QUEER UGANDA

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Podcast

Transition on the Wire

Transition on the Wire is the monthly podcast of Transition Magazine, hosted by author Sarah Ladipo Manyika. In our latest podcast, Sarah sits down with Mónica Macías—daughter of Equatorial Guinea’s first president—to discuss her memoir, BLACK GIRL FROM PYONGYANG: In Search of My Identity. In recent episodes, Sarah interviews best-selling, Booker-Prize- winning author Bernardine Evaristo, rapper, singer-songwriter will.i.am, and actor Delroy Lindo. And poet and creative scholar DaMaris Hill and curator and cultural historian James McNally discuss Black collage in Hiphop and all genres.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or directly from Soundcloud. Join us each month for a new interview with authors and artists of the Diaspora.

Artist Spotlight

Leilah Babirye

Leilah Babirye, whose sculptures accompany Tushabe’s essay “A Body in Balance: Wielding Community against an Oppressive Regime,” received asylum in the US in 2018. In 2015, Babirye was publicly outed in the Ugandan press. When Babirye’s sexuality was made public, Makerere University would not allow Babirye to continue their studies and Babirye’s family disowned them (The Guardian, 2021.)

Babirye’s bold and imposing wooden sculptures stand as tall as fifteen feet, insisting on their existence–like many queer individuals in Uganda who do the same in a society that would rather shut them up in prisons for life for their homosexuality. Each of the sculptures are named after the clan a queer person has been born into and will always be a part of, no matter how they have been treated by that clan and their family. The Guardian profile cited above notes that though masks “are a West African thing (Uganda is in the east), Babirye uses them [in sculptures like the one to the right] as a nod to those friends forced to hide behind them.”

Leilah Babirye’s first solo show “We Have a History” is currently on view at the DeYoung/Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco

Leilah Babirye, *Gunsinze aliwa Bitono*, 2023. Wood, wax, acrylic, aluminum, bolts, nuts, washers, nails, bicycle tyre inner tubes, metal bicycle parts, welded metal and found objects. Copyright Leilah Babirye. Courtesy the artist; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York, Gordon Robichaux, New York and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Paris and London. Photo by Mark Blower

From T135 SPECIES

Listen to Luisa Villa Meriño and Kim Jensen read an excerpt from Luisa’s poem “Dios Fue Mejor Cuando Era Tigre” (with music by Etelvina Maldonado)

Featured Awards

Winelle Felix and Zkara Gaillard Win 2024 PEN/Dau Awards for Debut Short Stories

The PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers recognizes twelve emerging writers annually for their debut short story published in a literary magazine, journal, or cultural website, and aims to support the launch of their careers as fiction writers. Winelle has won for her story “Return to Sender: Big Time Tief” and Zkara for her story “A Good Word.” Read both stories in T134!

The winning writers each receive a $2,000 cash prize and will be published by Catapult in their annual anthology, Best Debut Short Stories: The PEN America Dau Prize.

Because of the cancellation of the ceremonies this year, they were not able to have their work honored. We’d like to take this opportunity, however, to celebrate the grand quality of their writing and to wish them much continued success moving forward.

From the Archive

Upon Returning to Jamaica in Search of the Undead

When Thomas Glave visited Manchester, Jamaica, with his family, he could not find his great-great-grandmother’s grave. She, Catherine Wright, a Black woman, most likely, did not have one. But his great-great-grandfather’s stone, though cracked and unadorned, lays steadfast on the land to mark the death of the Englishman. Their child spreads his palms on the grave. What easier way to invoke the life of the forgotten by placing your hands on the one who has chosen, by circumstance or conviction, to forget you?

That is only one question the writer Thomas Glave posits for himself, and by extension his ancestry, in his essay, “In Search of the Undead: (Un)marked Graves and The Sea of We,” published in Transition, Issue T128. In his commitment to uncovering the hard truths of racial economy, sexual politics, and their intersection, Glave provides a searching, uncompromising historical account—as Transition authors have done since the magazine’s founding.

—Bizaye Banjaw