This issue of Wasafiri arrives while so many of us are feeling the loss of connection in our lives. The ways in which we relate to our creative communities, families, colleagues, flatmates, and friends, have been interrupted by Covid-19 and by state responses to the virus around the world. Physical contact has been distanced and digitised; shared group spaces, where ideas can grow and morph, have shrunk or been suspended. In this general issue, spanning Wasafiri’s perennial range of genres, geographies, and themes, much of the work coalesces around what it means to connect. And, on the level of society, community, language, form, and the body, our writers ask time and again how different modes of connection can disrupt, or reinforce, dynamics of power.
Artistic responses to the pandemic have more urgently raised familiar questions of how individual agency interacts with state power. From the migrating citizen in Ethel Maqeda’s short story ‘Peace Be Still’ to the decentring power of the artist described by Okey Ndibe in interview, the ways in which we connect with others, in comfort, trauma, and resistance, are explored as sites of power accretion and power transfer.
Rachel Long and the Octavia collective speak to the disruptive force of redistributing power, particularly in Long’s account of creating the space for Octavia to exist at the Southbank Centre, in the heart of London’s cultural mainstream, rearranging traditional hierarchies through the insertion of the previously marginalised. Meanwhile Tom Kew, writing on the Blackdrop collective in Nottingham, and particularly citing founder Michelle ‘Mother’ Hubbard, focuses on the need to maintain independent, alternative spaces that are not funded by, included in, or codified by the mainstream, in order to preserve their genuinely countercultural potential.
The possibility of collective connection that might provide resistance to and refuge from (as in Kew’s analysis) prevailing powers takes on a different urgency in the issue’s lead feature, ‘Grenfell, Race, Remembrance’. In this essay by Claire Launchbury, we see in tangible terms community’s capacity to speak back to power — more than this, to hold power to account when it has fatally, multiply, catastrophically failed in its duty. The issue’s arresting cover, ‘Grenfell’ by Tom Young, returns us to the granular, concrete texture of the tower and, in invoking so strongly its presence, confronts us starkly with the violence of the loss.
For Mohsin Hamid, interviewed here by Saba Karim Khan, a collaborative approach is not only practical but foundational and inescapable: ‘the “I” within us doesn’t really exist without other people; it’s constantly adapting and shaping’. Another kind of decentring mode of connection is present, too, in Rebekah Cumpsty’s interview with Okey Ndibe. Ndibe tells us that:
history operates in my writing, first and foremost, as an intensely intimate experience. … History is not an abstract, distant and epochal phenomenon; it is, instead, a project in which, to some degree, every human is involved.
The fiction in this issue asks how we move as individuals within broader webs of power, be this through the dynamic of family in Sharma Taylor’s New Writing Prize-winning ‘How You Make Jamaican Coconut Oil’, the upturned institutional hierarchy in Selvedin Avdić’s tale of the world’s strangest hotel head waiter, ‘A Drop of Happiness’ (translated by Will Firth), or the reality of state control over the literal movement of the individual in Maqeda’s story of a group of women attempting to cross the Zimbabwe border.
C A Davids and Kelwyn Sole talk together about the shifting landscape for poetry as a political art form in South Africa, and highlight the need for a community of writers that remains not only mutually supportive, but able to continue to engage critically with one another. In a similar vein, the women in Maqeda’s story have come together to increase their chances of success, but their very different reasons for making the journey remain murky even to one another, and their shared labour is complicated by resentments, silence and frictions. Again, we have alternative modes of mutual support against the backdrop of state power — here against the very real threat of the abuse of that power, are not idealised, but rather written, with a critical eye, attendant to the way power dynamics are still at work between apparently equal individuals, and even between the living and the dead.
Language as mode of connection is picked up as a theme in much of the issue’s poetry. In Byron Beynon’s ‘A Musician’s Ear’, a poetic account of a haircut, and in Dahmicca Wright’s ‘Wound’, physical immediacy and relatable experience – the hum of the barber’s clippers, the bright pain of a wound and a loss – are mediated by multiple speakers. The language of the poems connects us to these physical experiences but keeps them at arm’s length. Tom Sastry’s poem, ‘The Contract Cleaners Prepare Flat 64 for the Next Tenant’, depicts a poignant moment of (missed) connection, of witnessed absence. And the New Writing Prize-winning poem, ‘Conventional Wisdom’ by Yasmine Seale, overtly and with humour resists the fantasy that language (particularly translation) might be able to communicate everything, to make perfect contact between source and target language or between speaker and reader. In Seale’s twenty ways to translate an Arabic saying, meaning is at once overdetermined and allowed to slip past us; reading this along the framework of Sawti, quoted in Wallis, the oppressive capacity of translation is frustrated. We are reminded, implicitly, of language’s role as mediator, both facilitating and frustrating connection.
Similarly, the limitations of connection are felt in New Writing Prize winner Sharanya Deepak’s life writing piece, ‘Seamless’, in which connection with others is complicated and made uncomfortable by traumatic past experience, even while connection with another survivor does, in some complex way, help. The piece never settles on a tidy resolution, but rather, contact remains an ambivalent space of comfort and threat.
To decide on the winning entries of the 2020 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, published in this issue, field leaders in fiction, life writing, and poetry read manuscripts from unpublished writers, paying the longlisted work their serious, sympathetic attention. Contact, of a kind, was made; in the announcement of the shortlist and prize, some power, in some small way, has shifted, and that work will now go out into the world and make new connections. It would be trite to end this editorial with a reminder of the connecting power of literature, and to do so would undermine the messages contained here on the very real and damaging fissures experienced outside of, perhaps beyond, language. The challenge, it seems, is to maintain that decentring double vision: keeping faith in the radically disruptive power of our relationships with each other, while maintaining awareness of their very real limitations.