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scholar of literary & cultural studies, editor of poco.lit.
This Mournable Body is undoubtedly an important book, but it’s more than a little difficult to read. The deservedly renowned Zimbabwean novelist, filmmaker and playwright Tsitsi Dangarembga presents a devastating portrait of her country after independence has finally been achieved, but has failed to produce the equitable utopia that the struggle seemed to promise would follow liberation from colonial oppression.
more...My favourite thing about this book is the way it approaches serious problems with a light touch, while still granting them their gravity.
more...One of our aims with poco.lit. is to try to demystify some of the core ideas in and around postcolonial studies and the ways in which postcolonial literatures have been read. In this post, we take a look at Orientalism by Edward Said and some of its key contributions to thinking about colonial practices.
more...The first thing I liked about this book was its title, and the novel certainly delivers on the sensuous and sensory promises made by these four words placed alongside each other: Butter, honey, pig, bread.
more...This is a wonderfully strange book, and probably the most obvious reason for its strangeness is the confluence of genres it enacts. Ghosh’s book gives his readers both the findings of many years of research, and the story of his undertaking that research.
more...The blurb for Kati Kati runs “A young woman with no memory of her life or death, is helped with assimilation to the afterlife by a ghost.” So far, so weird. This Kenyan film delivers on this promise of weirdness in a wonderfully compelling and understated way.
more...Between the world and me is a letter from a father to his son about living in the United States of America in a Black man’s body. There are moments in this book where the beauty of Coates’ prose is quite breath-taking, and the whole is sustained by an intellectual rigour that allows it to shine all the better
more...The Promise marks the third time a South African writer has won the Booker: Galgut joins fellow laureates Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee. The book is executed with a real skill for the craft of writing, and commands respect for the author’s handling of his medium.
more...The Bone People, set on the South Island of New Zealand, is not always easy, but it’s absolutely worth the trouble. Over the course of reading it my relationship to it kept changing: from liking it, to hating it, to loving it; from wanting to redeem the characters, to loathing them, to taking them for what they were.
more...Friday Black is the acclaimed first collection of short stories by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. He has a knack for locating the horror already existing in the everyday and drawing it to chilling yet strangely logical conclusions.
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