Year: 2021
Issue: 131
Cover image: Virginia Chihota, Ndiri Mwana Wa…. (I am a child of ….) (Signed, 2018). Screen print on linen, (Copyright: The Artist. All images courtesy of Tiwani Contemporary)
T131 is the first issue of Transition published after the Spring and Summer of 2020. In a deeply personal essay, Camille Goodison reckons with the racial PTSD triggered by the seemingly ubiquitous black death caused by COVID, police, and white supremacists. In the wake of the killings, she is drawn to the unsmiling portrait of her uncle, a disaffected Jamaican activist whose history she does not want to entirely repeat. Lee Gilette explores the history of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in his personal essay “The House That Leopold Built” It begins: “While racist statues around the world are being torn down, the world’s largest monument to white supremacy has just been given a €67 million facelift.” Don’t miss lauded emerging writer Michelle Angwenyi’s short story “A Small World,” which lyrically describes the friendship of two brothers who meet as adults, one scarred by having been sold as a baby. Read on as Emmanuel Akyeampong tracks the development of global blackness in the US alongside an interview with Louis Chude-Sokei, in which he discusses growing up Nigerian and Jamaican in South Central LA. With poetry and art by Romeo Oriogun, I.S. Jones, Bisa Butler, Virginia Chihota, Nadia Huggins, and Lyle Ashton Harris.