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Welcome to the Bloods – Twine Game

  Click on the link in green below. The Game runs on your browser using html – no download needed. What’s the Game essentials? A quiz. You read the testimonies of other Bloods’ recruits then take the quiz.  You can also join the Resistance (those opposed to  the Bloods) if you can find the right pathway within the Game. I intend to expand this Twine Game but, so far, it ends with the quiz. It’s kind of eerie.  You are being recruited to join the Bad Guys and the ‘correct’ answers may not be what you benevolent instincts push you towards!   Welcome to the Bloods (v2)     Credits: Narrative based on ‘One Drop’ novel by Pete Kalu – out now, everywhere! ‘Game text by Pete Kalu. Except ‘Jasmine Fletcher story’, by Ellie Andrews Coding: Pete Kalu/Ellie Andrews/Visioning Labs Visuals/Avatars: Remi Rabillat Music: Naomi Kalu...

Small Circles

    Small Circles   Remember Me   Windfarm   Keep the faith   Abas   Voice of whiteness   Jasmine Fletcher -Telling My Truth            ...

Welcome to the Bloods

Welcome to the Bloods    

Lote, by Shola von Reinhold: a short review

Review of Lote by Shola von Reinhold   What to do if you are Born to be Beautiful but all the world around you insists on Ugliness?  How to escape the sartorial and existential drag of convention clogging your every brilliant pore?  How to Escape? Is it possible to effect a succession of Escapes from others’ constrictions, and blithely jitterbug to another persona, another self-incarnation of Beauty? Become someone else? This is Lote protagonist, Mathilda’s way of crossing through life. As she reincarnates, she looks at Beautiful people of the past, especially those of the late 19C and early 20C who were Bright Young Things – people of colour  such as Richard Bruce Nugent and Josephine Baker, but also Stephen Tennant and  Edith Sitwell –  those who embraced Beauty and fabulous living, whose way of living was itself a form of extravagant poetry. The era Mathilda is most focused on was also the time of peak Black Modernism, and many of modernism’s (and post-modernism’s) concerns ripple through Lote. Lote is a great intellectual banquet. Black Modernism is one of the things it explores, particularly modernism’s rejection of neat endings, of consistency of character, its embrace of randomness and of a sense of an ordered world being unachievable.  Lote also exhibits many tropes of postmodernism: multiple registers, multiple tones, multiple stylistic references. Its embrace of these modernist and postmodernist devices renders conventional / realist concerns with plot and character development secondary within its text. Instead, the book as a whole shimmers with linguistic extravagance, rococo thought chains, esoteric research and methodological invention. Central to many of Lote’s themes and obsessions is one question. It is specifically mentioned on p209 and is a question bell hooks posed in her essay, Paris is Burning:  when womanness and femininity is constructed as having at its apex  Whiteness, are not any black folk who quest after such Beauty implicitly buying into that white construction and so maintaining and reinforcing white supremacist ideology?  Pages 267 to p280 of Lote reprise this question in essay form as “Hermia English-ish Eccentrcs (-ish) VII” – a passage which is a superb ride through many of the aesthetic cross-roads, transgressions and cul-de-sacs that the black quaintrelle, dandy or boulevardier might encounter in seeking to be Beautiful. Ultimately, Lote as a text resists categorisation.  It is fiction.  But there is no hard-driving plot. It does have a fictional main character, Mathilda. But many other figures are actual historical figures rather than inventions and there are significant sections of biography. The text can switch register easily from novel to art history to biography to news report to diary. For this reason, as well as the density of erudite references (the main character’s principal vocation is biographical research) it is not the kind of book that demands it be read in one sitting.  But it is a no lesser thing for that. To return to bell hooks’ question, Lote probably does not square off the bell hooks’ challenge: the instances of Beauty shown through its 460 pages seem primarily Euro-centric ones and there is no sustained exploration of any alternative aesthetics. Or perhaps it does square off that challenge. Its argument may be, that, like Othello, we must embrace and subvert for our own purposes, the available Western forms. Ultimately, qua literary text, the issue of polemics matters little here. The book is a triumph, a celebration of black oddity,  extravagance and flamboyance. The burden of representation is lifting for black writers. Publishers are more open to off-beat texts.  No need any more to write in that dutiful, realist, novel-of-representation way. Lote is a breath-taking and singular addition to the weltering multiplicity of black literary voices/texts: a sauntering, sparkling, deep-diving joy of a...

Book Review: The Lost Woman of Santacruz by VIjay Medtia

    The lost woman of Santacruz by Vijay Medtia. Short Review by Pete Kalu Police Inspector Ajay Shaktawat of the Mumbai police force is in dire straits with his personal life. The last thing he needs is a cop-killer case. That’s what lands on his desk. With politicians, press, Dehli Special Branch and others breathing down his neck, Shaktawat’s plan to ease off work in order to rescue his relationship with his wife, rekindle bonds with his children and generally become a nicer person, fades amidst a welter of what-might-have-beens and if-onlys. Meanwhile, out there in the big, brawling city, retired police officers keep getting murdered. A rambunctious, detective story, one of the best I’ve read this year, Medtia achieves that rare feat of simultaneously yoking  the broad existential question of how we achieve intimacy in the anonymising, dehumanising modern city, with the page-turning suspense and joy (yes, joy!) of a well-crafted, detective story.  The lost woman of Santacruz exhibits a masterful economy of description, and perfectly pitched dialogue; these are synched and filtered through the compelling internal voice of the main character through whose eyes we see the action.  It is this voice which – more than any other element  – carries the brilliance of Medtia as fiction writer: it elaborates a thoughtful, philosophical and generous soul – intellectually curious, pragmatic yet empathetic of human frailties, and a smarter psychologist than the other professionals around him.  I read The lost woman of Santacruz cover to cover. Police Inspector Ajay Shaktawat is a fascinating creation.  I suspect he is here to stay....

Obinna Udenwe micro story, ‘The Right Side of History’ and Pete Kalu poem-song, Breathing

  The Right Side of History By Obinna Udenwe   Every evening, Tolani Boroface took a walk down her street all by herself, ignoring greetings from neighbours and street folk who looked at her with disdain. She had killed her daughter, they believed, and nothing anyone said could change their minds. Tolani walked to clear her head. This had started four days after Grace was buried – the rumours filtered to her ears that it was because she took her daughter to the End SARS protest that she got shot. Who encourages their children to go to protests in Nigeria? the women who had come to condole with her asked themselves. They’d gathered in front of her apartment, offering tidbits to the story, clasping their arms on their breasts, tying and retying their wrappers while at it. The women had come the morning after Grace died at the protest in Ikeja. At first, they came in groups of threes and fours, chatting on about the protests across the country all the way, then throwing themselves on the floor once they got to Tolani’s door, weeping uncontrollably. When they stepped out, they cleaned their eyes and talked loudly, not caring if Tolani heard. So, when Tolani finally heard, she began to take the walks. She would walk to the end of the street – to the junction where she used to go with Grace to buy fruits and vegetables, then walk back home and lock herself in. The fact that her neighbours and friends, people who’d known her for years and knew how much she’d adored Grace could say such unheard-of things tore her heart apart. On the sixth day after Grace died, Tolani locked herself in. She took some of Grace’s photos and her clothes, especially the ones she remembered seeing Grace in few days before her death and believed still had her smell. She took them into Grace’s room, sniffing and sobbing. Not even the laughter coming from her neighbour’s children distracted her. She cut herself with the kitchen knife and felt the blood from her stomach spilling through her fingers as she lay numb on the floor. Then she noticed a photo pinned to Grace’s wall. It was of three young women carrying a placard. The photo was taken at a Black Lives Matter protest somewhere and Grace had printed it from the internet. The white girl in the centre of the photograph was dressed in a sleeveless gown and wore sunglasses. The placard with her had the inscription ‘I stand on the right side of history’. Tolani thought the girl was Grace. The photo held her gaze and the inscription played in her mind. Suddenly, her cell phone rang. The phone was on the bed, and if Tolani could reach it, she could somehow live, for she now knew that Grace died standing on the right side of history, protesting injustice and hate, doing what many young people like her did across the world.         Breathing  poem-song by Pete Kalu   Please don’t come sliding onto my bench whispering nirvana is a construct and you’re here for us to do the construction  play by play to reach high, because That don’t fly for me, I need somebody grounded   There are journeys we have to go on and it won’t be easy, – the way you talk – it will require us to walk through storms  There are journeys we have to go on and it won’t be easy – the way you talk – it will require us to walk through storms   Truth is I’m looking for a friendship, a comrade-in-arms and together we’ll be the voice for those who can’t breathe any more Then maybe at days’ end, I won’t have any qualms If we sit back-to-back on evening steps, and doodle  🖤s on my door.   There are journeys we have to go on and it won’t be easy, – the way you talk – it will require us to walk through storms  There are journeys we have to go on and it won’t be easy – the way you talk – it will require us to walk through storms   Both texts produced as part of a British Council International Digital Collaboration Project @LitBritish #wahalaconvo Photo credit: Naomi...