Title: SPECIES
Year: 2024
Issue: 135
Cover: Serigne Ibrahima Dieye Les plumes de la fortune #3, 2020 Mixed media on paper mounted on canvas, courtesy Galerie Cecile Fakhoury © Issam ZeljyDiop/MAGNIN-A GALLERY
T135 SPECIES builds on T133 CLIMATE by tracking the intimate relationship of the Diaspora to all forms of life. Among the relationships considered in this issue are those imposed on Africans as a result of the atrocities of Middle Passage (and racialized chattel slavery) as well as practices and relationships that grow from–and resist–those atrocities. In her essay, “Off-the Grid,” Bénédicte Boisseron offers a moving portrait of her brother who traveled back to his father’s native Guadeloupe to live off the land only to be betrayed by the French (post)colonial regimes that poisoned it. Heather Davis’s “On Coral” features perhaps the most poignant, hopeful emblem of intimacy between humans and other species in the issue—an intimacy enacted through hope and care as divers fragment and regenerate coral in order to replant it by hand on withering reefs. Brigitte Fielder’s “Essai en Vol: The Zenaida Dove” is a lyrical attempt to imagine the Haitian-born enslaver, John James Audubon’s, Black sisters, whose lives would otherwise go unremembered, lost to the many voids in the archive.
In addition to these many essays, and an interview with artist Kapwani Kiwanga, remarkable fiction and poetry also address the issue’s themes. Ron Robertson’s rollicking debut story, “Ravenous,” describes the arc of a friendship forged through the love of dogs and the complex bloodsport of dogfighting. Solomon Samson (“A Gift from the Vatican”) presents a story with a strange mix of Christian and traditional African beliefs and parables. A young boy drags an enormous fish to the altar of his church and receives a blessing from a Catholic priest. Later that boy becomes a sacrifice himself. This work is ranged alongside the deeply imagined poems of Afro-Colombian poet, Luisa Merino. Written in Spanish and English these works at once mourn and celebrate pre-colonial and pre-capitalist Colombian life. Listen to Luisa and translator, Kim Jensen, read from “God Was Better When He Was a Tiger.”