Each year’s first issue of Wasafiri performs something of a balancing act, straddling, in the process of its creation and publication, the New Year. I write this in a London whose autumn is just tipping into winter, knowing it will be read in the spring, when the days will be even shorter here, but the new season will have started to stir. Long lead times always mean that writing an editorial feels like a sort of scrying, groping toward the future for what will feel important then. Particularly, I am trying to imagine early March, when the cold shock of the first New Year’s weeks have passed and we begin to turn outwards again. We will surely be reflecting on two years of the pandemic. Will the mood be — hopeful? recuperative? sombre? fearful? How will Wasafiri readers in different parts of the world be faring? How are you faring?
I also write in the immediate days following our first live event in two years. In November 2019 we celebrated our thirty-fifth birthday with two days of festivities, at Queen Mary, University of London, the British Library, and the October Gallery. It was a time of triumph for the magazine, riding the wave of Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker Prize win, and a moment strangely paralleled now, by Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel Prize win — both writers among the magazine’s oldest friends, people we have championed and who have championed us for decades, their wins a win for and a vindication of our founding vision. Two years later at the party for the 2021 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, you could almost imagine yourself back in that party two years before: so many familiar faces, the space thick with the buzz of delighted connections, the richness of the readings flooding the room.
But of course it was also profoundly different. Wasafiri has changed a lot in the past two years. Many of the faces at this party were new. Many of them were masked. We saw the thirty-fifth birthday as a springboard, a moment to gather our past about ourselves and leap forwards, with a new Editor in role after our founder’s completion of 100 issues. And while March 2020 knocked the legs out from under us as suddenly and terribly as it did everyone else, this fold in time, where the two parties meet, surprises me with how much, and in how many ways, it shows that we have grown. We have branched out, commissioning more broadly geographically, and spreading the focus of our mission to support underrepresented writers beyond the traditional demographics we have worked with. As a team, we are more integrated, able to work together as a network, a net, picking up the slack for one another through the turbulence of the past two years.
The winners we announced this October are published in this issue. The prize is a long labour over the course of the year and, while the prizegiving event at the end of the year is a celebration, the publication of the winning works always feels momentous. The winners this year were Anne O'Brien, Kate Carne, and Dipanjali Roy, and, along with the shortlistees, we lift them up as – we hope – the Evaristos and Gurnahs of the future. Their works, perhaps speaking from and to this time, all grapple with grief, and carry somewhere in them a sense of the unknown, both as fear and as possibility.
This year the prize winners are four rather than three; we awarded our inaugural Essay Prize to Antony Huen for his essay on Hong Kong and Chinese ekphrasis in contemporary poetry in Britain. Wasafiri has always published creative and critical work side by side, and one motivator for this new prize is to more directly support and mentor early career academics. Huen’s piece, coining the term ‘Hong Kong School’ of diasporic and second-generation poets in Britain, against the backdrop of political uncertainty in Hong Kong, is a more than worthy first winner.
The lead feature of this issue, on trans literary activism, brings trans writers from across generations and around the UK into dialogue, not through a traditional interview format, but in a chain letter. Passed from one writer to the next, the letters convey in form as much as content a message of continuance. These letters do not sugar-coat the duress of this moment, but they share a longer view as well. When you have had to believe your past into being from the absences in the archive, the future – even in the face of the multiplicity of attempted erasures felt by trans people today – might sometimes feel possible, too.
This issue is also particularly rich in interviews. Here you will find the renowned novelist Monica Ali; the novelist-cum-academic Saikat Majumdar; and the much-lauded independent academic and commentator Sara Ahmed — again reflecting Wasafiri’s bridging of critical and creative modes of writing. Our art piece, also written partly in interview format with the photographer Stacey Tyrell, reaches again across time, as Tyrell photographs the ruins of the chattel houses on Nevis, the island of her parents’ birth.
This is also an issue of activism — about what writing can do. The activism of the title feature reflects on the power and importance of the written word for belonging, for community, for identity, as well as for resistance. Ahmed’s interview on her recently published monograph Complaint!, with fellow activist Adrija Dey as her interlocutor, is a stirring and relatable read for anyone who has had to function within, or tried to push back against, any reluctant institution. And in Dessa Bayrock and Sarah Brouillette’s article on the CODE Burt awards in Canada, a critical lens is held up to the culture of literary prizes. These several writers, across continents, meticulously break down the machinations of some of the apparently monolithic powers behind so many aspects of literary culture, showing us what makes them tick, and at what cost. Beyond criticism, they pose questions that inspire solidarity, and even action.
The issue’s poems make their own neat folds in the fabric of time. K Srilata’s ‘Three Women in a Single-Room House’ layers the generations that move through a home over the years; while Fawzia Muradali Kane’s ‘Gulf of Paria’, the issue’s powerful opening work, traces the interconnected crises of colonialism and climate across the centuries and across the same stretch of choppy sea.
The party and the win in 2019, the party and the win in 2021: these peaks can feel frustratingly isolated, and separated by troughs of silence, or of two steps back. A few weeks ago it was announced that several works by Black British writers, including Bernardine Evaristo, would be added to the UK National Curriculum. This change was made in line with recommendations from consultants including our founder Susheila Nasta. Among many other things, this is a fulfilment of the goals set out by Wasafiri’s founding organisation, the pressure group ATCAL (Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African, Asian and Associated Literatures), and can be placed in a line that connects those past efforts with Evaristo’s Booker win in 2019 and the present. These moments of triumph, and these moments of turmoil, are continuous rather than discrete. This work is ongoing and collective.
To close this editorial, and open the issue, nothing speaks more clearly than Nat Raha’s words from her letter to her fellow writers in the issue’s main feature, in which the past and present come together to look forward:
We dust off new and old ways to push against the forces of oppression, even as the rising rents & tides & borders split us geographically from each other. We defy these gravities together.