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Kalamu ya Salaam's information blog

 

 

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

IF YOU’RE STILL

THE SAME AFTERWARDS

IT WASN’T LOVE

(to nia, thanx for making me better)

 

 

to say

“i am touched

 

by you”

 

is to be

changed

 

            / into

a person neither of us

was before

entering the other

 

more open, a sun of sensitivity

emotionally nude, erupting joy

& willing to kiss life open mouthed

emoting the vibrancy of glow

endemic to souls in the flow

 

in fact, it’s even unscientific

not to evol

ve/not to love, not to

grow & give back

 

the only humans who actually evolve

are lovers

all others

just simply fuck and reproduce

 

the transformation

of touch

 

that’s all

love is

 

—kalamu ya salaam

 

 

Tuesday 1 August 2017

 

 

Mumbo Jumbo:

a dazzling classic

finally gets

the recognition

it deserves

Praised by the likes of Tupac and
Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed’s
experimental novel about race in the US
is, more than ever, a book for today

 

Immortal pertinence … detail from the cover art for the Penguin Modern Classic edition of Mumbo Jumbo. Illustration: Ishmael Reed/Penguin Random House

 

America, wrote Ishmael Reed in his 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, is “mercurial, restless, violent … the travelling salesman who can sell the world a Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you”.

Forty-five years later, Reed has performed a magic trick reminiscent of something found in that book, a dazzling novel about Voodoo, jazz and white supremacy: his personification of the US has taken a step beyond rhetoric and become flesh, in the mercurial, violent and restless salesman who is now America’s president.

Ishmael Reed

Mumbo Jumbo, which has just been reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic, reeks of some kind of immortal pertinence. Reed has a certain immortality himself, as the author of novels, poetry, plays and music for more than 50 years. His work is embedded in every level of black culture in America. He has written about Muhammad Ali and Barack Obama; in turn, Tupac Shakur once rapped about him. (“My man Ishmael Reed” makes an appearance in Still I Rise.)

His 10 novels are, for the most part, subtle satires on race, worked into settings such as the OJ Simpson trials, a US civil war in which photocopiers exist and a wild west where cowboys wield laser guns. But Mumbo Jumbo is the most dazzling of them all. Set ostensibly in the 1920s, Reed’s novel follows conspiracy theories ranging backwards and forwards through time. A “plague” called Jes Grew has spread from New Orleans and caused half the country to dance recklessly, enjoy jazz and have a new appreciation for African American culture. Religious orders like the Knights Templar and the hi-tech Wallflower Order (responsible in Reed’s novel for the Depression and the US occupation of Haiti) seek to destroy an ancient Egyptian text that the Jes Grew may “want”.

But Jes Grew is “an anti-plague”, the spirit of innovation and freedom of self-expression itself: “Jazz. Blues. The new thang … Your style.” Reed took a snatch of the preface to 1922’s The Book of American Negro Poetry, in which James Weldon Johnson says “the earliest Ragtime songs, like Topsy, ‘jes’ grew’” – they just happened – and turned it into a clever literary device that exposes people’s prejudice.

While some believe the media invented Jes Grew to sell papers, Harlem Voodoo priest Papa LaBas is drawn into the search for its ancient text. Unbeknown to him, a Muslim scholar has already found it, translated it and had it rejected by a publishing house. The slip is found next to his dead body: “The ‘Negro Awakening’ fad seems to have reached its peak and once more people are returning to serious writing … A Negro editor here said it lacked ‘soul’ and wasn’t ‘Nation’ enough.”

Made up of newspaper cuttings and party invites, handwritten notes and footnotes, contemporaneous and contemporary photographs, Mumbo Jumbo gives one a sense of Reed just using everything that captures his own imagination. This is exhilarating because, like jazz, the novel feels improvisatory and ambitious. Reed embraces ridiculousness, while lending the ridiculous weight. It is a funny book about conspiracy theories that nonetheless feels serious and true, encompassing potted histories of Voodun loas and the Crusades, essays on Christ’s laughter and the cotton trade (“Was it some unusual thrill at seeing the black hands come in contact with the white crop?”), and a postmodern alternative creation myth involving Osiris, Incas, Homer and Moses.

The weight of ideas, along with the time-hopping and slapstick, makes Reed’s book read like something by contemporary novelist Ned Beauman. Or rather, Beauman’s books feel at home in Reed’s lineage: Beauman takes his cue from Pynchon, and Pynchon admires Reed, even name-checking him in Gravity’s Rainbow: “Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteries came from in the first place. (Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you’ll ever find here.)”

It is tempting to say that Mumbo Jumbo is “prophetic”, shining a spotlight on the US’s modern racial tensions: the vilification of the #blacklivesmatter movement, the sudden political prominence of white supremacists, Twitter outrage when Netflix commissions a show called Dear White People. But this would be patronising. The truth is that, since Reed saw his novel published in 1972, the world has changed very little. The only upshot is that we can read his work now with a similar urgency to what its first readers might have felt.

Yet there is a rightness to Mumbo Jumbo – already considered one of the best novels in the western canon by revered critic Harold Bloom – being canonised as a Penguin Classic a year after Paul Beatty’s Man Booker win for The Sellout, another philosophical and ingenious American race satire. As Papa LaBas says, Jes Grew is always there, always observable. But it flares up when “something is going on”. No one can deny, in the US today, that something is going on, and needs to be addressed.

 

>via: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/aug/01/mumbo-jumbo-a-penguin-classic-2017-ishmael-reed#img-1

____________________

 

Photograph: Keystone Features/Getty Images

Mumbo Jumbo and

Paul Robeson –

books podcast

 

Presented by
and produced by

On this week’s podcast, we return to the Harlem Renaissance, the great flowering of African American literature and music centred on New York in the early 20th century. The novelist Ishmael Reed introduces his 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, acclaimed as one of the 500 most important books in the Western canon by Harold Bloom and now reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic.

Mumbo Jumbo imagines a US seized by a virus that infects black Americans with a fever for dance and freedom. In his freewheeling satirical fantasy, Reed namechecks many of the great figures of Harlem’s glory years – including several who were connected to our second subject, the singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson, who got his start in these years.

The Australian writer Jeff Sparrow explains why he felt a new biography of Robeson was needed, and how his research carried him from Harlem to Moscow and from the south Wales valleys to the killing fields of the Spanish civil war in pursuit of a talented but troubled hero who should not be forgotten.

>via: https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2017/jul/25/black-history-mumbo-jumbo-and-paul-robeson-books-podcast#comments

 

 

 

 

08.09.17

 

Re-Imagining an

Africa Where Gender

and Sexuality Is Fluid

 

By Thandiwe Ntshinga and Mamello Sejake

Queen Mother Pendant Mask: Iyoba via The Metropolitan Museum

Before foreign invasion. Before cultural imperialism. Before the internalisation of Western values and ideals—there was a time of a tolerant and nuanced Africa—well much of it anyway. This Africa, made evident by research on precolonial West and Southern Africa, was home to empowered femininity through matriarchs and dual-sex systems. This Africa also understood and accepted the sexual fluidity of its people which went against western heteronormative assumptions.

Our Afrocentric future is simple and involves taking from the past as a means of informing the future. Fact may just be stranger than fiction in the cases of gender equality and sexual fluidity in precolonial Africa. A look into African history will show that homophobia and patriarchy in African society are nothing short of Western cultural imports.

An exploration into pre-colonial African society shows one which challenges the notion of what is “African” in contemporary Africa.

African Queens

Once upon a time, male dominance was not accepted as a norm. Instead, women were among the most revered and respected. The role of African women extended beyond the domestic domain and allowed women to hold great political authority as advisors, matriarchs and warriors. These displays of empowered femininity were social systems too sophisticated for the European mind of early explorers to comprehend. These include the militant Igbo women who resisted British invasion in Nigeria, the female ruler Ohemmaa of the Akan, in West Africa and South Africa’s Queen Modjadji the Balobedu Rain Queen. Uneasy with social structures which did not conform to Euro-Christian expectations, the ‘civilizing mission’ successfully instilled patriarchy into African society and diminished powerful representations of African women.

Arguably the most popular Black female comic book character, X-Men’s, Storm serves as an illustration of the representation of African women which reflects coloniality in society but also in the comic book sphere. Prior to being hyper sexualised as the token Black member of the X- Men crew, working under white leadership, Storm was actually of African royalty. Storm came from a royal line of Kenyan princesses, from Great Rift Valley, who were genetically inclined to “sorcery”. Unsurprising, with the Western understanding of African spiritual and supernatural practices, Storm’s inborn magical faculties of sorcery saw her as possessing ‘mutant abilities’ by western ‘mutant’, Charles Xavier .

In a discussion about decoloniality Afrofuturism researcher and author William Jonesaddresses the colonial relationship between Black and white as well as that between female and male characters, found in comics where in the post-colonial era the colonial relationship, symbolism and story remains the same.

Same Sex Relationships

It’s a common assumption in post-colonial Africa that same sex relationships have been informed by the Western world and are a satanistic expression of how colonialism continues to plague African society. The unwillingness to consider the fluidity of sexuality and gender which in itself precedes colonialism is what can be said to have been informed by to missionary contact in Africa that has done the work of reshaping social structures and traditions to suit the colonial legacy it has instilled.

Likewise, there is plenty of evidence that shows that prior to colonial invasion same sex relationships were not frowned upon and there were ethnic groups that allowed people to move within the gender spectrum. So, for example a female would have the freedom to declare herself a man for the sake of sexual liberties and have sexual or platonic same sex relationships. This fluidity was an openly practiced among the Nilotico Lango people from Uganda.

The advent of colonialism has brought with it the idea of fixed gendered roles laced with heteronormative thinking that is assumed to be an integral part of African life and culture. But, a look to Zimbabwe will show you a documentation that proves otherwise. The cave paintings left by San people, which are estimated to be around 2000 years old, depict same sex sexual relations between naked men. Then, further north, among the early Zande warriors in Congo and Sudan, same sex relations were believed to be common practice. The warriors were said to marry younger men who in turn performed the duties of a wife up until he was trained to become a warrior.

Men who behaved and dressed as women in northwest Kenya and Uganda’s Iteso society had sexual relations with other men. Likewise, same sex practices were also recorded among the Banyoro and Langi people from Uganda, while in pre-colonial Benin, engaging in same sex practices was seen as a natural phase for growing boys

There was even a time in Southern Africa when women who were said to be diviners had same sex relationships that may or may not have been sexual, based on the belief that the sanctity was understood to be closer to women and therefore by extension had spiritual intimacy to nature’s fundamental source of sustenance. The Nandi and Kisii people of Kenya, and parts of East Africa, have also been documented as people who practiced female to female marriages as a means of exercising social influence. Therefore, in such societies, these marriages make it possible for women to gain social status as the head of the household and mainly for inheritance purposes.

In Dark Matter, a comic series from the 90’s, there is a story by Samuel Delany where people have been completely stripped of their gender. This was written during a time when it was thought to be improbable that people could exist without conforming to a particular gender which is a replica of western thinking that suggests that one’s gender is informed by their body. Africa’s archives tell tales of many who lived outside of these Eurocentric ideals.

Peering into our past allows us to reimagine a tolerant and nuanced Africa where empowered femininity as well as sexual and gender fluidity are embraced and encouraged. The beauty of our past is in her inconsistency with claims that patriarchy and heteronormativity are synonymous with African culture.

If you allow yourself to turn your mind’s eye back into our past then you have examples of ways of reimagining the future in a way that gives life to the prospect of an Africa that is not Eurocentric in its homogeneousness. Instead, what it offers is an Afrocentric future where our magic lives in our recognition of the sincerity of gender and sexual fluidity as well as a celebration of gender equality.

 

>via: http://www.okayafrica.com/culture-2/re-imagining-an-africa-where-gender-and-sexuality-is-fluid/

 

 

 

 

 

8.10.2017

 

 

JAMES BALDWIN’S

ISTANBUL

 

Istanbul, 2017. Photograph by Rana Gökalp Hoffman

BY SUZY HANSEN

This is the latest installment of Public Streets, an urban observation series created by Ellis Avery and curated by Abigail Struhl.

 

“Baby, I’m broke, I’m sick. I need your help,” James Baldwin said to a friend when he landed in Europe, looking for a place to rest. This time, his European city of choice wasn’t Paris. It was Istanbul.

Many people might be surprised to learn that James Baldwin lived on and off in Turkey throughout the 1960s, the most dynamic and violent years of the civil rights movement in America. Baldwin was one of the great literary and moral witnesses to the struggle of black Americans. Turkey, nearly destroyed by World War I, was by midcentury a poor, fledgling republic with a confused secular yet Islamic identity. It was a place that seemed to have little to do with Baldwin’s main preoccupations, or with America at all.

That, it turned out, was the point: Istanbul was Baldwin’s escape. “I feel free in Istanbul,” Baldwin told his friend, the Turkish writer Yaşar Kemal. “That’s because you’re American,” Kemal replied. Baldwin loved the city. He combed through the sahaflar, the second-hand bookshops that line the streets around the Grand Bazaar, their dusty wares stacked on haphazard tables. He sat by the New Mosque, drinking tea out of tulip-shaped cups, playing backgammon, and watching the fishermen’s wooden boats launch into the dirty waters of the Golden Horn. Then, as now, shouting hawkers pushed wooden carts piled with watermelons or onions; prostitutes and pimps hung around in dank doorways; groups of men drunk on rakı roamed the streets. Baldwin was delighted by the Turkish custom of holding hands—even men could be openly affectionate! It was easier to be gay in Istanbul than in America, easier to be black.

Pera district, Istanbul, 2017. Photograph by Suzy Hansen

Baldwin’s friends took him to the best meyhanes, or taverns, on Asmalımescit Street in old Pera, where the fin de siècle architecture still feels like Constantinople. The once glorious Art Nouveau buildings were rickety and full of soot, a memory of a lost empire and of the thousands of Jews, Armenians, and Greeks who had been forced to flee the city. Turkey, then, was a beautiful, but sad, dark place; the detritus of its magnificent past collected at the bottom of Pera’s many urban valleys. Baldwin must have found this post-imperial atmosphere, and its effect on Turks, compelling. He believed the loss of empire meant a revolution of the soul.

Most of all, Baldwin was drawn to the northern neighborhoods around Boğaziçi University, which in his time was called Robert College. The campus was entirely unlike most of gritty Istanbul; it was lush, quiet, and green, a pristine oasis hanging over the twisting Bosphorus. It feels like a prosperous American university, with gray stone Gothic buildings like Princeton’s, bright-eyed kids in Western dress, and expansive quads of grass, which were patrolled by broods of well-fed stray cats. The school had been founded by American Protestant missionaries during the waning days of the Ottoman empire. By the 1960s, even larger numbers of Americans were coming as part of a new, only slightly less holy, mission: the Cold War.

Rumeli Hisari, Istanbul, 2017. Photograph by Rana Gökalp Hoffman

Baldwin lived nearby in a red wooden yalı, a waterside mansion, once owned by Ahmed Vefık Paşa, an Ottoman-era intellectual and statesman. He also spent time at another multistoried home on the Bosphorus located near the 15th-century stone fortress Rumeli Hisarı, from which Mehmet the Conqueror launched his attack on the Byzantines. In those homes, Baldwin threw all-night parties and gave talks; he entertained Marlon Brando, Alex Haley, Beauford Delaney. According to his biographer David Leeming, attendees of his nightly salons also included “students from Robert College, young American teachers, a young Greco-Turkish love of Jimmy’s, Turkish actors and writers,” as well as Americans from the United States Information Agency, who may or may not have been spies. In one photograph from that time, Baldwin sits at his desk in front of a window overlooking the Bosphorus, whose color could change from brilliant blue to pewter gray in a matter of hours. From that window, Baldwin would watch US Navy ships cut through the strait. “The American power follows one everywhere,” he observed.

A couple of months ago, a friend of Baldwin’s, the American writer John Freely, who had lived in Istanbul for 50 years and taught at Robert College, passed away. A memorial for him was held at the campus, and was attended by many of the Americans and Turks from Baldwin’s 1960s crowd. I met a charismatic elderly woman who said Baldwin hadn’t been interested in Turkish politics, didn’t learn Turkish. America was what consumed him, she said. From his perch on the Bosphorus, Baldwin saw that the United States was beginning to impose its unresolved racial traumas at home onto the rest of the world in the form of imperial ambitions. No one could escape America. Baldwin went home.

As I looked around at the last members of that 1960s Istanbul crowd, they and the campus seemed like a time capsule. Istanbul now sprawls as far as the eye can see. Very little green space remains. Istanbul has become a cacophonous, global metropolis of 15 million people. War, terrorism, and migration threaten to upend its fragile sense of order. But Robert College—with its towering, protective fir trees, precious quiet, and people who fondly remember a black American prophet—feels like a refuge, a reminder of a time when the country was left alone by both East and West, when it was a place anyone could go to live and feel free.

Suzy Hansen’s book about America’s role in the Middle East, Notes on a Foreign Country, was published on August 15, 2017, by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

>via: http://www.publicbooks.org/james-baldwins-istanbul/

 

 

 

07.07.17

 

 

CAN BLACK

CAPITALISM

EVER TRULY HEAL

BLACK PEOPLE?

JAY-Z might think so,
but this writer isn’t too sure.

Source: Slaven Vlasic / Getty

 

By Mia Charlene White

 

This article is about JAY-Z and not about JAY-Z. It’s not a review of Jay-Z’s platinum certified album, 4:44, but it riffs on 4:44 since everyone is talking about the album, which takes the acquisition of Black wealth as one of its primary themes. This article is really about Black capitalism and it’s ability to heal, or not. And this is certainly not a hater’s take on Jay; it’s a reflection on what is possible when we love Black people. And Jay is Black, so this is love.

Jay-Z represents a branch of our fam that is #blackcapitalism personified. And by that, I do not simply or only mean that he self-identifies as a billionaire. I mean he has called himself “a business, man” (not a “businessman”). Sit with that and note the difference. He has deemed himself an enterprise— not the brother working for a company but the company itself. He’s also clear that in the U.S. he’s “still n-gga,” billionaire be damned, under the conditions of white supremacy. But I can’t help but to ask what is produced when Black folk pay a self-identified billionaire, a business, for our healing?

What is capitalism, however, and why is it bad for Black people in particular? Simply put, capitalism is an economic and political system where a small minority of white elite conglomerates own the land, factories, technologies, transportation, and labor necessary for the making, building and selling of things. These are the folks who seek to own the past, present and future.  The motive for producing goods and services is to sell them for a profit, not to satisfy people’s healing needs.

American capitalism is rooted in slavery, murder, rape, patriarchy, land theft and indigenous genocide. Black capitalism is still rooted in white supremacy, even if it seems to be about representing the race well. The feel-good of Black capitalism is rooted in the false belief that we can buy our way to freedom, when we cannot. Singing “I’m sorry” songs, however deep or romantic, however therapeutic or transformative, and selling those songs for the purposes of billionaire profit-making, is still capitalism. In other words, just as we begin to sense the opportunity for sonic healing, we peel back the curtain and realize capitalism will never set us free—only we together, can do that (otherwise, “..even when we win, we gon lose”).

Artists need to support themselves. Everyone does. All people deserve a dignified life free from the panic and stress of insecure housing, hunger, debt and sickness. But because we identify with a brother, who riffs on Black women’s suffering—possibly as a full-circle recognition of his failings as a partner and father, or for the purpose of making more money—we are loathe to face facts: the same systems which produce the business that is Jay-Z, produce the insecure housing, hunger, debt and sickness Black people suffer within capitalism. Paying a self-identified business for healing, produces ill-effects. It’s possible some listeners will be healed. It is also possible we might get confused that what is produced as we pay for songs, is healing, but what is most produced is distance: distance from material love, the kind that responds to our suffering.

BECAUSE ULTIMATELY, OUR HEALING REQUIRES COMMUNITY—NOT A PAYWALL, AND JAY-Z’S HEALING REQUIRES COMMUNITY, TOO, NOT A GREATER EMPIRE.

It is not that buying art negates the opportunity for healing; it’s that the processes which produce art as commerce are implicated in the processes which trap us all and they require some critique, even if we do not have all the answers yet. Figuring out what might be wrong with this situation helps us build a better future—one that doesn’t rely on turning to the market for healing. Because ultimately, our healing requires community—not a paywall, and Jay-Z’s healing requires community, too, not a greater empire.

Jay-Z didn’t create capitalism, or the collective love of capitalism that produces our inability to hold him accountable. He just knows how to exploit these systems like a pro. He’s also not the “only” self-identified billionaire out here focused on paper for the sake of gaining more. Capitalism, Black or otherwise, is a historically and presently violent, anti-Black experience, and it’s one in which we are all daily implicated. But since 4:44 has provoked conversation on paper and Black comeuppance, it’s illustrative to consider how Jay is positioned in our worlds.

Subscribers to Tidal are not actually “paying” Jay for his art.  Subscriptions provide him with a regular source of capital through which he will make money, buy more property, make more money, repeat. This is the meaning of building an empire. But Black empire is still empire. Charitable donations do not even begin to speak to the universe of wealth Hov does not share with those who seek healing through his art.

You may be wondering: so what should the brother do? Jay said it himself, “Take your money and buy the neighborhood. That’s how you rinse it.”

If Jay were to ask me how he might show material love in more expansive ways (which is not to say he isn’t doing some of these things already), I would ask him the following: Might Black love look like the development of Black community land trusts for Black artists to live and create without the evils of capital debt chasing them down? Black artists could always have a place to live, and produce the gift of art, without seeing themselves as primarily a business. Because Jay was right when he said, “Gangsta and rude-boy still living in the tenement yard.”

Jay could use his clout to buy up what’s left of gentrified Bed-Stuy and turn those blocks into can’t-be-bought-by-rich-people housing (these models exist), so Black people can thrive, without the evils of capital debt chasing them down. That might include turning market-rate buildings into safe havens for Black and brown women who need homes as they navigate toxic relationships. Because Hov is wrong when he says he “..missed the karma that came as a consequence.” We, the consequence.

I hear you Jay — you say:

….fuck the Federal Bureau
Shout out to Nostrand Ave., Flushing Ave., Myrtle
All the County of Kings, may your ground stay fertile

Just help us keep it fertile, Jay.

Perhaps he might have from the start, followed Public Enemy’s lead in releasing his music for free download, since he does not need our paper and we have bills. I have brilliant, prolific and gifted Black and Brown friends who are deeply depressed and struggling in this evil-capital world. I’m not saying that is Jay’s fault. It’s not. But since he has capitalized on this capitalist system, I am asking why we don’t hold him accountable to doing more to make his art change the world, and not just his bank account. My questions are ultimately about a desire for sustained Black love. We need more love – the long-term gift of healing love in its most rich and communal sense, because we are suffering.

JUST HELP US KEEP IT FERTILE, JAY.

Art is a gift and art in our world is also commerce. The overwhelming power of art-commerce influences our practice of gifting each other with the kinds of collective, material love we all need to get free. Ultimately 4:44 is a push for us to ask ourselves what our respective responsibilities are in materially caring for each other, for Black and Brown people. I believe this is the daily revolution we must cultivate—caring for each other in sustained, everyday ways.  And yes, I believe that the responsibility is far greater for those who continue to enrich themselves from a system bent on killing us. Even billionaire Black folk got a work to do, too!  This doesn’t take away from working hard and earning your life. But I feel in my soul that our daily revolution must begin with doing away with notions of the “talented tenth” mentality, and facing the deep material divides in our Black worlds as if we really and truly matter to each other. Are we ever going to treat each other like we should—because Jay is right: nobody wins when the family feuds.

+++++++++++
Mia Charlene White is an Afro-Asian New Yorker, mama of 2 kids, and activist-scholar who teaches race geography at The New School. She is currently working on a book on Black cooperatives and community land trusts, with a focus on the Deep South.

 

>via: https://cassiuslife.com/11071/jay-z-black-capitalism/

 

 

 

 

Cha International

Poetry Prize 2017

To celebrate the tenth anniversary issue of Cha and to mark the twentieth anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover, we are hosting Cha International Poetry Prize 2017, in collaboration with PEN Hong Kong.

The competition is open to ALL poets. Thanks to several generous sponsors from the Asia-Pacific region, including the NINJA! Arts Grant, we are able to offer a total prize money of US$3201 (First Prize US$1501; Second Prize US$800; Third Prize US$400 and five Commended Prizes, each US$100). All eight winning poems will be published in the tenth anniversary issue of Cha, due out in late December 2017. As ever with Cha contests, there is no entry fee.

INFORMATION

  • Each poet can submit up to TWO poems (in English or translated into English), which should be sent to prize@asiancha.com with the subject line “International: Your Name”.
  • Each poem must be a translation (loosely defined) of a text(loosely defined) from/about Hong Kong or China, written originally in English or Chinese, into a poem that is about contemporary Hong Kong.*
  • When submitting your work to us, please include the title(s) of the source text(s).
  • Each poem should not be longer than 60 lines.
  • Selected poets will be asked to write an explanatory note (500 words or above) addressing their choice of texts and methods.
  • We reserve the right not to award the prize(s) if no suitable submissions are received.
  • Submission period: Thursday 15 June 2017 – Friday 15 September 2017

JUDGES

  • Tammy Ho Lai-Ming
    Tammy Ho Lai-MingTammy Ho Lai-Ming is founding co-editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, founding member and Vice President of PEN Hong Kong, and Assistant Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her translations have been published in World Literature Today, Chinese Literature Today, Drunken Boat and Pathlight and from Chinese University Press. Her first poetry collection is Hula Hooping (2015) and she was awarded the Young Artist Award in Literary Arts (Hong Kong Arts Development Council) in 2016.
    .
  • Lucas Klein
    Lucas KleinLucas Klein is a father, writer, and translator whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacket, Rain Taxi, CLEAR, Comparative Literature Studies, and PMLA, and from Fordham, Black Widow, Zephyr, Chinese University Press, and New Directions. Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong, he is an executive editor of the Journal of Oriental Studies. His translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize, and his October Dedications, translations of the poetry of Mang Ke, will be available soon. New York Review Books will be publishing his translations of Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin.

*Each poem submitted to us has to be — a translation of / an adaptation of / a response to / a comment on, etc. — another text that is about Hong Kong or China. Please note that all poems submitted to us should be about contemporary Hong Kong. Some examples of the kind of work we are looking for: Changing and poems discussed in this World Literature Today essay.

 

>via: https://chajournal.wordpress.com/international-poetry-prize-2017/?utm_content=57498650&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

 

 

 

Aura Estrada
Short Story Contest

Deadline: October 1, 2017

Judge: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Prize: $1,500

Aura Estrada (1977–2007) was a promising young Mexican writer and student, and the wife of Francisco Goldman. This prize is meant to honor her memory by supporting other burgeoning writers. Aura’s writing, and more about her life, can be found here.

Complete guidelines:
The winning author will receive $1,500 and have his or her work published online on Boston Review’s Web site. Runners up may also be published. Stories should not exceed 5,000 words and must be previously unpublished. Mailed manuscripts should be double-spaced and submitted with a cover note listing the author’s name, address, and phone number. No cover note is necessary for online submission. Names should not appear on the stories themselves. Any author writing in English is eligible, unless he or she is a current student, former student, relative, or close friend of the judge. Simultaneous submissions are not permitted; if you submit your story to another publication, you must withdraw it from our submissions manager or inform us by email. Submissions will not be returned, and submissions may not be modified after entry. A non-refundable $20 entry fee, payable to Boston Review in the form of a check or money order or by credit card, must accompany each story entered. All submitters receive a complimentary copy of our special literary edition on global dystopias edited by Junot Díaz. Submissions must be postmarked no later than October 1, 2017. The winner will be notified in the spring of 2018 and publicly announced by July on the Boston Review Web site.

Online submissions are strongly preferred; however, they can also be mailed to:

Short Story Contest, Boston Review
PO Box 425786
Cambridge, MA 02142

 

>via: https://bostonreview.submittable.com/submit/55330/aura-estrada-short-story-contest

 

 

 

 

 

 

Deadline:

November 1, 2017

1st PRIZE: $1,000

(Poem or Essay)

2nd PRIZE: $500 

(Poem or Essay)

Click “SUBMIT” below to enter Contest.

Or mail your entry to:

THE WONDER INSTITUTE

Attention: 2017 Essay Contest

28 Arroyo Calabasas

Santa Fe, New Mexico, 87506

 

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

• 2000 words or fewer.

• 8.5 x 11 page size. Double spaced throughout. Pages clearly numbered.

• Arial, Courier or Times font. 12 point font size.

• Submissions accepted online, or via regular mail.

• Acceptable file types for online submission: doc, docx, rtf, pdf

 

What to Submit: An original, unpublished essay or epic poem about a “Contemporary Pilgrim, Prophet, or Unsung S/Hero.” You may submit more than one entry. Each entry must be accompanied by a contest fee of $20. Please make checks payable to: The Wonder Institute if submitting by mail.

 

When to Submit: Contest deadline is November 1, 2017. Entries must be postmarked by this deadline or submitted online by midnight.

 

Prizes and Publication: First Prize is a check for $1,000 dollars and publication on The Wonder Institute website. Second Prize is a check for $500 dollars and publication on The Wonder Institute website. Honorable mention(s) will be selected at the discretion of the final judge, Linda Durham. Honorable Mention entries may also be published on the Wonder Institute website.

 

Results: Contest results will be announced by December 1, 2017 on the Wonder Institute Website. First and Second Prize winners will be contacted by phone or email. Honorable mention(s) will be listed on the Wonder Institute Website.

 

Anonymous Judging: Entries are judged anonymously. Include a cover sheet containing essay title, author’s full name, address, phone, and email. Your name must not appear on the essay itself.

 

Privacy: Your privacy is assured. We will not sell your information to third parties.

 

Copyright: By submitting your essay, you give The Wonder Institute a non-exclusive license to publish your work online.

 

Final Judge: Linda Durham.

submit

 

 

>via: https://www.thewonderinstitute.org/contest?utm_content=57976067&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

 

 

 

Deadline:

November 1, 2017

1st PRIZE: $1,000

(Poem or Essay)

2nd PRIZE: $500

(Poem or Essay)

Click “SUBMIT” below to enter Contest.

Or mail your entry to:

THE WONDER INSTITUTE

Attention: 2017 Essay Contest

28 Arroyo Calabasas

Santa Fe, New Mexico, 87506

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

• 2000 words or fewer.

• 8.5 x 11 page size. Double spaced throughout. Pages clearly numbered.

• Arial, Courier or Times font. 12 point font size.

• Submissions accepted online, or via regular mail.

• Acceptable file types for online submission: doc, docx, rtf, pdf

What to Submit: An original, unpublished essay or epic poem about a “Contemporary Pilgrim, Prophet, or Unsung S/Hero.” You may submit more than one entry. Each entry must be accompanied by a contest fee of $20. Please make checks payable to: The Wonder Institute if submitting by mail.

When to Submit: Contest deadline is November 1, 2017. Entries must be postmarked by this deadline or submitted online by midnight.

Prizes and Publication: First Prize is a check for $1,000 dollars and publication on The Wonder Institute website. Second Prize is a check for $500 dollars and publication on The Wonder Institute website. Honorable mention(s) will be selected at the discretion of the final judge, Linda Durham. Honorable Mention entries may also be published on the Wonder Institute website.

Results: Contest results will be announced by December 1, 2017 on the Wonder Institute Website. First and Second Prize winners will be contacted by phone or email. Honorable mention(s) will be listed on the Wonder Institute Website.

Anonymous Judging: Entries are judged anonymously. Include a cover sheet containing essay title, author’s full name, address, phone, and email. Your name must not appear on the essay itself.

Privacy: Your privacy is assured. We will not sell your information to third parties.

Copyright: By submitting your essay, you give The Wonder Institute a non-exclusive license to publish your work online.

Final Judge: Linda Durham.