Wangechi Mutu wonders why butterfly wings leave powder on the fingers, there was a coup today in .

Binyavanga Wainaina All works © Wangechi Mutu 1. We are made by our archives. Each of us is appeared on lists of arrested participants, Images Courtesy of the artist, Gladstone Gallery, Ourselves, too. his death was announced a few days later. Victoria Miro- London, and Susanne Vielmetter 2. This is A Short Biography of Us Inside Many Congolese suspected he had been Essay © Binyavanga Wainaina Designed by Marziya Mohammedali Wangechi Mutu. summarily executed. In his brief but active Published by Jalada 3. 1972. Wangechi Mutu is born. In Kenya. In a career, Boukaka grew from teenaged pop hospital run by Catholic order called Nyeri singer to principled social critic. Combining Discipline of The Blood. lovely melodies with trenchant lyrics, he 4. They are nice to babies. critiqued his people’s changing lifestyles 5. The first few days her parents considered and goaded the ruling elite in a manner calling her Susan. Anne. Ruth. An Aunt from similar to that of Bob Marley and Fela Nyeri strongly suggested the name Purity Kuti. (Gary Stewart, Rumba on the River, Scholastica to sit next to Wangechi on the Verso, London, 2011) birth certificate. A family friend was sure 8. Wangechi Mutu. Jackie Onassis Mutu would have worked 9. Mutu. Mud. Utu. Muntu. Person. Human. much better. 10. Ubuntu In Nguni. Ubuntu means 6. 1972. Ayee Afrika, ohh Africa, Ohh Liberte. Personhood. Utu in Kiswahili means Le Boucheron. Personhood. 7. Franklin Boukaka began to transfer his 11. Bantu. Is. A. Language Group. moral outrage from song to action. He 12. Anthropo-logical. joined a group of disaffected Congolese 13. uBuntu Linux operating system free with socialist leanings in a plot to overthrow software named after the Southern the government of Congo-Brazzaville. African philosophy of ubuntu (literally, The attempted revolt of February 22, 1972 “human-ness”), which often is translated as ended in failure. Although Boukaka’s name “humanity towards others” or “the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects 22. The Jetsons. Then The Flintstones. all humanity”. (Ubuntu Operating System 23. Jiggers. Queen cake. Kenya Cookery Book. (Wikipedia)) Beans. Kenyatta. 14. For the first six months of her life Wangechi 24. Baby Wangechi’s eyebrow returns to lives with a mobile left eyebrow. Every time position whenever a viewer seeks a witness. her mum takes her to the doctor the feral One night her father sees it sitting right eyebrow is calm. It moves unhindered up above her right eyebrow. He screams. and down her forehead; it moves to the left 25. Wangechi’s newly Christianized home of her forehead; it moves to the right of her village, once named kwa Wangu wa forehead. Makeri, was agitated to near violence by 15. Now you see it, now you don’t. the idea Wangechi’s demonic eyebrow. 16. Idi Amin has taken over Uganda. Wangechi 26. They soon forget, for many of them are Mutu’s father buys a Peugeot 504. Baba also riveted by Bonanza which shows on Wangechi and her uncles and some aunts the small black and white television in the love to smoke Rex Cigarettes. All Kenyan meditation room just behind the community beer bottles are stumpy and green. Over center of Church of the. beer adults discuss where they were when 27. Gikuyus love Cowboys and country music Jim Reeves died in a plane crash and American Bluegrass. 17. Bonanza is on television 28. Bloodstreams are pumping with the 18. And The Man From Atlantis with Patrick feeling of being newly independent from Duffy. Colonialism. 19. Yellow Submarine. 29. 1975. Wangechi is four and one-quarter 20. Yaliotokea. years old. 21. Dunia Wiki Hii. 30. Wangechiiiii! Wangechiiii! Mum is calling.

Left: Oh, Madonna!, 2010 Mixed media ink, paint, on Mylar 91.5 x 54 inches Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery 31. You are busy planning in your head to be a 35. Then your mum croons and goes out to supermodel Kenyan cowgirl nomad, a four- stick her beak in the belly of a motorcycle year-old Afro-girl with tulle claws and steel trapped in a fashion shoot. Even now you 38. “Wake Up!” Above: Yo Mama, 2003 killing teeth. can smell burning meat. Your fingers dream- 39. You are Wangechi. Soon, evening is Ink, mica flakes, pressure sensitive synthetic polymer 32. And you know that you have not been bling! coming, the first small coolings are present, sheeting, cut-and-pasted printed paper, painted paper, cow-herding. You are just dreaming you are. 36. “Wangechi! Ngechi!!!” and synthetic polymer paint on paper the cattle are still, your friend’s play-fights 33. Wangechiii. Wangechii. It is your mum, there 37. It is sleepy-late, and you are sure you have overall: 59 1/8 x 85 inches have become murmurs and warm whispers, in the distance. You are four-ish. herded the whole day and sit under a tree Courtesy of The , New York. flesh-slapping games and giggles. You The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary 34. It is not day. It is night. Your eyes are sticky. in the last heat of dry near Lake Naivasha. blink one eye open, and the softening sun Drawings Collection Gift, 2511.2005.a-b. You know that kiss, your mother’s fever kiss? You know you are wrong. Blurred cows burns your sight neon-blind. From your eye- Left: Non je ne regrette rien, 2007 It comes to you every year. She sings softly mumble and groan with gas and grass in shut shiny black tunnel you are carrying Ink, paint, mixed media, plant material and plastic and spits her chew into your mouth, herbs their bellies. An Anthro-Geographic Lion pearls on Mylar tumbling limbs on night-raid runs, and now, and hot mush, pastes of beans, blood and looms. You scratch your vagina idly and 54 x 87 inches in transition, you see a thousand twisted milk, in small bits. think of your claws tearing his belly. Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery acacia-men walking toward you, the fading 47. A bull back jerks upwards in your ears, and sun behind them. coughs out a deep painful moo, a long 40. Where you are all fogged up and hazy. painful jet of hot piss on the ground, and the 41. Wangechiii! Wangechiiii! cows are excited and gather together. Your 42. No, Wangechi, inside your head a thousand body huuurts. hairy caterpillars are grazing and chewing 48. They say you have Human Bovine Petechial mildly, stinging and tingling. Your mother’s Fever (Ondiri disease). Diagnosed only in arms are soft, but hurt. You smell hospital Kenya. Symptoms: widespread petechial smells. ecchymotic haemorrhages on the mucosal 43. You are Wangechi. surfaces, and throughout the serosal and 44. You are unconscious. Your mother is beside subserosal surfaces of body organs, cavities. herself Fatal in up to 50% of untreated cases. 45. They move you from Church of the Blood Transmitted by an arthropod vector, yet to Hospital to Kikuyu Eye Hospital, to examine be identified. your eyebrow, your strange fevers. 49. Wangechiiii! 46. Cow-herd! You can hear your knee-bones 50. Wangechi. Your fever-dream is crumpling scream, and you move more efficiently in fits and starts, the clarity shifts, and you through the cooling breeze, your body are pulling an udder, biting it hard, it breaks, becomes wind, and in the ripe attacking blood and milk spill over you and you drink dirt, your heart glows because you will be and your head is a soft pumice stone for the first to feel your hands grope at your cleaning feet. nearest sleeping friend’s body. She snorts, 51. You start awake. Her warm body and you cover her mouth, put your mouth at her heartbeat follows the shape of your ear, and say the secret word. movements, as the next shape wakes, and

Left: Sketchbook Drawing, 1997 Pen and ink on paper 10.5 x 8 inches Courtesy of the artist the next, and guns are collected, and you coils and patterns of neon greens, reds, shall attack first. Your personal girl-glory, yellows, sun-shaped and pupil-shaped chest-glowing like a crown of vinyl sunthorns explosions of distorted light. Sitting on the stinging in your ears and neck as you arrive lawn, as Voice of Kenya General Service home at sunset with a crowd of cattle and radio plays Mahanja Mike. She shuts her your troops cheering behind you. eyes fast. In that moment her eyelids are a 52. Wangechi wakes up days later. Fine after sky of shining blood-coloured flesh, with a eating Aspro-junior. And more. It was fuzzy fine glowing network of branches: Of fear sweet. Mooo. and coming death. Or glory. 53. “I know not to go too far and over- 58. 1979. complete it because at that point it’s 59. She is D, Delirious. She is I, Irresistable. She is quivering and almost has a vibration.” S-Super Sexy. She is C, Such a Cutie. She is (Wangechi Mutu) O-O ooo. 54. 1977. The family moves to Nairobi. 60. They would have considered, the New 55. Wangechi is six. This is a story taught the Christians, cutting Wangechi’s clitoris for first few weeks of Kenyan primary school. Anti-Colonial reasons in the 1920s. Wangu wa Makeri, a woman and Gikuyu 61. She is D.I.S.C.O! chief. Her dictatorship of women is toppled 62. They go to Mission School in the 1930s, Not when the men decide to get the women of Knowing what they are releasing in their the village pregnant. grandchild. 56. Wangechi is six years old. It is blurry and feels 63. But knowing it is a kind of release. A painful sooo D.I.S.C.O! She is D.I.S.C.O! one. 57. She can see their desire. Star-bursts of heart 64. 1980s. stopping thrill-power in her sun-blown pupils, 65. Kenya is in every fashion magazine, every

Left: Mountain of prayer, 2014 Collage painting on vinyl Unframed :77.5 x 90.2 cm, 30 1/2 x 35 1/2 in Framed: 89.2x101.6x7.3cm,351/8x40x27/8in Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London © Wangechi Mutu animal print magazine. It is a big Safari is carrying his fluffy bleeding entrails, clouds Animal park fashion shoot. On Kenya above are full of open nerve endings and Television too. painfully pink biolight. Breaktime in school. 66. “Archives contains primary source 72. Zebra-coloured tourist vans are part of documents that have accumulated over Kenya’s national archive of images. the course of an individual or organization’s 73. Mum’s New Imported magazines Smell lifetime, and are kept to show the function Good. It feels great to cut them up with of that person or organization. They have scissors. been metaphorically defined as “the 74. You are Wangechi. You are swimming secretions of an organism.” (Wikipedia) through the dreaming hot porridge in 67. Kenya is where old Fashional Geographic your head when they come for you. Your magazines come to die. And Vogue. grandmother’s screams are stranded in Playboy. Right On. Ebony. GQ. between three soft hot thuds. 68. There was a short frenzied season of 75. Masai chic. Postcards everywhere. drawing loopy psychedelic lollipops on 76. Your old fever time is only an occasional Colonially sacred Nairobi bungalow’s walls! memory now. Snippets surge at random 69. Wangechi is asked by mum to go and times. You are a Cowherd! Your ears rule choose a belt from Baba’s wardrobe. every feeling. They silence the soft pad of 70. She is mutinous after the first stroke she cries flesh just below your kneebones which are after the second. After the third, mum can’t cutting in the stones and dried sticks. Goat- take it, and hugs. Her eyebrow twitches. Her legs are backwards. Magazine It Girls go mother frowns in some confusion. hunting dressed in vinyl, for fur. 71. You are Wangechi. One racing-car ostrich 77. 1980s. crouches near, and you look at him, and he 78. In a glorious three days of measles, Tree-

Left: The screamer island dreamer, 2014 Collage painting on vinyl Unframed: 184.8 x 154.9 cm 723/4x61in Framed: 199.5 x 169.5 x 7.3 Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London © Wangechi Mutu Top Orange Squash, Ribena and House difficult game indeed.” Alice’s( Adventures 88. There was so little to watch. We wait months died, or were dismembered. They kissed. of Manji biscuits, Wangechi read Alice in in Wonderland) for the next development. “Nyeri chics are really brown,” he said, Wonderland. 80. The tractor spareparts would make really 89. Kama Kama Kama Kama Kameleon, you “and when they grow up they beat their 79. “The chief difficulty Alice found at first nice earrings for a giant Wangechi alien come and go, you come and go-o –oh-oh. husbands.” was in managing her flamingo: she warrior. Seven year old Wangechi wonders 90. Second-hand Vogue. Second-hand 95. Wangechi is determined to become succeeded in getting its body tucked away, why butterfly wings leave powder on the Cosmopolitan. Second-hand Ebony a Consultant Neurologist and act on comfortably enough, under her arm, with fingers. There was a coup today in Kenya. magazine. Second-hand Right On International Television. In her spare time, its legs hanging down, but generally, just 81. Blood soaks the streets of Nairobi. Whispers magazine. New Second-hand economy. she will design slick clothes for thin white as she had got its neck nicely straightened and fear everywhere. 91. Lost of people are being arrested. people. out, and was going to give the hedgehog 82. Rich ripe jewels, drip from your nostrils, like 92. President Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi banned 96. Girl! Behind your crawling back, the a blow with its head, it WOULD twist itself screaming ovaries, and crushed iridescent toy guns and other foreign inFluenzas. lowering Western sun is heating up, not round and look up in her face, with such insects in the sand on your verandah. Your 93. 1990. above the head where it is just everybody’s. a puzzled expression that she could not tonsils are screaming. 94. Wangechi goes clubbing at The Carnivore It is yours now. It burns the skin of your neck. help bursting out laughing: and when she 83. Mums Magazine has a famished African for the first time in a friend’s stolen car In the distant world outside this tunnel, the had got its head down, and was going to Baby, like Madonna will. wearing shoulder pads and bopping to cattle have gathered together waiting begin again, it was very provoking to find 84. “The Kikuyu were Matriarchal – power in Milli Vanilli. Early morning, sun is up, they to go back to the boma and they shuffle that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and the hands of women – before men finally crawl out scared and full of alcohol and restless, complaining in your earlobes as you was in the act of crawling away: besides all overthrew them.” Wangechi notices a crushed chameleon creep forward, in your private tunnel, with this, there was generally a ridge or furrow 85. Iman was discovered herding goats in next to the ladies toilet. She leans to pick your private last sun. Your generation will in the way wherever she wanted to send Somaliland riding a zebra. it up and thinks about cannibal butterflies, make themselves the center of the West. the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up 86. Barbie dolls are imported at great expense and giggles. It is leathery like silk. Driving 97. Girls gangs of rich plastic Nairobi. Sneer. soldiers were always getting up and walking for a world-starved, Moi-ruled Kenya. past the Military hospital on Mbagathi Road, Hot golden sunset magma of humiliation off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon 87. In the 1980s, Michael Jackson’s face melts where, every few months, drunk teenagers surges up your teenage throat, and you let came to the conclusion that it was a very slooowly. We are soooo bored. in their parents’ borrowed cars, crashed, it gurgle, not into tears or rage. No. You are Wangechi. Cowherd Supermodel. You push of this knowledge – if only from a straight- it down back to the top of your stomach, laced high school lecture about syphilis. and stretch your loose mobile mouth to its Ricord is an early, and substantial, original limits. Whenever you do this, you find that a source about gynecological disorders. Part crowd bubble of gentle laughter makes you of our casual knowledge about this has the center of friends. But they are hostile filtered down from him. Our young man has now with your weakness in front of them. magazine lips too: cutout pink lipstick lips, 98. Kenya is flat. Middle class is broke. Moi large and lush: the sort of lips some pay season is tired. No money. No Dreams. No for collagen to get. How lucky, Wangechi Hope. In Kenya. Get a Visa and Run if you seems to suggest somewhat wickedly? That can. Anywhere. Or Drink. Or Become a Born lips are the one territory we have that are Again Christian. wanted by the magazine perceptions of 99. Eddie Murphy is Coming to America. How You Must Look. A bit of the lip is red, 100. Wangechi Mutu is going to America to lipstick again. The lips are pasted on, and study Fashion Merchandising for Safari-chic slightly out of place – and it starts to arrive Cyborgettes with longish goat-legs and that what seems grotesque here is not. crippled bleeding gold boots. 104. “The young man is in good health – 101. But first she must study Medicine. and the shapes imposed upon him leave 102. Like This. his face with integrity. The questions being 103. uterine catarrh by Wangechi Mutu: This asked here seem to be about membership: yellowing paper is an important piece of this black man is, too, an heir of medical medical history. This young man has a third and other histories that have come before eye – a wisdom to offer? A possible insight? him – but his choice and participation will He too is a recipient (knowing or unknowing) be original – his colour, and its history, will

Left: Uterine Catarrh, 2005 Glitter, ink and collage on found medical illustration paper 18 x 12 inches Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter bring their own contexts and insights. His people smile. Now, they jeer at you, and 112. You make And You. Do. Facing, above and overleaf: The End of eating third eye. His membership of this world has when the now soft blue bubbles of laughter 113. Exile. Paperless exile. For seventeen Everything, 2013 (stills) its inflammations; but has also wisdom. His magma surge up and turn the red sunset years. Animated video (color, sound) 8 minute 10 second loop, edition of 6 third eye – digging deep into his brain, gold, your limbs leap up with them and, 114. “What is my name? I frown. What is Courtesy of the artist, Gladstone Gallery, and Victoria has received yellowed ideas, will provide you throw yourself into the herd of friends, my name?” (Yvonne Owuor, Weight of Miro Gallery. eurekas and will give birth to things. It is not elbows and crowd-noise, and race forward, Whispers) Commissioned by the at Duke for nothing that his brain is a womb.” faster than all of them, limbs freer, cows 115. Exile. Paperless exile. Much of the time, University, Durham, North Carolina. 105. Wangechi is unable to return home for chasing behind. locked inside a studio. In-between. For seventeen years. A simple mistake left her 109. For seventeen years. seventeen years. battling to legalise her stay in America. 110. Paperless Loneliness in America. Every 116. Wangechi Mutu’s work makes new 106. For seventeen years. Kenyan is trying to be a banker. The middle things, and remixes. Her work became a 107. Wangechi did not return to Kenya until class girl in America who will not, cannot. middle-passage, never real in America, 2012. Finds she won’t. never real at home. She builds a world to 108. Your private day-dreams have stolen 111. “It was like a long sentence... (pun live in that Africans can inhabit. An African you from them. Your smile makes other intended)” Wangechi Mutu. global citizen is the inheritor of all archives.

She is an early African provoking the season standing on their own. of Afro-futures. Once distressed, distorted, 123. Wangechis everywhere. re-made, this African global citizen releases 124. “Pleased to present a solo exhibition us from ugga booga fears of the hegemony of new work by Wangechi Mutu titled that makes these magazines, and freezes Nitarudi Ninarudi, Kiswahili for I plan to us as one-dimensional agents of their glossy return I am returning. Nitarudi Ninarudi. spectacle. The tone of the work has shifted towards a 117. Just consume, brown world, just eat deeper exploration and disclosure of the what we throw at you. Beg, African, Beg for artist’s own experience in the Diaspora. AID. The hegemony fills all our senses with Ideas around longing, memory, and exile its spectacle. And then we realize that you resonate and subvert traditional notions of can remix in exile. a singular place of origin. Fusing her Kenyan 118. The archive is ours to do as we will with it. experience with inflections of other cultural 119. Remix: religious ritual that removes influences, the work calls into question demons of fear and releases imagination. any notion of a static identity and firmly 120. It is 2012. They gave Wangechi a rejects the centralization and dominance of greencard! Eurocentric constructs within and outside of 121. And she is on the first plane out home her homeland. Nitarudi Ninarudi expresses for a visit to Kenya. the complexity of longing for a place that 122. China is coming. Brazil. Africa heaves is alive in the memory in a very different with arrival. Stands and departs to who way than in the physical reality – a place knows where. Running, killing, imagining, not as evasive and fleeting as the identities stagnant, vibrant, rotting, breaking borders, one negotiates when they are relocated, beautiful new forms of people trying out bringing into play issues of transformation,

Left: Beneath lies the Power, 2014 Collage painting on vinyl Unframed: 212.1 x 156.2 cm 831/2x611/2in Framed: 226.5 x 171.5 x 7.3 cm Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London © Wangechi Mutu translation, and even personal survival.” i 130. The flat wall hangings, swollen into giant Mami Watas her way through Goree Island, Notes: 125. Oh! We forgot to mention the armless, helium video. Sort of. West Africa, Congo, Tanzania into the Indian i From the press release for the exhibition Nitarudi loving, legless, floating, gorgeous foetal 131. She can leave America legally now. Ocean, and swims across the lagoon in Ninarudi at Susan Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 2012. season before the baby. Remix: Only a small We, the rest of us, are no longer bored. We Mpeketoni, to Lamu where Nguva looks to bodypart now, in the making of something eat the world. In our swelling gorging body, eat again. utterly new. our bright dangerous digital lights, we are 135. 126. Wangechi’s house-studio is too full carrying many things and her fake hair, 136. And Nguva is Wangechi in grit, flesh and of stuff. Rivers and Banks are Bursting. magazine parts, machinery, cut-outs Beads, blood performing. Too. Everywhere. Bursting with the closed weight Porn Kings, viable monster babes who hunt, 137. of 17 years of archives and ideas. She wants jewels, gynecological drawings, Brooklyn, 138. Back for a season of home-making. It’s to feel lighter, truer again. blood, flowers, petals, blood, knives are high hard for a mermaid to find her feet. There is 127. “Wangechi Mutu’s interest in the subtle heels, we carry worlds of dead mushrooms. work to do. distinction between Nitarudi and Ninarudi is 132. The Blimp blings with Santigold. It flies 139. embedded in the ever-so-slight difference out of Wangechi’s studio window, burping 140. She is starving. between the desire and promise to return, eaten birds, it re-crosses the Atlantic on versus the absolute insistence and the video Africa Rising is Eating Everything. capability to come back to a place.” 133. It bursts and falls into the sea in the 128. I plan to return I am returning Atlantic. After vomiting toxins and ejecting 129. Her archives jump into a Goodyear the hot air, Wangechi, a mum now: lean, Blimp video, that decides to fly back to honest, mean, feral and nguva, now has to Kenya. The video has been slowly swelling swim back new truths. up in studio over the last seventeen years, 134. Wa-Nguva, accompanied by pythons the whole world digested by capital and in vinyl land, feral in a weave, and starving your archive, or remaking. after sinking and bursting over the Atlantic,

Preview: AfroFuture

Jalada’s Afrofuture Anthology will be released on January 15th 2015. The Prelude, which features Binyavanga Wainaina’s profile of Wangeci Mutu, and her art, is a perfect expression of this shared dream among African artists to redefine how we envision future Africa. A group of Jalada editors are hard at work on the submissions, and here is what they have to say about it all. Moses Kilolo, Managing Editor

“I see Jalada’s Afrofuture issue as an expression “Even our continent’s past is rightly contested; of the Pan-African vision of Afrofuturism. so, what about its possible futures? They are Afrofuturistic art has always been about places of speculation: of hopes for something “ crossing the borders of time and space: it better, but equally of dystopian fears. The reaches into the distant past as well as the far poems in Jalada’s forthcoming Afrofutures future, and across the traumatic breach of the publication predict both, from across the Middle Passage. I love that this anthology brings diverse continent. But one thing about the together voices and visions from different parts future is known for sure: the Jalada anthology of Africa and the diaspora--to me, that’s the will be something worth reading, a miscellany “true spirit of Afrofuturism.” that provides us with a range of plausible, beautiful, horrible options.” Sofia Somatar, Fiction Editor Stephen Derwent Partington, Poetry Editor

As a reader, Afro-futurist writing, allows me Afrofuture(s) is a call to all imaginations in the Jalada’s Afrofuture anthology promises to shift 116. Wangechi Mutu’s work makes new to lose myself in vividly imagined worlds work of proliferating and continuing a remaking perceptions and to enhance realities. It will things, and remixes. Her work became a deeply and specifically rooted in who I am, and rewriting of the African and the Black make you think a new thought and feel a new middle-passage, never real in America, never as ‘African’, as ‘woman’, as ‘other’. When lost in resistance to what Keguro Macharia has emotion. Poems and stories from an Africa no real at home. She builds a world to live in that in the words, I explore and occasionally find described as “the persistent unmaking of black longer afraid of its imagination. A generation Africans can inhabit. An African global citizen myself. life.” This anthology is an opportunity to contest of young minds willing to co-create their future. is the inheritor of all archives. She is an early As for being an editor: the raced, gendered, classed, and ethnicised It will fizzle and pop in the mind: a titillating African provoking the season of Afro-futures. ways we live now, to interpellate the variously addition to our literary landscape. Once distressed, distorted, re-made, this African “ “You write to communicate to the hearts and colonised ways we exist here (everywhere), to global citizen releases us from ugga booga “ minds of others what’s burning inside you. confront the ongoing interruption of our history, Kiprop Kimutai, Fiction Editor fears of the hegemony that makes these We edit to let the fire show through the smoke” and “stay woke” in that fantastic Delany-esque magazines, and freezes us as one-dimensional (Arthur Plotnik) moment “when words tear from the nervous agents of their glossy spectacle. matrix and, like sparks, light what responses This anthology is a raging forest fire. they may.” Binyavanga Wainaina, from the Essay

“ Ann Moraa, Fiction Editor Orem Ochiel, Fiction Editor “