Final Words

.



“My name is Aaron Bushnell, I am an active duty member of the US airforce, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine!”



.

Sometimes it seems to me that the process of rehearsal is simply a process of emotional armouring...

 

A quote from my book Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART. As posted by Lucy Bellwood on Tumblr:

https://lucybellwood.tumblr.com/post/728466340736827392

“Sometimes it seems to me that the process of rehearsal is simply a process of emotional armouring: we will make everything absolutely perfect so no one will ever see who or what we really are.”



.

Ten years ago I thought this was never meant to happen....

.



I've been thinking a lot about how Polyamorous Love Song came out ten years ago. How it was a moment that, in some ways, really changed my life. The first time it had occurred to me my books could have any sort of readership. I had always assumed I would be a writer without a readership. I had always been told my books were too experimental for very many people to ever read them. And here was one of my most experimental books, being read by far more people than had read anything I'd previously written. I partly assumed the success of Polyamorous Love Song had something to do with the last minute title change, that the title itself drew people to the book. But, much later, a friend said the quality she most liked about it was its “surrealist polyvocality,” and this quality was one of the main reasons for its success. (When I was young I think I wanted to be some sort of “cult writer.” But now that I am in fact some sort of cult writer, I have the strange feeling that people don't even really know what that is anymore.) Ten years is both a long time and not such a long time. Sometimes I have the feeling I will never write anything people like as much again. But, I suppose, every time one puts out a new book there's a chance something unexpected might, once again, occur.

You can read an excerpt here.
You can find out about the original title here.

Plus some reviews of Polyamorous Love Song:
Shannon Tien at Cult Mtl
Liz Worth at Quill and Quire
Jade Colbert at The Globe and Mail
Featured book in Maisonneuve
Lesley Trites for the Montreal Review of Books Blog
Letters we wrote to friends after reading Polyamorous Love Song

Percival Everett Quote

.


“In my writing my instinct was to defy form, but I very much sought in defying it to affirm it, an irony that was difficult enough to articulate, much less defend.” 
– Percival Everett, Erasure



*


[Fascinated by the idea that they’ve made an Oscar-nominated film from Percival Everett's Erasure. As is often (but not always) the case, the book is considerably better. But I was intrigued by just how Hollywood they managed to make it while at the same time maintaining something of its original essence. Between American Fiction and Poor Things, I find myself wondering if turning experimental novels into Hollywood films has become something of a momentary trend.]


.

The Air Contains Honey / with a reading by Assiyah Jamilla Touré

.


The Air Contains Honey
With a reading by Assiyah Jamilla Touré
Fundraiser for Brique Par Brique
Co-presented by Arts in the Margins

La Sala Rossa
Wednesday January 31st, 2024
7:30pm doors / 8pm show
$16 + tax in advance / $20 at the door
NOTAFLOF

(The Air Contains Honey only performs once a year. Don't miss your chance!)


(The Air Contains Honey’s lineup is ever shifting. But on January 31st we believe it will be: Pietro Amato. Maude Arès, Patrick Conan, Michael Feuerstack, James Goddard, Thanya Iyer, Modibo Keita, Adam Kinner, Liam O’Neill, Lara Oundjian, Pompey, Stephen Quinlan, Rebecca Rehder, Catherine Fatima, Frédérique Roy, Mulu Tesfu & Jacob Wren.)


Advance tickets
Facebook Event

The Air Contains Honey Facebook Page


Poster by Maude Arès

.

The Haunting Presence of a Network: On Eugene Lim / By Shinjini Dey

.



The Haunting Presence of a Network: On Eugene Lim / By Shinjini Dey:

https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/writing/eugene-lim

I’ve been reading all of Eugene Lim’s books for a while now and it was really nice to read such an important essay on his work by Shinjini Dey. A short excerpt:

“No one is writing like Lim. If anything, Lim forces us to articulate how we ask questions of the world—inside and outside literature. How does anyone act in retaliation or defense? How does anyone appraise and evaluate anything at all? How does one live inside this impasse?”

(I highly recommend all of Eugene Lim's books but if you have to pick just one I would definitely start with Search History.)



.

Pum Pum Poetry by PYNE featuring Gavsborg

.


I only posted albums on my 2023 end of year list. But if I'd also had individual songs I would have definitely included Pum Pum Poetry by PYNE featuring Gavsborg:

https://pyne-sound.bandcamp.com/track/pum-pum-poetry

Such an amazing track.

a trilogy (of a sort)

.



I guess I'm working on a trilogy (of a sort): https://radicalcut.blogspot.com/2020/10/three-trilogies.html



.

Updated PME-ART website

.


I’ve updated the PME-ART website just in time for the holidays: www.pme-art.ca


.

Some favourite things from my 2023

.

[So it seems like I now do this list more or less every year. I really do love lists. As with previous years, this is in no particular order and many of these things didn't come out during the previous year. As well, there should really be more performances and exhibitions on the list, but since the pandemic I'm still not seeing nearly as many of either and therefore this is where things currently stand.]



Music
MIKE – Beware of the Monkey
B. Cool-Aid – Leather Blvd
Jockstrap - I Love You Jennifer B
Noname – Sundial
Aldous Harding – Warm Chris
Kari Faux – Lowkey Superstar (Deluxe)
HOUSE Of ALL – HOUSE Of ALL
Dreamer Isioma – Princess Forever
nutrients – Different Bridges
Melenas – Ahora
H31R – HeadSpace
Just A Touch: Underground UK Soul Compiled by Sam Don
Somewhere Between: Mutant Pop, Electronic Minimalism & Shadow Sounds of Japan


Books
Ordinary Notes – Christina Sharpe
Hospicing Modernity – Vanessa Machado De Oliveira
The Nutmeg’s Curse – Amitav Ghosh
Francisco – Alison Mills Newman
The Fifth Wound – Aurora Mattia
A Rock, A River, A Street – Steffani Jemison
The Women’s House of Detention – Hugh Ryan
Baby Book – Amy Ching-Yan Lam
Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun – Jackie Wang
The Rage Letters – Valérie Bah (Translated by Kama La Mackerel)
Easily Slip into Another World – Henry Threadgill with Brent Hayes Edwards
For Sure – France Daigle (Translated by Robert Majzels)
Catastrophe Time! – Gary Zhexi Zhang (Editor)


Performances & Visual Art
BLACK MOON – FATHERMOTHER (Kezia Waters & Jordan Brown)
Nehanda – nora chipaumire
Reminiscencia – Malicho Vaca Valenzuela
Quantum Choir – Michèle Pearson Clarke
The Roman de Remort, or the inhumane, villainous fabliaux of the Ultimate Carnaval – Marion Lessard




Plus:
Some passages from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
Some lines from For Sure by France Daigle (Translated by Robert Majzels)
A short text I wrote about HOUSE OF ALL

La famille se crée en copulant and Le génie des autres / updated French translations from Le Quartanier

.


I'm happy to announce that Le Quartanier is publishing updated French translations of my books La famille se crée en copulant and Le génie des autres:

https://lequartanier.com/auteur/95/jacob-wren

Read an excerpt of La famille se crée en copulant. Read an excerpt of Le génie des autres.

This is the first in a series of translations Le Quartanier will be doing of my books. Stay tuned.

Also, in English, you can read an excerpt of Families Are Formed Through Copulation here. And read an excerpt of Unrehearsed Beauty (the orginal version of Le génie des autres) here.

Finally, in French, people have stared to write about it:
Yvon Paré in Quebec literature
Ariane Gagnon on Insagram

.

Kevin Coval Excerpt

[I heard this read last night at Paroles de résistance pour une Palestine libre. This is an excerpt.]



"i will tell my jewish kids
we have long story. more than what is seen
now. we are a people who wander and wonder
who have a bag prepared in the corner. i will
tell them israel is not a jewish state. it is
an empire state, a state against people
and a state against G-d. a G-d that is
borderless and nationless, a G-d that is
certainly without drone missiles and air
raids. in a jewish state no tank stands
between people seeking water or medicine.
israel is a farce, the guilt of the western world.
a christian admission of the holocaust.
a watchdog over oil. a stepchild power mad.
a baby country raging against everything
i know to be jewish. i will tell them, help dis-
mantle israel. Zion is yet to be, it is in the struggle
of becoming. this is the truth. it will venerate us
it will exodus, the truth will set us, free!"

- Kevin Coval, what will i tell my jewish kids (for the 5771)




.

Audre Lorde Quote

.



“I went through a period once when I felt like I was dying. I wasn’t writing any poetry, and I felt that if I couldn’t write I would split. I was recording in my journal, but no poems came. I know now that this period was a transition in my life.

The next year, I went back to my journal, and here were these incredible poems that I could almost lift out of it. Many of them are in The Black Unicorn. “Harriet” is one of them; “Sequelae” and “A Litany for Survival” are others. These poems came right out of the journal. But I didn’t see them as poems then.” 

– Audre Lorde

[As quoted in Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate]



.

I Need Music by Anaïs Duplan

.


Perhaps now would be a good time for everyone to read Anaïs Duplan's exceptional book I Need Music:

"When I first come into contact with an image, I say,
what is an image? I begin to believe paradoxically one failed picture
is the total picture. I can tell there’s an art to staying
either inside or outside the lines."
– Anaïs Duplan, I Need Music

Order it here.

As you might already know, Anaïs Duplan has been removed from the exhibition "We is Future" by the Museum Folkwang:

Anaïs Duplan's Instagram Post

Article in The Art Insider




“While I do, of course, feel a sense of accomplishment, growth, belonging, great
fortune, ‘n’ vitality, I also feel a deep ‘n’ abiding sadness.
I try to make space for this sadness here, by I feel there’s a sense to it.
I feel it’s talking to me ‘n’ I need to listen.
I’d rather not.”
– Anaïs Duplan, I Need Music

An Open Letter in Support of the Scotiabank Protestors at the Giller Prize Ceremony

.


As writers and publishers, we express our support for the protestors who disrupted the Scotiabank Giller Prize gala at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto on November 13th, 2023. The protest called attention to Scotiabank's $500 million stake in Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer; Scotiabank is Elbit’s largest foreign shareholder.

During the gala, protesters were booed by the audience and forcibly removed, and after the event ended, they were reportedly detained by police for three hours, and are now facing charges.

We stand with the protestors, and we urge that the charges against them be dropped. And we join our voices with hundreds of thousands of protestors across Canada who are decrying the unfolding genocide happening in Gaza and Palestine.

In the past five weeks, Israel has cut off water, electricity, and communication to Gaza. Over 11,000 Palestinians have been killed, the majority civilians and non-combatants. There are no more universities standing in Gaza. This week, Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza, was bombed until it could no longer be used. Among those who have died are more than 4000 children, many of them infants. This has been the deadliest attack for children in recent times. Many of our government officials and institutions swiftly condemned the October 7th deadly attack on 1200 Israeli civilians and the taking of 220 hostages. We ask that our institutions treat Palestinian civilians with the same concern and humanity.

We are writers and publishers who have been proud and grateful to receive invitations, nominations, grant funding, and prizes from literary institutions including the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the Toronto Book Awards, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award, the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Evergreen Award, the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts, among others. As working artists, we are reliant on these institutions for our livelihood.

We ask all of our literary institutions to be loud where our governments and news outlets have been silent: to call for a ceasefire; to express condemnation for the collective punishment of Palestinians and the war crimes being enacted by the Israeli government; to exert pressure on the Canadian government to stop its military funding to, and diplomatic support for, the Israeli government; to call for a release of all hostages: Israeli hostages and the 5000 Palestinian civilians (including 170 children) who are illegally incarcerated in Israeli prisons; and to urge Israel to end the 75-year occupation of Palestine. We also ask these institutions to do their utmost to protect artists within their purview from censure for speaking out.

If you'd like to add your name to this statement, please do so here.


.

Paroles de résistance pour une Palestine libre

 

Motivated by the urgent need to express our solidarity with the people of Palestine, the Decolonial Love Circle is inviting artists and activists whose communities are united in their struggle for liberation, to lend their voice to the words that fuel resistance.

Animé·e·s par l’urgence d’exprimer nos solidarités au peuple palestinien, Le cercle d’amour décolonial invite des artistes et activistes membres de communautés unies dans leurs luttes pour la libération à se faire porte-voix des mots qui nourrissent la resistance.

Avec-With Hoda Adra, Bengi Akbulut, Yassin Alsalman, Marilou Craft, Karla Etienne, Oula Hajjar, Brintha Koneshachandra, Ehab Lotayef, Qiz7a, Sanna Mansouri, Leila Marshy, Charlie Prince, Lucine Serhan, Nour Symon, les Tisseuses, Amel Zaazaa, Marya Zarif, Jad Orphée Chami, Mohamed Masmoudi, Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM)- حركة الشباب الفلسطيني (d'autres noms s'ajouteront)

La Sotterenea
November 19
6 pm, doors at 5h30

More information here: https://www.facebook.com/events/334250685963000/



.

Sudanese artist Amna Elhassan and Sudanese author's Stella Gitano and Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin

Just discovered the work of Sudanese artist Amna Elhassan. This is her website: https://www.amnaelhassan.com

I don't know nearly enough about what's currently happening in Sudan to write anything about it. But you can read the Sudanese author's Stella Gitano and Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin speaking about it here: https://qantara.de/en/article/sudanese-artists-speak-out-its-not-our-war

That's all I can think to write for now.

EDIT: I felt there should be at least something else. Here's an article: In Sudan, a genocide unfolds — again — and the world does little

"Don’t forget that the Palestinian, Sudanese and Congolese genocides are all connected and the common threads are the economic and military interests of the West."
https://twitter.com/THISisLULE/status/1718441909130068366



.

Rashid Khalidi Quote

.



“The erasure of the Palestinians on display this week as President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled a one-sided “vision for peace” might have been an unusually blatant act of disregard, but it was in no way new. The omission is the essence of the conflict. I was reminded of this back in the early 1990s, when I lived in Jerusalem for several months at a time, doing research in the private libraries of some of the city’s oldest families, including my own. I spent over a year going through dusty worm-eaten books, documents, and letters belonging to generations of Khalidis, among them my great-great-great uncle, Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi.

Through his papers, I discovered a worldly man with a broad education acquired in Jerusalem, Malta, Istanbul, and Vienna. He was the heir to a long line of Jerusalemite Islamic scholars and legal functionaries, but at a young age, Yusuf Diya sought a different path for himself. After absorbing the fundamentals of a traditional Islamic education, he left Palestine at the age of 18 — without his father’s approval, we are told — to spend two years at a British Church Mission Society school in Malta. From there, he went to study at the Imperial Medical School in Istanbul, after which he attended the city’s Robert College, recently founded by American Protestant missionaries. For five years during the 1860s, Yusuf Diya attended some of the first institutions in the Middle East that provided a modern, Western-style education, learning English, French, German, and much else.

With this broad training, Yusuf Diya filled various roles as an Ottoman government official: translator in the Foreign Ministry, consult in the Russian Black Sea port of Poti, governor of districts from Kurdistan to Syria, and mayor of Jerusalem for nearly a decade. He was also elected as the deputy from Jerusalem to the short-lived Ottoman parliament established in 1876, and he did stints teaching at the Royal Imperial University in Vienna.

As a result of his wide reading, as well as his time in Vienna and other European countries, and from his encounters with Christian missionaries, Yusuf Diya was fully conscious of the pervasiveness and virulence of European anti-Semitism. He had also gained impressive knowledge of the intellectual origins of Zionism, and he was undoubtedly familiar with “Der Judenstaat,” or “The Jewish State,” by the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl, published in 1896, and was aware of the first two Zionist congresses in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 and 1898. Moreover, as mayor of Jerusalem, he had witnessed the friction with the local population prompted by the first years of proto-Zionist activity, starting with the arrival of the first European Jewish settlers in the late 1870s and early 1880s.

Yusuf Diya would have been more aware than most of his compatriots in Palestine of the ambition of the nascent Zionist movement, as well as its strength, resources, and appeal. He knew perfectly well that there was no way to reconcile Zionism’s claims on Palestine and its explicit aim of Jewish statehood and sovereignty there with the rights and well-being of Palestine’s Indigenous inhabitants. On March 1, 1899, Yusuf Diya sent a prescient seven-page letter to the French chief rabbi, Zadoc Kahn, with the intention that it be passed on to the founder of modern Zionism.

The letter began with an expression of Yusuf Diya’s admiration for Herzl, whom he esteemed “as a man, as a writer of talent, and as a true Jewish patriot,” and of his respect for Judaism and for Jews, whom he said were “our cousins.” He understood the motivations for Zionism, just as he deplored the persecution to which Jews were subject in Europe. In light of this, he wrote, Zionism in principle was “natural, beautiful, and just.” He added, “who could contest the rights of the Jews in Palestine? My God, historically it is your country!”

But the former mayor of Jerusalem went on to warn of the dangers he foresaw as a consequence of the implementation of the Zionist project for a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine. Whatever the merits of Zionism, Yusuf Diya wrote, the “brutal force of circumstances had to be taken into account.” Palestine “is inhabited by others.” It had an Indigenous population that would never accept being superseded, making it “pure folly” for Zionism to plan to take Palestine over. “Nothing could be more just and equitable” than for “the unhappy Jewish nation” to find a refuge elsewhere, but, he concluded, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.”

Herzl replied—and quickly, in a letter on March 19. His letter was probably the first response by a leader of the Zionist movement to a cogent Palestinian objection to its embryonic plans for Palestine. Herzl simply ignored the letter’s basic thesis, that Palestine was already inhabited by a population that would not agree to be supplanted. Although Herzl had visited Palestine once, in an 1898 visit timed to coincide with that of German Kaiser Wilhelm II, he (like most early European Zionists) had not much knowledge of or contact with its native inhabitants.

Glossing over the fact that Zionism was ultimately meant to lead to Jewish control of Palestine, Herzl deployed a justification that has been a touchstone for colonialists and that would become a staple argument of the Zionist movement: Jewish immigration would benefit Palestine’s Indigenous inhabitants. “It is their well-being, their individual wealth, which we will increase by bringing in our own,” Herzl wrote, adding that “no one can doubt that the well-being of the entire country would be the happy result.”

Herzl’s letter addressed a consideration that Yusuf Diya had not even raised: “You see another difficulty, Excellency, in the existence of the non-Jewish population in Palestine. But who would think of sending them away?”

But Herzl had underestimated his correspondent. From Yusuf Diya’s letter, it is clear that he understood perfectly well that at issue was not the immigration of (as Herzl put it) “a number of Jews” into Palestine, but rather the transformation of the entire land into a Jewish state. Instead, Herzl offered the preposterous inducement that the colonization, and ultimately the usurpation, of their land by strangers would benefit the people of that country. Herzl’s reply to Yusuf Diya appears to have been based on the assumption that the Arabs could ultimately be bribed or fooled into ignoring what the Zionist movement actually intended for Palestine.

This condescending attitude toward the intelligence, not to speak of the rights, of the Arab population of Palestine was to be serially repeated by Zionist, British, European, and American leaders in the decades that followed, down to the present day. As for the Jewish state that was ultimately created by the movement that Herzl founded, as Yusuf Diya foresaw, there was to be room for only one people, the Jewish people. As for the others, “sending them away” was indeed what happened, despite Herzl’s disingenuous remark.

Herzl’s letter referred to Palestinian Arabs, then roughly 95% of Palestine’s inhabitants, merely as its “non-Jewish population.” The Jewish state, Herzl wrote in “Der Judenstaat,” would “form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” Herzl’s imperious disregard of the Palestinians has been replicated over the decades in much discourse in the United States, Europe, and Israel; indeed, it was clearly audible from the White House as recently as this past week.”

- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance



.

One day...

"One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this."

https://twitter.com/omarelakkad/status/1717082321445421056

Free Palestine spotted in the NYC subway 

* * * 

“The best comparator for what Israel is doing now in Gaza is not anything previous in Palestine. It’s Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

There, as here, Israel engaged in a bloody long-term attack with the purported goal of ending Palestinian resistance from Lebanon once and for all and establishing a Lebanese government that would give Israel “forty years of peace.”

The result? Israel lost any global sympathy quickly, especially after the Sabra and Shatila act of genocide. Israel’s puppet government fell almost immediately. Israel occupied a portion of Southern Lebanon for 20 years, at the end of which it withdrew with nothing gained. In the wake of its occupation came Hizballah, one of Israel’s most potent consistent enemies. On the way to gaining nothing, Israel killed tens of thousands, mostly civilians.”

- @leibowitzadak

* * * 

"When I’m asked why I’m a self-hating Jew, I like to say I’m someone who values the Jewish principles of tzedek (the pursuit of justice), tikkun olam (repairing the world), & derekh eretz (treating all with dignity/respect), NOT an alliance with a genocidal global superpower."

https://twitter.com/Dr_mauraf/status/1718818317241085989

.

PME-ART in Lisbon

I'm extremely excited to be travelling to Lisbon to perform A User's Guide to Authenticity Is a Feeling at Teatro do Bairro Alto on October 13 & 14:

https://teatrodobairroalto.pt/en/event/a-users-guide-to-authencity-is-a-feeling

It will be my first time on tour since February 2020. (And I used to travel constantly.) Very curious to see what it's like to head back out on the road.

(Also, Lisbon is one of my all-time favourite cities. Also, I just realized - due mostly to the pandemic - that the last time I performed in Europe was five years ago.)

Facebook Event.

You can still order the book in either English or French:
Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART
Un sentiment d'authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART

There's also this video of a short reading plus my answers two short questions about Authenticity is a Feeling to celebrate the French translation.

And of course, if you're interested, you can find out more about PME-ART here.