Socialism underpins Definable Traces in the Atmosphere (OR Books, £13), a collection by the indefinable Mike Marqusee, the American writer who spent most of his adult life in England before his death in 2015 and so was able to get to grips with cricket, one of his many great loves. See also, in this insightful, kaleidoscopic book, the politics of Bob Dylan, wanderings in the Subcontinent, flamenco and the quest for authenticity, and – poignantly and previously unpublished – a piece completed in December 2014 entitled The Cancer Dance and the Rites of Positivity.
Read the full article in the latest print edition of The Big Issue.
Israel announced Monday it will seal the Kerem Shalom commercial border crossing between Gaza and Egypt. This means Gazans, already suffering a health emergency due to the dozen years-long siege of the refugee enclave, will be subject to even greater privations. Israel’s actions fly in the face of World opinion, and repeated rulings by the United Nations, who released a report last year saying conditions in Gaza are degrading at a rate to make the Strip “unlivable” by 2020.
Listen to the full interview here.
By National Slam Champion, Beltway Grand Slam Champion, and a 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam representative Elizabeth Acevedo, from Women of Resistance.
An Open Letter to the Protesters Outside the Planned Parenthood Near My Job
who stuck a cross in my face and told me,
“abortions are the largest genocide of black people,
God won’t forgive you for having one”:
I’m not sure how I became the finger
to pull the trigger of your mouth.
That’s a lie. I know exactly what turned
my lunch break into a firing range
and why this clay pigeon of a body
attracted your aim—
Tell me more, how you care about
“this largest genocide of black people”
when I’ve never seen you and your signs
at a Black Lives Matter protest.
Tell me, did you mourn Tamir & Aiyana & Jordan,
as hard as you celebrated the shooting of a clinic in Colorado?
Do you know how often I’ve walked by
your markers, megaphones, and mantras?
Your pickets signs and prayers that you cock like pistols
as I clench half a millennium of horror between my teeth?
You don’t know my god.
You and mine ain’t on speaking terms.
My god understands the choices black women
have needed to make in the face of genocide.
My god understands how slave women plucked pearls
from between their legs rather than see them strung up by the neck.
My god doesn’t condemn us who when faced with taking claim of our bodies
do so with our chins unchained to the ground.
My god understands how for generations bodies like mine
were the choice for someone like you to make.
Do you know how many years, women like me
lived equally afraid of both hangings and hangers?
Yet we’re still here, everyday carrying ourselves.
WOMEN OF RESISTANCE
Poems for a New Feminism
Representing the diversity of contemporary womanhood and bolstering the fight against racism, sexism, and violence, Women of Resistance unites new writers, performers, and activists with established poets to take a feminist stance against the new authority. More |
GRABBING PUSSY
In a breathless cascade of poetry and prose, celebrated performance artist Karen Finley here lays bare the psychosexual obsessions that have burst to the surface of today’s American politics. More |
INFERNO (A POET’S NOVEL)
“[W]hat more can you ask of a novel, or a poet’s novel, or a poem, or a memoir, or whatever the hell this shimmering document is? Just read it.” —Alison Bechdel on Inferno. More |
Is consciousness internal, readable, even uploadable? Does it exist in the external world? Here are some mind-bending reads that have the answers
Read the full article here.
Questions abound as to what exactly Andrés Manuel López Obrador will do after last Sunday’s resounding electoral victory in Mexico. During the campaign, he had studiously avoided pledges that might have damaged his chances by triggering comparisons with the beleaguered South American left or by upsetting financial markets. Many sympathizers criticized AMLO, as the president-elect is commonly known, for fudging his policy commitments and for evading the key issues in debates on violence, economic development, and foreign policy. Others complained that his decision to apply “justice but not vengeance” to members of the corrupt presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto would perpetuate the culture of impunity that has eroded confidence in the law in Mexico. But one thing is certain: AMLO’s electoral formula worked like a dream. There are lessons here. And not just for Latin America.
Read the full article here.
How does one consider 70 years of conflict that countless UN resolutions, global power brokers and peace activists have been unable to resolve? Through a weighty compilation of analysis from some of the most prominent and informed voices on the issue.
Upon the Nakba’s 70th anniversary, such a considered analysis of Israel and Palestine is quite frankly overdue. That’s what Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Toughest Questions, a book edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner and published by OR Books, aims to provide.
With more than 50 contributors, including such distinguished voices as Richard Falk, Norman Finkelstein and Gideon Levy, among many others, the book lays out some of the toughest questions on the conflict and considers the facts on the ground.
Read the full review here.
Mexico heads to the polls Sunday in national elections that will likely mark a sharp change in the political direction of Latin America’s second largest economy. It comes at a time of disillusionment for many: incumbent President Enrique Peña Nieto is deeply unpopular, as is his rightwing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has ruled Mexico for 77 of the last 90 years.
Read the full article here.
Latin America’s second largest economy will go to the polls on Sunday to choose its next president and a new congress at a time of widespread disillusionment at unchecked corruption, poverty and violence that has claimed at least 200,000 lives since 2007.
Read the full article here.
A sense of foreboding hung in the air on the eve of one of Iraq’s greatest modern tragedies – the killing, displacing and enslaving of tens of thousands of Yazidi men, women and children by Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi’s army of terror.
Mosul had fallen in June and they knew an ISIS attack was likely. But it wasn’t until the early hours of August 3, 2014, when vigilant men gripping rusty Kalashnikovs spotted unfamiliar vehicles heading towards them through the desert, that Iraq’s Yazidis came face to face with their killers.
In one swift assault, ISIS fighters armed to the teeth attacked and seized Yazidi towns and villages in Sinjar, north Iraq, where about 500,000 members of the religious minority lived.
In the days that followed they killed thousands and enslaved an estimated 6,383 women and children, devastating and traumatising entire communities in the process. Countless families were shattered by the loss of a mother, a daughter, a sister.
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Read the full review here.
Ah, there’s nothing like a good dystopia. They imagine how the world could go to hell, then set likable characters loose inside that pessimistic sandbox. That formula has created an army of iconic protagonists, loathsome villains, and worlds that inspire horror…especially when they seem more likely, given current events.
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Read the full review here.
The Democratic Party is attacking Donald Trump’s foreign policy from a position far to the right of Trump’s own “fire and fury” position. Why are the Democrats advocating for nuclear confrontation, and what are the facts on the ground from the Singapore summit? Later, we talk about a new Amnesty International condemnation of the United States’ massive infliction of civilian casualties in Raqqa. We are joined by Walter Smolarek, an analyst for Sputnik News; and Dr. Greg Shupak, author of the book The Wrong Story: Israel, Palestine, and the Media.
Listen to the full interview here.
The wonderfully alliterative name of this recently published book may be difficult to resist, but don’t let the title fool you. This slim volume has been written to further the fight on a number of epic fronts – gender, data privacy and disinformation. The battlefield is the digital world and its three writers are self-declared digital activists. What do such labels really mean you may wonder and where does Julian Assange fit in?
This book takes the form of a conversation between three dedicated female activists – British journalist and human rights advocate, Sarah Harrison, Renata Avila, a well-known Guatemalan human rights lawyer and digital rights expert and Angela Richter, a Croatian-German theatre director and author. I was party to a similar live conversation between these three women at a recently attended Border Sessions Tech Culture Festival here in the Hague. This is a wide ranging collaboration between Crossing Borders and a variety of local tech-focused initiatives including Impact City, Start-Up Factory and Hack the Planet among others. All three women have close connections with Wikileaks and all are highly sympathetic to the current situation of the organisation’s founder – Julian Assange. Described by him as a ‘a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents’ to which this multi-national media organisation ‘gives asylum’, Assange may well be describing his own situation in the Ecuardorian embassy in London. Founded in 2006, WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses including the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Diary and of course the NSA scandal leaked by Edward Snowden.
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Read the full review here.
Modern Tibetan literature has been rather hard to find, with the exception of religious and spiritual writings, and some poetry, notably Woeser’s Tibet’s True Heart: Selected Poetry, the only book of modern Tibetan poetry I have come across. Woeser has a short story in this new collection, and was the only Tibetan writer represented that I actually knew by name.
Tenzin Dickie, with a story of her own included, has done a singular service in gathering together these twenty-one stories from Tibetan authors, the first collection of such writings that has been made available to the English-language reader. Quite a few of the writers are from the Tibetan diaspora, notably that in the United States, and a number of them have either been educated abroad or occupy teaching positions there now. Some of them actually write in English..
Read the full review here.
Performance Artist and poet, Karen Finley, creates for an adult audience and speaks up for those that are silenced or victimised. Her latest book, Grabbing Pussy, based on a performance piece, Unicorn Gratitude Mystery, combines Language and Beat poetry in a bravura display employing the deeply limited and limiting sexual vocabulary of recent American political discourse.
Read the full review here.
Desperately Seeking Self-improvement: A Year inside the Optimization Movement by Carl Cederström and André Spicer is a hilarious (and sometimes frightening) account of how they spent a full year dedicating each month to a different way of improving themselves.
Read the full article here.
Listen to the full interview here.
