Year: 2019
Issue: 128
Cover image: Vicktor Ehikhamenor, We Are Members of the Benin War Council, 2017.
Transition 128 delivers on its legacy of honest, nuanced commentary on racial sexual politics in Caine-prize winner Helon Habila’s short story of a grief-stricken single father’s encounter with a rich, married white woman in Berlin and Thomas Graves’s unflinching reckoning and lyric re-imagining of the union between his white and black ancestors in post-emancipation Jamaica. Ladee Hubbard, winner of the Hurston/Wright award for a debut novel, wryly draws an in-depth portrait of three “bitches”—insiders and outsiders alike—caught in the orbit of a self-destructive mayor based on Marion Barry in “Bitch: An Etymology of Family Values.” T128 leads with poems by Kwame Dawes and Remica Bingham-Fisher and features sculpture by Simone Leigh and photography by Lebohang Kganye, and Mohau Modisakeng.
Don’t miss the interview with Teju Cole about his latest performance piece, Black Paper, or 2022 Caine Prize winner Idza Luhumyo’s story, “Sister Ships,” (#OpenAccess) a meditation on a friendship between two girls who grow up in the same quarter of the same town, but come from “essentially two different worlds.”