Callaloo最新文献

• Praying for Rain
• Daniel B. Summerhill (bio)

after Nikki Finney

i first want to say: we are dancing in this rain. the water,a kaleidoscope of color ricocheting off our backs and fallingto the sneaker-beaten concrete. the rift, the shout. ain’t no music, but the bluesinside our waterlogged heads, but we in sync anyway and anyway,the spin, the wind follows— on this 40^th night, we still aint quakethis metronomic storm off, so we antagonize zeus and all his fair-skinned homiesuntil the sky cracks enough to let the light through— [End Page 1]

Daniel B. Summerhill is a poet and essayist who has earned fellowships from Baldwin for the Arts and The Watering Hole. He is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Monterey County and has published two collections of poems, Divine, Divine, Divine and Mausoleum of Flowers. His poems and essays appear in The Academy of American Poets, Indiana Review, Columbia Journal, Obsidian, Inkwell, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. An Oakland native, Daniel lives in the Bay Area and is assistant professor of poetry at Santa Clara University.

• How to Become a Butcher
• Keith Hood (bio)

Lay the foundation for a bloody career of decapitating poultry and slicing the flesh of cows, pigs, and other livestock by being born Negro, in 1924, the second of seven children birthed in a misshapen, low-ceilinged, four-room house in Inkster, Michigan. You receive Lincoln Logs for Christmas when you are five and imagine designing a new house with cleaner lines and a higher ceiling that does not risk brushing your father’s head. Decide to become an architect.

Grow up with other large families, all of them Black like you, on a street full of bicycles, tricycles, and scooters with wheels that are dirt-caked because Inkster streets will not be paved for another forty years. Walk the gravel streets on your way to school, admiring the Sears kit bungalow on Cherry Street around the corner from your house. Admire one of your classmates, Eleanor Hicks, the girl who lives in the Cherry Street bungalow.

Learn reading and arithmetic from your father. Master numbers better than your older brother and other siblings. They can all count to one-hundred and beyond, but you do sums in your head. Your siblings call it magic. So does Eleanor. Impress your teacher who doesn’t believe in magic. Your father’s proud smile warms your heart because you aren’t yet aware that he’s tricked you. Accede to your father’s request that you join him peddling vegetables from your garden, door to door. His pushcart’s spoked wheels are taller than you. A scale is chained to its slatted wooden side. Spinach and cabbage five cents. Onions seven cents a bushel. Eggs from yard chickens, ten cents a dozen. Handle the money. Make change.

“Great job, son,” your father will say. “You know, we need to be selling more than eggs and vegetables.”

Take a family trip to Detroit where Gratiot Central Market and other meat packers are happy to give your father pounds and pounds of discarded “chitterlings” that he plans to sell at five cents a pound for the upcoming July 4^th holiday. Clean and wash the stinky things, cut them up, put them in buckets, put the buckets in ice on your father’s pushcart. Bask in his widening smile as the day progresses. Make change as the pig entrails sell out.

Ask to be included in a special beginning algebra class for eighth graders. Stare at equations on the blackboard and discern from the corner of your eye how the teacher catches your gaze, appreciates your gaze, a gaze like a kitten’s when it’s about to pounce on a ball of string. Determine that equations are important. Your teacher gives you a gift: your first slide rule. Show it to Eleanor. She looks as if you’d shown her some intricate language, which, of course, you have.

Consider the slight weight of the twenty-five-cent coin in your palm. T

• Before and After and After Again
• Megan Howell (bio)

The way you carried on during the Pledge of Allegiance on your first day in class 5B, asking kids why I was the way I was and if that reason had happened in my mom’s womb, you must’ve thought I was deaf. But I wasn’t deaf. I just didn’t have any ears. And no, my mom wasn’t an alcoholic. She was naturally crazy.

“Dog attack,” someone explained.

“Oh,” you said. “That sucks.”

“Shh!” I pressed a finger against my lips.

The worst part about the attention from kids like you was when it ended. I didn’t like the ease with which you moved on from me, going from dog bites to flicking eraser bits off of your desk. You were new to the class and already you’d decided that I was old news.

I didn’t talk at all during language arts. Our teacher Mrs. Johnson would write that I was difficult in her evaluation of me. I didn’t like her, didn’t like you, hated the very idea of school. She wouldn’t let me wear the hat I’d used all of last year to cover my lack of ears. She told Mom that I needed a doctor’s note, and Mom told me it was time to woman up instead of covering up—no more babying, she said as she tried not to cry. I’d grow my hair out if I could, but my curls were the extra kinky kind that grew upward, and Mom said no relaxers until middle school—another whole year. I got used to being told no, but I wasn’t happy about it.

When class ended, it was time to get our costumes. I was so excited that I forgot not just you but the reality of my whole situation. I skipped over to my cubby and pulled out the crinkled paper Shoppers bag, my new identity folded neatly inside.

The Halloween parade was tomorrow, two days before Trick-or-Treating, which fell on a Sunday.

“Not just any Sunday,” my older sister Whitney had said that morning in a ghostly voice. “Eee-vil Sunday for Satan.” She tickled me, saying she was excising the demons as I tried not to spit out my cereal laughing. Mom didn’t like that. We were supposed to be Christian, but Whit had a bullring and stick-and-poke tattoos that just barely showed up on her flawless, blue-black skin. Meanwhile, I’d stopped believing all together.

Our school was Christian too, very conservative, very white. There at the front of the classroom, stapled to an orange-papered bulletin board: the Lone Star, a picture of a Kenny G-looking Jesus, and that one poem about God witnessing 9/11 and crying. This was Galveston, Texas. Our principal had made it so all costumes had to be approved by our teachers after this one parent, a potential mayoral candidate, huge donor, got upset at a kid for dressing up as Bush in a mocking way. The parade rules were no politics, no gender-bending, nothing above the knee, and no excessive gore. Whit and me were su

• i. boy, and: i waded through a hurricane once the water was high
• Shy-Zahir Moses (bio)

i. boy

there was a wilt of a boy’s flesh thin the air slim around him how his mother wept her womb drya pile of shards a box of breath her name knead concrete kneed the boy a crack a white candle corner memorial shoes strung up the phone lines the boy can only be boy there is nothing left to grow [End Page 84]

i waded through a hurricane once the water was high

Shy-Zahir Moses

with my mouth openduring the baptismnose pinched, eyesclosed enough to seethe man that wasmeant to save mehis palms facingtoward a moonshifting tide iwas peter, treadingsea, sinking mylittle faith therewas nothing tograsp only the allof my life spillingdissolving turningthe water darki rubbed iton my gumsnumbed my tonguestaught me howto brick mylegs i think of god’sboy swallowing thewater whole, the skycracking, me,floating [End Page 85]

Shy-Zahir Moses (they/them) is a poet and scholar from Dallas, Texas, pursuing an MFA in poetry at The University of Texas at Austin’s New Writers Project. Their work meditates on the intricate relationship and tension between queerness, Black Southern spirituality/religion, and reckoning with god/God/The Ancestors.

Abstract:

This article examines how the Belizean nation and national belonging are constructed in the representational politics of Belizean Belikin Beer campaign advertisements. In 2012, Belikin Beer released a series of commercials showcasing the “culture of Belize,” while addressing themes related to Belizean national identity, labor, heritage, and commemoration. Contrary to national constructions of Belize as a multicultural and plural society, the Belizean identity performed in Belikin’s campaign located Belize within an ambiguous regional geography, portraying it as a unique site within Central America and the broader Circum-Caribbean that provides the space for the reconciliation of diasporic and transnational Black and Indigenous identities. Belize provides a complex framework for the examination of Central American Caribbean identities and the utilization of Blackness and Indigeneity by the tourism industry. In tourism industry-driven cultural projects, competing ideals of Belizean identity, Belizean Blackness(es) and Indigeneities are heightened in new media and cultural productions that draw on the peculiarities of Belizean ethnic relations and ideology of national identity.

Abstract:

Placing Aimé Césaire’s The Tragedy of King Christophe into its performance history at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, this article explores the use of tragic form in assessing the nation-state as a viable political structure in the wake of decolonization.

• A Prayer for Chantal
• Amanie Mathurin (bio)

My cousin’s death preceded my grandmother’s by twenty-six years. At least that’s what the official records say. But if you asked anyone—from a distant relative to the village gossip—they would say with certainty that the beautiful young child and the stoic old lady died at the very same time. They would assert this as an established fact, for no one can forget the day of their dying.

And as sure as they are to insist on this plain truth, they will just as certainly use beautiful as the first word to describe Chantal. Whether you asked men, women, young or old, everyone agreed: Chantal was just as beautiful as her mother, Cynthia. As a child, I had always been fascinated by Cynthia, my mother’s much younger sister. She didn’t come around much, but whenever she did, I made every effort to be near her, trailing behind her for every minute of the few hours she visited. Her larger-than-life presence filled every crevice of my grandmother’s tiny house, her animated laughter spilling through the wooden-framed windows and out into the dirt yard. The house, much like our village, could not contain Cynthia.

I often wished that Cynthia was my mother, and as a child, I sometimes resented Chantal for the indifference with which she treated her mother. Cynthia possessed a beauty that simply did not belong in our little village where almost all of the women seemed to be built short and squat, as if pushed down into the narrow dirt paths by the very weight of the bananas they graciously carried atop their heads.

Cynthia was nothing like these women whose broad features and calloused hands belied an inheritance of cruel labour and a future of scarce reward. She was tall and curvaceous, her long elegant body stretching up towards the sun, embracing a faraway place well beyond the sprawling green of the banana fields. Her body effortlessly arched towards the heavens, and her delicate features angled towards the only conceivable place deserving of her beauty. Her smooth, light complexion paired with high cheekbones and a head of thick curly hair easily evidenced the native Kalinago blood running through her veins.

But beyond these physical characteristics, Cynthia’s appeal lay in the air of ease and luxury she embodied. It was an air unfamiliar to us all. She lived in Castries, the capital city, and on her rare visits, she brought back stories of the restaurants where she ate, the boutiques where she shopped, and of course the wealthy men whose company she kept. These tales sounded as fantastical as the mysterious stories of folklore that my grandmother used to regale Chantal and me at bedtime.

I was always excited when my aunt arrived, bearing gifts of chocolates, books, and toys for both Chantal and me. I looked forward t

• Contributors

Julian Breandán Dean is assistant professor of English at York College/CUNY. His research is interested in tragedy as a form and how it is deployed in the postcolonial setting with special attention to Irish, Caribbean, and global Anglophone drama.

Adaeze Elechi is a Nigerian writer and filmmaker. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in her chapbook Harmattan (Bottlecap Press, 2019), and are forthcoming in the Black feminist anthology In Words of Our Own: Black Women & Being (Canadian Scholars & Women’s Press, 2025). Her poems have been performed at literary festivals, including the New York City Poetry Festival. She is a Logan Nonfiction Fellow and a Catapult Film Fund Research Fellow. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Robert Fernandez is the author of Scarecrow (Wesleyan University Press, 2016), as well as Pink Reef (2013) and We Are Pharaoh (2011), both published by Canarium Books. He is also co-translator of Azure (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), a translation of the work of Stéphane Mallarmé.

Marame Gueye is associate professor of African and African Diaspora Literatures at East Carolina University. Her work is on the verbal art of women, the intersections of gender and language, hip-hop and social change, and migration. Her creative work has appeared in Transition Magazine and Bellingham Review.

Keith Hood is a former janitor and window cleaner living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He retired from a job as a field technician for a Michigan electric utility after 32 years avoiding electrocution. He is the One Story magazine 2024 Adina Talve-Goodman Fellow. His work has appeared in Blue Mesa Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Your Impossible Voice, The Forge Literary Journal, Vestal Review, and more.

Megan Howell is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review, and The Establishment, among other publications.

Yesmina Khedhir is a senior Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the Doctoral School of Literary and Cultural Studies, the University of Debrecen (Hungary), and a former Fulbright scholar (FLTA) at Stanford University. Her research project focuses on studying the multiple aspects of cultural memory and trauma in Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage novels. Yesmina has published several book chapters and articles in international academic journals related to her field of research. Her most recent article, “‘Tomorrow, I think, everything will be washed clean’: Water Ima

• Embers
• Adaeze Elechi (bio)

Nnedi returned home seven years after her own death. She arrived on foot with the sun rising behind her, luminous and deep orange in a lilac sky. Her mother Kainebi was already awake and tending to the back garden of her cottage when she heard what sounded like thunder in the distance. But this was not the season for thunder or rain or anything that came down from the sky except sunbeams and moonlight dappled by a haze of dust. She registered this deep rumbling as an omen as Nnedi knocked loudly three times.

Kainebi was not expecting a guest, and certainly not her daughter whose bones she had buried years ago. So, when she opened the door to find Nnedi standing on her porch, wearing the delicate cream lace gown she wore the night she died, Kainebi’s knees buckled. She kicked the door shut from the floor and scurried away from it, covering her mouth with her soil-coated hands to catch her screams. And her heart, as weak as it was from endless grieving, began racing and snatching her breath. Scrambling around her house, she locked the back door and shuttered the windows.

If this were seven years ago, one week or even a month after the incident, Kainebi could have believed that Nnedi’s death had been a bad dream and her return would have been like waking up. She would have engulfed her daughter in an embrace without a second thought. But this was not seven years ago. Time had passed, and in that time, disbelief curdled into desperation, then calcified into a hard-shelled sadness. She could not bring herself to touch the door handle. Instead, she wheezed the name of Jesus again and again and clapped her hands over her eyes.

Kainebi remained on the floor for hours, for much of the afternoon, knees drawn tightly to her body while the sun peaked and then began to set, Nnedi’s undulating breath on the other side of the door harmonizing with the sounds of the breeze whispering through the leaves in her garden. Was Nnedi’s return not what she had pleaded for, wailed and wept for? Yet today, as her old prayer was answered to near-exact detail, it was only a choking fear that wracked her.

But what if...what if...what if God had indeed shifted the laws of nature just for her? Seven years of praying, of begging, of anguish.

What if?

The tangerine dusk now leaked into the foyer through gaps where the door didn’t meet its frame. It cast a thin, crooked, fiery rectangle around Kainebi.

What if...

She hushed her thoughts and sharpened her ears. What if... [End Page 86]

The only thing now standing between her and the answer to her supplications, the only thing now separating her and her only child, was a door. No longer the rigid, impenetrable shell of death,

• Bearing Witness to the Slave Past: A Review of Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend
• Yesmina Khedhir (bio)

In her latest novel, Let Us Descend (2023), African American writer and two-time winner of the National Book Award for Fiction Jesmyn Ward takes the reader back in space and time to the deep South and the gruesome history of American slavery. The novel focuses on Annis, a teenage enslaved teenage girl, who recounts her harrowing journey from the rice fields of North Carolina to the sugarcane fields of Louisiana after being sold by the man who raped her mother and fathered her. Chained and exhausted, Annis, together with a group of other enslaved individuals, marches for days to reach the slave markets of New Orleans. Once sold, Annis starts another journey of horror, torture, and pain, but also friendship, endurance, and ultimately liberation.

One of the novel’s main subjects is motherhood. The novel’s opening sentence, “The first weapon I ever held was my mother’s hand” (1), centers and much like Ward’s earlier fictional works identifies motherhood as a symbol of power and a site of female strength. Indeed, as much as it presents motherhood as an ontological state of “non/being” due to the “non/status” of the mother and her inability to legally own her children under the partus law of chattel slavery (Sharpe 15), the novel does not completely take away the agency of Black enslaved mothers to perform their maternal identities, even if to a minimal extent. Similar to Ward’s fictional depiction of the mother-daughter relationship in Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), the transmission of ancestral knowledge from mother to daughter is an important survival practice rendered in Let Us Descend. Annis, for instance, is taught by her mother the skills of both herbal healing and spear fighting, which she inherited from her African warrior mother, Mama Aza, as a way to protect and arm her with the means to survive and defend herself. Sold away early in the novel and presumably dead later in the narrative, Annis’s mother, much like Esch’s mother in Salvage the Bones, remains present in absence, her haunting ghost roams everywhere through flashbacks and memories. The novel’s ending further emphasizes the centrality of motherhood. Free after escaping to the Great Dismal Swamp, Annis is now an expectant mother and promises to bring her future baby in the swamp, a desolate, wild, and alienated place that yet provides a haven, a home, and a space for freedom, community, and being to the enslaved: “I want the seed, the secret, the babe, to be born here,” Annis confirms (Ward 297).

Remarkably, the novel’s end bears a strong resemblance to Ward’s first and recently published short story, “Mot