The Fraught Nature of Belonging: Nathalie Handal’s Life in a Country Album
Each poem opens a window into cities and vocabularies of exile.
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Posts Tagged: Diaspora
What to Read When You Need to Know SWANA
SWANA writers share recommendations for what to read to gain perspective on the region.
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Just Do Something: Talking with Sam Farahmand
Sam Farahmand discusses his debut novel, CHIMERO.
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Afrofuturist Triptych for My Mother
This is what I think of when I think of home; Africa is my altar.
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Aswang as a Second Language
She holds me. We hold each other.
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Terror Is a Faggot with Halal Sausages Strapped to His Chest
Dishonesty became a form of protection.
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Finding the World Within
Secrets are expectations passed down over silent years.
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On the Futility of Defying Extinction
Always, when my father spoke to me in words I could not understand, my guilt spoke back.
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I Assimilate into Mere Bubbles
It’s subtle, the violence of language.
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Which Flame Is Mine?: A Conversation with Rajiv Mohabir
Rajiv Mohabir discusses his second collection, The Cowherd’s Son, his work as a translator, and resisting erasure in a racist America.
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The Ability to Pass Becomes Her Cage: Talking with SJ Sindu
SJ Sindu discusses her new novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, queer readings of Hindu scriptures, and issues of privilege and power.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Lisa Factora-Borchers
Lisa Factora-Borchers talks about being a Catholic feminist, writing across genres, and pushing back against a singular narrative about New York.
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Mothers of My Diaspora
It paralyzes me to think about the sacrifices my family made before I was in my mother’s womb. When they came here they knew they would lose a part of their language, their memories, their sanctity of self.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: No Wound
Maybe I can touch it and show it to you. If I convince you, we can call it real. And then perhaps it will be.
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The Rumpus Interview with Vanessa Hua
Vanessa Hua discusses her debut collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, writing fiction in order to understand life as an American-born child of immigrants, and the importance of literary community.
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The Rumpus Interview with Meline Toumani
Meline Toumani discusses her debut, There Was and There Was Not, the rewards and risks of writing a political memoir, and what it means to approach a divided past and future.
...more“Black to the Future”
Black to the future was/is a radical, dangerous, and daring dream—an impossibility. Science fiction and fantasy (sf&f) is a rehearsal of the impossible, an ideal realm for redefinition and reinvention. For Africans and their descendants in the diaspora, decolonizing our mind/body/spirits was/is an on-going sf&f project. In a stellar essay for the LA Review of Books, […]
...moreBlack Quotations from Marion Berry to Natasha Trethewey
For Guernica, Lauren K. Alleyne interviews Retha Powers, editor of the new Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations, which collects quotes by a rainbow of black sources, from Zora Neale Hurston to NWA to ancient Egypt. It’s a really interesting glimpse at the necessity and difficulty of distilling the essence of “the black experience” from all the different black […]
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Round Trip
Thinking my grandfather was from here deepened my experience of Plovdiv. I felt closer to the city, to the people, and to my own family.
...moreAbandoning the Mothership
We’ve all heard the stories about people getting fired from jobs because of overly revealing Facebook photos, or of couples breaking up by changing their Facebook “relationship status” before even talking to one another. Though Facebook is meant to exist in virtual reality, we have given it the power to seep into and intermingle with […]
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