Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
Ndar sits at the mouth of the Senegal River, west of the Sahara and north of the Lompoul, with salt marshes circling the island’s edge and baobabs, acacias, abundant and upright just like that, unbothered by the Harmattan winds. In its earliest settlement in the fifteenth century Muslims convened at Ndar to embark on Hajj. Again and again Portuguese, English, and Dutch traders sailed and convened there, too, capturing the Wolof as slaves and often experiencing expulsion by floods. The French Colonial Empire seized Ndar in 1638 and baptized it Saint-Louis for King Louis XIV. The Royal Concession of Senegal was established in 1664, after which the Senegalese were forced to mine the gold of Ngalum and tap gum arabic from acacias in the Sahel. By 1895 Saint-Louis was crowned the capital of French West Africa, and Gorée, Saint-Louis’ slave warehouse, a feeder of the Atlantic Slave Trade, captured more than twenty million Africans in its four-century tenure. Enslavement continued under the guise of “abolition,” as four hundred thousand Senegalese tirailleurs were conscripted into France’s lower regiments to fight in World War I and II as well as the Indochina War. The kora preceded such colonial violences.
Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
In his final years Ali Farka Touré grew indifferent to stardom’s demands. A deference towards agricultural and infrastructural needs led him to become the mayor of his town, Niafunké, where he graded the roads, constructed sewer canals, and fuelled a generator, while working his land. After sundown he withdrew with his black Seiwa Powersonic ‘Tjowmidini’ (Satan) and his red Telecaster ‘Alkannaasi’ (Angel). The body of his guitars didn’t weaken with age like bone. One of his eleven children, Vieux, left home for Institut National des Arts de Bamako, despite the family’s adamance about enlistment. A few months before Ali passed, Vieux asked his permission to record an album on guitar, with the encouragement of Toumani Diabaté. Ali relented, and much of their remaining father-son time was spent playing and listening to the guitar. His funeral procession began in a dust storm.
Fall 2024 - Land
Sama Alshaibi was born in Basra, Southern Iraq, in 1973, to an Iraqi father and a Palestinian mother. Hers was a forbidding migratory childhood, as her family was exiled during the Iraq-Iran War. She now teaches in Arizona and roots herself in the future tense, at the fog’s edge; surefooted in her belief that there’s a dawning million-man fight for the people of Palestine. In her photographs, sculptures, and videos, the academics disappeared by Saddam Hussein during the Second Gulf War are summoned, an irretrievable Baghdad is reconstructed, the drought-laden Mesopotamian Marshes are enlivened. This is both a political action and a directional promise. Alshaibi possesses the alchemist’s prophetic assurance: when the summon, the reconstruction, and the enlivenment will in truth occur is indeterminate: the seeds remain idle dispersed underground. Through enacting these processes she is leading us toward the day of germination.
Summer 2024
Kincaid and Kishoiyian is an annotated conversation with writer and former Harvard Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence Jamaica Kincaid. The conversation occurred midmorning on 29 February 2024, and much of what was said is absent. Prior to the 29th, the day I transitioned from a legal pad to a transcription program; some topics we spoke about are the History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), Henry Adams and Henry James, Madagascar and Vermont, the seeds of Southwestern China, the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, the Mombasa–Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway, Kenyan Pentecostal cult leader and murderer Paul NthengeMackenzie, The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (1969), Josephine Baker’s banana skirt and near nudity, V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, Richard Pryor and Labi Siffre, the urge to eat Indian food on Christmas, the difficulty of digging a grave in a garden, and her theory that we are all assembled by the age of seven.
Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo is dutiful and kind, as though her nervous system extends from the Ensenada known in childhood, to the Chiapas embraced in university, to Mexico City, Zafarraya, Palo Alto, Tepoztlán. Her anthropological and political work centers the intimate and extrajudicial violence committed against the Maya, the Guatemalan refugees in the South, and the imprisoned women in Morelos by the Mexican government, militias, paramilitaries, gangs, and cartel. Equally weighty in Hernández Castillo’s two-three decades of writing are the unionization, land occupation, legal and militant advances of the Chuj, Kanjobales, Mam, Jacaltecos, and the Mochos. She sees a kinship between each effort of the resistance, be it the Zapatista or Al-Qassam, affirming that all we have is the attentive eyes and ears of each other. When we first spoke in January, she said twice, at the onset and toward the end: No dejemos de hablar de Palestina. Our two conversations are an attempt to trace her enduring commitment to paying attention.
Fall / Winter 2023
Hilton Als came up across Brooklyn, under a Bajan matriarch, surrounded by West Indian migrants. He stands far from the condemning stony critics, the woodcutters, who approach the playwright, musician, poet, or artist with an axe, who assume a weeding duty. Als instead constructs a shelter for his found subjects; among whom are Prince, Richard Pryor, Alice Neel, Dorothy Dean, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, and Dianne Arbus. He entered my mind on 25 November 2022, when I read The Women (1996) sitting beneath the North Bridge beside the Gulf of Mexico. During October of 2023 he arrived in my life—immediately daring and tender, his earth-embracing heart audible through the telephone.
2026