I have crossed an ocean
I have lost my tongue
From the root of the old one
A new one has sprung
Epilogue, Grace Nichols
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Caribbean hybrid identities are characterized by survival and creativity out of monumental loss, including various languages from Arawakan, to...
Many are the privileges and rewards that come from being an editor. All the more true when you’ve been called into service for a magazine with a storied and lengthy history like the Massachusetts Review. Despite fifteen years in the trenches, I only recently became aware of a conference that had taken place at UMass on April 22-23, 1988, the spring after James Baldwin had passed. His colleagues here had planned a symposium for that semester: they wanted to celebrate having Baldwin together in Amherst with their former colleague, Chinua Achebe, who had been back in Nigeria in recent years. When Baldwin died that planned symposium became impossible, and the meeting was instead reconceived as a collective tribute to the man, a more formal (and no doubt less hurried)...
On February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, a member of the US Air Force, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. to protest the U.S. committing genocide in Gaza. A recent essay by Nan Levinson in TomDispatch examines the media reaction to this extreme act, with a focus on how quickly the press discussion swerved away from the political justification that Bushnell himself offered towards amateur psychoanalysis and a focus on the airman’s upbringing. (Masha Gessen, per usual, offered an important corrective to this particular media bandwagon.)
...
When the Tree rises up, the branches
Shall flourish green and fresh in the sun
The laughter of the Tree shall leaf
Beneath the sun
And birds shall return
Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.
—Fadwa Tuqan, from “The Deluge and the Tree”
The very title of Adam Shatz’s most recent, unfortunate piece of writing announces itself clearly as Zionist apologia. “Israel’s Descent” invokes Charles Darwin’s The Descent...
The excitement in Mexico and abroad about North America’s first woman president has dominated the headlines—almost to the exclusion of who Claudia Sheinbaum is, and what she stands for. How did she win, and how will she confront the enormous challenges facing Mexico, perhaps none more dramatic than pervasive violence, including murder and violence against women?
While I am skeptical, or at least cautious, about how much or in what ways her gender will affect her politics, it is worth taking a moment to feel the enormity—and the ecstasy—of the moment. Not only has a left-wing Jewish woman been elected president of an overwhelmingly Catholic country (a country steeped in machismo where women only gained the vote in the 1950s), she won by a landslide (30...
Front Cover by Daisy Quezada Ureña
Untitled (detail) 2018
Porcelain and clothesline in Wuhan Student Dormitory
500 Sq. Ft.
