I believe in the small writ large, writ impossible
as an unlit canoe silvering beneath the Milky Way
scattered above this lake mirrorless as a gulp.
Black Pastoral, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
“S’il existait le contraire du prix Nobel de la paix, Donald Trump pourrait le recevoir” – Mediapart
Georges Biassou (1741-1801) died in Saint Augustine.
Biassou est représenté comme un chef révolutionnaire cruel et sanguinaire dans Adonis, ou le bon nègre, anecdote coloniale, roman de Jean-Baptiste Picquenard, paru en 1798.
Biassou est également présent, sous la figure d’un révolutionnaire tyrannique, dans Bug-Jargal, roman de Victor Hugo.
Joan Didion, “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” first published in Vogue, 1961.
people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.
character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.
To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.
One throbbing pulse is shaking
All Nature’s mighty frame,—
The child its toys retaking,
The ember’d grate its flame;
Love, and folly, and madness,
Petty aims, and grand,
And fame, and hope, and gladness—
To each one what he plann’d.
Still, whether loving or sighing,
In the bridal garb or pall,
We’re only drifting, flying
To the final goal of all:
We all seek what is ours,—
A lad the joys of youth,
A bee the daintiest flowers,
Whilst I am seeking truth!
Truth, Victor Hugo
Paris Noir, podcast.
Parisian syncretism – Art critic and curator Franck Hermann Ekra discusses the multiple influences of Cote d’Ivoire artist Ouattara Watts and his painting Divination, exhibited here.
A new Black Paris map – Haitian photographer Henry Roy presents the context of Regards noirs (Black Looks), a series of photographs taken in 1996.
Visite de l’exposition Paris noir avec Alicia Knock et Éva Barois de Caevel. 15min 13s. Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Haiti Inter documents performance on the last day of the show.
meaning could only be shaped in relation
“Lord, increase my bewilderment.”
(KA)
It was summer when I found you
In the meadow long ago,
And the golden vetch was growing
By the shore.
Did we falter when love took us
With a gust of great desire?
Does the barely bid the wind wait
In his course?
