Volume 07, Chapter 09 | July 2020

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Image by Khadija Saye
courtesy of the artist’s estate

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

In solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and to mark the third anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire which in 2017 claimed the lives of 72 people in London, most of them from Black, Asian and ethnic minority families, Visual Verse brings you an image and lead words by five extraordinary creators.

Our issue this month resonates with the idea of inspiration (from the Latin, spirare, “to breathe”). Inspiration – as breath, as life, as hope – and as a human right. Our world resounds with the phrase ‘I can’t breathe’, uttered by Black people who have suffered institutional brutality, including, in the UK, Jimmy Mubenga in 2014 (his head held down by G4S security guards whilst on a plane) and by Sheku Bayoh in 2015 (who suffered positional asphyxiation by the police: they sprayed CS gas in his face and held him down). ‘I can’t breathe’ were the words of Eric Garner in New York in 2014 as he died from a police chokehold, and George Floyd in Minnesota on May 25, 2020 who died with a police knee in his neck. The phrase also resonates terribly with the reality of the Grenfell Tower fire. ‘We can’t breathe’ were among the last words of nursery teacher Nadia Choucair as she called emergency services from her 22nd floor flat that night. The survivors of Grenfell are still awaiting justic
e, while the official inquiry refuses to recognise the systemic racism of social inequality and institutional response as contributing to the disaster. The death of George Floyd and the anniversary of the fire fell during the lockdown for a pandemic that affects our breathing, our lungs, and is most disproportionately taking the lives of the poorest from Black and Bangladeshi minority communities (in the UK).

What is the role of art and curation here? As memorial, as reckoning. As inspiration.

Our image is from the self-portrait series, Dwelling: in this space we breathe by Khadija Mohammadou Saye with the kind permission of her estate (https://www.estateofkhadijasaye.com/) . Also known as Ya-Haddy Sisi Saye, she was a Gambian-British photographer whose work was exhibited in the Diaspora Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017. She died aged 24, in Grenfell Tower.

The British Library’s exhibition, Khadija Saye: in this space we breathe was due to take place in Spring 2020. It was postponed, and new dates will be announced in due course.

And so to our lead writers, with respect and gratitude for their responses to this most important work…

Kadija Sesay (https://twitter.com/kadijattug) , FRSA, is a literary activist. She is the founder/publisher of SABLE litmag, SABLE litfest, and co-founder of The Mboka Festival of Arts, Culture and Sport in The Gambia. She is the editor of several anthologies of work by writers of African and Asian descent and the Publications Manager for the Inscribe Programme for Peepal Tree Press. She has also mentored several writers and judged several writing competitions. Her poetry collection, Irki (https://www.peepaltreepress.com/books/irki) (which means ‘Homeland’ in the Nubian language) (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry in 2014. She received an Arts Council grant for Research and Development for her second collection, The Modern Pan Africanist’s Journey which includes a poetry and Pan-Africanism app. Kadija has received several awards for her work in the Creative Arts. She is a Fellow of the Kennedy Arts Centre of Performance Arts Management
and a Kluge Fellow. She currently has an AHRC scholarship to research Black British Publishing and Pan-Africanism at University of Brighton. She is a cousin of Sheku Bayoh.

Maame Blue (https://maamebluewrites.com) is a Ghanaian-Londoner splitting her time between Melbourne and London. She is part of Jacaranda’s #Twentyin2020 initiative. (https://www.jacarandabooksartmusic.co.uk/blogs/news/twentyin2020-is-announced-and-its-quite-the-moment) Her debut novel Bad Love (https://www.jacarandabooksartmusic.co.uk/products/bad-love) is available to buy online (https://www.jacarandabooksartmusic.co.uk/products/bad-love) , at Foyles (https://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/bad-love,maame-blue-9781913090180) and all good Indie bookshops, and as an Audible audiobook (https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Bad-Love-Audiobook/B084HLGCZY) . Her short stories and creative non-fiction pieces have appeared in Black Ballad, AFREADA, Litro Magazine and The Good Journal. She also has pieces forthcoming in the Royal Literary Fund Magazine and New Australian Fiction 2020, and co-hosts Headscarves and Carry-ons – a podcast about black girls living abroad.

Karthika Naïr (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/150393/remaindering-habits) is the author of several books, including the award-winning Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata (https://www.brooklinebooksmith-shop.com/book/9781939810366) , and principal scriptwriter of Akram Khan’s DESH, Chotto Desh and Until the Lions, a partial adaptation of her own book. Also a dance enabler, Naïr’s closest association has been with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet as executive producer of their works like Babel (Words), Puz/zle and Les Médusés, and as co-founder of Cherkaoui’s company, Eastman. She lives in Paris.

Ruby Cowling (https://rubyorruth.wordpress.com/) grew up in Bradford and lives in London. Her short fiction has won awards including The White Review Short Story Prize and the London Short Story Prize, and her publication credits include Lighthouse, The Lonely Crowd, Wasafiri online, the Galley Beggar Press Singles Club, and numerous print anthologies. Her collection This Paradise (Boiler House Press) was longlisted for the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

Visual Verse is a free, shared space for writers across the world collaborating in art and words. We believe that curating art and writing is an ongoing statement of who we are. We are committed to the work that making genuine, lasting equality for Black lives asks of all of us, not only as allies but as active accomplices (with thanks to The White Pube for this term).

And now dear writers, we hope you are inspired. Give yourself an hour, and 50-500 words. Make work, share it with us by 15 July.

Now, more than ever, the image is the starting point, the rest is up to you.

Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Luke

Connect with us
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse?lang=en)
@kadijattug (https://twitter.com/kadijattug) / @sablelitmag (https://twitter.com/sablelitmag)
@maamebluewrites (https://twitter.com/maamebluewrites) / @JacarandaBooks (https://twitter.com/JacarandaBooks)
@rubycowling (https://twitter.com/rubycowling) / @bhousepress (https://twitter.com/bhousepress)

Resources
Justice for Grenfell (https://justice4grenfell.org/)

The Grenfell Inquiry and racism Khadija Saye IntoArts Programme (https://intouniversity.org/content/khadija-saye-intoarts-programme)

The White Pube: art statements on Black Lives Matter (https://www.thewhitepube.co.uk/blm)

Black Lives Matter USA (https://blacklivesmatter.com/ )

Black Lives Matter in arts, academia, culture, research, education (UK) (https://beinghumanfestival.org/blm-resources-for-the-humanities/)

Donations and fundraisers

Justice for Sheku Bayoh (https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/justiceforsheku/?utm_source=backer_social&utm_campaign=justiceforsheku&utm_reference=339c027a16d4d9fa1d367a92c36f3228&utm_medium=Facebook&utm_content=post_pledge_page_flat_v1&fbclid=IwAR2hfGzu5RcTD1dnOlTFfBa_EbGAL-9VY5-PHQd65PlMwFJ_BEnBtfGb5oA) : Five years after Sheku Bayoh’s death at the hands of Scottish police, not one officer has been disciplined let alone charged with his murder. This campaign is raising funds to support legal costs for Sheku’s family as they continue to fight for justice.

United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC) (https://uffcampaign.org) : All funds donated here go towards all family campaigns for those families who are members of UFFC, which is open to all family and friends whose loved ones have been violated and died at the hands of the state.

Injustice – UV (https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/injustice—uv-1) : Injustice was named “The most important British documentary of my professional lifetime” by Peter Bradshaw, Guardian Film Critic. Director, Ken Fero was one of the founders of UFFC. This is a crowdfunder for the second Injustice film, it follows the struggles for justice of families in the UK whose loved ones have been killed by the police.
Start Timer (https://vclock.com/timer/#countdown=01:00:00&enabled=0&seconds=3600&title=Visual+Verse%3A+One+image.+One+Hour.+50-500+Words.+)
Submit (https://visualverse.org/submit/)

** #DailyVisual
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Don’t forget you can join us every day on Instagram for a 15-minute, 5-50 word writing challenge.
Visit Visual Verse Anthology on Instagram now… (https://www.instagram.com/visualverseanthology/)

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Volume 04, Chapter 01 | November 2016

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Image by Hernan Bas

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Happy Birthday! Visual Verse is three years old this month and we are thrilled to continue to grow this very special publication. We now have well over 1000 writers and readers getting this newsletter each month and we receive up to 150 submissions with each new issue. Over the last three years we have published writers from around the world – New Zealand to Scotland and Argentina to Japan. Some have been nominees (and even winners) of Bookers, Goldsmiths and Polari prizes. Some have gone on to publish debut novels and short story collections. We have championed big names and up-and-coming ones, from small presses and none – and every month we find our inbox stuffed full of the best, the freshest, the most exciting and radical writing from around the world. Today we celebrate Visual Verse as a platform for new writing, no matter where it comes from, and we celebrate you. Our writers who have made Visual Verse what it is.

A birthday for Visual Verse means the start of a brand new volume. Volume 04, Chapter 01 features Miami-born artist Hernan Bas (http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/hernan-bas) , the candle on our cake. His work is often inspired by stories, full of literary intrigue and tinged with nihilistic romanticism and old world imagery; he says his influences include Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysman. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and at the 53rd Venice Biennale. His work is part of the permanent collections of New York’s Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art among others.

Hernan’s works are stories that unfold and Visual Verse is nothing if not an act of translation: the world and all its art transformed into words. This month we decided to go even more meta and lead with some fantastic writers who are also actual translators. For where would literature be without these multilingual multi-talents?

The icing our cake is a lead piece by Maureen Freely, the author of three works of non fiction and seven novels, including, most recently, Sailing through Byzantium, an elegy to the art of thinking in many languages. She is also the translator of five books by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, and a number of memoirs, biographies, rising stars and 20th century classics. Her translation with Alexander Dawe of The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, was awarded the Modern Languages Association Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work in 2014. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the Sunday Times for three decades, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing. As President of English PEN, she champions free expression worldwide. As the former chair of the Translators Association, she also works with campaigns aiming to promote world
literature in English translation. It’s wonderful to celebrate Visual Verse with her.

Our cake’s first layer comes from Cecilia Rossi, originally from Buenos Aires, who holds an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University and a PhD in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia, where she now works as a Lecturer in Literature and Translation and convenes the MA in Literary Translation. Her original poetry has appeared in several journals including Poetry Wales and New Welsh Review. In 2010, her translations of Alejandra Pizarnik’s Selected Poems were published by Waterloo Press. In 2013 she won a British Academy Small Grant to undertake research into the Pizarnik Papers at Princeton University Library. Her latest translations of Pizarnik’s prose texts and excerpts from her journals appeared in Music and Literature No. 6.

The ganache is by Saskia Vogel (http://www.saskiavogel.com) , who has written on the themes of gender, power, and sexuality for publications such as Granta, The White Review, The Offing, Sight & Sound, and The Quietus. Her translations include work by leading female authors, such as Katrine Marcal, Karolina Ramqvist and the modernist eroticist Rut Hillarp.

And the final layer is by Jeffrey M. Angles, who has spent his life traveling back and forth between Japan, where he lived for many years, and the US, where he is a professor of Japanese literature and translation at Western Michigan University. He is the award-winning translator of dozens of Japan’s most important modern Japanese authors and poets. He believes strongly in the role of translators as social activists, and much of his career has focused on the translation of socially engaged, feminist, or queer writers into English. He writes poetry in both English and Japanese, and his collection of Japanese-language poetry Watashi no hizuke henkō sen (My International Date Line) was published by Shichōsha in 2016.

As an extra slice, if you want to hear more about the art of translating fiction, tune in to BBC Radio 3 on 24th November at 10pm when Preti will be picking some of the latest brilliant new books recently translated into English, and discussing them live.

Enjoy the flavours, dear writers, then get inspired, and send us presents we can share.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen and Preti

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