T134 Home Soon

Title: Home Soon
Year: 2023
Issue: 134
Cover: Golden Portal, Felicia Megginson

T134 Home Soon, Transition’s newest issue features a stellar roster of debut and emerging writers. It includes stories by Jess Silfa, Zkara Gaillard, and Eviano George and poetry by Myronn Hardy, Adedayo Agarau and Clemonce Heard. Don’t miss essays on the rise of neo-fascism in the French Caribbean by Silyane Larcher and Amy Abugo Ongiri’s exploration of the African roots of Mambomania, as well as Bhakti Shringarpure’s illuminating interview with East African film directors, Lula Ali Ismail and Amil Shivji.

Home Soon takes its title from Taylor Byas’s poem “Re-narrativization” in which the speaker, chooses to call “the vague choreography” of vultures following her home “a halo.” At the end of the poem, the birds scatter as she declares her permanence. Ama Codjoe, in her experimental personal essay, finds the comforts of home in Little Africa in Paris, which is, at times, less than welcoming. In other work, like Zkara Gaillard’s story “A Good Word, “reality complicates the longing for home, or a home; see Panamanian artist Giana De Dier’s series of collages, “Home and Belonging: Contextualizing Ownership,” which explores the history of Panamanians of color displaced in the early 1900s by the segregation of the Canal Zone.

Detail of Many Rivers to Cross. May Clémenté. Acrylic, fiberglass, hemp rope, gold leaves, metallic sticks. Courtesy of the artist. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Essay

The Colonial Chains of Neo-Liberalism: How Marine LePen Was Able to Win the Elections in the French Caribbean

Silyane Larcher

“How could societies born of the Atlantic slave trade and the racism inherent therein, as well as in European colonization, turn to a far-right party?”

Stan Douglas, *Luanda-Kinshasa*, 2013,
Single-channel video projection, 6 hours 1 min (loop), color, sound. © Stan Douglas Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner

Essay

Looping the Loop: Assemblage, Repetition, and Diaspora: Three Museums-Paris

Ama Codjoe

“Hell, in other words, is our unawareness, our unknowing. Half-listening, my father looked at something past my shoulder. Unwilling to budge from the omniscience of his role…”

From the Making of *Dhalyniaro*, Second Assistant Director of Photography
amidst crowd in collective prayer to celebrate Eid al Fitr. Courtesy of Lula Ali Ismail

Interview

Love, Feminism, and Freedom on the Indian Ocean: Lula Ali Ismail and Amil Shivji on East Africa’s Film Renaissance

Bhakti Shringarpure, Lula Ali Ismail, and Amil Shivji

“This is what I mean when I say that people are more aware, organized, and living their life even though there are bombings left and right. They want to see their history from within.”