Callaloo articles from January 1993

Callaloo archives from January 1993

From L'Amour, La Fantasia. (excerpt)(fiction)
January 1, 1993... Assia Djebar's sixth novel was published in 1985. These two excerpts are taken from the second part (of three), "Les Cris de la fantasia" |The Cries of the Fantasia~. "Prostrate Women..." is the second of three narratives of events during...

Childhood. (poem)
January 1, 1993... Summer brought fireflies in swarms. They lit our evenings like dreams we thought we couldn't have. We caught them in jars, punched holes, carried them around for days. Luminous abdomens that when charged with air turned bright. Imagine! mere...

Offering. (poem)
January 1, 1993... In the dream I am burning the rice. I am cooking for God. I will clean the house to please Him. So I wash the dishes and it begins to burn. It is for luck. Like rice pelting newlyweds, raining down it is another veil, or an offering that...

Streetcorner church II: for James Baldwin. (poem)
January 1, 1993... The curious parade, stop to stare as we sway & shout... then hurry on. A spectacle that turns off non-believers. Or is it the alley's sour alcoholic breath that sends them reeling? We don't know enough shame to go inside. No, we stand in...

Holding. (poem)
January 1, 1993... Evening comes and it is the only promise the day has kept. Nobody knows about the wig and she doesn't look at herself taking it off. Then she feels for her own stubby braids, unbraids them, liking the coarseness like a working man's hand....

Remembering kitchens. (poem)
January 1, 1993... In the kitchen we compensate for missiles in the world by fluting edges of crust to bake rugged, primping rosettes and peaks on cakes that are round tables with white butter cloths swirled on, portable communion altars. On the Sundays, ham...

One year Sonny stabs himself. (poem)
January 1, 1993... One year Sonny stabs himself setting up the tree. Ever stubborn evergreen. All eyes watching, all us standing there like somebody said, "Behold." Beside me is the mama with her arms draped down the chest of the littlest and another youngun...

First prize. (fiction)
January 1, 1993... Dawn slipped a gentle light under Mambo's quivering eyelids. She tried hard to keep them shut. She did not want the new day to take away too quickly the remnants of a wonderful dream which she was struggling to recapture, unreeling the film of...

Framed. (poem)
January 1, 1993... She is in your painting the one you bought when the taxi snarled in market lines you jumped out and grabbed a picture of stilted wooden houses against the vivid island even then there was recognition She is the woman in a broken pair of men's...

Mysteries. (poem)
January 1, 1993... and at this moment the accidental world why in the foreground a flamed wire fence cat's weathered step-ladder in the dandelions cat himself rampant considering intently this butterfly its fluttering yellow statement at the grid what does cat...

Flounder. (poem)
January 1, 1993... Here, she said, put this on your head. She handed me a hat. You 'bout as white as your dad, And you gone stay like that. Aunt Sugar rolled her nylons down around each bony ankle, and I rolled down my white knee socks letting my thin legs...

The image of the Indo-Caribbean woman in Olive Senior's "The Arrival of the Snake Woman."
January 1, 1993... This paper looks at the portrayal of the Indian woman in the contemporary literature of the anglophone Caribbean. It attempts to examine the processes of readjustment and accommodation, acculturation, interculturation and indigenization in its...

Revisioning our kumblas: transforming feminist and nationalist agendas in three Caribbean women's texts.
January 1, 1993... 12. In "Profile of the Jamaican Free Woman," Erna Brodber, in her other role as social anthropologist, analyzes the findings of a sample of life histories of the first generation of free born women, part of the oldest generation of women still...

Report on the Third International Caribbean Women Writers Conference.
January 1, 1993... The aim of the First International Conference on Women Writers of the English-Speaking Caribbean was to gather together, for the first time, creative writers of the Anglophone Caribbean, as well as a few of their critics, to talk about their...

Haitian literature after Duvalier: an interview with Yanick Lahens. (Francophone and Anglophone Literature: The Women Writers) (Interview)
January 1, 1993... "I like to think of myself as a natural born go-between" Yanick Lahens Yanick Lahens is a young Haitian intellectual, born and based on the island. The year 1991 saw her first participation in the annual Spring meeting of the African...

An interview with Merle Collins. (Grenadian writer) (Francophone and Anglophone Literature: The Women Writers) (Interview)
January 1, 1993... The following interview with the Grenadian writer Merle Collins took place in London, England. As the interview begins, Collins is reading her poem, "No Dialects, Please," aloud. WILSON: That's wonderful, Merle. You do your poems so well....

An interview with Myriam Warner-Vieyra. (Francophone and Anglophone Literature: The Women Writers) (Interview)
January 1, 1993... Elizabeth Wilson has noted that although Francophone Caribbean women's writing shares the identity quest with its male counterpart, the call to adventure often results in confinement rather than conquest, a thwarted journey rather than a...

"When the past answers our present": Assia Djebar talks about 'Loin de Medine.' (Francophone and Anglophone Literature: The Women Writers) (Interview)
January 1, 1993... Assia Djebar's newest book, Loin de Medine |Far from Medina~,(1) deals primarily with the events surrounding the Prophet's final days in 632, after years of bitter exile and the relentless consolidation of his power from Mecca to Medina, in...

Geographies of pain: captive bodies and violent acts in the fictions of Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Gayl Jones, and Bessie Head. (Francophone and Anglophone Literature: The Women Writers)
January 1, 1993... not clarify, but it maps out the places of speech. It is necessarily fictive because it is this interpretive repetition, which prefigures, by means of 'textuality,' and in a variable way, the witnesses, the moments, the spaces of speech. The...

To w/rite in a new language: Werewere Liking's adaptation of ritual to the novel. (Francophone and Anglophone Literature: The Women Writers)
January 1, 1993... "A lunatic language must be born to allow lunatics to express themselves in the face of an age of lunacy."(1) This maxim is Werewere Liking's assessment of the state of discourse in African arts and letters. Citing contemporaries,...

Bessie Head's 'The Collector of Treasures': change on the margins. (Francophone and Anglophone Literature: The Women Writers)
January 1, 1993... The subject of Bessie Head's stories is change itself, and specifically the threshold where change takes place. Change has become the issue of women's writing since independence--change and not simply rights or equality. Though there has been...

Race, privilege, and the politics of (re)writing history: an analysis of the novels of Michelle Cliff. (Francophone and Anglophone Literature: The Women Writers)
January 1, 1993... The history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies. --V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage, 29 The...

Michele Maillet's 'L'Etoile noire': historian's counter-history and translator's counter-silence. (Francophone and Anglophone Literature: The Women Writers)
January 1, 1993... in which women's perspectives remain marginal. 4. See Aime Cesaire's La Tragedie du Roi Christophe or the character of Delgres in L'Isole soleil and Soufrieres by Daniel Maximin. 5. Since l cannot summarize in a footnote the monumental...

The nigger of the narcissist: history, sexuality and intertextuality in Maryse Conde's 'Heremakhonon.' (Francophone and Anglophone Literature: The Women Writers)
January 1, 1993... In time the slave surrendered to amnesia. That amnesia is the true history of the New World. That is our inheritance, but to try and understand why this happened, to condemn or justify is also the method of history, . . . --Derek Walcott...

Women, silence, and history in 'The Chosen Place, The Timeless People.' (Francophone and Anglophone Literature: The Women Writers )
January 1, 1993... "Our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting."(1) The Freedom Charter, South Africa "Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about...

Daughters. (Francophone and Anglophone Literature: The Women Writers)
January 1, 1993... Paule Marshall stopped me at the door. "I really want to hear your rewrite. You know, lots of people have more talent than you or I. Hard work makes the difference. Hard, hard unrelenting work." Maya Angelou on her first meeting of the Harlem...

Journeys Through the French African Novel.
January 1, 1993... Some critics such as the Tunisian poet Hedi Bouraoui have long advocated a unified approach to African literature in French, but few have followed his call to bridge the chasm between the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa (Bouraoui 1985: 108).(1)...

Nigerian Female Writers: A Critical Perspective.
January 1, 1993... Henrietta C. Otokunefor and Obiageli C. Nwodo, eds. Nigerian Female Writers: A Critical Perspective. Lagos: Malthouse, 1989. Nigerian Female Writers: A Critical Perspective, is dedicated "To the Nigerian Female Writers who dare to 'challenge...

A Gesture of Belonging: Letters from Bessie Head, 1965-1979.
January 1, 1993... Ironically, since her death, Bessie Head (1937-1986) has received the critical interest, even the publication, that she found so difficult to secure during her lifetime. Tales of Tenderness and Power, short fictional, semi-fictional, and...