This issue features the work of distinguished Nigerian-British artist, Yinka Shonibare, whose recent installation ‘The British Library’ places the deeply embedded migrant history of the nation centre stage. Full of bright British ‘treasures’, Shonibare’s storehouse is composed of shelf upon shelf of batik-covered books. Apart from signalling the extent to which migration has shaped Britain's cultural life, the exhibition points to how the porosity of such cultural influences remain more crucial than ever in the contemporary moment. Visiting Turner Contemporary in 2016 (just before the Brexit vote), I was both impressed by the sheer scale of the installation as well the weight of the presence signified by the thousands of gold-embossed names on Shonibare's shelves. Not only made up of listings of the famous or worthy, to cite Nikesh Shukla's recent discourse around the ‘good immigrant’, some famous protagonists present in Shonibare's visual chronicle were also fiercely anti-immigration such as Walter Mosley, Enoch Powell and, more recently, Nigel Farage. Further scrutinising the library for well-known names from the literary world, I began to feel a deep sense of kinship as so many who jumped out at me have also shared space in the pages of Wasafiri; including, amongst others, novelist and 2016 Booker Prize judge Abdulrazak Gurnah and Vesna Goldsworthy both featured in this issue.
Border-crossing of any kind is often a courageous act, whether resulting from a physical journey (such an acute reality in current times) or as here, in usually less dangerous conditions, as writerly expressions of translation and transformation. Whilst it is not possible to identify a neat pattern across the range of writing in this issue, it is interesting to note that, despite prevalent concerns with the ever-present and knotty relationship between language, power and politics, explorations of questions of form and aesthetic freedoms still prevail. As Boyd Tonkin perceptively reminds us in his passionate feature on the status of translation in the contemporary international marketplace, writing and translation are not only ancient acts – dating back in terms to the days of King Alfred – but are also and continuously ‘labour[s] of love’. In Vesna Goldsworthy's travel writing piece which recounts a personal trip to ‘Hare Street’ in Calcutta, we witness how fast the familiar can become strange and how recognisable bearings (whether of landscapes, known through history books or family stories) can fast disappear. Arrival in the much-heard-of city soon makes the author hyperconscious of how her ‘English words’ and their flimsy signifiers soon become ‘unanchored’. Moreover, as she begins to view its fading imperial architecture through the multiple lens of her English, Serbian and Balkan eyes, more immediate postcolonial geographies take precedence.
Explorations of the complex reverberations of cultural collision as well as the ever shifting relationship between representations of the familiar and the foreign emerge between the lines in several of the contributions. These range from Cristina Navazo-Eguía Newton's exploration of ‘speechlessness’ in her aptly entitled poem, ‘Foreign Homeland’ to the bleak vision of Rabindra Swain's ‘This House is Not for Knowing’. Similar questions preoccupy the conversation between Chinese poet Agnes Lam and Jennifer Wong as they explore her dual cultural identity, its impact on her poetic and aesthetic choices and her decision to write in English even though her formation was primarily amidst a Cantonese cultural context. Offering a wider historical and geographical lens, Charne Lavery interprets the significance of the transcultural figure of the ‘beachcomber’ in Abdulrazak Gurnah's 2005 novel Desertion, examining how Gurnah's construction of his European stranger points intriguingly to the possibility of an ‘oceanic imaginary’, stretching from the local world of East Africa to the Indian Ocean to the South Seas. Contingent issues of memory and history amongst Pacific populations in Australia also form the focus of Emma Scanlan's rigorous interrogation of how national narratives come to be constructed, as she investigates questions of ‘Reenactment in the Pacific and Australia’ that resonate directly with the spirit of Shonibare's reinvented national biography of migrant Britain. It is not possible in this short preface to detail the works of all the wonderful contributors to this issue. As ever, we have published a number of exciting interviews with writers, including a searching discussion with Indian poet Sudeep Sen on poetic form and the need for productive cross-cultural collaboration. We also include a lively writer-to-writer discussion on the role of short fiction in Caribbean writing conducted between established writer Monique Roffey and fellow-Trinidadian Kevin Hossein. And, finally, we offer several exciting glimpses into the future by featuring a number of excellent new short fictions: such as ‘Electric Solutions and Miscellaneous’ by Amita Murray (winner of the 2016 UK SI Leeds Prize), whose confident voice plunges us deep into a day in the Mumbai life of her intimate character, Ramu. The almost Narayan-like comic vision of Ramu's everyday world contrasts starkly with Makena Onjerika's also intimate but pacey evocation of the vernacular underworld of Meri and her followers on a Nairobi street. Last but not least, we feature as usual the winning entries of our very own Wasafiri New Writing Prize. Selected from 610 entries and twenty-eight countries across the globe, Niamh MacCabe's powerful short story ‘Nobody Knows the Shivering Stars’, Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné’s intriguing ‘Portrait of my father as a grouper’ and Shiva Rahbaran’s unusual life-writing piece ‘Massoumeh: An Iranian Family in Times of Revolution’ all deserve much celebration.