Editorial

‘Writing … like reading, is about stopping time … ’ (Romesh Gunesekera, The Sandglass, 1998)

There is no doubt that we are living in increasingly difficult times. As reports of human tragedy and devastation from war zones in the Middle East are streamed across the globe, we are listening at the same time to stories about the fall-out from such conflicts, with millions of people willing to make treacherous crossings to Europe to seek refuge. Described by German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the ‘defining issue’ of ‘our times’, this current crisis is not new, rather, it seems to be an ironic repetition of the relentless consequences of the continuing march of history. For instance, anyone familiar with the global aftermath of both World Wars will know about the huge migrations that resulted, whether across Western Europe, Russia (formerly the Soviet Union), Armenia, the Asian subcontinent, Africa or the countries of Eastern Europe. And most readers of this magazine will already be aware of many other such movements, whether ancient or modern, of diaspora and migration, as well as Wasafiri’s thirty-two year commitment to offering a platform where readers and writers can engage with the diverse creative articulations of these often troubled histories. In such a world, where it is continually necessary to remain vigilant about the realities of the human stories underlying the production and circulation of ‘knowledge’, the wide-ranging imaginative visions of the critical and creative voices published in this magazine are ever more urgent.

Although this is a general issue and has no overarching theme, many pieces speak in prescient ways to current times. The vital relationship between personal and public histories, age and youth, memory and loss, art and temporality, recur in different contexts, evoking poignant human comparisons across different cultural landscapes. As the opening piece entitled ‘Time’ by Dike Chukwumerije suggests, ‘history’ is unreliable, it is a ‘story’ that encapsulates a variety of presents and ‘changes with the telling’. Set in Nigeria and framing a love born just before the Biafran war, the story reverberates with several others as it traces a path between the often blurred lines of connection between the private and the public. The subject of ‘time’ is also explored in Romesh Gunesekera's reflections on the short story: writing a story is like embarking on a directionless journey; it is always a ‘risky’ endeavour but can offer respite when the ‘rest of our lives’ make no ‘sense’. It is also the force of memory and the redemptive power of storytelling that drives Wanjiku wa Ngugi's memoir ‘Doves and Cowboys’, a moving and humorous account of how the stories recited almost daily by her aunt kept her soul and imagination alive following the arrest and detention of her father, the eminent Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, on New Year's Eve 1977.

From a more overtly political perspective, the question of how to make art amidst the ghostly traumas of the past is taken up by journalist Hadani Ditmas, who discusses the fragile landscapes of Indo-Jewish British artist Gerry Judah. In part an ongoing conversation with the artist, the feature shifts from Judah's apocalyptic white cityscapes of Beirut to the complexities of representation and commemoration of key historical moments in this and the last century. Moving from the barbed edges of the sculptures commissioned to commemorate World War One, to works that evoke the unspeakable traumas of the Holocaust, the essay ends with the startling juxtapositions of Judah's Bengal works, where tradition and modernity literally ride side by side.

If Judah's work provokes us to think and see differently, Brenda Cooper's essay ‘“Eight chickens” … “and there was this goat”’ questions how knowledge – especially academic knowledge – is transmitted, received and constructed in contexts where cultural misunderstandings and difference may completely overturn what appears to be authoritative meaning. Beginning with a miscomprehension of an oral testimony delivered to the South African post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this piece raises intriguing questions about the power of telling, our modes of interpretation and the ethics of why we should remain alert to alternative systems of meaning and representation. Interestingly, this subject is also addressed in Íde Corley's interview with radical South African photographer and activist Zanele Muholi. Keen to counter the continuing circulation of homophobic stereotypes, Muholi describes how she uses her work and the power of the image to strategically shift understanding and memorialise the subjects of anti-homosexual violence in her community.

Questions around how to express alternative cultural realities and histories is touched on again in two pieces on Caribbean writing. In an unusual interview, Jamaica's poet laureate Mervyn Morris reveals how the poetic techniques and orality of Louise Bennett's voice not only continues to influence his own writing but has also been pivotal in opening the continuum of the nation's language. And whilst dealing with the subject from quite a different angle, Sara-Louise Cooper, in ‘Writing Selves, Written Selves: Spiralling Paths from Past to Present in Patrick Chamoiseau's Une Enfance créole’, explains the non-linear narrative strategies that the Martinican writer devises to complicate any notion of a unified self, creating a version of his past history in his autobiographical trilogy that will never sit comfortably with one way of reading or seeing the world.

As is common in our general issues, the fiction and poetry published here stems from a number of different regional contexts, from the Caribbean through Europe and Africa to Asia though, as already noted, there are a surprising number of thematic links and correspondences. Importantly, alongside the many fascinating new stories and poems featured, we also celebrate the winners of this year's Wasafiri New Writing Prize. With 649 entries from over thirty countries across the separately judged genres of life writing, fiction and poetry, the three new voices published here and which stood out against stiff competition, promise great things for the future.