Slight Return
We can’t go home to the old world. We must have run out of ways to grasp for it. Denial of the COVID plague has prolonged it for years, as business attempts to go on as usual and the party won’t stop despite the need to contain a virus, and it’s the same with our predicament under fascism in this stage of the empire’s, fall, many will push aside knowing the danger we’re in until it comes to their door, many will believe America is exceptional to catastrophe even then.
I’m not trying to rewind time. As I grow older, now a baby-faced middle-aged, I realize that that the past is different in the now, and when we reach back into it we find things that were perhaps always coiled within those moments, that seem specially for now.
This is where the “news” part of “newsletter” comes in. A book I wrote is being published by a small Black imprint called Willow Books. A book I wrote as a much younger person, off to live in Morocco and learn its language and to live within its culture and to make heart to heart connections with its people. This person who wrote this book, young me, though such things as publishing a book you write are easy. I was sure, sixteen years ago when I first began to take the serious steps to become what you call an author, that my novella I wrote in Fes would easily make its way in the world. Actually what happened was, well too many things to recount, among them publishing the second book I wrote, NONE BUT THE RIGHTEOUS, as my debut novel.
I’ve held my next novel FES IS A MIRROR in my heart for a long time. It means different things to me now. I wrote of sexual assault years before I experienced it. I wrote of fascist government suppression years before it applied to the county I’m from in quite the way it does now. Its themes of marginalization and belonging revealed in time that they would thread my other work, including my debut NONE BUT THE RIGHTEOUS. FES IS A MIRROR will be released this fall and I’m eager to share this work as far as it can spread, for you to travel through the ancient city of Fes on fire during that city’s historic December 1990 bread riots. I’ve wanted you to come with me on the voyage for so long.
I also want to spread word about a fiction workshop I’ll be doing with Workshops 4 Gaza. It’s called “Storytelling Out of Your People and For Your People” and is online in a week from today, on September 17 from 6:00pm-8:00pm EST. You can join from wherever you are! All proceeds from this workshop support The Sameer Project in providing critical mutual aid to people under genocide in Gaza. We’ll talk about writing fiction out of who we are and who we belong to. Which is not the same as writing what you know in the sense of situations you’ve experienced! And we’ll come away with some new writing to play with. Everyone who reads this is invited! Just register here:
https://www.workshops4gaza.com/calendar/storytelling-out-of-your-people-and-for-your-people
Even the African novel I plucked to read comes from a past life, an ARC I was given in 2011 as a bookseller that’s somehow come along with me all this way. I’m reading ON BLACK SISTERS STREET by Chika Unigwe. It takes place in Europe, in Amersterdam’s red light district, following women who have come to make their lives there. Like my book I wrote long ago has lessons now for me, and I hope for us, I hope to see what treasures planted in the past by this novel were only waiting for me here where I am.