Category: history

“I love ya! I love ya all. Don’t act like that. You women. Stop it. Don’t act like that. Don’t you see I love ya? I’d die for ya, kill for ya. I’m saying I love ya. I’m telling ya. Oh, God have mercy. What I’m gonna do? What in this fuckin world am I gonna dooooo?” (TM)

Fragments d’histoire ou Hier et aujourd’hui : à la faveur d’une promenade dans les rues et aux environs de Fort-de-France. Baude, Théodore, 1866-1949. 1940. WikiSource. Manioc.

« Chaque pas sur un pont, sur une place rappelle un grand passé. À chaque coin de rue s’est déroulé un fragment de l’histoire ».

GŒTHE

Baude, le premier Martiniquais à recevoir, à titre civil, la cravate de commandeur de la légion d’honneur. 1940 (during the Vichy regime?).

What Palestine has taught the world. (The Slow Factory)

It’s not complicated…

There is nothing complicated about colonialism, genocide, and occupation

Back home the shine is nulled
Just shades of a musical theme
Or it could also be said
That it’s night

[…]

May imagination always come before knowing

Like shadows of a musical theme, Tilsa Otta
Translated from the Spanish by Farid Matuk

Welcome to the world, Lennox!

Since 2010, the number of people sleeping rough in England has more than doubled and all other forms of homelessness (for instance, families living in temporary accommodation) are at record highs. Around eight hundred libraries have closed (a fifth of all libraries in the UK, most of them in deprived areas) and more than two hundred museums. In many cases, surviving institutions have reduced their hours and cut staff. More than a thousand publicly accessible swimming pools have been closed, and nearly 60 per cent of public toilets. So many bus routes have been cancelled that buses now cover 14 per cent fewer miles than in 2010. Councils face an estimated £14 billion backlog in road maintenance, with up to 50 per cent of roads judged to be at risk of complete deterioration within fifteen years.

[…]

Why,? with this record, did the Tories keep on winning?

Carnival of Self-Harm, Tom Crewe in LRB

The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003),

The Practice of Diaspora is nothing short of a masterpiece. By looking at the way black life, thought, struggles and quite literally, words, are translated across the black Francophone and Anglophone worlds, Edwards reveals how Paris became a locus for the development of black modernism and internationalism during the crucial interwar years. Rather than search for some essential unity, he explores difference, creative tensions, misapprehensions and misunderstandings between key black intellectuals. The result is a spectacular interdisciplinary study that will profoundly change the way we think about the African diaspora.–Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

—just an ache that grew

until she knew she’d already lost everything

except desire, the red heft of it

warming her outstretched palm.

I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land, Rita Dove