June 18, 2021 History Celebrating Juneteenth in Galveston By Clint Smith Jas. I. Campbell, Historic American Buildings Survey: Ashton Villa, Photograph, 1934. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The long-held myth goes that on June 19, 1865, Union general Gordon Granger stood on the balcony of Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, and read the order that announced the end of slavery. Though no contemporaneous evidence exists to specifically support the claim, the story of General Granger reading from the balcony embedded itself into local folklore. On this day each year, as part of Galveston’s Juneteenth program, a reenactor from the Sons of Union Veterans reads the proclamation at Ashton Villa while an audience looks on. It is an annual moment that has taken a myth and turned it into tradition. Galveston is a small island that sits off the coast of Southeast Texas, and in years past this event has taken place outside. But given the summer heat, the island’s humidity, and the average age of the attendees, the organizers moved the event inside. A man named Stephen Duncan, dressed as General Granger, stood at that base of the stairwell, with other men dressed as Union soldiers on either side of him. Stephen looked down at the parchment, appraising the words as if he had never seen them before. He looked back down at the crowd, who was looking back up at him. He cleared his throat, approached the microphone, and lifted the yellowed parchment to eye level. “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” All slaves are free. The four words circled the room like birds who had been separated from their flock. I watched people’s faces as Stephen said these words. Some closed their eyes. Some were physically shaking. Some clasped hands with the person next to them. Some simply smiled, soaking in the words that their ancestors may have heard more than a century and a half ago. Being in this place, standing on the same small island where the freedom of a quarter million people was proclaimed, I felt the history pulse through my body. Read More
June 17, 2021 First Person Worldbending By Akwaeke Emezi In Akwaeke Emezi’s new book, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir, the writer traces their experience as an ọgbanje, an Igbo term that refers to a spirit born into a human body, through letters to friends, family, and lovers. In the below excerpt Emezi describes trying to find community within their M.F.A. program and their discovery that working fearlessly could be a form of worldbending. Guy Rose, The Blue House, c. 1910. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Dear Kathleen, Sometimes, you remember me better than I remember myself. I think that’s important in a friendship—to hold reflections of people for them, be a mirror when they start fading in their own eyes. I hope I do the same thing for you, too. I can’t wait for you to get here for Christmas; I know Germany has been hard on you this fall. The last time we texted, you wrote, I need you and our time this break. I know what you mean. The world can be a grit that sands away at us, and love can be a shelter from that. If this godhouse in the swamp is a wing, then I imagine you arriving and joining me underneath it, where we make syrup with the chocolate habaneros from my garden and sit out on the haint-blue porch. I wish the house was bigger, five or seven bedrooms instead of three, so I could fit more of us in here. We are safer with each other. We see the worlds we’re trying to make, and we lend our power to each other’s spells. I was steaming baos in my kitchen today and I got so excited to show you this house, my house. Just a year ago, you came down to the swamp for Christmas and we stayed in that sublet and cooked fish fresh from the lake. And now I have this house, this land, and the shock of what I made happen still makes me reel when I look at it fully. You think I’d be used to it by now, the way I can make things come true, but every year it expands. Every year I make bigger and bigger things happen—and it’s not just me, obviously. It’s my chi and the deityparents and God and so on, but I have to say yes first and I have to do the work and I can’t believe it works. You know how people are so in awe of Octavia Butler’s journal, the way she wrote down what she wanted with her books? I think it’s because written worldbending resonates so widely. I’ve been curious about what other languages one can worldbend in, though, languages of manifestation, if you like. Writing things down, using images to make vision boards, speaking things aloud—these are all spells. Most of my own worldbending is very action-based: I move as if the future I want is absolutely assured, making choices and spending money like a prophet—buying clothes for galas before I was ever invited to one, paintings for a bungalow I had no idea how I’d ever afford, the pink faux fur for my book launch before I even had a book deal, shit like that. And see, this is why I love you, because you never thought it was impossible; you dream even bigger for me than I do for myself. I ran the potential outfits for make-believe events by you and you took them all seriously. When the noise started happening for my book, I told you I was shocked, and you immediately called me a liar. “You said this would happen,” you reminded me. “You’re not surprised! Don’t act surprised.” Read More
June 16, 2021 Arts & Culture Diving into the Text By Emilio Fraia Photo: © isman rohimly ibrahim/EyeEm / Adobe Stock. I first read the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti in December 2007, when I spent three weeks in the hospital due to an appendectomy gone wrong. Between doses of antibiotics, I asked my father to bring me a book that had just been published, of Onetti’s complete short stories. Before long, I came to one entitled “Convalescence,” which seemed appropriate given my situation. A woman is recovering from an illness in a hotel by the sea. Onetti doesn’t tell us what the illness is. A man keeps calling her on the phone, making threats, insisting she return to the city. I knew it might not be the best idea to read Onetti while laid up in a hospital bed—he’s not exactly the most upbeat writer. But the feeling that came over me as I turned the pages was one of joy. Back then, I used to go on diving trips with a couple of friends. I was really into it—getting away from São Paulo and heading down to Ubatuba or some other town on the coast, spending the weekend in the water, going out at night to drink acai juice and chat in a sandwich shop or some beach bar, wondering what the next day’s adventures had in store. As my friends exchanged long emails, hammering out the details for their next so-called expedition, like a pair of Jacques Cousteaus setting sail on those windy, unpredictable mornings in the silvery sunshine of our little patch of lush South American coastline, a nurse was changing the dressings on my right abdomen and adjusting the IV in my arm. I had had two general anesthesias, an infection, two operations. Throughout my entire recovery, I kept reading Onetti. Rather than revolving around a desire to pick apart and reconstruct meaning, these stories seemed to be aimed at revealing something else. It was as if Onetti were saying to me, It’s impossible to have access to everything, a narrator may actually exist to throw us off, and there’s always something we can’t see. Read More
June 15, 2021 Bulletin Aisha Sabatini Sloan Wins the 2021 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary By The Paris Review Aisha Sabatini Sloan. Photo courtesy of Sabatini Sloan. The Paris Review is pleased to announce that Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s column for the Daily, Detroit Archives, has received the 2021 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. Sabatini Sloan is the author of the essay collections The Fluency of Light and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit as well as the forthcoming book-length essay Borealis and the father-daughter collaboration Captioning the Archives. She is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. A sampling of the three essays recognized by the award appears below. From “Ladies of the Good Dead,” May 22, 2020: My great aunt Cora Mae can’t hear well. She is ninety-eight years old. When the global pandemic reached Michigan, the rehabilitation center where she was staying stopped accepting visitors. There were attempts at FaceTime, but her silence made it clear that for her, we had dwindled into pixelated ghosts. She contracted COVID-19 and has been moved again and again. When my mother calls to check on her every day, she makes sure to explain to hospital staff that my great aunt is almost deaf, that they have to shout in her left ear if they want to be heard. From “On Immolation,” July 9, 2020: For a period of time in 2014, I couldn’t stop watching the surveillance video of a person setting fire to the Heidelberg Project, a world-renowned art installation by Tyree Guyton in a residential area of Detroit. The recorded arson struck me as a performance piece in itself. In what appears to be the very early hours of the morning, a figure approaches the threshold of a structure called “Taxi House,” a home adorned by boards of wood that have been painted with yellow, pink, green, and white vehicles labeled “taxi.” There is a painted clock, real tires, and toy cars. A meandering, peach-colored line has been painted along a sagging corner of the roof, then it comes down onto the siding, where it moves geometrically, like Pac-Man. From “On Doulas,” September 15, 2020: In 2016, Erykah Badu performed at Chene Park, now called the Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre, a beautiful, outdoor waterfront venue in Detroit overlooking Canada. Badu donated proceeds from that concert to the African American 490 Challenge, an organization trying to raise money to process 11,341 untested rape kits that had been abandoned for years at a Detroit police department storage facility. The initiative was named 490 after the dollar amount needed to test a single kit, each of which represents, the organization’s president Kim Trent emphasized, “a living, breathing victim.” Four years later, thanks to their work, 11,137 kits have been tested, and there have been 210 convictions. Eighty-one percent of the victims were Black women. You could call this an archive of negligence. The Review also was named a finalist for the 2021 National Magazine Award for Fiction, recognizing Senaa Ahmad’s “Let’s Play Dead” (Spring 2020), Eloghosa Osunde’s “Good Boy” (Fall 2020), and Bud Smith’s “Violets” (Summer 2020). Congratulations to all! And for more great stories, essays, poems, interviews, and more, don’t forget to subscribe to The Paris Review today.
June 15, 2021 Redux Redux: Without Wanting to Live Forever By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Elizabeth Bishop. Photo: Alice Helen Methfessel. Courtesy of Frank Bidart. This week at The Paris Review, we’re eating our vegetables and celebrating the summer’s bounty. Read on for Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Poetry interview, Alice Munro’s short story “Spaceships Have Landed,” and Sue Kwock Kim’s poem “The Korean Community Garden in Queens.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off. Elizabeth Bishop, The Art of Poetry No. 27 Issue no. 80 (Summer 1981) The next day there was a picture in the afternoon paper—they take such things very seriously in Brazil—and the day after that my Brazilian friend went to market again. There was a big covered market with stalls for every kind of comestible, and there was one vegetable man we always went to. He said, “Wasn’t that Doña Elizabetchy’s picture in the paper yesterday?” She said, “Yes, it was. She won a prize.” And he said, “You know, it’s amazing! Last week Señora (Somebody) took a chance on a bicycle and she won! My customers are so lucky!” Isn’t that marvelous?! Read More
June 14, 2021 Celebrating N. Scott Momaday Every Poem Has Ancestors By Joy Harjo On April 12, The Paris Review announced N. Scott Momaday as the recipient of the 2021 Hadada Award, presented each year to a “distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” In the coming weeks, the Daily will publish a series of short essays honoring the multifariousness of Momaday’s achievements. Today, in an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir Poet Warrior, Joy Harjo recalls how Momaday’s poem “The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee” inspired her to begin writing poetry. N. Scott Momaday. Photo: Darren Vigil Gray. Though I loved poetry all of my life, it wasn’t until poems like “The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee” by N. Scott Momaday that I turned to the making of poetry. Like Momaday, I came to poetry as an artist who painted and drew. And both Momaday and I have a love of those traditional rituals that place the speaker/singer into an intimate relationship with a place on earth, a people. I believe every poem is ritual: there is a naming, a beginning, a knot or question, then possibly revelation, and then closure, which can be opening, setting the reader, speaker, or singer out and back on a journey. I can hear the tribal speaker in his voice, in whatever mode of performance. And when I trust my voice to go where it needs to be, to find home, it returns to where it belongs, back to the source of its longing. * Every poem has ancestors. Kiowa singers and orators can be found staking words to the ground, with poetic lines appearing as prayer flags waving in the winds in Momaday’s poem “The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee.” I can also hear the long-legged poetry of Walt Whitman, who is considered one of the original American poetry ancestors. I wonder who influenced Walt Whitman to release poetry from the highly stylized European forms, to make a poetry that flowed like the winds rippling over vast fields of leaves of grass. Read More