Cécé, Emmelie Prophète. Translated from French by Aidan Rooney. Archipelago Books, 2025. Les villages de Dieu, Mémoire d’encrier, 2020 (Un extrait (PDF) est disponible).
Laferrière loves it.
040125
Category: language
AG2025_1045258a ou passer du monde visible
Discours de reception de Dany Laferriere, 28 mai 2015.
“C’est Legba qui m’a permis de retracer Hector Bianciotti disparu sous nos yeux ahuris durant l’été 2012. Legba, ce dieu du panthéon vaudou dont on voit la silhouette dans la plupart de mes romans. Sur l’épée que je porte aujourd’hui il est présent par son Vèvè, un dessin qui lui est associé. Ce Legba permet à un mortel de passer du monde visible au monde invisible, puis de revenir au monde visible. C’est donc le dieu des écrivains.”
Devoted to … AG2018_1490143a4
Devoted to the cause … of here, presentness, their conjoined expression.
What will you do?, Kaveh Akbar
In The Nation, Akbar asks us to help the vulnerable.
What is the purpose of an app, owned by a man who cheered on the new regime at inauguration, that carousels these videos in between baby photos from casual acquaintances and ads for underwear and linen sheets?
What is the purpose of a government that disappears its people? Ozturk had a valid student visa, as did Alireza Doroudi, a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, and Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia grad student, who were both disappeared in similar fashion this month.
[…]The videos, the disappearings, are obvious intimidations intended to choke dissent, both in the specific cases of Ozturk, Doroudi, and Khalil, and in general, in the cases of all of us who look or pray or believe or vote like them. The Trump regime, like every despotic autocracy before it, is making examples of a few to terrify the many. Into what? Silence, compliance, submission? Anguish?
I hate their harm. I hate the countless rifts they’ve torn open across time as they preen for cameras and expand their bitcoin empires. But they don’t give a shit about me or my hate. My place of birth (Tehran [or Port-au-Prince]) disqualifies me from concern. It also endangers me.
[…]I think about the children Ozturk was learning to help. The hours of tenderness stolen from them. I think about my father, whose beloved big sister is right now this second desperately fighting a serious cancer in Tehran. My father became an American citizen some years ago, but feels he cannot safely, under this regime, return to Iran to be with her. I want to hurl my laptop through the window typing that. The hours stolen from them. From Doroudi and Khalil and every soul domestic and abroad who has ever been stolen or stolen from by the American project.
AG2016_1040729 or direction, clarity, audacity
AG2021_2030352a or But you knew … didn’t you?
This is an Administration that does not have to slip on a Signal banana peel to reveal its deepest-held prejudices and its painful incapacities. You get the sense that we would learn little if we were privy to a twenty-four-hour-a-day live stream of its every private utterance. Part of what was so appalling about Trump and Vance’s recent meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky was not just their penchant for channelling the world view and negotiating points of Vladimir Putin but their comfort in expressing them, barking them, at the Ukrainian President in front of reporters in the Oval Office.
[…]The threat of autocracy advances each day under Donald Trump, and it is a process that hides in plain sight. Some will choose to deny it, to domesticate it, to treat the abnormal as mere politics, to wish it all away in the spirit of “this too shall pass.” But the threat is real and for all to see. No encryption can conceal it.
David Remnick, New Yorker, 032625
Know what the snake said? Said, ‘But you knew I was a snake, didn’t you?’ (TM)
AG2022_2120590a
AG2025_2100255c or don’t you see
“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?).