Welcome to Issue 11
Summer 2020
We post the photograph at the right, taken about 12 years ago in La République du Bénin, with sober thoughts about the persistent disease of racism in the US in particular. In the town of Ouidah, notorious in the historical past for its pre-emancipation slave markets, the severally-named tree, it is claimed, marks the spot where human beings were auctioned off, and, as the French plaque (not visible) put it,
destines au Ameriques etaient troques contre des merchandises de pacotilles. Loosely, “destined for the Americas [where] they were traded for junk merchandise,” or as British historian David Olusoga has put it just as baldly—in an editorial for The Guardian on the toppling of slaver, Edward Coulson’s, statue in Bristol in the UK—for sugar and rum. Slavery that enshrined the lethal American ideology of profits over people. |
In an odd gesture of historical tourism, enterprising Beninois rewrote the story of this site and named the tree, “the Tree of Remembering.” So the (apocryphal) story goes, before they went onto the beach, those about to become slaves were made to circle the tree three times so they would not forget their culture. The closest thing to that that historian Robin Law[1] was able to find was that both this tree (also more commonly called the "Tree of Return" or the "Tree of Forgetting") and its purpose were not recorded until the 1990s, at the same time as the town began its attempts to grow a tourist business there. Rather, the commemorative tree (the original is gone) marks the spot where arriving European slave traders were welcomed by the local slave vendors of Ouidah, then referred to as “Whydah” in the historical record. If there was any circling around this tree, says Law, it was the Ouidah chiefs who circled it three times before rolling out the red carpet to their visitors, the slave-trading yovos (“white people,” in Fongbe, the language of southern Bénin.)
Why bring all this up? We express both our revulsion for the continued snail’s pace of achieving racial justice in the US and our support for those who stand steadfast in peaceful protest. Indeed, given those protests around the George Floyd murder, the continued abuses, and the colossal failure of the current leadership in the US to respond in an adequate and statesmanlike manner—not to mention the continued racial inequalities and abuses in so-called “developed” countries around the world—we should remember, but not in the way that the tourist business might want us to. Neither forget the brutality, nor sentimentalize the suffering.
[1] Law specialized in the history of Bénin, previously known as Dahomey, even under French colonial rule. See his Ouidah :The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727–1892 for a fuller picture.
Why bring all this up? We express both our revulsion for the continued snail’s pace of achieving racial justice in the US and our support for those who stand steadfast in peaceful protest. Indeed, given those protests around the George Floyd murder, the continued abuses, and the colossal failure of the current leadership in the US to respond in an adequate and statesmanlike manner—not to mention the continued racial inequalities and abuses in so-called “developed” countries around the world—we should remember, but not in the way that the tourist business might want us to. Neither forget the brutality, nor sentimentalize the suffering.
[1] Law specialized in the history of Bénin, previously known as Dahomey, even under French colonial rule. See his Ouidah :The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727–1892 for a fuller picture.
On that note, Dear Reader, welcome to Issue #11, vol. 2, of Witty Partition (formerly, The Wall.) And—"Allons enfants de la Patrie! "—just shy of Bastille Day on the 14th. The day of Glory may not yet have arrived nor has the end of tyranny, but be reminded of that marvelous image put forward by US poet, Emily Dickinson, "hope is that thing with feathers that sits on the soul..."
In this issue's ¡VIVA! Maria Isabel Alfonso commemorates the person and the work of Nicaraguan poet, Ernesto Cardenal, who passed away this year.
Our Fiction section features a light-hearted romp, excerpted from Glenn Ingersoll’s Autobiography of a Book—with that very book as primary protagonist. We also include novel excerpts from Canary Club, a historical novel by Bronwyn Mills.
Chris Sawyer-Lauçanno and Bronwyn Mills have also collaborated on a translation of Frontera by Carmen Herrera Castro. The work addresses the notion of borderlands, those peculiar areas where language, cultures, and god-knows-what-else mix and produce yet other remarkable hybrids. And like that notion of frontiers, borderlands, areas of conglomeration and confabulation, the book is neither fish nor fowl, fiction or non-. In the spirit of multilingualism, we have presented it under its own category, "Ventanas," Spanish for windows, a form advanced by the late Eduardo Galeano.
And, of course, Sawyer-Lauçanno's Memoir of his interesting life continues.
We are also pleased to include poems by Levent Yilmaz, translated from the Turkish by Nazim Dikbaş, with the original Turkish included of course.
Our Remarkable Reads feature reviews by Dana Delibovi, Jan Schmidt, and editor Hardy Griffin. We have once more added our annual Summer Reads recommendations in no particular order from contributors, friends, and ourselves.
On the visual front, we offer a portfolio of the work of Gwendolyn Kehrig-Darton, and, in lieu of our usual colophon, INCITE!, a series of photographs around some of the recent protests and what should be obvious: black lives matter. We hope, of course, that our InSights continue to provide a lens into the world of sometime visual irony, sometimes just a sight to behold.
In this issue's ¡VIVA! Maria Isabel Alfonso commemorates the person and the work of Nicaraguan poet, Ernesto Cardenal, who passed away this year.
Our Fiction section features a light-hearted romp, excerpted from Glenn Ingersoll’s Autobiography of a Book—with that very book as primary protagonist. We also include novel excerpts from Canary Club, a historical novel by Bronwyn Mills.
Chris Sawyer-Lauçanno and Bronwyn Mills have also collaborated on a translation of Frontera by Carmen Herrera Castro. The work addresses the notion of borderlands, those peculiar areas where language, cultures, and god-knows-what-else mix and produce yet other remarkable hybrids. And like that notion of frontiers, borderlands, areas of conglomeration and confabulation, the book is neither fish nor fowl, fiction or non-. In the spirit of multilingualism, we have presented it under its own category, "Ventanas," Spanish for windows, a form advanced by the late Eduardo Galeano.
And, of course, Sawyer-Lauçanno's Memoir of his interesting life continues.
We are also pleased to include poems by Levent Yilmaz, translated from the Turkish by Nazim Dikbaş, with the original Turkish included of course.
Our Remarkable Reads feature reviews by Dana Delibovi, Jan Schmidt, and editor Hardy Griffin. We have once more added our annual Summer Reads recommendations in no particular order from contributors, friends, and ourselves.
On the visual front, we offer a portfolio of the work of Gwendolyn Kehrig-Darton, and, in lieu of our usual colophon, INCITE!, a series of photographs around some of the recent protests and what should be obvious: black lives matter. We hope, of course, that our InSights continue to provide a lens into the world of sometime visual irony, sometimes just a sight to behold.
* * * *
ADDENDUM: We have just received notice of Novel Slices, a new magazine that publishes the novel excerpts of our 5 contest winners. See all the details at novelslices.com/contest