When African literature is published in the West, it is all too often realist, in English, and in the spirit of Chinua Achebe. But romance, science fiction, fantasy, epic, experimental poetry, satire, and political allegory all find expression in Africa, …
Essay
A Snippet of the Matter: The Literary Cosmogony of Malcolm de Chazal (Mauritius)
1.
One story goes: Malcolm de Chazal, hoping for just a minute’s reprieve from a friend’s dull soiree, a gulp of fresh air, stumbled out onto the wrap-around veranda and, upon turning the corner, found himself shadowing a young girl, …
Trick-or-Treat
A fawn crossed the road as I began my descent—via bicycle—into the valley; I thought I could see little buds on its head, but I didn’t trust that it was possible for a baby deer to have horns of any …
Black Magic
Mrs. Bilbo, my first and best teacher, presided over grades one through five at Murphy Adventist School, a two-room A-frame that sat upon a hill, not far from a church whose members worshipped on the seventh day of the week, …
Reasons Not to Join
I came back to my barracks room to find my bunkmate meditating in darkness to a cranked death metal album and when he looked up he smiled like Vincent D’Onofrio on the toilet in Full Metal Jacket.
There was …
Fire
While stationed in Spain, one of my friends had his car set on fire. They did it, I’m assuming, because he was American. They didn’t know he had a Confederate flag in his room. Come to think of it, he …
The Return of Marvin Gaye
Crowded around the living room at my 50th birthday party in San Francisco, my friends recounted some of my characteristically offbeat accomplishments in recent years. I’d smuggled six inch women’s pumps past security into a U2 concert to get …
An Evening with Dorothy Day
I have met a truly liberated woman. Not Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, or Shirley Chisolm, but Dorothy Day, a woman of seventy plus, whose freedom is not put on delicately like perfume as one leaves the house, but rather authentically …
Some Words on the Lives and Lines of Jimmy Carter
A poet in a crowd of poets, I first met Jimmy Carter at the White House in 1980. Too short a time after that Tom T. Hall, an old friend, asked Jim Whitehead and me if we would meet him …
It’s Making You Happy
Yesterday I stood in line with two books, waiting for a poet I love to sign them. While I waited, the photographer who had been roving the event paused about five feet away and began taking my picture. Confused, I …
