Title: CLIMATE
Year: 2022
Issue: 133
Cover: Floridawater I, 2019. © Allison Janae Hamilton
Environmental catastrophe has been a longstanding condition of life in the African Diaspora, not a sudden existential emergency; the Diaspora comes to it with that long perspective and with the urgency of a community that is directly affected by it.
T133 includes Leah Penniman’s 2024 Pushcart-winning essay “Black Land Matters: Climate Solutions in Black Agrarianism.” Leah Penniman, director of Soul Fire Farm, and environmental justice leader Elizabeth Yeampierre, in her interview with organizer Alycia Bacon, put the blame for climate catastrophe squarely on white supremacy–as codified by colonialism and racialized capitalism. Brittany Meché, in her essay “Desert Black,” asks: How we can see Africa as more than the climate crisis’s canary in the coal mine? How do we recognize and relate the disproportionate effects of environmental change for African and Black communities “without naturalizing those vulnerabilities or simply abstracting them into useful lessons for ‘others.’…Without a return to reductive frames of African victimhood?”
Don’t miss Danielle Legros Georges series of poems on Congo and cobalt extraction and oral histories by organizers of the 2022 Alternative World Water Forum, and by the Ethiopian women that responded to the “’77” famine with improvised networks of care. T133 features the Awele Creative Trust-award winning short story of Mustapha Enesi, “Safety Pins are Good Omens,” the art of Allison Janae Hamilton, Theresa Chromati, Mafalda Mondestin, Tavares Strachan, Nydia Blas and so much more.
Editor Robert Reid-Pharr writes in his introduction: “…the struggle to ‘save our planet’ is ancient and ongoing. In order to prevail…we have to remember who we are…we are the living promise of the colonized and enslaved. Our passion can never be subdued. Our links to our planet can be stretched and deformed but never broken.” The writers and artists of T133 remind us, over and over, who we are and what the task ahead of us is.