This issue of Wasafiri can be mapped in many ways. Even simply tracking its geographical movement yields intriguing sensibilities of cosmopolitanism and locality. Invoking London, Cape Town, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong and Newcastle on the first page alone, the issue crosses to Singapore, stops in Delhi, dwells in Scotland, finds and leaves Nigeria, returns to Lagos, remembers Soweto, shifts between Denmark and India, drives through Bangalore, floats down the Nile, observes in Pakistan, mourns in Ontario, is disconcerted in Philadelphia, routes through Armenia, gestures to Palestine, Berlin and Tiananmen Square, visits the English coast, compares Ireland and Trinidad. And so it moves. Locations are named in ways that draw upon accepted meanings and imbue them richly with new ideas and atmospheres. But this issue is, of course, more than an evocative naming of places. It performs many other elegant mappings.
In conversation with Maya Jaggi, Tan Twan Eng speaks of memory, rejection and atonement, and on his prize-winning novel about the aftermath of the Japanese occupation of ‘Malaya’ as a meditation on the lines between refinement and barbarity. Tan also speaks of the organic processes by which his female protagonist came to inhabit his book, and of the continuities and differences between writing as a lawyer and writing as a novelist. These two themes – writing across genres and imagining women – are distinctive features of this issue of the magazine, and they work their way through an intriguing variety of forms and tones across stories, essays, poems and reviews.
Ashish Kulshreshth's ‘Swapping: A True Singapore Ghost Story’ is a pacey and witty tale of sexuality, aspiration and a woman reader. The subtlety and humour of the story derives in large part from the representation of the dissatisfactions and fulfilments of a wife and her ghostly lover. The story moves towards a most satisfying and unexpected final moment of poetic justice. And justice, too, is a recurring theme in this more than ‘general’ issue of Wasafiri. Shifting intensively between mythic and visceral images of the non-human, Terry Jones's poems compel the reader to consider the very human nature of social injustice.
A woman reading is an image that occurs again in Petra Tournay-Theodotou's essay on Jackie Kay's Red Dust Road. While drawing out the centrality of descriptions of physical place within the memoir, the essay also acknowledges the importance of fictionalised and fantasised places to the structure of the narrative. Tournay-Theodotou centrally addresses the crossing of Kay's poetics into this work of ‘life-writing’ that matches the flow of autobiography into her poetry; a shifting that seems necessary to the humour and emotional power of her engagements with memory, family and sexuality.
With an exuberant and precise sense of physical humour, Uzor Maxim Uzoatu's ‘Borojah's Law’ tells the story of a woman's apparently infuriating sexual mischievousness. At the end of the story, this tone strategically falters, allowing the reader to momentarily see that her deviance belies a serious yearning. The theme of betrayal continues through Marvin Thompson's narrative poem ‘The Story of Summer’, which traces shame, regret, longing and time passing in a moving exploration of the inability of a whole life to exceed a single moment.
Genealogy and genre, marriage and family are again addressed within Geetha Ramanathan's expansive mapping of ‘Memoirs of Feminist Modernities’. This essay puts aside various literary critical formulations in order to more directly identify the ways in which women writing from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia have entered ‘modernity’. This piece highlights the importance of the combination of fiction and life writing to these narrative processes. Influences across genre again emerge as a central theme in the conversation between Tabish Khair and Imtiaz Dharker. They talk about the relationship between Khair's own poetry, fiction and academic work; and they consider the influences of Hindustani songs and Urdu poetry on their own work towards a broader exchange around the possibilities and failures of language, the idea of authenticity, the power of the media and the politics of religion.
In a beautifully crafted story about beautifully crafted objects, Revathi Krishnaswamy explores the seductive and destructive power of ‘style’. The story pursues a complex understanding of the paradoxes of aesthetic sensibility: it can embed but also defy an unjust economy; it can enable a deep appreciation of the moral and historical significance of material objects; and it can encourage a shallow consumerism. The vast economic inequalities realised by Krishnaswamy's story are more starkly compressed in Michael Dunne's poem ‘Local Colour’. Here the difference is self-mockingly apprehended as a distinction between immortality and mortality — the wealthy tourist as a graceless God floating towards Luxor is a startling and memorable image.
The grace and brutality of faith is also significantly mapped by this issue of Wasafiri. In ‘Reframing “Violence”, Transforming Impressions: Images in Contemporary Pakistani Visual Art and English-language Fiction’, Madeline Clements pursues subtle comparative visual/textual readings that resist the too-hasty absorption of art into either global or local discourses about Islam. The essay reminds us that our location of encounter is significant to our understanding of art and its relationship to politics. The significance of proximity and distance is also explored in Najwa Ali's delicately disjunctive ‘Writing Toward a Distance’. Part life writing, part journalism, part literary criticism, entirely poetic, this piece offers both strident and wistful response to the grace and awkwardness of the veil, the awful closeness of love and deadly violence, and the brittleness of ‘honour’. Honour is also at stake in Daniel M Jaffe's ‘The Rebbetzin’. A story of slow revelation and wonderfully nuanced comedic dialogue, Jaffe moves from humour to pathos in another story of women, secrets and betrayal.
Secrets of a very different sort thread the conversation between Sarah Hymas, Razmik Davoyan and Arminé Tamrazian. Davoyan says that ‘poetry is the most secretive thing in the world’, attributing his extraordinary oeuvre to a mysterious bond with the ‘divine creator’. But he also speaks in more earthly terms of the strains and confinements of living and writing under communism. Changing regimes, incursion, confinement and resistance are also the themes of Michelle Cahill's superbly taut ‘Surveyors at the Edge of Empire’, a poem that carefully offers history as both myth and the measurements of men in dirt and stone.
Mapping this issue of Wasafiri, it strikes me that it is notably marked by comedy. Celebrating the winners of the Wasafiri New Writing Prizes in poetry, fiction and life writing, this issue particularly celebrates work in all three genres that use humour to complexly moving effect. Anita Pati's ‘A concise Chinese–English dictionary for stealing love’ uses pun, cliché and coincidence to express a poetic of loneliness that is all the more felt for being so funny. Gita Ralleigh's clear eye for the humour of the small, awkward moment in ‘Back at the Museum’ is central to her portrait of the intimate connections between the apparently most unrelentingly local of places and the vast and deep nature of the planet. And Cliff Chen's incorrigible life-reflection inflects Irish rain with Trinidadian English to exquisitely, painfully funny effect. In keeping with Wasafiri's long tradition, this issue energetically promotes writing in and across genres that is finding new ways of being international.
Stephanie Jones