Callaloo最新文献

• Belly, 1998 Dir. Hype Williams, and: Deep cover, 1992 dir. Bill Duke, and: Us, 2019 Dir. Jordan Peele
• Robert Fernandez (bio)

A deal with the devil doesn’t go rite. A deal with the devil stipulates a child. A poem burns like a dollar bill held by a child over a pentagram and red candles. Smoke attracts the gods. The gods bleed money. A spell is a key, like a protein activates a gene, like money opens an age of ore. Like a poem is a door unlocked with a key held by a child in the belly of a dragon. Get back to what you war. Akin is a space; home is a family. The world is a margin; a dancehall is a universe. A poem stands out like coral against the dark. Run your fingers across it, wet as film, reel as a beginning. Red as a sunrise and start again. [End Page 21]

DEEP COVER, 1992 DIR. BILL DUKE

Robert Fernandez

A blast of crack smoke pours from the throat. Christ is here. What is money? A pelican on a seven-dollar bill. Counterfeit possibility. Reality kills; I would master it. What am I? A strung-out father. A criminal son. I go down, go under; I come up, a master. I multiply the sacrament, break profane bread. Dirty flames streak meat with soot. A poem ends in money. Billions groan in the furnace. The walls of the house are poison. Addiction is idolatry, counterfeit prayer. Hypocrisy is the law; the living convict the dead. The world is addiction, life reduced to money. I search for a father, expose every corruption. Truth pours from me like smoke. Truth is impossible; reality intrudes. The world transforms; the impossible enters. The devil is a pattern, a roving flame. [End Page 22]

US, 2019 DIR. JORDAN PEELE

Robert Fernandez

Do you answer to the past? Are you master of the past? Does the past master you? The possibility of recreation, like a stroll edging everything from its path, is the possibility of seeing you and forgetting what brought you here. Here you are. You are you. You are here. You are a family—in it together. Where colonialism produces the bourgeois family, you carry others with you like a shadow. A shadow knots a mirror. A mirror, a tissue, the stencil of a family. A voice cries from the depths: WHAT IS NOT ME IS ME. A zombie Seurat paints the picture of an afternoon in the park with five billion screaming dots of roe. A debt comes due. You to you. Me to me. Us. Look in the mirror. Grab yourself by the throat and make a choice. [End Page 23]

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 Pre

Abstract:

“Imagining Colonial Motherhood: Métissage, Mother Nation, and Marian Apparitions in Houat’s Les Marrons (1844),” examines two tableaux from Les Marrons, an abolitionist novel written by Réunion Island native Louis-Timagène Houat in 1844. Les Marrons marked a turning point in Réunion’s history: it was the first novel to be authored by a native, and the first written utterance of Reunionese political consciousness and imagination. The novel was conceived as an anti-slavery pamphlet, fueled by Republican ideals of social and racial reconciliation. It stages a colonial romance between a white woman and an African slave in Réunion, then a French colony, culminating in the birth of a métis child.

Through a close analysis of two tableaux from Les Marrons, this paper investigates the ideal of motherhood that emerges in the French colonial imagination. Marie, the novel’s only feminine figure is imagined as a white mother, in an apparent denial of the Black mothers of the island’s origins. The white mother is likened to the island itself, as both island and woman are perceived as porous liminal grounds—sites of potential racial pollution. Houat’s novel offers a prime perspective onto the ambivalence that characterized the colonial apprehension of the white woman, through its iconic evocation of the Virgin Mary and the Mother Nation. This paper also suggests that the figure of the white mother, identified as a significant point of convergence of metropolitan and Reunionese antislavery discourses, helped tie a symbolic knot between France and its insular colony, and produced France as the motherland.

• Interview with Toni Ann Johnson
• Marame Gueye (bio) and Toni Ann Johnson

Toni Ann Johnson won the Flannery O’Connor Award for her linked story collection Light Skin Gone to Waste (October 2022), selected for the prize and edited by Roxane Gay. The book has also been nominated for a 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work.

Her novel, Remedy for a Broken Angel, released in 2014 was nominated for a 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. In 2020, Johnson’s novella Homegoing won Accents Publishing’s inaugural novella contest and was released in May 2021. She won the Missouri Review 2021 Miller Audio Prize for her story “Time Travel,” which is the final story in Light Skin Gone to Waste.

Johnson is a two-time winner of the Humanitas Prize: first, for her Disney/ABC screenplay, Ruby Bridges, the true story of the child who integrated the New Orleans public school system; a second Humanitas Prize win came in 2004 for Crown Heights, another true story, developed and written for Showtime Television. The film examined the aftermath of the Crown Heights riots of 1991. Johnson co-wrote the feature film Step Up 2: The Streets, the second installment of the successful Step Up franchise.

As a young playwright, Johnson’s work was produced Off-Broadway by The Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) in 1989 when she and colleagues from the organization Black Women in Theatre partnered with playwright Leslie Lee and co-wrote Here in My Father’s House, which was staged at Theatre Four in New York City and directed by NEC’s founder, Douglas Turner Ward. Her subsequent play Gramercy Park is Closed to the Public was produced in 1999 by The New York Stage and Film Company. Johnson’s most recent play, presented in August of 2022 at The Cherry Center for the Arts in Carmel, California, is a one-woman show titled The Way We Fell Out of Touch, adapted from the short story (same title) that appears in Light Skin Gone to Waste. The play is based on Johnson’s Black mother and her relationship with the family’s White housekeeper in Monroe, New York during the 1970s.

In addition to her recent story collection, Johnson’s short fiction has appeared in The Emerson Review, Hunger Mountain, Callaloo, Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor, The Coachella Review, and is forthcoming in Fiction Magazine’s 50th anniversary issue.

Congratulations on winning the Flannery O’Connor Prize. I want to open this conversation by focusing on genre and how a writer chooses to do a novel or a collection of stories. Light Skin Gone to Waste coul

• Regime
• Malik Thompson (bio)

& the gods bring leaflets of nightshade to the slaughter.The virgins disrobe & huddle. Crests of ocean tremble& rise behind them—one expanse of blue beggingto reach another. Blade of obsidian, pommelof petrified wood. Our dawn prayers chantedin concentric rings of sand. The moon drawsclose & grazes its lips against the tide. An incurvedrib-cage shudders beneath the knife.Crimson lilies open where the bodies lie,the tenderness of one priest as he sets them down.These flowers dissolve upon the white foam’sarrival, deep red brightening into brief coral.Sea birds call to one another as they wadeacross the warming sky. Pelican.Opportunistic & beady-eyed gull. Will youbecome my angel for these grisly hours?Will you grant me wings as pure & featheredas your own? The priests crush the nightshadein blood & seawater. The gods pour the potionin their mouths & eyes. The gods sing withthe eyes of mothering does. A committeeof vultures will arrive here soon. & the boneswill sparkle—sun-bleached & stripped of flesh. [End Page 45]

Malik Thompson is a Black queer man from Washington, D.C. His work is featured or forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Sundog Lit, Diode, MQR Mix-tape, Oroboro, Poet Lore, and other places. He has received support from Lambda Literary, Obsidian Foundation, Brooklyn Poets, Cave Canem, and other organizations.

• Contributors

JOSHUA BENNETT is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of four books of poetry and criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)—winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—as well as Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), Owed (Penguin, 2020), and The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022). In 2021, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award for Poetry and Nonfiction.

MARQUIS BEY is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English, and core faculty of Critical Theory, at Northwestern University. Their work concerns black feminist theorizing, transgender studies, abolition, and critical theory. The author of The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender (Minnesota, 2020) and the forthcoming Black Trans Feminism (Duke, 2022), Bey is currently working on a collection of autotheory essays meditating on the relationship between blackness and cisgender.

ELIJAH BEAN is a poet and storyteller from Huntsville, Alabama. He teaches creative writing and public speaking workshops at various artists communities and universities in the South.

OLIVIA MILROY EVANS is a PhD candidate in English at Cornell University, where she holds the Shin Yong-Jin Fellowship for excellence in teaching and scholarship, and a former high school literature and rhetoric teacher. Her research focuses on fragmented and serial forms, from long poems and television shows to archipelagoes. In her dissertation, "Contemporary Documentary Poetry: Rhetoric, Poetics, Form," she explores how the documentary mode transforms both legal texts and poetic forms. Her work is forthcoming in Word & Image and Contemporary Literature.

JULIA MICHIKO HORI is a Fletcher Jones Foundation Postdoctoral Instructor in Contemporary Literature at the California Institute of Technology. She is a scholar of African diaspora literature and visual culture, Caribbean literature, postcolonial studies, and critical race studies, with strong overlapping interests in architecture, style, and design. Hori holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University with a Doctoral Certificate in African American Studies. Her current book project, Restoring Empire, explores the intersections of built space, violence, and narrative in the living legacies of British imperial rule and Caribbean plantation slavery. The book traces the enduring powers of colonial planning, plantation aesthetics, and imperial nostalgia from Empire's postwar decline into presentday battlegrounds of architectural restoration and cultural memory. Her scholarly writing has appeared in American Quarterly

JOVONNA JONES is a cultural historian and writer. She is