By TEOLINDA GERSÃO
Translated by MARGARET JULL COSTA
The reason I first donated sperm wasn’t to fill the world with my children, but to get money to buy a new skateboard and go to the movies more often. I didn’t think it would change me.
By LATOYA FAULK
When we identify respect (coming from the root word meaning “to look at”) as one of the dimensions of love, then it becomes clear that looking at ourselves and others means seeing the depths of who we are. Looking into the depths, we often come face-to-face with emotional trauma and woundedness. Throughout our history, African Americans have pounded energy into the struggle to achieve material well-being and status, in part to deny the impact of emotional woundedness. Truthfully, it is easier to acquire material comfort than to acquire love.
—From Salvation: Black People and Love, by bell hooks
Home is not just a house; it’s this yearning for a place where you’re safe, [a place where] nobody’s going to hurt you.
—Toni Morrison, in conversation with Claudia Brodsky at Cornell University on March 7, 2013
By KC TROMMER
Louise Bourgeois, MASS MoCA
Inside the bounded mercury,
we keep going. All circuits that close
make serpents of us, constrict
and envelop every tender corner until
only a small portion
is distinct, our feet dangling like the end of a
sentence. We suspend ourselves
in a room full of light but take none in.
By JENNIFER JEAN, NANCY VIEIRA COUTO, and CAROLYN SILVEIRA
As part of this fall’s Lusosphere portfolio, The Common will publish accompanying work online. This month’s poetry feature highlights the work of three Lusa-American poets, tracing their roots back to the Azores and Cape Verde: Jennifer Jean, Nancy Vieira Couto, and Carolyn Silveira.
On October 28th at 4:30pm EDT, join The Common for the virtual launch of our 10th anniversary issue! Contributors from across the globe will be tuning in to read excerpts from Issue 20’s portfolio of writing from the Lusosphere: Portugal and its colonial and linguistic diaspora. Don’t miss out! Register for the free event at the link here.
By MERON HADERO
Meron Hadero is a finalist for The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.
Original version published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Issue 52, finalist for the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing
When I met Herr Weill, I was a lanky 10-year-old, a fish out of water in –, Iowa, a small college town surrounded by fields in every direction. My family had moved to the US a few weeks earlier from Ethiopia via Berlin, so I knew no English, but was fluent in Amharic and German. I’d speak those sometimes to strangers or just mumble under my breath to say what was on my mind, never getting an answer until the day I met Herr Weill.
This is the fifth in a series of features highlighting the Black writers our editors and staff have been reading. To read The Common’s statement in support of the nationwide protests against anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and police brutality, click here.
Recommendations: semiautomatic by Evie Shockley, Wandering in Strange Lands by Morgan Jerkins, and How Are You Going to Save Yourself by J.M. Holmes
A Retelling from the Popol Vuh by ILAN STAVANS
The archetypal creation story of Latin America, the Popol Vuh began as a Maya oral tradition millennia ago. In the mid-sixteenth century, as indigenous cultures across the continent were being threatened with destruction by European conquest and Christianity, it was written down in verse by members of the K’iche’ nobility in what is today Guatemala. In 1701, that text was translated into Spanish by a Dominican friar and ethnographer before vanishing mysteriously.
Music by ABRAHAM KATZ
Northern Israel-Palestine
The chunk of the ball
On the cracked blacktop
And our torsos so covered
In sweat nearby the sea
Swells and the smell seeps
Into our hair and the air
The Common Young Writers Program is a two-week (Monday-Friday) online creative writing program for high school students (rising 9-12). Taught by the editors and editorial assistants of Amherst College’s literary magazine, the summer 2020 course will focus on the short story. Through writing exercises and contemporary reading assignments from The Common, we will introduce students to the building blocks of fiction (scene, character, plot, image) and guide them through the process of writing and revising their own short stories.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.