Welcome to Litsy!

#literaryworldtrip Trinidad

This is Capildeo's seventh poetry collection. Published in January 2016 it went on to win the Forward Prize for best poetry collection (a prize Rankine had won last year). The book tackles the question of what it is of living between homes, places, traditions, ideas. Capildeo's style is varied, sometimes her poems sit right on the edge between poetry and short stories others are shorter and way less narrative driven.

#literaryworldtrip Ireland

This novel takes place in only seven days and recounts how Penelope (short Pen) deals with the death of her longtime partner Cara, who died in an accident. The women had met during their school years in a Catholic school, where Pen still teaches and everyone believes that Cara was her flatmate. This book is packed with memorable characters and places (from the Catholic school to the Attic, a lesbian feminist commune).

#literaryworldtrip "Junglee" means wild and it is used to describe the protagonists of these stories, wo try to engage with their sexuality in a context where sexualized violence is normalized and female desire unspoken of. The stories meander between the realistic and the fairytale-esque, including a girl who cries 100 tears every day. The scope of the collection is limited and some scenes are be a bit disturbing, but still an interesting book.

#literaryworldtrip Hungary

When Budapest was invaded by German troops during World War II Miriam Katin's mother faked hers and Miriam's death, left everything behind and fled on foot. In this graphic memoir Katin revisits these traumatic experiences and interrogates her ensuing struggle with faith. The story is told in pencil drawings - predominantly in black. Only scenes set after the 1940s are in colours. The style is highly effective.

#literaryworldtrip Ethiopia
One of my favourite poetry collections this year. Shiferraw takes colour imagery, turns it around, subverts it, makes it her own. She writes about experiences of sexual violence, the tolls war took on her family, Addis Ababa, hair politics, resilience and love. The eulogy for her late grandfather made me cry. She manages to tell approachable stories clothed in deeply metaphorical phrases and makes you feel and think.

#literaryworldtrip Democratic Republic of Congo
A book like a jazz album, in which lines are repeated over and over again. Lucien is a professional writer fleeing the repression of the Back-Country. He finds his refuge in the City-State with his kind-of friend Requiem, who makes his money in all different (dubious) kind of ways. The centre of their life is Tram83, a night club close to the train tracks, where everyone comes together.

#literaryworldtrip Cuba

This book consists of blog posts written between 2007 and 2010 from Sánchez' blog "Generacion Y". There is the Soviet elevator in her apartment building, which always gives troubles, the black market and the sometimes strange kinds of lessons her son has to take part in school. The book is an insightful read, but the style of blogposts can get a bit tyring and sometimes all the bits and pieces seem a bit disjointed.

#literaryworldtrip Côte d'Ivoire

In 2000 Kourouma published the novel Allah n'est pas obligé about a boy who becomes a child soldier. In "Quand on refuse in dit non" we meet this boy, Birahima,again when he escorts Fanta, the daughter of the iman, out of the war zone. On their trip Fanta starts to teach him about the complicated history of the Côte d'Ivoire.

Unfortunately this book stays unfinished. Kourouma died in 2003 and left the manuscript.

#literaryworldtrip Canada

Allen is one of the key figures, who built a dub poetry scene in Canada. In the introduction to this collection she wrote: "The first generation of dub poets wrote of police brutality, of dashed immigrants' dreams, of hard work and little pay, of the opression of Black women at the hands of Black men, of the need to nurture and fight back. We made art part and parcel of political work." Themes which still resonate.

#literaryworldtrip Brazil: Helena Parente Cunha „Woman in Mirrors“

A woman stands in between a three-way mirror and looks at her reflections trying to piece together a coherent self. This experimental feminist novel published 1983 dissects binaries like author-protagonist, pure-promiscuous, self-other in order to look at what it means to be a woman in a highly patriarchal world (and to write in this world) - also considering class and race.