Thursday, December 12, 2024

PRATIK's CURRENT CITY SPECIAL ISSUE : "Unsinkable City" Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka reflects on a lifetime in Lagos

 

WOLE SOYINKA

Unsinkable City

Wole Soyinka reflects on a lifetime in Lagos*

 


Going to the Portobello Road Market for wosi-wosi— the Yoruba name for odds and ends, antiquities true and fake, and general bric-a-brac of even unmapped nations—has remained my routine destination whenever I find myself in London. It may have commenced in curiosity, provoked by the aqueous association of names—Portobello, Beautiful Port; Lagos, Lakes, originally Lago de Curamo—I can only testify that it all began while I was a student in mid-1950s and has remained ever thus. Periodic forays into Britain even decades after my first student incursion have failed to diminish the tug, despite deleterious changes at the Lagos end of the axis. Each visit still registers personal correlations, some stimulating, others sobering. It is no longer the innocent, prying eye on antique oddities, ogling, desiring and caressing art objects of dubious pedigrees; it is now both attraction and repulsion, but always evocative—in absentia—of that amphibious city, thousands of miles away, called Lagos. It was the official capital, once upon a time, but it is still the commercial capital of the most populous, and perhaps most unmanageable, black nation of the world: Nigeria. Lagos exerts a secretive, sometimes resented, but tenacious hold on all who pass through its steamy streets and tumultuous markets. Do not take my word for it. Ask any foreign resident or mere bird of passage through that frustrating capital. The accustomed expression is, “You can take the expatriate out of Lagos, but you cannot take Lagos out of the expatriate.” The less charitable version goes, “Lagos is akin to a mosquito bite: the malaria spores never completely leave your bloodstream.” The ever-popular high-life song with fluctuating lyrics that give away recent peregrinations of whichever band leader appear to settle the matter once and for all, applicable even to Portobello addicts, but with increased dosage of disenchantment:

Lagos is the place for me

Lagos, this lovely city

You can take me to England and Amerikay

Keep your Paris or Roman city

Give me Lagos any day

Lagos, for my temperament, is perhaps best enjoyed vicariously and in small doses. Luckily, the city shares many features with the antique mart or, perhaps less glamorously, a flea market. Sometimes one feels that the world’s discards, the detritus of the constantly surging ocean, eventually come to rest on the beaches of Lagos. No wonder, the argument also rages forth again and again, especially at election time, that Lagos is a no-man’s land. Historical facts jostle with myth, migration waves with politics of concessions, attributions and conquest. Were the monarchs of Lagos truly vassals of the Benin kingdom, or was Benin a mere occupation force on military camps established in parts of Lagos island? Does the name by which a large Lagosian group of settlers, the Awori, are known, truly derive from the triumphant cry Awo ri? This would lend credence to the Lagosian origin myth that claims a roving hunter from the Yoruba hinterland, having decided (or been forced) to migrate with his people, consulted Ifa, the Yoruba divination system. The outcome was instruction that he place a bowl on a stream and follow its progress. Wherever the bowl sank—ibi ti awo ri— that was the destined habitation.

Lagos’s numerous ties to the ancient Benin kingdom—culture, trade, indigenous names, etc.—are not disputed, only the details. A Yoruba war leader wrote a unique chapter in war chivalry by journeying for several weeks just to return the corpse of his slain foe, a Benin war commander, to the king, the Oba of Benin. As a reward, the king sent him back as regent over one of the Benin war camps and its zone of authority. Just as strong are the claims of another set of “true owners”—the Idejo, the Olofin, plus the radiating lines from a great hunter, Ogunfunmire. Ogunfunmire wandered in from the heart of Yoruba land and founded Isheri, from where his 12 descendants fanned out along the coast and farther inland to establish a clan dynasty. Was that the same hunter? Or a different ancestor entirely?

The Lagos of today is what preoccupies, agitates, repels and seduces, and from widely different causes. Lagos is truly a Joseph-city, a garment of many colors, textures and stylists. Try to imagine a straight line, drawn from any point on the border of Lagos across its land mass until it terminates at the beach. Walk that straight line through buildings, markets, lagoons, canals, upscale and hole-in-the wall shops and residences, flyovers and clotted streets, shrines, parks, warrens, mosques, churches, etc. You would end up surfeited by sheer variety, like a jumbo meatloaf attempting to set the world record in the stuffing of incongruities. I suspect that it was a whiff of that wanton ecumenism of identities that I sensed in those stalls of Portobello markets at my very first visit as an impressionable youth. I gratefully found it a generous, accommodating substitute that served as relief from the notorious British inhospitable and insular character, plus the unpalatable weather menu of the 1950s—cold, wet and dismal.

But even as Portobello began to burst its bounds, both in its capture of neighboring streets and enlarged cosmopolitanism in its offerings, opening out to other continents, so did Lagos begin to expand, become more haphazardly textured, more daring, with insertions of thematic galleries and mobile stalls, its squares and traffic islands pocked also by itinerant performers and lethargic to enraptured audiences, vanishing into endless by-streets and cul-de-sacs, in and out of festive seasons. The pace has become so rapid that it is hard not to imagine a Lagos of the future, prefigured in those intensive transformations, including new hordes of visiting or relocated nationalities—Japanese, Chinese, Caribbean, and other babblers in their own tongues and accented English. Let us traverse backward through the years to a significant fin de siècle transitional phase in the life of this writer, for a sampling of human and other exotic wares.

Occupational risks, of the political extracurricular kind, eventually prescribed exile. I returned to Nigeria in 1999 after a compulsory spell outside her borders, an exile of some four years. Before that hasty departure, I had lived mostly in my hometown, the rockery encrusted city of Abeokuta, but also with a foot in Yaba, a Lagos suburb where the trees had not been eaten, and even enjoyed residential, integrated status. By then, I had long terminated a career of regular teaching at my former university in Ile-Ife. It had served as the transient third of a residential triad of unequal occupancies. The other two were Abeokuta, maternal home, and Isara, paternal, a small town of unremitting red laterite whose dust permeated even the human skin, giving it a russet pigmentation.

Back from exile, I found myself obliged to seek another toehold in Lagos. I found one, right on the island itself and close to a sandy stretch known as Bar Beach, largely a weekend and holiday relaxation recourse that also serves as a buffer between the Atlantic Ocean and the newly developed residential zone known as Victoria Island. That habitation sometimes felt, in some ways, a further extension of my exile, as so much of it had changed. My awareness of the sea, from childhood vacations spent in Lagos, had been formed by friendly surf and wave-sculpted sand. Nature was then at its most placid and collaborative, in peaceable partnership with the lagoon and sluggish canals that threaded the marshy islands—Obalende, Ebute Metta, Ikoyi. Apapa, Isale Eko—each wet surface with its own network of plying canoes, shacks and shanties, cries and gurgles, whispers and raucous sales chants and dark silences, even in brutal daylight.

Abeokuta of the rocks was my principal home, Isara a stolid, impregnable linkage with time past. Lagos of the canals was my escape into exotica, yet also within the seamless consciousness of a personal proprietorship that comes with affinities. Bar Beach was still a stranger to public executions of armed robbers, by firing squad, under a military regime, a spectacle that was open to all non-paying audiences, including children. Until then, that beach was little more than a home to makeshift churches—more accurately, bamboo and palm fronds around a cross-topped mound of sand, the cross itself sometimes made from fresh palm fronds. They were presided over by colorful charlatans who would later people such plays as The Trials of Brother Jero and even pop up in everything from cameos to major roles in stories such as my novels The Interpreters and Season of Anomie. My mother being an itinerant trader, and with a family line stretching through Lagos, the lagoon city became a mere extension of the maternal home, Abeokuta.

So did the markets. I grew up familiar with all the open-air markets—Ita Faji, Iddo, Ebute Metta Sangross—a name derived from a corruption, it is claimed, of the sand grouse that once populated the area. I did eventually take to the hunt, but as I was not remotely close to conception at naming time, and no historian has traced my ancestry to the alleged founder of Lagos (the hunter Ogunfunmire) I could not be held responsible for the extinction of the grouse population. I do not even know what a sand grouse tastes like. It was a different matter from the flavors, smells, colors and sounds of the market itself, identical—except for the riveting forms, the heady smells of freshly delivered fish, crabs and lesser shellfish—with the markets of Ibarapa or Iberekodo in Abeokuta. All provided a medley of sensations that relegated Portobello to the ranks of deodorized human spaces, nonetheless irresistible. But then, I was prejudiced. My vacation home in Lagos was Igbosere Street, just a stone’s throw from Sangross. To seal an unspoken pact, one of the more famous juju bands took up residence in a night-shack that opened its doors after the market women had departed. It became a favorite haunt after I joined the ranks of lawfully and lowly employed school leavers.

My mother, that enterprising lady, had her main shop in Ake, Abeokuta, quite close to the palace, reigned over by a monarch who exuded much mystery and dignity until his downfall at the hands of rebellious women in the famous anti-tax riots of the 1940s. They were led by my aunt, the feisty Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti—name sound familiar? Substitute Ransome with Anikulapo, and the equation reads Anikulapo Kuti—yes, the Afro-beat king, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, who dominated the Lagos—then the entire Nigerian— music scene, extending into the continent, the Diaspora and even Europe. France was certainly the earliest European conquered territory. Fela’s “Afrika Shrine” remains a pilgrimage destination today for a cross-section of avid music consumers or simply the merely curious—indigenes and expatriates, diplomats and the underworld, even foreign presidents with a yen for the raw, raunchy and raucous. His sons, also musicians with their own bands, keep up the legacy, including a guaranteed line for the fattest smoke wraps to be encountered in the world’s republics of nightlife.

That much, at least, has not changed. An extension of that shop, in a coincidence that took years to register in my mind, was my mother’s stall in Isale Eko, near Iga Idunganran, the seat of another monarch, the Oba of Lagos. We shared our vacations between Lagos and my paternal home, Isara, a city bereft of either rocks or canals; it had just a stream, and a deep wooded spring that appeared to be the source. Isara was a somewhat in drawn village of supernatural and numinous forces, steeped in tradition.

 

For Full version, pls read the print edition of Pratik’s current Issue

(*First published by Stranger’s Guide in 2020)

Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright, poet, author, teacher and political activist. In 1986, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. A towering figure in world literature and a multifaceted artist-dramatist, poet, essayist, musician, philosopher, academic, teacher, human rights activist, global artist, and scholar, he has won international acclaim for his verse, as well as for novels such as Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth. His works encompass drama, poetry, novels, music, film, and memoirs; he is considered among the great contemporary writers He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems, two novels, books of essays, and memoirs, including The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness, and numerous plays. Soyinka has held positions at Harvard, Yale, Duke, Emory, and Loyola Marymount in the US, as well as highly regarded institutions throughout Africa and Europe. 




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Wednesday, October 23, 2024

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Pratik Magazine's Special Issue Himalayan Literature Festival/NYWW Edition

 

  

Call for Submissions

Pratik Magazine's Special
Himalayan Literature Festival/NYWW Issue



Pratik Magazine is thrilled to announce a Call for Submissions for a special edition inspired by the 2024 Himalayan Literature Festival (HLF) and the New York Writers Workshop (NYWW). We invite writers from the Subcontinent and around the globe to submit original works of poetry, short fiction, creative non-fiction, and artwork that reflect your experiences, insights, or creative engagement with the festival, whether attended in person or remotely.

This special issue, part of our Winter 2024 edition, will be enhanced by images and photographs from the festival. Feel free to share photos from your archives to be considered for inclusion.

This edition will offer a unique platform for both emerging voices and established writers. Submissions should explore the themes and essence of the festival, celebrating its rich literary culture, breathtaking mountain landscapes, and the vibrant creative exchange it fosters.



Submission Guidelines:
• Submit your work as a single Word document attached to an email.
• Send submissions to: pratikmagsubmissions@gmail.com
• Include your name, contact information, and a brief bio in the email body.
• Deadline for submissions: November 10, 2024.

We welcome works that capture the literary vibrancy of the Himalayan region and the festival’s global engagement. Let your words bring to life the landscapes, cultures, and stories that resonate at the intersection of tradition and innovation.

For more details, visit:
hlf.whitelotusbookshop.com  www.whitelotusbookshop.com  https://niralapublications.com/


Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing
Edited by Yuyutsu Sharma
White Lotus Book Shop, Hanumansthan, Kupondole, Kathmandu, Nepal
Phone: +977-5520248, +977-9803171925
Email: whitelotusbookshop@gmail.com
www.whitelotusbookshop.com




Monday, August 5, 2024

PRATIK CITY WRITING SPECIAL : JULIE WILLIAMS-KRISHNAN'S "A Photographer’s Journey Through Time and Light"

 

PHOTOGRAPHY

 

JULIE WILLIAMS-KRISHNAN

A Photographer’s Journey Through Time and Light

 


Day by day, moment by moment, with both intention and divine happenstance, we move toward that person that we are meant to be. We are, and we are becoming, at the same time. For me, connecting with that authentic artist inside me, that photographer who sees images all day long in her mind, has been a process of learning to trust myself, to see myself, to believe in myself, and very importantly, to make time for myself. What has been very important for me to come to understand is that my creative voice offers something meaningful to the world, and only I can say it in that unique way.


My journey as an artist and photographer has tendrils to my childhood, but my coming of age as an artist was much later. I was raised in central Pennsylvania (USA), in a rural and working-class area, and art was not experienced or valued in a significant way. Like many of my generation, I had a point and shoot film camera and I enjoyed photographing my friends and family. When I was about 15 years old, I learned about French Impressionism from Mrs. Vanderhoof, a volunteer art teacher at school, and I was hooked on art. I started taking photographs of the nearby jewelry store sign covered in snow and the ice mounds as they built up on the river that snaked by our home. I wanted to study photography in college, but we could not afford the camera that was required to take the program.

“The Threshing Place” is a body of work that was inspired by my upbringing. My mother taught Bible stories to children and I inherited her archive of teaching materials. Years later, I used that material to tell another story, one that weaves in my personal narrative as subtext. Most of the images are photographed in London in the Unitarian chapel where my husband and I were married. The final five images were taken in my hometown against the windows of the basement of the church where I went to school.

Washington DC



After college, I moved to Washington, DC. It was my first time living in a city. Every weekend I visited art galleries like the Smithsonian Institute, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Phillips Collection, the Corcoran Gallery of Art. I fell in love with art and dreamt of having my work on the walls. The first large photography exhibition I saw was Annie Leibovitz’s portrait retrospective and I was amazed at how she portrayed her subjects. To this day, those images stand out in my mind. All this art exploration and self-discovery helped immerse me in the ways of seeing, of representing, and of interpreting. I invested in a serious film camera with some manual functionality and I started photographing the city and my life more intentionally.

London

I moved to London, UK in my late 20s, initially as an English literature graduate student and then I worked at a university for a number of years as an international admissions officer. I always travelled with a camera and many rolls of film! One of my students from Nepal, Hom, and I became friends. Hom needed an old motorcycle to get around London to make pizza deliveries and I needed a more serious camera to pursue my ever-growing photography passion. He had an Olympus manual camera that he no longer needed and I happened to have a non-functioning motorcycle that needed some repairs, so we did a swap! I signed up for a photography class at the university where I worked and started shooting with my “new” camera. I exhibited my first print at the end of that first class.


Somewhere along the way, I realized that I was taking about 1000 photographs a day in my mind. I was seeing the world as a photographer, even when I did not have a camera in my hand. I bought my first digital SLR camera, I built a portfolio, and I pursued my MA in Photographic Studies at The University of Westminster in London. There I learned about the work of some of my photographic influences, such as Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Jeff Wall, Stephen Gill, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, to name a few. The MA program solidified my love of photography, taught me so much more about the language of imagery, and made me believe in myself as a photographer. 

Since then, the journey has been about learning to flex my photography muscles, and I have been able to do so in a variety of ways. I started freelance work for a media company that made huge billboards and I photographed their installations around London. I also assisted a food photographer, photographed events, and did some editorial assignments (for my friend Hom, who started a magazine!) and some portrait photography. I also exhibited my work around London and Oxford. I also taught photography at the university where I had worked in admissions. Being an artist can be a solo practice, but it does not have to be a lonely practice, and I have found it very important to stay connected to other artists and to trust them to give honest feedback and to provide mutual support. I started a monthly group for my artist friends so we could support each other. It was called “The Flying Eggs,” named after the Ethiopian proverb “Given the time, even an egg can fly.” I even did a photography project called “Learning to Fly” in which I wore angel wings and repeatedly jumped off a bench on Hampstead Heath.

London was a launchpad for me in so many ways, including photography and travel. Much of my urban work was done during these travels. I made a series titled “Between Towns” because I was photographing details of urban life rather than the obvious icons of the cities I was visiting.

Boston

In 2010 Sanjay and I moved to the Boston area. I accepted a consulting job in higher education and decided to focus on fine art photography rather than commercial photography. This was a pivotal decision for me. In addition to the consulting work, I set up a small studio, first at home and then in an artist building. I also worked part-time for several years as the director of programs at the Griffin Museum of Photography, which connected me to fine art photographers across the US and elsewhere. I learned about many different approaches to photography, got involved in portfolio reviews, and helped run photography classes, lectures, and events. I continue to make my own photographic art and submit work to shows and reviews. I also am part of a salon group of very talented female photographers and we support each other in our practice. I also started teaching photography classes and workshops, which I love to do. All these activities keep motivated as a photographer and artist.

Chennai

Another very important city in my life is Chennai, India. When I lived in London, I met and married Sanjay, who is from Chennai. We have spent much time there over our 20 plus years together. When visiting the family home and places important to our family, I use my camera to observe and investigate, as well as find my place within the family and in a culture so different from mine.


My personal photographic work is narrative and autobiographical. Work I have made in Chennai is about my relationship to my husband’s family. In my series “The Bindi Collection” I photographed my mother-in-law’s bindis across many years. In “Morning Poetry” I photographed the family home on one regular morning. In “The Third Eye” I photographed Tamil soap operas, seeking moments of tension between scenes that layered together stories.

In 2020, when the pandemic hit, the consulting work went quiet for a while and I decided to see what commercial work I might do in photography. I was hired as a real estate photographer and learned a whole new genre of photography. I have continued to do that work part-time and I enjoy telling the story of the space where people make their dwelling. It has been profitable and enjoyable work. I am also learning to be a food photographer and look forward to entering that field soon.

Cities are an inspiration to me. They are both a place to live and a place to play.  They are where ideas and people come together, where you can seek out your own interests and passions, where you can be as anonymous or as flamboyant as you wish. If you are curious, you can meet strangers who lead you to new lives. You meet ideas that take you new destinations. You learn about the gritty and the glamourous. I have been fortunate to visit many cities throughout the world, and while each has its own identity, there are common threads that make urban life stimulating. As a photographer, I seek to observe and celebrate meaningful moments, and the city is a delightful playground in which to photograph. Cities allow you to reinvent yourself without judgement, and I have taken advantage of the opportunity to evolve and grow in each city in which I have lived.


“I am a photographer.” The power those words have for me is immense. For so many years, it was a far-away aspiration, but now, photography is my language, it is part of what I do and who I am. It is not a journey I did alone. My husband, Sanjay, is my biggest supporter, and I am so grateful to him and for the many family members, mentors and teachers along the way. I also have a wonderful group of photographer and artist friends upon whom I rely for support and encouragement. I have learned that if I am not doing something related to photography, even if it just a small part of my day or week, it is as if a light has turned off inside of me. When I am making work, and I am connected to photography and photographers, my creative self is fulfilled and the spark is lit.

 

 


Julie Williams-Krishnan is a fine art and freelance photographer, artist, and educator who teaches photography and leads workshops at university and community level. Julie served as the Director of Programs at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts (USA) for five years. She has served a juror for the Somerville Arts Council and the Winchester Public Schools, a committee member for FlashPoint Boston photography festival, and on the committee for the Renaissance Photography Prize, an international photography competition that raises money to support younger women with breast cancer. Julie’s personal photographic practice investigates identity and personal narrative. She has exhibited her photographs at Melrose Tiny Gallery, The Sanctuary, Cambridge Art Association, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Khaki Gallery, and Zullo Gallery in the Boston region, the Colson Gallery in Easthampton, Massachusetts, and The Center for Fine Art Photography in Colorado, A. Smithson Gallery in Texas, as well as other venues in Boston, London, and Oxford. She has also been included in online exhibitions with “Don’t Take Pictures” and “Lenscratch.” She earned her MA in Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster in London, UK. Based in Boston Massachusetts (USA) since 2010, Julie lived in London (UK) for more than 16 years and has traveled to more than 75 countries. She lives in a multi-cultural family and travels regularly to India. Learn more about Julie’s work at www.jwkphotography.com and on Instagram.

 

 

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Wednesday, July 31, 2024

PRATIK SPECIAL CITY ISSUE NEWS UPDATE BY GABRIEL OCHOA-DREYFUS

 

GABRIEL OCHOA-DREYFUS

 

News Update

 


 

Awards & Honors

 

For the first time, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was won by two novels this year. Both books explore class in America at opposite extremes. In Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver tells the story of a boy confronting poverty and addiction in contemporary Appalachia. Trust, by Hernan Diaz, focuses on the lives of a wealthy couple in New York during the Roaring Twenties and the subsequent Great Depression. The prize's finalist, The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara, examines both ends of the class spectrum in its tale of a Dalit child turned CEO.


Prophet Song
by Paul Lynch was the winner of the Booker Prize 2023. The Chair of Judges described the near-future dystopian novel as a "visceral reading experience" that "captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment." The book features a unique format without standard paragraph breaks or quotation marks.

Norwegian author Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable". He writes in Nynorsk, the standard more common in the western part of his home country, where he was born in 1959 and where much of his writing is set. The Swedish Academy describes his debut play, Nokon kjem til å komme, as articulating "the most powerful human emotions of anxiety and powerlessness in the simplest everyday terms". He previously won the 2015 Nordic Council Literature Prize for his prose trilogy, Andvake, Olavs Draumar, and Kveldsvævd.

The 2023 National Book Award for Fiction was awarded to Justin Torres for his sophomore novel Blackouts. The judges cite his historical fiction work as "slowly unfolding more and more inventive 'blackouts'—revealing, divulging, or re-elaborating mainstream narratives and thus creating newer and truer meanings."

Craig Santos Perez won the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry for from unincorporated territory [åmot]. The parenthetical title refers to the Chamoru word for medicine, as this collection focuses on how storytelling can aid indigenous communities in healing from colonialism, systemic injustice, and loss of connection with their culture.

The Center for Fiction, a literary nonprofit based in Brooklyn, awarded its 2023 Medal for Editorial Excellence to Graywolf Press. Founded in 1974 and currently located in Minneapolis, Graywolf Press is an independent publisher of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and work in translation. Graywolf books and authors have won the Pulitzer Prize, Booker Prize, Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Book Award.

This year saw the inauguration of two new literary awards. The Joan Margarit International Poetry Prize was created to honor poets whose body of work has achieved international recognition. Its first winner is Sharon Olds, a California-born poet whose work the jury describes as "non-conformist and genuine writing." Olds' poetry ranges from detailing her personal life to examining world events. Her collection, Stag's Leap, won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize.

The Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation was launched to promote the visibility of translated works of fiction and nonfiction from a South Asian language into English. The winner will have their translation published. Musharraf Ali Farooqi won for his translation of Siddique Alam’s short story “The Kettledrum”, which depicts an Adivasi widow and her husband’s ghost. Farooqi’s translation will be published by Open Letter Books in 2024 in the collection The Kettledrum and Other Stories.

 

New Releases

 

The United States Poet Laureate Ada Limón presents a diverse literary landscape in the new anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World. Edited and introduced by Limón, the fifty-poem collection aims to bring readers on a meditative walk through a “small forest of poetry”. Included in the anthology are previous U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, Rigoberto González, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil.


Brooklyn
, Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel centered on a young Irish immigrant to the namesake borough, receives a sequel in his new work, Long Island. The follow-up features protagonist Eilis Lacey returning to her home country for the first time in decades after receiving shocking news. The New Yorker hails Long Island as “a narrative of remarkable power with a sparseness and intensity that gives immense emotional impact.”

Salman Rushdie has released a new memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. In the book, the celebrated author recounts the attempt on his life at a lecture on the importance of protecting persecuted writers in 2022. More importantly, in Rushdie’s own words, his new work moves beyond the attack into his recovery process, where with the help of his wife and fellow writer Eliza Griffiths, “love wins.”

 

Notable Departures 

 


Brooklyn author Paul Auster died last month at 77. His breakout work was The New York Trilogy, a postmodern mystery series exploring the nature of personal identity. In addition to novels, Auster also wrote for the screen, winning the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay for Smoke in 1995. He was particularly celebrated in France, where he lived for a time after college translating French poetry. In 2007, he received a medal as a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of France. His penultimate novel, 4 3 2 1, a tale of four parallel lives, was shortlisted for the 2017 Booker Prize.

Acclaimed author Cormac McCarthy passed away last summer at the age of 89. Two of his most famous works were set in the American Southwest, where he spent the latter part of his life. Blood Meridian, an epic, violent Western, is widely considered his magnum opus. All the Pretty Horses, a more romantic Western, won the National Book Award in 1992. McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic tale of a father and son, The Road, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.

Translator Edith Grossman died at 87 last fall. Grossman raised the visibility of the work of translators when she became one of the first to have her name on a book cover beside the original author’s. Her translation of Don Quixote is considered among the best, and author Gabriel García Márquez described her as “his voice in English.”

Gita Mehta, both a writer and filmmaker, died this past fall in her home in New Delhi, India at 80 years old. Mehta first began a career in documentary film covering the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. It was later on in 1979 that she made her writing debut with Karma Cola, a nonfiction book tackling the cultural misunderstandings of Westerners visiting India. Mehta’s later books include Raj, a fictional tale of an Indian princess, and Snakes and Ladders, an essay collection on Indian life released on the fiftieth anniversary of the country’s independence. She was married to Sonny Mehta, former head of Knopf publishing house, who passed away in 2019.

Poet Louise Glück passed away last fall at the age of 80. Glück won many honors over the course of her life, including being appointed the United States Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004. Her book The Wild Iris won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and in 2020 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. On the subject of death, Glück wrote in her poem “October”: “death cannot harm me more than you have harmed me, my beloved life.”

 










Lucas Ochoa-Dreyfus is a New York-based writer and translator.


 

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Friday, July 26, 2024

PRATIK SPECIAL CITY WRITING HIGHLIGHT: AMERICAN POET JAMES RAGAN POEM, "The Tent People of Beverly Hills"

 JAMES RAGAN

The Tent People of Beverly Hills

 


Faceless on the Boulevard of Mirrors,

north along the flats of Rodeo Drive’s

stripped bald head mannequins,

they come treading on

the fears of high fashion, wandering

homeless, tents on their backs

and on their cheeks the beach

black tar of tasteless chic.

 

              As if to dress were not enough,

              we would have them wash

              our backhand slap

              from their Rimbaud faces.

 

And all through the supple stick lash

wands of their eyes, all

through the wind whiskers

of fishbone and sour cream

curdled by fame,

they see along the fruit stalls and deli box bins

of Wilshire Boulevard,

 

the world in the room

of their small walk-space.

They are never certain

whether they are merely asked

to fill a role like memory

in some thoughtful dream of place

or live always short of major

in some dying minor sort of way.

 

              As if to live were time enough.

              We would have them end

beyond their means.

 

Hours long they scrabble

onto hotel walls and mirrors

the words they would like to leave us,

the haunted prints of thought-falls

drifting out of mind’s possession

like nostalgia or grief.

The world has lost its face.

 

There are no hobo kings or pioneers

late to live by. When they lie above

Beverly Drive’s windy steam of sewer grates,

dream-still and all-mind gone,

they warm their body holes to sleep.

They wake to be awake.

In the dreams of many

who never took the road

to gypsy sorrow, breathing is enough.

 

              It is a mistake to feel themselves alone,

              to fill their skyholes up with darkness.

 

There has never been a need

for crying, the dying always say.

Once we move within the final

inch of breath, there is no other.

There are a million tents in the universe

with holes we mistake for stars.

 

 

American poet James Ragan is the author of 10 books of poetry, including The Hunger Wall and Chanter’s Reed. With poems in Poetry, Nation, LA Times, and 36 anthologies, he has read for the U.N, Carnegie Hall, CNN, NPR, PBS, BBC and 7 Heads of State, including Vaclav Havel and Mikhail Gorbachev. Honors: 2 Litt. D’s, Fulbright Award, Emerson Poetry Prize, NEA, 9 Pushcart nominations, Poetry Society Citation, and Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award. With plays staged in U.S, Moscow, Beijing, Athens, he’s the subject of “Flowers and Roots,” awarded 12 Documentary Festival recognitions, and Platinum Prize at Houston’s Int. Film Festival. Director/Emeritus of USC’s Professional Writing Program (25yrs).

 

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Tuesday, July 23, 2024

PRATIK'S SPECIAL CITY WRITING ISSUE HIGHLIGHT : YUYUTSU SHARMA EDITORIAL POEM. "Thrissur in her Dream"

 

YUYUTSU SHARMA

 

EDITORIAL



 

Thrissur in her Dream 

 

On the first night of our arrival

in Thrissur, the famed sadhu of Pashupati

with his sandal-smeared forehead

dotted with U-shaped scarlet tika

holding a ting brass trident

found in most of flashy tourist

brochures and guidebooks,

the one who otherwise

lived a delightful worldly life

with his wife and numerous children

in a tin-roofed shack

outside Ram Mandir vicinity

across the Bagmati river

appeared in her dream.

The sadhu pulled a three-headed naga

out of his wicker basket and let it

crawl towards her in the dream.

She panicked; in due course

he persuaded her to honor the deity,

allow it to slither atop her shoulders

and cover her head under the canopy

of its fangs as a protector.

Birds whistled shrill notes

in the Ramanilayam Guest House

as she woke up in a town that

circled round a Shiva shrine on a hilltop.

As we walked around the town that

reminded me of my own Punjabi birthplace:

smelly granary stores, quiet

Malgudi squares dotted with street vendors,

blobs of lazy dozing dogs,

old time Raymond and Philips showrooms

along with Gandhi handicraft outlets.

When we finally rode a beautiful

green auto rickshaw that actually

ran on a regular meter to the Shiva shrine

and entered sacred grounds with bare bodies,

the same three-headed naga

stood in the dark hole of the shrine

protecting the Lord's head.

She flipped out, her big black eyes

opened wide: It's the same naga

I saw in my dream earlier in the dawn.

"Lord," I closed my eyes, "I've walked away from

sullen glaciers." I prayed.

"I've come to the summer of your backwaters

to let blood rush back to my groin

in your little town that resembles

the one I grew up in

and where as she once confided

we had the best love of our life

in the courtyard after a bath at

our ancestral water pump,

just a week after my father passed away."

 

 



Yuyutsu Sharma
is one of the few poets in the world who make their living with poetry.  Named as “The world-renowned Himalayan poet,” (The Guardian) “One-Man Academy” (The Kathmandu Post) and “Himalayan Neruda” (Michael Graves, Brand Called You), Punjab-born, Indian poet Yuyutsu is a vibrant force on the world poetry stage.

He is also recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature.  Author of eleven poetry collections, most recently, The Alchemy of Nine Smiles: Nine Long Poems (Red River, New Delhi, 2024) and Lost Horoscope ( Nirala, 2023), he has read his works at several prestigious places and held workshops in creative writing and translation at Heidelberg University, University of Ottawa, Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University, Belfast, The Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, Rubin Museum, New York, Beijing Open University, New York University and Columbia University, New York. 


Yuyutsu was at the Poetry Parnassus Festival organized to celebrate the London Olympics 2012 where he represented Nepal and India. In 2020, his work was showcased at Royal Kew Gardens in an Exhibit, “Travel the World at Kew.” Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world and conducts creative writing workshops at various universities in North America and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home.

 Currently, Yuyutsu curated the Himalayan Literature Festival 2024 in collaboration with New York Writers Workshop in Kathmandu. He also edits Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing.

 

More: www.yuyutsusharma.com

 

 

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Monday, July 22, 2024

PRATIK'S SPECIAL CITY WRITING HIGHLIGHT : GUEST EDITORIAL BY PIIA MUSTAMÄKI

  

PIIA MUSTAMÄKI

GUEST EDITORIAL



Do cities have souls? We feel as if they do because we see cities as living organisms, feeling as strongly about them as we do about people: we love some of them passionately, while we loathe and fear others. Some are off-putting, while some others make us feel safe. Some evoke tenderness, some oppress, and sometimes our home cities change and start alienating us, as happened to Rúnar Helgi Vignisson’s Reykjavik and Charlson Ong’s Manila. But where do we locate a city’s soul?  In a detail we love about it and hence it’s the city’s soul for us, in its collective beating heart, or in the city’s opposing characteristics of “goodness and suffering,” as James Ragan puts it? 


City writing as a term is as elusive as a city’s soul. This collection of poetry, essays and short fiction about cities around the world – Lagos, Dakar, Reykjavik, Paris, Rome, Nicosia, Lahore, Kathmandu, Delhi, Varanasi, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Manila, Hanoi, Jakarta, Sydney, Los Angeles, New York, Toronto – does not provide a clear definition for either. But it maps the kinds of diversions cities – whether our homes or travel destinations – provoke as they stage the mundane alongside desire and violence, morphed into being by history, inequalities and movements of people. These diversions disclose cities as beautiful but unfair. They provide belonging, shelter or slaps in the face. They treat men and women differently, as they do people of color and those who have less than others. But what they do all have in common is the ability to conjure up the writer’s imagination.


From Charles Bernstein’s desolate Brooklyn Park to Nathalie Handal’s Rome apartment where green muslin gives way to passion, to Anand Thakore’s Constantinople at the eve of the Turkish conquest where a courtesan prays for mercy for herself and for those who have scorned her, the poetry in this collection captures moments in cities that are undeniably soulful. But cities can be soul crushing, too: Philip McLaren’s fictionalized true story “Black Cul-de-sac” reveals the murderous dead-end Sydney can mean to Aboriginal Australians, Tim Tomlinson’s short story “Sir” a domestic worker’s plight in Hong Kong and Manila, and Sally Breen’s “Embassy” the soulless expat luxury in Hanoi.   


In their essays, Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka wrestles with his sometimes nemesis, sometimes soulmate city of Lagos, Vagneux Yann with Varanasi’s tangible holiness, Neelam Hanif with the soul-searching Lahore inspires, and Ravi Shankar with envy for Nicosians’ passion for their city despite or because of its troubled history. In “The Night Driver,” Pratik editor Yuyutsu Sharma takes a Kathmandu taxi that reveals both corruption and deities in the post-earthquake cityscape, while in “She Stares at Me,” Dakar’s Museum of Black Civilizations compels me to look at the legacies of colonization in the eye. The photography chosen by Tadej Žnidarčič echoes the issue’s global scope and the diversions its cities instigate, whether the pandemic’s effects in NYC or Dhaka, weightlifting at a Bangkok cemetery, nighttime street scenes in Kampala, or the quieter side of the megacity of Chennai, captured by Julie Williams-Krishnan.  

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah describes the aim of cosmopolitanism as us “getting used to one another.” In today’s fragmented world, it’s the city where this can happen, where people of all walks of life make homes, work, pray, fight, love and wander the same streets, miraculously more often in harmony than not. This collection bears witness to how in the end the city doesn't only spark creativity but, as Teju Cole puts it, “might be our greatest invention.”

 

 

 Photos by Julie Willaims-Krishnan, Tadej-Znidarcic, Imran Ahmed & Samsun-Helal


Piia Mustamäki is a Finn, a New Yorker and an academic wanderluster, currently located in Abu Dhabi, where she teaches at NYU’s Writing Program. A Fulbright scholar, she has a PhD in English Literature from Rutgers University and her research interests include travel narratives, global south urbanism and gender and postcolonial studies. Her travel writing and essays have appeared in Meridian: The APWT Drunken Boat Anthology of New Writing, Literary Traveler, Memoir Magazine, Panorama: Journal of Travel, Place and Nature, among others. Piia has traveled to more than 120 countries. web: www.1001worlds.com.


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