock and tension of again inter-acting with family and friends – including a now married, heterosexual Themba – Kitso sets out on a series of hard-core gay sex adventures. In addition, his heavy drinking and general submergence in self-destructive behaviour further alienates him from the family and eventually sees him leave with little to show for his return. No Poison No Paradise is thus a work charting pain, loss, reckless pursuit of pleasure and the anguish of dissolution as Kitso struggles to come to terms with sundered relationships and attempts to find a place of refuge and joy in a world of rejection and ambivalence.