“In the war, I was a munitions loader. The men who were stuck with munitions loading were very bitter, very angry. And in our bitterness and anger we went out and got drunk. We wanted to beat up everybody we met, including each other.”

—from “Remains of the Day-O”

 

TRANSITION 92: Table of Contents

 

DISPATCHES____________________

Nanette Went to the Fountain
Every year, men from around the world travel to Haiti for the prostitutes. And every year, women from the Dominican Republic travel to Haiti for the johns. Trenton Daniel ponders sex, misery, and the color of money.

Baked Lunch
For bookworms, Tangier is the city where Paul Bowles went native. For building buffs, it's a heterotopia of Byzantine mosaics and Moorish temples. But for potheads, it's the city of dope—a place where even your hotel clerk will try to sell you hashish. Brian Preston gets dazed and confused in Morocco.

Moctar and Moctar
The streets of Lomé are a kind of open-air Circuit City, full of cell phones, boom boxes, and CDs by everyone from Destiny's Child to Manu Dibango. There's only one problem: every single album is counterfeit. Matt Steinglass reports from the front lines of the culture industry wars.

POSITION____________________

Strange Fruits
The Harlem Renaissance was a classic avant-garde movement, full of adventurous new writing, bold artistic experiments, heated literary polemics—and homoerotic subtexts. In the decades that followed, it was enshrined as the birth of blackness, but at the time, it seemed more like an orgy. Mason Stokes revisits when Harlem was in bloom.

FICTION____________________

The Silence of Night
Buried alive.
By Tahar Ben Jelloun

PORTFOLIO____________________

Great Planes
Sibusiso Mbhele built his own private South African airline, one tin jet at a time.

Photographs by Koto Bolofo

CONVERSATION____________________

Remains of the Day-O
Don't be fooled by his Broadway pedigree and banana-boat repertoire. Decades before Bono, Harry Belafonte was the original crusading crooner, a mass-market folk hero and confidant to Martin Luther King, Jr. So why was he singing “Danny Boy” and “Hava Nageela”? Michael Eldridge talks with the godfather of protest pop about the roots of race music.

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