Issue 22 | The Common

Past and Future on Rapa Nui

October 25, 2021 Essays, Issue 22, Issue 22 Essays, Studio

The morning was clear and the colors vivid: yellow brush, white ocean froth against cobalt sky. In front of me, dense gray volcanic stone appeared to consume the light. I stood in salty mist before an altar on the north coast of Rapa Nui, Easter Island. A single toppled moai lay in violent chunks on the ground. At 9:00 a.m. the sun still hovered tight at the horizon. Rapa Nui, which is part of Chile 2,300 miles away, is kept closer to mainland time than by geographical rights it should be. The sun rises gray and sticky at 8:30 in the morning, and sets late, too. This is not the only disorienting thing about Rapa Nui, but rather the most objective example.

Sometimes All You Can Do Is Wait

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

By ZEINA HASHEM BECK

The dermatologist injects the local anesthetic
into my upper arm. When she begins to carve,

Safety Advice for Staying Indoors

October 25, 2021 Fiction, Issue 22, Issue 22 Fiction

By MARY O’DONOGHUE

The farmer’s daughter began her fifth period, more excavating, more mortal than the previous. The toilet under the stairs flushed half-heartedly, returning red-brown effluent. Go down, go away, be off to the underworld! She pumped a second time, jangled the handle to make her point. But there would be more. Dark clumps and entrails, another six days of the end of the world.

Tupac of Mamourah, 1999

October 25, 2021 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 22, Issue 22 Fiction

By ANNA ZACHARIAS

Tupac Shakur was in Ras Al Khaimah, said Sami.

“But Tupac is dead,” said Connor.

“Astaghfirullah,” said Mayed.

“Tupac’s not dead,” said Sami. “He’s at the sheikh’s palace.” Sami had heard from his friend Nadia, whose uncle arranged security for the sheikh, that Tupac Shakur, the king of hip-hop, Mr. Thug Life himself, was on Jebel Jais.

Dey

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

Winner of the 2021 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry

By STEPHANIE DINSAE

The Common Magazine · “Dey” by Stephanie Dinsae

The pidgin form of ‘to be’¹

A young child, I was privy to hearing this word
in my household, around my uncle and his friends
reminiscent of his schoolboy youth.
A part of a pidgin I could never participate in
for fear that the broken English might
have too much of an essence, might
tarnish my own English.
They would not let me code switch
thinking the pidgin would overtake me

Disorder

October 25, 2021 Fiction, Issue 22, Issue 22 Fiction

By FARAH ALI

Early one morning, when the sky was still dark, Annie locked herself in her room. She turned the key three times, then went to her bed and opened a book.

II.

At half past seven, her mother knocked on her door and told her to get up. When Annie didn’t appear, her mother tried the handle and found the room locked. Half an hour later, she put her ear to the door and heard nothing, not even the loud whisper of the ceiling fan. A strange feeling got hold of her; she knocked and spoke more sharply. “Open!” She slapped the wood with the palm of her hand and began to shout for her husband. “Come quickly! Annie’s not coming out—something has happened to her!”

Who Writes the Arabian Gulf?

October 25, 2021 Essays, Issue 22, Issue 22 Essays

By NOOR NAGA

I have dreamt of this Arabian Gulf Portfolio ever since I was a teenager, writing about snow and squirrels and picket fences—despite living in Dubai where I had more experience with temperatures of 40+ degrees, karak chai, compounds… Because English was my first language, the fiction that was available and accessible to me at the time was perpetually happening elsewhere. My high school education focused on the British and American canons, meaning that we had no exposure to global Anglophone literature, let alone any works set in the United Arab Emirates. The bookshops sold mainly self-help and cookbooks in the 2000s. The public libraries were few, poorly stocked, and dominated by Arabic literature that was also generally quite dated. Consequently, for most of my teenage years, my imagination was furnished by foreign clutter and peopled by strangers I had no knowledge of first-hand. There was the book-world and there was the real-world, and I didn’t even appreciate how separate they were in my mind until I began to write about rivers and forests and realized there were none around me. The mimetic dimension of literature had been severed entirely.

Oman Is Mars: An Alien All Along

October 25, 2021 Essays, Issue 22, Issue 22 Essays

By PRIYANKA SACHETI

“We want to simulate Mars on Earth and so we need a place that looks as much like Mars as possible. And we found it here in Oman.”
—Alexander Soucek, lead flight director of the AMADEE-18 mission, in Phys Org, October 30, 2017

The first time my husband visited me in Oman years ago, he peered down from the plane window and received his first glimpse of the landscape: an undulating palette of browns, beige, mauve, and grays. This is Mars, he thought to himself. Mars on Earth.

Castro Street

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry, Poetry Recordings

By PHILLIP WATTS BROWN

The Common Magazine · Castro Street

As through a prism, the city shifts
to rainbow. We cross into technicolor,

Rite

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

BY KWEKU ABIMBOLA

For the three months before I left home,
my father allowed me to cut his hair—

a strange way to apologize
for all those years of being
unclose. But for those three months,
he wanted me to make him presentable.

So I did, every other Saturday afternoon,
standing behind him, as he sat shirtless
on a beige foldaway chair in the master bathroom,
above the sandy whorls of our linoleum floor,
wearing his favorite home khakis.

His usual was the Even Steven:
slick dark Caesar, with a shadow
taper close to his temples,
and above his neck.

I studied how his hair sprouted
in different grains. Especially tufts
that spooled from the birthmark
near his dome.

He chose Saturday afternoons
so we’d have enough time for shearing,
before he rose to Sunday’s pulpit and power.

But all this closeness was just
a parting present, before I left
and grew my hair iridescent; prodigal.

Now even when I’m home,
my father trims his own
hair, and fears mine.

Avoiding the touch of the one who cut
his hair before seven sermons. Including Mama Akua’s
memorial where he preached the whole message
in Akan about our funerary rites,
before giving the altar call in English:

For our people all it takes to enter
Asamando is a cupful of water
for the journey, and tended hair:
a freshly shaved head for men, and new
plaits for women. But saints, I tell you,
to enter heaven you’ll need more, you’ll need—

Dad, if you die before me, I swear
to still give you water.

But Dad, if I die before you, please
just reach into whatever earth’s below my body,
and feed that moisture to me.

Please empty your hands
of all razors, clippers, and blades
before you cup my head.

Bring instead to my pre-burial
some argan and almond oil.

Douse my skull. Take your
hands and comb my hair—
then, plait it. Surprise me, weave my hair
into something terrible. Into the flourish
you fear. Because if you don’t, I’ll know.

If I open my eyes and have nothing
to shelter my scapula and clavicles
from Asamando’s wind, I’ll know.

I know we’ll find ourselves in different
heavens. I’ve chosen the one that requires
only my groundwater, and my mess of hair.

Though we’ll find ourselves in different
heavens, I’ll be haunted by that other eternity
I lived, draped in linoleum and afternoon beige
for three months of summer Saturdays.

Kweku Abimbola is a postgraduate Zell Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He is of Gambian, Ghanaian, and Sierra Leonean descent. He is a finalist for the 2021 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and the second-place winner of Furious Flower’s 2020 poetry contest, and has work published and forthcoming in Shade Literary Arts, 20.35 Africa, The Common, Obsidian, SUNU Journal, and elsewhere. Kweku is presently working on his first full-length poetry manuscript, entitled Saltwater Demands a Psalm. His chapbook, Birth Elegies, is forthcoming in May 2022 with Finishing Line Press. You can find him on Twitter: @kwxkuu.

[Purchase Issue 22 here.]