“Anyone who can explain the rules of cricket to someone who does not speak your language is well equipped to explain that people need a Lord who is three people in one as well as a lamb and also a sheep herder who sends sinners to Hell.”
—from Nimco Mahamud-Hassan's “Saved by the Bell”
TRANSITION 96: Table of Contents
DISPATCH____________________
Guyanarama
In the last decades of the 20th century, tiny Guyana hosted an outsized roster of rebels, rogues, and raconteurs, from Pan-Africanist hero Walter Rodney to the homocidal cultmaster Jim Jones. It's a land where Calypso is king—and where Africans and Indians engage in low-intensity race warfare. Achal Prabhala goes down to Georgetown.
MEMOIR____________________
Saved by the Bell
Like Paul on his way to Damascus, a young girl crossed the road one day and found herself Born Again. She left her native Somalia behind, only to discover a particularly English circle of Hell. From Hargeisa to Heathrow and on to heathendom, Nimco Mahamud-Hassan makes a great escape.
POSITION____________________
How to Be an African
The Sphinx's busted nose . . . Jesus's nappy hair . . . Angelina Jolie's telltale lips: the hidden wonders of Africa are everywhere and nowhere. From an Afrocentric precinct, Binyavanga Wainaina signifies on an empire of maybes and almost becames.
UNDER REVIEW____________________
Honkey Night in Canada
As with hockey, so goes literature: the number of black players (and player-haters) has exploded in recent years, engulfing the National Hockey League in a minor blizzard of blackness. Now a small band of Afro-Canadian critics are ready for their turn in the spotlight. Or are they? Peter James Hudson takes one for the team.
FICTION____________________
The River Lena
Land of the lost Slovaks.
By Alexander Boldizar
Tambu's Choice
It doesn't look good.
By Tsitsi Dangarembga
Desperately Seeking Tsitsi
Tsitsi Dangarembga is best known as a writer who catapulted into the canon of African literature with Nervous Conditions, her 1989 coming-of-age story about a black girl under colonialism in Rhodesia. But her strangest, most ambitious work might well be Mother's Day (Kare Kare Zvako), a movie musical about hunger, motherhood, and a cannibal husband, complete with singing, dancing termite men. Christopher Joon-Hai Lee talks with her about Lars von Trier, Nollywood, and the tasks of African aesthetics.
PORTFOLIO____________________
Textile Skin
What happens to a seam deferred? Pepe—secondhand clothing from the United States—has invaded Haiti. But even as the streets are overrun with cloth, artisans still spin gold from dross. Hanna Rose Shell reports from a land where even the castoffs are tailor-made. Photos by Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi