Chronic—A Chapbook on Living with Illness, edited by Yvonne Wabai There’s a certain silence that often settles around chronic illness—a quiet that comes not just from pain, but from being disbelieved, misdiagnosed, or forgotten; a […]
While Otieno’s first oath was unintentional, the second time she stood naked in that dim room in Gaitumbi next to her fellow revolutionary dissidents, she meant it. The second time she committed her life and wealth to a struggle against empire and its collaborators—words which could render her a signatory to her own death if she betrayed them—was not a mistake.
A Long House is pleased to announce that Yvonne Wabai and Sihle Ntuli have been selected as the 2025 Rajat Neogy Editorial Fellows. Wabai and Ntuli are writers and editors who have been doing literary […]
“It is easy to speak about this book purely at the level of what it is about, rather than what it is.”
if a poem is intended to “move” readers, as in, enact a kind of change that leaves one different than before they encountered it, it should be especially attuned to detail, to sense and memory.
Ecologists believe that all organisms are connected in a complex web to each other and the material resources that sustain them. Sometimes, the web is literal, the entanglement of roots and fungi found in mycorrhizae. Many humanists adapt the idea to the context of human relations: I am because you are. My existence is predicated on yours.
I think it is important for every writer to define what “winning” is for them. They have to discover what gives them fulfilment or value because writing, the act of putting words on paper for oneself or for others, is quite different from the industry that has sprung up around writing.
A Short Talk is a series of short interviews and conversations with writers, editors, artists, and cultural workers across Africa and the Black diaspora. It is conceived as a companion (not an abridgement or summary) […]
It may be said that we become most aware of the bonds we share when those bonds are threatened; we realize how powerful they had been all along when they become strained. A woman misses her father most acutely when he is no longer around. A man in exile yearns with nostalgic ache for his home country. A marriage, like a manacle, chafes when love grows cold. All of these are fertile nodes of inquiry. But what of our untroubled bonds, what of the relations in which we are at ease? Here Achebe offers us an Igbo proverb by which we advance: “Where one thing stands, another will stand beside it.” There is something against which ease rests, something it stands beside. Literature must illuminate those as well.
Two visual artists: Khaled Olufemi Mamah (Fhemy.raw) and Sambacor Konate (Le Jardin Jolof) discuss African art, fashion, photography, masks, history, and griot tradition in Mali and other parts of West Africa. They speak in the […]