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TAIYE SELASI

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African Literature Doesn’t Exist

 

Taiye Selasi

The title of my talk tonight is “African Literature Doesn’t Exist”—but, as you may know, I live in Rome, and so start, as we do, with confession. Confession number one: I’m a recovering academic, one decade past my Oxford days, but still prone to making provocative statements whether or not I can defend them. Confession number two: I’m sure I’ll regret having given this talk once the scholars swoop in, but for now, I’m young and idealistic enough to relish the risk of defeat. So. That’s confession done. On to the good part.

The blasphemy.

African Literature Doesn’t Exist.

What do I mean, or not mean? By “African literature,” I refer not to the body of written

and oral texts produced by storytellers on and from the continent—but rather, to the category. African Literature is an empty designation, as is Asian Literature, European Literature, Latin American Literature, South American Literature, North American Literature, and so forth. My very basic assertion is that the practice of categorizing literature by the continent from which its creators come is past its prime at best. Our dogged insistence upon doing so, in the case of the African continent foremost, betrays a disregard both for the complexities of African cultures and the creativity of African authours. If literature is, as its finest practitioners argue, universal—then it deserves a taxonomy neither based on nor supportive of racial distinction, but reflective of the workings of the race-less human heart.

I am by no means the first to champion a non-national, human-centric approach to literature. In 1827 Goethe wrote, “I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind…National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” In 2001 Edward Said, still attempting said hastening, wrote a piece called “Globalizing Literary Study,” freely admitting that “there is something basically unworkable or at least drastically changed about the traditional frameworks in which we study literature. There is a profound insufficiency now to the notion that a Wordsworth poem can be seen as emanating from English literature of the late eighteenth century, or as the work of a solitary genius.” Speaking here, also in 2001, at the very first ILB, Charles Simic defined literature as “the defense of the individual against all generalizations that seek to enclose reality in a single conceptual system.” What these three men are pointing to, centuries apart, is the universality of art, the extent to which all literature—English, Ethiopian, European, African, etc.—transcends per force the geopolitical and personal borders with which we try to parse it.

If we accept, with Goethe, Said and Simic, that poetry is without nationality, “the defense of the individual against generalizations,” then we must ask why we’ve sought to nationalize it. Why do we call that Wordsworth poem an English poem, an Achebe novel a Nigerian one, worse, an African one? Where does the instinct come from? In his article “Ethnic Categorizations in Literature,” scholar Alec Hargreaves tells us that the practice dates back to the 19th century, when the state was finding its feet.

The main institutional lines of modern literary studies were laid down during the nineteenth century, which was marked by a growing tide of nationalism within Europe, and colonial expansion overseas…Just as historians constructed teleological accounts of the past leading “naturally” to the nation-states in which they lived, so literary scholars took for granted the primacy of national boundaries in demarcating literary spaces. In telling the story of French, German or English literature, literary historians confirmed the apparent naturalness of those boundaries…The fact that national and linguistic frontiers did not always fully overlap was often overlooked, no doubt in part because it was assumed that the underlying logic of the nation-states which came to dominate the map of Europe [would] eventually lead to neatly isomorphic cultural and political boundaries.

Would that it had all been so simple. As we know, the 19th century logic of nation-states did not lead, neatly, to anything—neither in Africa, where the chaos is obvious, nor in Europe, where language can often obscure it. One need only ask what is meant by “French literature,” say, to watch nation-making at work.

France has a long history of incorporating in its national literature the works of writers born in other parts of Europe: Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco and Andreï Makine are all regarded as French writers, though they were born respectively in Ireland, Romania and Russia. By contrast, writers born in former French colonies who have migrated to France are generally classified as “francophone” rather than French even when, as [with] Léopold Senghor and Tahar Ben Jelloun, they take French citizenship. Emile Zola was the son of an Italian immigrant but is never referred to as anything other than a French writer, while Azouz Begag and Ahmed Kalouaz, born in France of Algerian immigrants, are seldom referred to simply as “French.” Beneath the linguistic surface of the “francophone” label, the political legacy of colonialism continues to play a major role in the categorization of writers.

And there’s the rub.
The classification of writing and writers is never as benign as it seems. If the practice

began as a way to naturalize the state, it persists as a way to defend it. By calling Beckett and Zola French, but Begag and Senghor Francophone, we re-invent the boundaries of authentic French-ness, defending the borders of France. So it goes with America and the category “American novelist.” If we call Taiye Selasi an American novelist, without that handy hyphen, we threaten the very borders of an imaginary America. Witness: Wikipedia calls Pulitzer winner Junot Diaz “Dominican-American,” Edwidge Danticat “Haitian-American,” but the blond-haired debutante Tea Obreht an “American born in Belgrade.” Just so, to call me an African novelist is first to invent some monolithic Africa, and second to restrict me—my characters, their color— from overstepping its bounds. We imply that I have something important in common with all other African authours, who, together with me, produce African literature. The question is: what might that be?

In 1963 a prominent novelist attended an academic symposium. It was called “A Conference of African Writers of English Expression.” Later he wrote:

There was [one] thing that we tried to do and failed—and that was to define ‘African literature’ satisfactorily. Was it literature produced in Africa or about Africa? Could African literature be on any subject, or must it have an African theme? Should it embrace the whole continent, or south of the Sahara, or just black Africa? [The] conference produced a tentative definition as follows: ‘Creative writing in which an African setting is authentically handled or to which experiences originating in Africa are integral.’ [We] are told specifically that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness qualifies as African literature while Graham Greene’s Heart of the Matter fails because it could have been set anywhere outside Africa. I could not help being amused by the curious circumstance in which Conrad, a Pole writing in English, could produce African literature while Peter Abrahams would be ineligible should he write a novel based on his experiences in the West Indies. Those who in talking about African literature want to exclude North Africa because it belongs to a different tradition surely do not suggest that black Africa is anything like homogeneous. What does Shabaan Robert have in common with Christopher Okigbo? Or Mongo Beti of Cameroun and Paris with Nzekwu of Nigeria? What does the champagne- drinking upper-class Creole society described by Easmon of Sierra Leone have in common with the rural folk and fishermen of J. P. Clark’s plays?

Indeed, the so-called father of African literature was remarkably skeptical of his offspring. The late great Chinua Achebe, writing in 1965, concludes, “Any attempt to define African literature in terms which overlook the complexities of the African scene at the material time is doomed to failure.” Fifty years later I would argue that the only way to define African literature is to overlook these complexities.

Which is the problem.

In order to believe in “African literature”—to employ the term as if it possessed some cogent, knowable meaning—we must believe that the word African possesses some cogent meaning as well. But what? The African continent consists of 55 states recognized by the UN. That’s roughly the same as Europe’s 50, though I’ve never heard of anyone placing authors from, say, Switzerland, Serbia, Spain and Sweden on a panel of “European writers.” One struggles to imagine anyone attempting to group Rushdie, Murakami, Yan and Roy under the banner “Asian Writers,” as if the term shed any light whatsoever on the fine works of the four. The trouble is obvious: continents are naturally formed landmasses comprised of numerous countries. If states make suspicious categories for art, continents are closer to useless. And yet, just the other day I had a cheerful altercation with the Danish presenter Martin Krasnik, who argued—very genuinely, I should say—that I am an African writer. When I asked him why, he said that I’d written a novel about an African family, that Kweku Sai, my protagonist, for example, is an African man. I asked him whether we’d call Anna Karenina a book about a European woman? “No,” he laughed a bit cautiously. “Obviously, she’s Russian.” Why then, I wondered, do we call Kweku Sai an African man rather than, at the very least, West African or Ghanaian? The audience clapped, Martin conceded, and the conversation continued—but I marveled, not for the first time, at the truth behind these terms. We speak of Russian writers and characters, French writers, Spanish writers, Italian writers, German writers, instead of European writers—and we do so because we take seriously the differences between countries. We speak of Japanese writers, Indian writers, Chinese writers, instead of Asian writers—and we do so because we take seriously the nuances of these cultures. What is implied by our use of “African” is that the nuances of the countries and the cultures of that continent are not worthy of our notice. We suggest that there are no meaningful distinctions between a predominantly Catholic, Portuguese-speaking country like Angola on the one hand and a predominantly Muslim, French- speaking country like Senegal on the other.

Why do we do this? Of all the earth’s landmasses, Africa may well be the most culturally, religiously, ethnically and linguistically diverse. There are over two thousand languages spoken on the continent, over 400 in Nigeria alone; South Africa, everyone’s favorite exception, has eleven official tongues. Of course, we tend to dismiss this linguistic complexity as a symptom of primitive clannishness, as if these two thousand languages were spoken by one hundred people apiece. In fact, Amharic, Swahili, Hausa and my own Yoruba, for example, are spoken by tens of millions of human beings—and soon to join Google Translate. Of all the continents, Africa is the least eligible for generalization. Still, not a week goes by that I don’t hear someone use the adjective “African” and wonder: where exactly, in your mind, is this Africa of which you speak? What language do they speak in this Africa? What is the weather like? What are we thinking for food, clothing, music, worship, topography? Are we imagining the snow-capped mountains of Cape Town or the grasslands of Nairobi or the urban sprawl of Cairo or the cacophonous chaos of Lagos? Or are we rather imagining an animated scene from Disney’s The Lion King, a yellow- orange vista just before twilight with drums playing softly in the distance?

Enter Wainaina. In 2005 the brilliant Binyavanga Wainaina gave us “How to Write About Africa.” If you haven’t read it, do. Amongst his truly priceless set of satirical instructions:

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Wainaina is telling us not how to write about Africa, but how to invent it. This singular Africa to which we allude with “African literature” doesn’t exist: it must be imagined and insisted upon, like Beckett and Zola’s France. If we were even to begin to attend to the particulars of those 55 African states, to allow that the differences between Angola and Senegal are as material as the differences between Austria and Spain, we would find the label “African writer” as empty as “European writer.” But we don’t. We insist that there is some knowable space implied by the adjective “African,” a monochromatic entity that exists in our minds alone.

This is the entity Wainaina is considering, and the one we keep creating when we refuse to specify the country—at the very least, the region—a text takes on. This is why my undoubtedly well-meaning hosts in Hamburg, this April, chose for my talk a safari-themed room in the Tierpark Hagenbeck, a zoo. I opened that talk by remarking upon the lovely East African artwork, noting that there’s no such art in West Africa—nor safaris in Ghana—where my novel takes place. Indeed, this is why my very wonderful German publisher Fischer was wary of using the novel’s English title “Ghana Must Go.” They, like my Italian publishers (who chose the title La Bellezza delle Cose Fragili), feared that readers would see the word Ghana and immediately assume that the novel was about Africa. Not about a continent, nor a country, nor the human beings who live therein, but the imagined Africa, the single Africa from which African novels come. This is a book about a family, they told me, not about poverty or hunger. Indeed. I love my German title but hate the reasons that we need it. At the end of Part 1 of Ghana Must Go, Dr. Kweku Sai, who has been dying for the better part of one hundred pages, finally gets on with it. In the very last moment of his very short life, he comes to a realization: of what he was seeking in leaving home, in going from Ghanaian to immigrant:

To be ‘free,’ if one wants swelling strings, to be ‘human.’ Beyond being ‘citizen,’ beyond being ‘poor.’ It was all he was after in the end, a human story, a way to be Kweku beyond being poor. To have somehow unhooked his little story from the larger ones, the stories of Country and of Poverty and of War that had swallowed up the stories of the people around him and spat them up faceless, nameless Villagers, cogs; to have fled, thus unhooked, on the small SS Sai for the vastness and smallness of life free of want: the petty triumphs and defeats of the Self (profession, family) versus those of the State (grinding work, civil war)—yes, this would have been quite enough, Kweku thinks.

I couldn’t agree with him more. The challenge of the African writer—or the writer with relatives from sub-Saharan Africa—is Kweku’s challenge: to be treated as “artist” first, “citizen” second.

I sat once on a panel with the gentle novelist Shubnum Khan, a self-described South African Indian Muslim woman. The first question posed to her was, “What do you think of Zuma’s foreign policy priorities?” She was politely attempting to answer when I impolitely cut in. I asked the moderator whether he would ask a German novelist who’d recently published a thoughtful meditation on contemporary love to comment on Ms. Merkel? Again, the audience clapped, the moderator laughed, and we proceeded to talk about books. But the moment illumined a common assumption: that African novelists are sociologists in creative writers’ clothing. To be sure, there are writers (tiresome ones) who like to pen polemics, others who write political satire and elegant social critique. But to presume that every African writer is a closeted social scientist betrays a fundamental disrespect for those writers’ artistry. Even where an African novelist has attended to autobiographical material—that is, setting a story in his or her country, observing its social dynamics—we are mistaken in engaging the politics to the exclusion of the poetry. In the words of the marvelous Seamus Heaney, whom we’ve so recently lost, “The autobiographical content per se is not the point of the writing. What matters is the shape-making impulse, the emergence and convergence of an excitement into a wholeness.” Denuded, the assumption is that African novelists write only about the condition of African-ness, and that we do so not on a “shape-making impulse” but on a self-explanatory one. Never we mind the family dynamics, romantic catastrophes, intellectual musings—all of this humanity is secondary to the African-ness at hand. What offends me most about the question posed to Shubnum—and the questions posed to me, however well-intentioned the questioners—is the implicit suggestion that African writers’ thoughts about their writing are less interesting, less valuable, than their thoughts about Africa. The problem isn’t that we’re so often asked to speak about politics, identity, immigration—but that we’re so much less often asked to speak about our art.

I’d be more patient with this trend in criticism and journalism if it applied to all writers, irrespective of color, but it does not. In the United States, when a writer is white, and especially when he is male, we speak of him as “artist,” focusing our contemplations on his art. We concern ourselves with his singular voice, the particulars of his writing style, the inner lives of his characters, and ask him about the same. When the writer is brown—be he Ghanaian, Indian, Dominican, or better yet, an Immigrant—we speak of him as “citizen,” as a representative of his kind. We concern ourselves with his country’s politics, the outcome of its latest war, making him an exemplar not of an artistic approach but an Experience. In May of this year Amit Majmudar published an opinion piece in the New York Times called “Am I an ‘Immigrant Writer’?” It opens, “I learned recently, to my surprise, that I had written a novel about the immigrant experience. The novel I thought I’d written was simply about a mother and daughter, but the inside flap of the book jacket made it clear I had ‘written anew the immigrant experience.’” I laughed aloud. The Abundance is a glorious novel about cooking, mothers, death, and TV—but to those who would seek to market the book, it is about immigration. Yes, Majmudar’s characters are Indian immigrants to the United States, as Bulawayo’s are Zimbabwean, Adichie’s Nigerian, Waclawiak’s Polish. But in classifying these works as immigrant novels, we do what Kweku Sai most fears: we let the larger story swallow the smaller ones, the human ones—in err.

Later in the same article, Majmudar echoes Simic: “Fiction strives to attain the universal through the particular; readers want to relate to characters, to see themselves.” In the small stories, in the particular stories, the reader finds one’s truest self; for, tucked away amid the foreign details is humanity, ever familiar. Finally, what so frustrates me about the designation “African literature” is the suggestion that African experience stands outside the realm of the Universal. If we took African characters—or immigrant characters—to be as universally relatable as, say, middle class suburban white characters, we wouldn’t speak of African novels. Having allowed African characters and African stories into the Human Familiar, we’d have little to cling to in defining the Foreign that is African literature. How? ‘Literature with African characters’ would become literature with human characters. No good. ‘Literature set in Africa’ would fail on the Josef Conrad grounds. ‘Literature written in African languages’ would satisfy wa Thiong’o, but would preclude the global engagement to which novels, I think, aspire. ‘Literature written by African people’ would be the next best bet, but things get sticky quickly here: Who is an African person? Someone born in Africa and raised elsewhere? Somewhere born elsewhere and raised in Africa? Egyptians? White South Africans? White South Africans living elsewhere? And what if these African people write novels that don’t have African characters, such as Helen Oyeyemi’s rather brilliant Mr. Fox? Helen was born in Nigeria (good), but raised in London (tricky); does this make Mr. Fox an African novel or an English one? Teju Cole was born in America (tricky), but raised in Nigeria (good); Julius, his protagonist, is half-Nigerian and never steps foot on African soil. Is Open City African writing? Teju an African writer? William Boyd was born in Accra and raised between Ghana and Nigeria (tricky); A Good Man in Africa is set where you’d think, but Mr. Boyd is white. Is he an African novelist? A Good Man in Africa an African novel? I was born in London (tricky) and raised in Boston (bad); my Nigerian mother was born in London, my father, like Boyd, in Gold Coast. I speak no African language and hold no African passport. But the protagonists of my novel were born in Ghana and Nigeria respectively. Does this make Ghana Must Go an African novel, me an African novelist? Or could it be the case—with me, as with Helen, Topé and Teju—that all this clumsy background checking rather misses the point?

Why does it matter where a writer comes from? Does it change the way he writes? I’m not speaking of the material conditions under which he works; certainly, I type more quickly in Accra and Delhi, where I’m afraid that the electricity may at any moment cut out. I’m speaking of the magical conditions under which a writer receives, and of the universal human condition illumined by his so doing. To write fiction, one must remove oneself—one’s consciousness, one’s experiences, one’s biases, one’s doubts and fears—as completely as one can. To write powerful fiction, one disappears altogether. All writers know this moment. One minute you’re there, banging away at the keyboard, and the next, you’re coming back from somewhere; seconds, minutes, hours have passed for which you cannot account for. The only record you have that time has passed are the words you have typed and the proof of the clock. You read these words with an acute awareness that they’ve come from somewhere beyond you. These are the moments we live for, as writers, these portals into truth and out of ourselves. It is this magic act that allows a 33-year-old woman to write a novel about a dying 57-year-old man. I have never been a father. I have never been a parent. I have never been male. I have never been dead. What madness allows me—encourages me!—to write in the voice of Kweku Sai? We call this madness “art,” and those afflicted by it “artists.” It is this madness that allows a woman like Louise Erdrich to write a boy like Joe Coutts, a man like William Boyd to write a woman like Hope Clearwater, a human like Yann Martel to write a tiger like Richard Parker. It is this madness that allows a single human being to access the truths of all human beings, to write of the love, lost, longing, fear and folly that distinguish the condition. To suggest that this madness affects one differently based on where in the world one was born—or, in the immigrant’s case, where in the world one’s grandparents were born—is absurd. This madness knows no national bounds. There is nothing about my Ghanaian-nes—or, say, Kiran Desai’s Indian-ness (or is it American-ness?) or Priya Basil’s British-ness (or is it Kenyan-ness?)—that mitigates this madness.

Ask them. Ask any writer how his nationality affects his writing—not the finished product but the process itself—and I suspect you’ll get an answer akin to Ben Okri’s.
In January 2012 we were at the marvelous Jaipur Literature Festival, sharing a stage with Teju, on a panel of “Afropolitan writers.” I suppose I have myself to blame for the existence of this panel. In 2005 I wrote an article about Afropolitan identity. Of course, I was writing about personal identity, about the challenge faced by a certain demographic of Africans, both in and outside of Africa, in declaring their own identities. For example, if I say “I’m British,” because I was born in London, I get questioned about my accent. If I say “I’m American,” because I hold the passport, I get questioned about my manners. If I say “I’m Ghanaian,” because my father is from Ghana, I get questioned about my upbringing. How much time have I spent in Ghana? Have I ever actually lived there? And if I say “I’m Nigerian,” because my mother is from Nigeria, I get teased about my Yoruba. I’d come to feel that I was standing in some anteroom between four doors—British, American, Ghanaian, Nigerian—locked out of all four rooms. At a particular moment, eight year ago, it occurred to me that there must be others standing in this liminal space, at this crossroads, with me. I called these compatriots “Afropolitans,” as my task was to write about Africa, but swiftly discovered that our hybrid kind exists all over the world.

At the Jaipur Festival I was touched by the number of Indian audience members who felt that the essay embodied their experience. “Indopolitans,” I jokingly called them. So there we were in India—Ben Okri, Teju Cole, and I, Afropolitan writers and an Indopolitan audience—when someone asked Ben the question. Do you consider yourself an African writer? I’ll never forget his answer. “There are only two kinds of writers,” he said. “Good writers and bad ones.”

I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones. But I am not an African writer. At no point in my writing process—in the act of actually being a writer: seated at the laptop, wherever I may be—do I experience a nationality. Nor am I an Afropolitan writer, disappointing as the news may be. Afropolitan is a personal identity. Fiction has no need for such things.

Then how should we classify literature? you ask. We can’t very well expect bookstores to have two sections only: Good Writing and Bad Writing (though it would help). No. I would submit that, if needs must, we should classify literature as we do music, allowing that the identity of consequence is the writing’s, not the writer’s. We no longer speak of “contemporary Asian music,” “contemporary American music,” without specifying a type of sound. For instance, the singer Berry and the rapper Diam’s are both young, female, French, but nothing about their music is illumined by those facts. We know this. We speak of jazz, pop, rock, alternative, electronic, chamber music—irrespective of the demographic profile of the musician. It would be an insult to insist that Louis Stewart is an Irish jazz musician: a great jazz guitarist would be more to the point. If you were listen to the reggae of Tilmann Otto without seeing his photo, you’d think he was Jamaican; that Gentleman is German has nothing to do with his sound. And so on: Adele sings soul music, as does Aretha Franklin; Bob Marley was half-white, his reggae wholly his own; as Saul Williams says, “When Jimi Hendrix was making rock music, he didn’t make black rock. He made rock.”

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we classified literature not by country but by content: the love story, the city novel, the novel of the nation-state, the war novel, the bildungsroman? Then, we might find Cole’s brilliant meditation on New York with Graceland, Abani’s on Lagos, but also with McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Under “Civil War,” we might find Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun with Drakulic’s S, but Adichie’s Americanah with Lahiri’s The Namesake and Bulawayo’s We Need New Names under “Immigration.” Under “Novels about the Novel,” we might find Jansma’s The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards with Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox, but her Icarus Girl under “Magical Realism,” with Marquez, where it belongs. My own Ghana Must Go—despite having the name of an African country in its title—might sit alongside Franzen’s The Corrections, Heller’s Something Happened, and Mann’s Buddenbrooks in the Seriously Dysfunctional Family section. Classifying texts in this way would restore our attention to the intention of authours, drawing connections between the human experiences that come to life in their words. We would, of course, watch the borders of French-ness and American-ness and mythical African-ness weaken—but surely, this is the long-term effect of literature anyhow?

Every time we pick up a book, we erase our personal borders. We trespass the boundaries of the self and enter the wilds of the Other. After those initial moments of disorientation, we find that we are home. As Scott Fitzgerald has it, “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” Recently, a friend, apprised of my talk, said, “You live in a fantasy world, Taiye: a world without nations, without color, without borders. Not all of us are artists.” But all of us can be readers, I said. All of us can belong. And if it sounds like a utopia—a world without African literature, or need of it, a world with human literature—I would say: yes, it is. As Mr. Simic said of literature those twelve short years ago, “Its utopian hope is that one will recognize oneself in some stranger’s words. For a moment, one steps out of one’s cramped self and lives other unfamiliar lives. If literature is not utopia, then I don’t know what is.”

 

>via: http://www.literaturfestival.com/service/archiv/eroeffnungsreden/die-festivalprogramme-der-letzten-jahre/Openingspeach2013_English.pdf

 

 

 

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November 21st 2013

 

 

venezuela0

Viva Venezuela:

Fighting for Socialism

By RCG

 

In October 2012 Venezuela faced a choice: whether to deepen the Bolivarian Revolution that under the leadership of Hugo Chavez, has brought dignity, health, education and hope – or to return to a brutal, unequal, neo-liberal society where oil wealth lined the pockets of multinational companies and Venezuelan elite. The people of Venezuela who voted for Chavez, voted to fight for socialism.

The Revolutionary Communist Group was on the streets of Caracas throughout the presidential elections in October 2012. We joined hundreds of thousands as they thronged the city, braving torrential rain or baking sun, to express their support . This film takes you on that journey, through the barrios, universities and workplaces to meet the political activists, students and workers who are changing their future.

The film premièred in London on 25 October where 150 people packed out Bolivar Hall to hear speakers from the RCG, the Venezuelan and Cuban embassy discuss the movement in Latin America and its relevance to the struggle here in imperialist Britain. It continues to screen all around the country, picking up momentum, not only increasing our understanding of the struggle in Venezuela, but helping us understand the tasks that face us here in Britain.

 Our solidarity with the struggle for socialism takes this form – publicising the example of the Bolivarian Revolution and through films, articles and leaflets; bringing the message to the streets as we struggle against capitalist cuts, the parasitic banking system, imperialist war and occupation here in Britain, the belly of the beast.

As the capitalist crisis bites in Britain, Venezuela provides an inspiring example of how the fight against austerity can develop into a fight for socialism

 Why Venezuela? 

Venezuela is at the front-line of the battle for socialism in the world today. 2013 has seen a renewed campaign of destabilisation aiming to topple the Bolivarian Revolution. Fascist thugs left 13 dead in the street violence following April ‘s presidential elections, an economic war breeds desperation through manipulated inflation and food scarcity, an international media campaign seeks to create a pretext for foreign intervention.

The forces of the Bolivarian Revolution are pushing forward, occupying companies engaged in speculation and fraud, cracking down on corruption and expanding the communas as a system of participatory democracy.

Now is a vital time, we can not allow the ruling classes here in imperialist Britain, with their corporate newspapers, television and websites to slander the revolutionary process in Venezuela. Every attack against them, is an attack on us, our principles, and our struggle here to overthrow the forces of capitalism and imperialism.

The Bolivarian Revolution illustrates what can be achieved when governments and people, working together, put human need before capitalist profits. Despite Chavez’s death in March 2013, the process is being built every day by millions of Venezuelans, working to create a society built on collective, socialist organisation and production. In that conscious struggle the spirit of Hugo Chavez lives on.

Show the film yourself!

We encourage everybody, students, workers, activists, in Britain and around the world to use this film, spread the word and seize this opportunity to to highlight Venezuela’s role in breaking the chains of imperialism. Alongside the achievements of socialist Cuba, Venezuela illustrates that not only is another world possible, but this world is being built today in Latin America!

Our fight is one fight – towards socialism, internationalism and unity!

If you plan to organise a film showing please get in touch atoffice@rcg.frfi.plus.com or phone 0207 837 1688. We may be able to support with publicity and materials for the event. Also don’t miss our pamphlet that accompanies the documentary ‘Viva Venezuela Fighting for Socialism’.

Individual pamphlets cost £3 including P&P or £5 with a DVD copy of the documentary.

Why not place a bulk order for copies for your local reading group, trade union or student union, or just to sell in your local area.:

10 for £18.00 (inc P&P)
20 for £30.00 (inc P&P)
50 for £65.00 (inc P&P)

Send cheques payable to Larkin Publications to
FRFI, BCM Box 5909, London WC1N 3XX together with your postal address. You can also pay via Paypal: donations@rcgfrfi.plus.com.

A big thanks …

We would like to take this final opportunity to thank the following people who helped make the 2012 delegation and the documentary film possible.

All supporters whose donations made possible our delegation and documentary film
Agent Of Change
Ana Julia Cedeno Maiz
Ana Marin
Aporrea
Bolivarian University of Venezuela
Barrio 23 de Enero
Carolina Conao
Catia TV
Cuidad Caribia
Community of La Salina, Vargas
Daisuke Tanabe
Desde Abajo
Emily Trip
ENFODEP
FCI UNEARTE
Fernando Soto Rojas
Fiorella and Gabriella
Francisco Rodriguez
Ivonne Delgado and Rafa Angulo
itookyourpic.com
Jody McIntyre
Latin American Children’s
Cardiological Hospital
Pablo Gimenez
Pablo Navarrete
Rafael Ramos
Richard Velez
Roberto Jimenez Diaz
Rogelio Polanco
Ruben Granado
Xoan Noya
PSUV and JPSUV
The Ministry for Foreign Relations
The Venezuelan Embassy in London
Venezuela Analysis
Viviana Lombardi
Workers and managers at PDVSA Gas Communal ‘Ambrosio Plaza’
Yolanda Bascon
Source: www.revolutionarycommunist.org

 

>via: http://venezuelanalysis.com/video/10180

 

 

 

black history studies

December 2012

 

15 Things You Did Not Know

about the

History of Black People

in London before 1948

 

By Charmaine Simpson

 

Black people came from all over Europe and Africa and settled in London where their presence is significant but little known. The presence of Africans in England dates back to at least the Roman period when African soldiers who served as part of the Roman army were stationed at Hadrian’s Wall during the 2nd century AD. Septimus Severus, the emperor who was born in Libya, spent his last three years in Britain before he died in York in 211AD.

 

 

 

I will present 15 facts aimed at raising the level of knowledge and uncovering the hidden histories of people of African and Caribbean descent who have contributed to London before 1948.

1. The earliest known record of a Black person living in London is of “Cornelius a Blackamoor” whose burial on 2nd March 1593 was recorded in the parish register at St Margaret’s Church in Lee. 

 

2. Olaudah Equiano (1745 -1797) was one of the most prominent Africans involved in the British movement towards the abolition of the enslavement of Africans. He was a prominent member of the ‘Sons of Africa’, a group of 12 Black men who campaigned for abolition. In 1789, he wrote his autobiography ‘The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African’ which depicted the horrors of slavery and helped influence British lawmakers to abolish transatlantic enslavement through the Slave Trade Act of 1807. However, no enslaved people were freed by the Act – so the struggle continued. 

 

3. Ignatius Sancho (c1729-1780), the composer, actor, writer and businessman was the first Black person known to have voted in Britain in 1774 and 1780. Sancho was also the first African prose writer whose work was published in England. 

 

 

 

4. William Cuffay (1788 – 1870) was a Black tailor who lived in London. He was one of the leaders and martyrs of the Chartist movement, the first mass political movement of the British working class. 

 

5. In 1773, Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) is the first African-American woman to have her book published ‘Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral’. The book was published in London with the help of the Countess of Huntingdon. 

 

6. Mary Prince (1788 – c.1833) was the first Black woman to write and publish an autobiography ‘The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave,’ an account of the horrors of life on the plantations enslavement, published in Britain c.1831. Mary Prince was also the first woman to present an anti-slavery petition to Parliament. 

 

7. J.S Celestine Edwards (1858-1894) was the first Black man to edit a White-owned newspaper Lux (1892-1895), the weekly Christian Evidence Newspaper. He was also the editor of its monthly journal ‘Fraternity (1893-1897)’ which reached a circulation of more than 7000. 

 

8. The ‘Africa Times and Orient Review’ is the first political journal produced by and for Black people ever published in Britain. Duse Mohamed Ali, an Egyptian Nationalist and Pan Africanist Journalist founded The African Times and Orient Review in London in July 1912. It was printed in Fleet Street in London. Marcus Garvey was a staff writer at the newspaper. 

 

9. In 1931, Dr Harold Moody (1882-1947) founded the League of Coloured Peoples (LCP) in 1931, the first Black pressure group and the largest British Pan-African organisation in the 1930s and 1940s.

 

10. Una Marson (1905-1965) was the first Black female broadcaster at the BBC from 1939 to 1946. Una Marson, born in Jamaica in 1905, was a poet, publisher and activist for racial and sexual equality. She was a secretary to the League of Coloured Peoples as well as many other organisations including the Women’s International League for Peace.

 

 

11. Henry Sylvester Williams (1869-1911) helped to found the African-Association, which lobbied for human rights in the colonies and was instrumental in holding the first Pan-African Conference in London (1900).

 

12. John Richard Archer (1863-1932) became London’s first Black Mayor on 10th November 1913 aged fifty years old when he was elected mayor of Battersea. 

 

13. Amy Ashwood Garvey (1897- 1969) was a playwright, lecturer and Pan-Africanist who founded the Nigerian Progress Union in London in 1924. She became an important figure in the anti-racist movement in England. In 1959, she chaired an enquiry into race relations following the racially motivated murder of Kelso Cochrane in London. In the wake of the Notting Hill riots in 1958, she co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Coloured People

 

14. The West African Student Union (WASU) was one of the most important political organisations in Britain from the 1920s until the 1960s. Members included Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Fela Anikulapo Kuti and Joseph Appiah who played an important role agitating for an end to colonial rule in Britain’s West African colonies.

 

 

15. Elisabeth Welch (1904-2003) was one of the first Black people to have her own BBC radio series in 1935, Soft Lights and Sweet Music, which made her a household name in Britain.

 

 

>via: http://www.blackhistorystudies.com/resources/resources/15-facts-about-black-londoners-before-1948/

 

 

photo by Alex Lear

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 exit left

 

when i came to i didn’t know where i was

on the ground, prone, near the levee bottom—i blacked out

while jogging, got up, walked home, still laboring a bit

between deep gulps i told nia as much as i could remember

 

my brother is a cardiologist, nia urged me to call him

tuesday morning early i take an ekg and the results are so disturbing

keith schedules me for a battery of tests an hour and a half later

i still have a meeting to do in between, my blood pressure was normal

 

i reappear, am radioactively injected, get wired up and climb on

a treadmill, lay under a nuclear camera, chat as though nothing

was wrong, submit to a sonargram, nia is there the whole time,

the results are negative, acceptable, i did not have a heart attack

 

keith can not determine the etiology of the alarming ekg

but i know the hard truth: at fifty i am almost through

i am dying and perhaps there is a metaphysical reason

no physical break down showed up on the machines this time

 

as the world unravels around me i coolly center the resulting chaos

within the calm of my karma’s core—this is how i exist: i dare to do

all the good i can, i accept the uneveness of chance, i simply love

life for what it is and when my time comes, i am not afraid to exit

 

—kalamu ya salaam

____________________________________

 

Music—”Monk’s Mood” by Thelonious Monk

 

Kalamu ya Salaam – vocals

Stephan Richter – clarinet

Frank Bruckner – guitar

Georg Janker – bass

 

 

Recorded: June 14, 1998 – “ETA Theatre” Munich, Germany

 

 

 

Open Road Review Guidelines

open road

Starting from 20 Dec 2012, Open Road Review will pay Rs 1000 for all solicited works of fiction / poetry / artwork / creative nonfiction. Efforts are on to find ways to fund regular contributors too.

Submission period for Issue 8 — Second Anniversary Issue (due out 1 Feb 14): 15 Nov 13 to 15 Jan 14.

Fiction:  Open Road Review accepts previously unpublished short fiction up to 4000 words and flash fiction of 1000 words or fewer throughout the year, though we may close submissions on occasion to catch up on reading.

We look for literary work that is influential, yet elegant in a subtle way, fiction that effortlessly takes the reader to a deeper level, revealing the human condition without sloshing the flow of consciousness over its banks. We encourage work that has rich interior, a story that teaches us how to read it, something that if you can get it on a greeting card, it’s not working.

Stories must be typed, double-spaced and in MS Word DOC format with your full name and address on the manuscript. Submit only ONE story at a time. We accept simultaneous submissions, but please let us know that the piece is submitted elsewhere. Query is unnecessary. We do not offer compensation.Send your submission as an attachment (and in the body of the mail) to fiction@openroadreview.in

Creative Non Fiction:One CNF piece, under 2000 words. Words that poke, teach, reason and stay put in the mind for a long time. Show us places we haven’t heard of, people we thought didn’t exist, misery or excess in any form, living or dead, that hurts. Send in the body of the mail to cnf@openroadreview.in

Poetry:

Please submit at a time 3-5 poems of under 30 lines each. The poems should be original and unpublished (we do not consider poems posted on a personal web site or blog as “published”).

Most forms and styles of poetry are eligible for publication, provided the poems are well-crafted and their content has a contemporary relevance. Of particular interest is poetry that is sophisticated and imaginative, but has the potential to be understood and enjoyed by an audience that goes beyond “other writers”. We are interested in fresh voices and wish to include poetry from diverse perspectives and backgrounds.

Open Road Review upholds the values of peace, community and universal love, so submissions that are deemed offensive for whatever reason will be rejected. The editor holds the right to reject or accept any work. Send your best poems in the body of an email to poetry@openroadreview.in (no attachments). 

Visual Art: Photographs (black and white, or colour), computer generated artwork, painting or pencil sketch that represents life on the road. Straight, curved, looped, up / down etc. Show us a good road and we will build our next issue alongside it. When you are ready, send a lowres image (under 10 mb) to kulpreetyadav@gmail.com . Queries are welcome.

Blog: While the blog is a designated space for editors to share their random thoughts, we are willing to have guest posts too. Do send them to the CNF id and if we like your moving thoughts, it will appear online. Maximum word limit 750. Please include a picture that relates to the writing.

Rights revert to the author upon publication. It will be nice if you say we published it first. ORR also holds the right to include the works published on its website in future anthologies.

Want more insights? 

Read Shanti Perez’s (Fiction Editor) interview in the blog ‘Six Questions for…’ by clicking here.

Or her interview on Duotrope by clicking here.

 

>via: http://www.openroadreview.in/guidelines/

 

africa is a country

NOVEMBER 23RD, 2013

 

 

 

Weekend Music Break 62

image
 

 

BY TOM DEVRIENDT 

 

10 new music videos from Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Kenya, Mali, Burundi (via Belgium), South Africa and Nigeria (via the US and the UK) to get your weekend started. But first up, from Senegal, Daara J Family have a new video out, directed by Lionel Mandeix and Loïc Hoquet. N’Dongo D and Faada Freddy, from Dakar, still bringing it after all those years:

 

 

“THIS VIDEO IS SOOOO AMAZING IT HAS A JAMAICAN VYBE PLUS DANCING N FLAVOR I GOTTA LUV MY NAIJA PPL DEM TUN UP LOUD BUSS TWO BLOODCLAAT BLANK FI DIS!!!” And that was just one of the first YouTube comments under this new Burna Boy jam, ‘Yawa Dey’, directed by Peter Clarence:

 

 

Here’s another Nigerian jam, by Omawumi and Remy Kayz:

 

 

More Pan-African styling courtesy of Nde Seleke in ‘Pelo Ea Ka’. Lesotho house music as good as it gets:

 

 

Kenyan director Wanuri Kahui shot this video for South African rapper Tumi — is this the new Pan-African aesthetic?

 

 

Compare the above to what Zimbabwean hip-hop artist Orthodox is doing in Bulawayo…

 

 

…or what Nigerian-American Kev is doing in Queens, New York (he is part of the Dutty Artz’L’Afrique Est Un Pays project — check the EP we shared yesterday):

 

 

In Kenya, Muthoni the Drummer Queen has released an unusually dark video:

 

 

Meanwhile, in Belgium, Burundi-born (but claiming Rwanda as his original home) Soul T knows his Soul classics; this is a first single off his EP Ife’s Daughter:

 

 

And now for something completely else, to end, ‘Ay Hôra’ is a great new tune by Malian singer Sidi Touré and band (throwing a good party too):

 

 

>via: http://africasacountry.com/weekend-music-break-62/

 

 

 

Winter in Variations:

Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest

winter prize

December 1, 2013   –  $150.00 Prize

 

•Submission of six poems accepted up to December 1st 2013

•Write poems about witnessing some every-day occurrence in winter

•Must be original unpublished work

•As of 2013 all submissions via Submittable with $10.00 reading/submission fee.

•Winner or winners to be published online at www.writersrisingup.org

•Prize – $150.00 (May be split if more than one winner.)

•Writer owns all rights

•Writers Rising Up reserves the right to declare no winner.

 

>via: http://www.writersrisingup.org/component/eventlist/details/6

 

 

The Brunel University African Poetry Prize

african poetry prize

THE PRIZE IS NOW OPEN FOR ENTRIES. 

Please read the rules carefully before entering.

The submission period for this prize will be 3rd September to 30th November 2013. The winner will be announced on the 28th April 2014.

Rules: General

1. The prize is open to African poets, defined as those who were born in Africa, or who are nationals of an African country, or whose parents are African.

2. The prize is open to African poets who have not yet had a full-length poetry book published. Self-published poetry books, chapbooks and pamphlets are exempt from this stipulation.

3. Only poems written in English are accepted. Poems translated into English are also accepted with a percentage of the prize going to the translator.

4. The prize opens for submissions on 3rd September 2013 and the closing date is midnight (UK time), 30th November 2013. 

5. Each entrant must submit 10 poems to be eligible, no more and no less. There is no stipulation as to the content of submitted poems.

6. The poems may have been previously published or won previous awards.

7. All entries must be submitted via email only to BUAPP@brunel.ac.uk*.
An acknowledgement will be sent. (Please note that the rules have been made very clear in this document and email enquiries about the rules will not be answered.)

8. The submitting poet must submit a covering notes in the submission document with the following information only: name, nationality, country of birth, full address including country of permanent residence, personal email address, telephone number.

9. Under no circumstances can alterations be made to poems once entered.

10. Under no circumstances will the organisers or judges enter into discussions with entrants who have submitted for the prize.

11. The prize organisers reserve the right to not award the prize if, in the judges’ opinion, such an action is justified.
The organisers also reserve the right to split the prize if they decide that more than one poet is worthy of it.

12. The judges’ decision is final and they will not enter into any correspondence with entrants regarding their decisions.

Rules: Poems

13. All poems must have a title and no single poem must exceed 30 lines in length (excluding title).

14. Poems must be the original work of the entrant.

15. Poems should be single spaced.

16. There is no stipulation regarding font type and size.

17. Poems must be emailed as a SINGLE file document attachment with an index cover page with the entrants name on it. This single document should have page numbers.

18. Individual poems received as separate file attachments and poems sent within the body of an email will be automatically rejected with no notification to the poet.

19. People who have submitted previously for the prize can re-submit. People who have been previously shortlisted for the prize can re-submit but only with new poems. Poems already submitted by previously shortlisted poets are not eligible.

Rules: Winner

19. The prizewinner will be notified at the end of April 2014.

20. The winner will be required to provide a biography and photograph.

21. The copyright of each poem remains with the author.

*Submissions sent to the previous email address have been accepted.

 

>via: http://www.africanpoetryprize.org/rules

 

 

 

 

 

Downstairs stories

By A. Naomi Jackson

 

Hillside, Grenada

Hillside houses, Grenada. Photograph by Tony Hisgett, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

 

 

As the ingenious title of Merle Collins’s short fiction collection suggests, The Ladies Are Upstairs explores the stories of downstairs women, women who work. In one of the book’s freshest scenes, a domestic worker shouts to her employer that the lady who sells jack fish is downstairs, before her boss lady corrects her. “‘A lady in the yard with jacks?,’ she ask me … ‘The ladies are upstairs.’” The book’s triumphs lie in its ability to chronicle, through the story of one woman, the wider story of many black Caribbean women’s experiences with work, family, illegitimacy, and emigration.

In these linked short stories, we are invited into the world of Doux Thibaut, a woman born into a hardscrabble life in the fictional Caribbean island of Paz in the 1920s. Paz is close both geographically and culturally to Collins’s home island of Grenada. These stories take us from Doux’s early childhood through her adolescence and adult years working for a well-to-do family in Paz, to her experiences as a young mother, and finally her twilight years shuffling between her children’s homes in Boston and Brooklyn. Doux, known affectionately to her husband Jeremiah as Sweetie, is, like Paz, an example in opposites. The sweetness of her name belies the challenging nature of her life. In the aptly titled story “You Don’t Count”, Doux tells her employer, “I know trouble, Mr Peter,” and her entire life seems accurately encapsulated in those five words. After Doux learns from a man in the district that she is illegitimate, and therefore a child who doesn’t count, her mother says with painful nonchalance: “Is due to your father and the fact that your mother splice in there between your father and his wife.” Here in Paz — and some of the truths of this fictional Caribbean island seem to have resonance for life in all the Caribbean — emotional difficulty is a fact of life to be accepted and endured, no more notable than the weather.

The Doux stories, which make up the bulk of The Ladies Are Upstairs, are juxtaposed sharply against the first story in the collection. “Rain Darling” examines the abbreviated life of a woman who responds to the news that she is a bastard child and the fact of her limited horizons — working as a maid for white people abroad, or wealthier, lighter-skinned people in Paz — as well as years of abuse at the hands of an evil aunt, by descending first into depression, and finally into madness. Where Rain’s days spool out aimlessly as she is haunted by the past in Paz’s asylum, Doux becomes a prisoner as an old woman in her daughter’s home. While the book’s cover blurb promises that these stories’ “juxtaposition contrasts two very different responses to the hazards of life,” the contrast is not a favourable one. The Doux stories are made brighter by the natural landscape, the passage of time, and the different characters that tell them. Rain’s story, by comparison, feels flat, and gets off to a clunky, slow start. The book would have benefited from more stories set in the earlier part of Doux’s life, and from resisting the impulse to include “Rain Darling” here.

 

ladies-are-upstairs-merle-collins-paperback-cover-art
The Ladies Are Upstairs, by Merle Collins
(Peepal Tree Press, ISBN 9781845231798, 154 pp)

 

The Ladies Are Upstairs has many strengths, among them Collins’s ability to delve into questions that have dogged Caribbean people both at home and in the Caribbean diaspora over the last century. One salient question: what does home mean when you’re forced to leave it in order to make a way for yourself and your family? Here we see not just the story of struggle at home or the struggle in a new country, but also where these two narratives intersect — for instance, the hassle of accepting help from those abroad, as Doux navigates the Pax customs service to receive a barrel of presents her children send from the United States. In The Ladies Are Upstairs, the necessity of leaving home and the disappointment and difficulty upon leaving — both for those who go and for those who are left behind — is reflected in a rhyme that recurs:

They cut me down
And now I have no home
I don’t live in country
I don’t live in town
They cut me down.

The stories take occasional flights of magical realism that make Paz and its inhabitants come alive, and offer a fresh take on some of the issues facing the contemporary Caribbean. For example, Collins uses a La Diablesse story to show the havoc that an obsession with the future has wrought on Paz, as a whole bevy of cloven-hoofed La Diablesse temptress ghosts congregate on the spot where a tree has been unceremoniously chopped down to make way for a new development. In another story, “Big Stone”, Nurse Chalmers encounters a spirit child sitting by herself on her way home from delivering Doux’s second baby. After she throws the ghost of the child over her shoulder, a spirit calls after her, saying, “Ou tini bon chance, ou. Ou a parti” — “You’re lucky. You escape.” The escape here is not just from being dragged into the spirit world by this trickster child spirit, but also the escape from Paz, and moreover from the suffering that defines life there.

The book benefits from its technique of linked short stories, told from different perspectives, including those of Doux, her mother, the midwife who delivers Doux and Jeremiah’s children, and Doux’s grandson Jericho. This allows for a shifting lens on Doux’s life, and enables the author to tell the story not just of Doux and her family but also of the entire community she comes from. That said, there seems to be a lost opportunity to draw out the rhythms and culture of the small community of Hideout Hill by the stories’ constant shifts from there to Paz City to Joie de Vivre — places whose names are apparently intended to draw attention to the difference between the promise of beauty on Paz and the emotional and material difficulty that defines life there. This shifting geography is highlighted further towards the end of the book, where there are several stories set in the United States. While I appreciate the author’s ambition to use this book to explore the entire arc of Doux’s life from birth to death, I found these stories stilted, lacking the confident voice and authenticity that distinguish the earlier Doux stories set in Paz.

Merle Collins

Merle Collins

But, overall, The Ladies Are Upstairs is a fresh and engaging read, a fine addition from one of the Caribbean’s most capable storytellers. Readers are graced with the gift of Collins’s sure-handed, lush writing, shot through with the sounds and landscape of the Caribbean, as well as the rich emotional texture of contemporary Caribbean and Caribbean-American women’s experiences.

•••

The Caribbean Review of Books, November 2013

A. Naomi Jackson studied fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to South Africa, her work has appeared inbrilliant cornersThe Encyclopedia ProjectObsidianThe Caribbean Writer, and Sable. She is currently the 2013–2014 ArtsEdge writer in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, at work on her first novel.

 

>via: http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/30-november-2013/downstairs-stories/