The Globe and Mail is edited on May 10 by two guest editors – anti-poverty activists Bono and Bob Geldof – who produced a special issue focused on the future of Africa and its importance not just for the more than 1 billion people living on that continent, but for Canadians and the rest of the West as well. See the full section here.
February 12, 2010
SLS-KENYA ON OPENDEMOCRACY.NET
Selina Cuff, the Nairobi-based British journalist, has an article on the perspectives of contemporary Kenyan literarure and arts on the Open Democracy site: http://www.opendemocracy.net/selina-cuff/kenyas-artistic-renaissance. Yours Truly was interviewed for the piece, and SLS-Kenya is mentioned prominently in it.
February 3, 2010
KEVIN CRAIG’S KENYA BLOG
Kevin Craig, SLS-Kenya-’09 participant, has started a blog dedicated to his time in the country, both in and outside the SLS context: What Happened in Kenya. So far, vivid and interesting. Check it out:
http://happenedinkenya.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/young-lion-on-safari-masai-mara-kenya-dec-11-2009/
February 3, 2010
ED PAVLIC’S “BUT HERE ARE SMALL CLEAR REFRACTIONS”
Ed Pavlic, SLS-Kenya permanent faculty member, has a new book out with Bard University Press: But Here Are Small Clear Refractions. Based on the dhow trip Ed took around the Kenyan Archipelago in 2006, together with Binyavanga Wainaina, Martin Kimani, Usama Goldstein, Mike Vazquez, Gary Dauphin, and YT, among several other people, the book features some seriously beautiful, powerful writing — and tells a fascinating story along the way. It is now available for sale here: achebecenter@bard.edu.
February 1, 2010
JULIE COMPTON
Julie Compton writes:
Hi there,
I a member of the Summer Literary Seminars group on Facebook. I don’t remember how I stumbled upon your group, but was excited to learn about your programs in Africa. I traveled to Kenya and Tanzania in 2007, and large portions of my newest novel, RESCUING OLIVIA, are set there and were inspired by the trip. RESCUING OLIVIA hits US bookstore shelves tomorrow, February 2, and will be released in the UK in May. The novel has been described as a cross between a modern-day fairy tale and a contemporary thriller. It’s the story of a Florida biker who sets out a dangerous path to find his girlfriend (Olivia) when she mysteriously disappears from the hospital after a motorcycle crash. His quest takes him from his Florida home to New England and ultimately, to Africa, where Olivia was born. The early reviews have been strong. Kirkus Reviews described it as a “modern-day fairy tale about a princely Florida lawn guy who must rescue his princess from a clutch of monsters” and said that “Compton burrows so deeply into [the characters’] troubled back stories and dramatizes in such psychologically compelling terms the swain’s attempt to rescue his princess . . . that the result is a pleasing hybrid of fairy tale and contemporary thriller.” Publishers Weekly called it an “intense, entertaining second novel” and said “Compton pulls off a super-satisfying resolution.” Booklist called it “a page-turner.”
I’d love the opportunity to share the news of the release with fellow members. Interested readers can learn more at my website, www.julie-compton.com.
Thank you. I can’t wait to get back to Africa and I hope to be able to join your group on an upcoming trip.
Best,
Julie
Julie Compton
www.julie-compton.com
TELL NO LIES (2008), Kirkus starred review
RESCUING OLIVIA (coming February 2, 2010)
January 28, 2010
SHENG PRIMER
FB comment from one of Kenya’s most popular newspaper columnists and media personalities of the new, MTV-bound generation:
Hif branjelinas da mos andsome kapos in da worlds can splits wat chances ndoo hases mere motos stands?
How does one say indeed in sheng?
January 25, 2010
TWO DOCUMENTARIES SET IN KENYA AND THE US
Powerful and poignant story: Roger Ebert on two documentaries, one set in Kenya, the other in the US:
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/01/a_superwoman_for_kenya_but_ame.html#more
January 19, 2010
10:25 AM
Two adjoining status updates from two of Yours Truly’s Facebook friends:
Person 1 (US): “finished writing program notes for the National Symphony Orchestra program (Kennedy Center…)”
Person 2 (East Africa): “… it’s six fifteen … n i m thinkin of how to avoid ‘tyhe talk’ wit certain female by escapin to a dark bar to watch ghana versus the burkina be babies…”
January 18, 2010
A MOMENT IN TIME
Lamu, 3 pm
December 26, 2009
This was the emptiest Yours Truly had seen the Lamu jetty on this trip. Typically, it would be the fulcrum of town’s frenetic water-bound activity almost around the clock: well past midnight, fishermen dhows would pull in to it with their daily catch; by five in the morning, it would already be thronged with workers commuting, also by dhows and an occasional speedboat, to the Shella Beach hotels and Manda Island’s airstrip and construction sites; and during the day, all through the afternoon, when direct sun’s dull razor drove even the most stubborn of street vendors and perambulating burkaed beauties and itinerant philosophers into the shade of grimy stone arcades in town’s innumerous blind alleys, young boys of all ages still dove off of it in droves, ceaselessly, shouting at the top of their lungs. It was pleasant to watch them, those untiring seaworthy creatures, imagining the coolness of water and thinking various unburdensome thoughts about the cruel swiftness of life’s passage.
This afternoon, however, on the first day after Christmas, the boys were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps their parents had told them, in passing yet with a stern tone, that it might not be the greatest of ideas, on this day of a heightened degree of holiness for the large masses of world’s non-Muslims, to submerge themselves in water, as though in mocking imitation of the important infidel ceremony called baptism. Or perhaps this is but YT’s habitual retroactive, ratiocinative projection of plausible fictional scenarios onto the simple real-life circumstances whose logical underpinning is unknown to him and may not exist, or need to exist or be accounted for, in the first place…
So then, it was the first day after Christmas, three o’clock in the afternoon, the sweltering equatorial sun as blindingly ferocious as it is every afternoon of the year on the island, and the jetty was void of people, save for one brightly-clad young woman leaning forth against the porous, mollusk-ridden basalt parapet and gazing off into the near distance of the narrow channel that separates Lamu from its more compact, and largely unpopulated, satellite of Manda. Her solitary, somewhat dolorous presence accentuated the placid vista’s certain existential lonesomeness. (In order to be complete, emptiness must be incomplete. Likewise, the total absence of sound does not constitute perfect silence. For a slice of life’s reality, rendered in writing, to strike the reader as credible, it must first be leavened with a dose of artifice… What else can one say in that regard? Imagination is the best and most reliable source of recollections.) What was she thinking about, in the momentary stillness of her sun-dazed reverie? Ah, who knows, you know. Something or other, no doubt. Nothing of any major consequence to our lives, one would imagine.
With no program-organized activities scheduled for much of the afternoon, the four of us SLS-running people were taking it easy up on the third-floor of Petley’s Inn — the oldest lodging establishment in East Africa — in by far the largest and best-stocked bar in town. (Lamu, of course, has an overwhelmingly Muslim population, so the number of places where one can purchase alcohol can be counted on the fingers of one hand.) At this interim hour, we were the only people up there, besides the somnolent middle-aged bartender and his occasional substitute and night-shift backup, the all-purpose man about town, now probably in his mid-forties and looking pretty rough, going by the theologically neutral nickname of Satan: Yours Truly’s good acquaintance from some ten years earlier, when Satan worked at the Hapa Hapa seafood restaurant next door, was the handsomest guy on the waterfront and constantly radiated an almost preternatural happiness.
Come nightfall, the enormous, cathedral-like space of the Petley’s bar would be packed to capacity, throbbing with suppressed frenzied energy. But at this hour, it was empty.
Slouched over the bar counter, Satan was immersed in some thick, dog-eared paperback, with the word murder splashed in crimson-red across the cover. He nodded without raising his eyes from the book as the four of us filed in. “Hello, Satan,” I said.
Seated at a long table in the far corner, sprawled luxuriantly on the cushioned, harem-style sofas pushed close against the wall-sized aperture that gave onto the waterfront (there are no glassed-in windows anywhere on the island), we were sipping on our Tusker beers (“Very baridi!” the bartender assured us; and indeed, the sweat-covered bottles were ice-cold) and weak white wine from South Africa (wine spitzer, the bartender called it), when YT, glancing outside, took notice of that brightly-clad young woman below, standing alone on the jetty, her back to him. Right away he thought it would be cool (just as cool as Lamu’s weather invariably is hot) to have that arresting image preserved unto posterity, in a medium more reliable than the flimsy matrix of his memory; to have it frozen in time, if you will.
Lamu girl, frozen. This would be an example of what is known as an oxymoron. Hardly any of the island’s permanent residents have ever seen snow, or ice, other than in photographs and on television. One of the people there had told me that the most distinct image of Russia she had in her mind was that of Omar Sharif and Julie Christie riding along in a troika, amid the boundless expanse of pristine snow, with Lara’s Theme (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC2Bk8f8plU&feature=fvw) swelling in the background.
A moment to remember other, less distinctly chrystallized moments by. Human memory is discrete, rather than continuous, in nature, and its landscape unfolds after the manner of a night train ride across the Russian countryside (this, of course, is YT-specific frame of reference; feel free to conjure a journey through some other geographic terrain), with its lengthy spells of pitch-darkness interspersed at rare intervals with remote flashes of light: some nameless village of a few decrepit izbas or a small town with an instantly forgettable name, partly obscured by the unseen slanted copses of anemic birch trees; a smattering of disconnected, faintly luminous dots…
That’s all there is to it, really. YT then asked the SLS Programs’ Coordinator, Mike Spry, who had his new digital camera sitting on the table in front of him, to take a picture of the woman — no particular reason, man, I just think there’s something, you know, about her, this whole view, something that really captures this moment, this place’s, like, atmosphere, if you know what I mean — and Mike shrugged his shoulders but obliged, putting down his Tusker and reaching for the camera. “It’s not going to be the greatest picture ever,” he warned YT. “The angle’s not the best. Plus the sun’s kinda…”
YT thinks the picture turned out just fine.
That’s all there is to it. No more there there. This is not a story, after all, to have a story beyond the story; rather, this is just a long caption to a photograph. This is just what it is: a moment in time. Something by which to remeber some small part of everything else.
SLS Writes 