Letters & Essays, Nonfiction

In The Shadow of Context

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By Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún

“Context: The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.”

– Oxford English Dictionary

 

In the early twenties, Professor Ivor A. Richards, in search of a new way to teach the assessment and appreciation of poetry, came up with an idea that seems commonplace now, but at the time was interesting enough to challenge existing conventions. What he did, an experiment he detailed in his book Practical Criticisms (1929), was to distribute to his students, poems written by a wide range of people from ancient masters to modern practitioners, from Shakespeare to a random poet in the reigning literary magazine, without the names of the authors printed on the pages of the poems.

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Letters & Essays

Jollof Rice Wars, Cultural Appropriation, and the Ugly Heart of the Other’s Darkness

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by Ikhide R. Ikheloa

Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.

– Chinua Achebe

Those who control the narrative literally control the literary world. Chinua Achebe reminds us of the African proverb: Until the lions get their own historian, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. Traditional African narrative as exists in books is controlled by the gatekeepers of Western publishing houses. But then, the world is changing. For once, thanks to the Internet and social media, writers and thinkers of colour have a chance at the steering wheel. Technology has democratized the reading and writing culture, and the world is in that space where the traditional literary world steeped in the analogue 20th century analogue way of doing things is reluctantly coming to terms with the power of the new order. Still, change is slow and the ways of the old persist even as folks look up from their smartphones, puzzled by the stubborn ways of the old dying order.

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Letters & Essays, Nonfiction

​Afropolitan – No Less and No More

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by Taiye Selasi

How would you, 10 years after you wrote the essay, respond to its main ideas and to such criticism? How would you evaluate your essay – both in terms of the positive and negative reception and in respect to how you may feel that your ideas about Afropolitanism have changed or matured since then? Do you feel that the need to complicate Africa is different today than it was in 2005?

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In 2005, I wrote an essay describing a particular experience. No less and no more. No less in that I believed then and believe now that much of the power of writing—fiction or non—resides in the transformative power of description. To hear one’s experience described in words can fundamentally change the way one sees oneself: where one once felt entirely alone she now feels utterly human. As F Scott Fitzgerald has it: “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” In a very basic sense “Bye-Bye, Babar” said to a great many people (myself foremost), “You are not isolated.” To those for whom the description rings true the essay says, “You belong.”

It says no less than this—and no more.

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Letters & Essays, Nonfiction

Amsterdam

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by Junot Díaz.

 

Of course I loved her—isn’t that how all these stories are supposed to begin?

She was from Amsterdam, a black Dominican mother, a white Dutch father, a luminous gale of a girl.  I called her my chabine because that’s what she looked like, only her lips and her hair keeping her from passing completely, from pulling a Jean Toomer.  And the ass she had—my fucking God—it was supersonic—which is to say she couldn’t walk past a group of straight men without pulling out the shingles or shattering the panes of their conversation.

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