With JAQUIRA DÍAZ
Your name: Jaquira Díaz
Current city or town: Miami Beach, FL
How long have you lived here? I grew up in South Beach, and I’ve been back here (in North Beach) for about a year. But most of my immediate family lives in Miami, and I’ve been leaving and coming back since I was 19.
Book by HARPER LEE
Reviewed by
Isn’t it wonderful that so many people are upset about Go Set A Watchman? I am not being sarcastic. Think about it: one of the most talked about events in the summer of 2015 is the publication of a book. Harper Lee’s old friend, Truman Capote (the model for Dill in To Kill A Mockingbird), would probably have had something snarky to say about it. The author herself remains silent, as she largely has since her first book—the only one until now—was published in 1960.
Go Set A Watchman is not a great book. We see Harper Lee, who was in her early 30s when she wrote it, before she fully found her voice and getting in her own way more times than not as she struggled to write her first novel. I agree with her original editor at Lippincott (now HarperCollins) who judged that this one wasn’t ready, but saw enough potential in Lee’s writing to think that it could form the scaffolding for a stronger book. But in some ways Go Set a Watchman is the more ambitious novel. Lee reached far in this first attempt to come to terms with her childhood in racist, segregated Alabama of the 1950s.
Once upon a time I fell in love with Jack Kerouac, the words of Jack, the ghost of Jack, the idea of Jack. It started with On the Road, and then it wasn’t long before I set out to read everything he’d ever written, nearly fifty years after he’d written it. I was married, middle-aged with kids, living in the suburbs. My 20s had been spent working, getting married, going to grad school, and having my first child. My 30s were spent raising two children and piecing together part-time work as a writer, urban planner, and volunteer. Then, one month before my 40th birthday, further infatuated with Jack’s Visions of Cody and The Dharma Bums, I latched onto the idea that I myself had never driven across the country before, had never experienced the typically American rite of passage known as “the road trip.” This was something Ineeded to do. Now. Alone. At least that’s the story I told myself and my family and friends as I planned and made my escape.
Author’s Note
These “color swatch poems” are taken from a larger work in progress called Mutterfarbe, a book of experimental translations and poems using Goethe’s Theory of Colors as a primary source.
Each of the colors and their names were pulled from the landscapes and built environments I inhabited during my travels throughout France in early 2015. The nine images at the top correspond with each color swatch poem, and represent those landscapes/built environs. The “Anhang” (appendix) at the end features lines I translated from Goethe’s text on color theory—each numbered line corresponding with one of the color swatches to create a new poetic text.
Lobster in the Rough is over. On a given summer day we can no longer pull off the highway on the Maine side of the border into the parking lot alongside dusty motorcycles, cars, and trucks, and take a seat at the bar or a table beside the bocce courts, inhale lobster rolls in the sun and have a drink among locals and interlopers. This was a place of tribute bands, ladies nights, and horseshoe pits. A place we visited any chance we had heading north or south, a place we returned to, the origin of memories and oft-repeated phrases overheard in the midst of one fantastic day or another. Its closing confirms or reaffirms that these sorts of things—the places we’ve come to depend on to be there as some small but increasingly significant facet of our lives—are going away.This link—to the past we have lived and a past that is hinted at by the place itself—is gone. It’s not a loss of food (certainly there are other shacks within a mile radius that could sufficiently do the job), but a loss of sustenance nonetheless—a shift in atmosphere. Sometime this past winter it transitioned from closed for the season to closed permanently. It’s for sale.
By KURT CASWELL, SARAH WHELAN, SAHIBA GILL, PAOLA PERONI, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH
Are you up for a challenge? This month we’re reading books that test us as they enlighten us, seeking to explain the world on a grand scale—warts and all. We’re held rapt by catalogs of world travel, remembered across decades; the brutal pageantry of crisis erupting through daily rituals; the history of poverty and injustice; the intricacies of mental illness, personal and societal. Don’t turn to these titles for escape—we’re here to focus the lens of the human experience and find something as irascible as it is beautiful.
Book by CHIGOZIE OBIOMA
Reviewed by
The year I left Nigeria, 1993, was a momentous one. For the first time in about a decade, there was a presidential election—a democratic process that had eluded Nigeria after at least two military leaders had ruled the country, seizing power through coups. I was 18, old enough to vote but not inclined to do so. My parents were not politically active, though my father loved to discuss current affairs with his friends at our house in northern Nigeria. That year, their discussions were filled with excitement about Nigeria’s future, about the presidential candidate, M.K.O. Abiola, whose beaming face was plastered on flimsy poster boards along busy roads. I, too, found myself swept along by the high hopes for the country despite the increasing power outages, corruption, fuel scarcity, and religious and ethnic tensions.
When the election finally occurred, on June 12, 1993, the charade that followed left us all jaded and crestfallen: the election, which Abiola won, was annulled due to unfounded accusations of rigging. An interim president was quickly instated, after which Sani Abacha took over the country and ran it with the iron hand of a despot.
Today the corn is new, no higher than my knee, and at this height it has a special color: luminous green under the overcast sky. The clouds are thick and dark, like a stew. For some, this place might seem always the same: the corn growing, the looming mountain, the lone trees far off across the fields still and silent, punctuating the view. But for me there is always something to see.
S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews SARA NOVIĆ
Sara Nović’s first book, Girl at War, was published by Random House earlier this year and was immediately well received: described by critics as “outstanding,” “intimate and immense,” The New York Times concluded it is “a brutal novel, but a beautiful one.” American-Croatian Nović recently graduated from the MFA program at Columbia University, where she studied fiction and literary translation. She is the fiction editor at Blunderbuss Magazine and the founder of ReDeafined, as well as an advocate for the Deaf community. S. Tremaine Nelson spoke with Nović in June while she was on a book tour in London.
Please join us in welcoming Ukrainian poet SERHIY ZHADAN to our pages—and look for more of his work forthcoming in our print journal.
All poems translated by Ostap Kin. With an introduction by Polina Barskova.
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Celebrating 15 Years