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Rumpus Articles
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What Is Freedom: Christina Sharpe
On July 5, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, at a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Frederick Douglass delivered his now famous speech “What To the Slave is the Fourth of July?” In this the…
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Patching Up The Past
When Novak ran past shouting, “Incoming!” I tumbled out of my GI hammock and scrambled to a sandbagged culvert hooch, waiting out the attack with squad leader Lloyd Edge. At the all clear signal we emerged to shouts that a…
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Dibé be’ iiná Remembering Sequence
Dibé be’ iiná From a Diné perspective, goats and sheep are emblematic of womanhood. My great-aunt would winter with sheep deeper in the canyons, move with them, care for the flocks. When I was a girl, my grandmother herded our…
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Pomegranate Season in the Underworld
This is the difference I am trying to name. The pomegranate on the shelf and the pomegranate on the newspaper. The fruit polished for display, and the fruit cracked open in a living room. The version of a place that…
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Form as Historical Memory: On D. M. Aderibigbe’s “82nd Division”
Are elegies fundamentally love poems? Or are love poems always tinged with elegy, knowing they contain their own ending?
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The Godbrother
Candida founded the agency; she was a middle-aged powerhouse with a keen literary eye, taste, and a no-nonsense air. She’d ushered Joseph Heller through the 22 rejections of what was then called “Catch-18” before she found him a publisher. She…
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Precisely Flesh
Everyone I love is flesh, the kind that shatters in a bomb blast, that breathes a virus in and crumbles, that putrefies when there’s no room at the mobile morgue. At least four thousand one day in winter, overflowing.
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Logan Takes a Lit Test
I ask that my parrot remind me how to breathe. He complies. I take the cue from him as always. Thank you, he says, I say. Papa telling me when I was a child, inhale, inhale, inhale. The village doctor…
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What Is Freedom: Eileen Myles
There’s only one freedom and that is freedom in Palestine and the occupation ending. Then we can talk about freedom anywhere. All our freedoms today are failed because of this nation held captive on their own land.
