{"id":4216,"date":"2024-09-25T16:36:13","date_gmt":"2024-09-25T15:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/?page_id=4216"},"modified":"2024-11-05T10:08:55","modified_gmt":"2024-11-05T10:08:55","slug":"chrystel-oloukoi-october-2024","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/chrystel-oloukoi-october-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Chrystel Olouko\u00ef, October 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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What I am Reading Now\u2026<\/strong>
Chrystel Olouko\u00ef<\/strong>
October 2024<\/p><\/div>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

‘I plead drunkenness
<\/em>I am intoxicated
<\/em>With anger’<\/em><\/p>

(Dung of Chicken)<\/p>

Anger, as a structure of feeling, aptly portrays this season of grief, in the midst of unrelenting genocidal violence unleashed in Congo, Palestine, Sudan, and many other places. Ugandan poet Okot p\u2019Bitek<\/strong> pleads with insurrectionary panache in Song of a Prisoner<\/em><\/strong> (1971), a satirical lament on postcolonial disenchantments, and poetic analog to Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma\u2019s Suns of Independence<\/em> (1968). The plea, as a repeated structure, sutures fragmented poems into a singular song: ‘I plead guilty,’ ‘I plead drunkenness,’ ‘I plead hunger,’ ‘I plead smallness,’ ‘I plead fear,’ ‘I plead hopelessness,’ ‘I plead helplessness,’ ‘I plead insanity . . .’<\/em>\u00a0I return to Song of a Prisoner<\/em> often, as a touchstone, and often still, I pause at the dedication:<\/p>

\u2018for
<\/em>lumumba mondale kimathi mboya tshombe balewa . . .
<\/em>none of whom
<\/em>will ever read it<\/em><\/p>

and for the
<\/em>bruised others . . .\u2019<\/em><\/p>

And yet, this thunderous and indocile ensemble, is full of visions of freedom, utopias in supine position and radical openness to a world still worth fighting for. I, too, want to \u2018swim in the naked air \/ Of the dying night.\u2019<\/em><\/p>

With the usual reactionary politics of US electoral season pressing upon us \u2014 non-citizens of an empire with worldwide reach \u2014 I immersed myself, with even more urgency, within a Black radical tradition unbounded from the state and aspirations to assimilate into violent regimes. I settled on two books of June Jordan<\/strong>\u2019s political essays, Civil Wars<\/em><\/strong> (1964-1980) and On Call <\/em><\/strong>(1979-1985). Subtitled \u2018Observations from the Front Lines of America,\u2019 Civil Wars<\/em>, as well as On Call<\/em>, fit squarely within a radical Black feminism that understood the distinction between foreign policy and domestic matters as a white supremacist ruse. As Toni Cade Bambara in Vietnam, Demita Frazier, organising antiwar protest from her Chicago high school, or the Combahee River Collective\u2019s proud assertion of being \u2018third world women,\u2019 June Jordan knew that either in Harlem or Nicaragua, she was facing \u2018the unreal scene of a full-scale war with no one but enemies in view.<\/em>\u2019 (Civil Wars<\/em>, 18).<\/p>

These multidirectional paths of solidarity are also evident in the traces of smuggled Palestinian resistance poetry within the walls of the California San Quentin maximum security prison. Enemy of the Sun<\/em><\/strong> a poem mistakenly attributed to George Jackson<\/a>, was in fact the work of his brother in arms from faraway lands, the multiply incarcerated poet Samih Al-Qasim<\/strong>. The poem is the title piece of a precious anthology of radical Palestinian poetry edited by Naseer Aruri & Edmund Ghareeb<\/strong>, Enemy of the Sun<\/em><\/strong> (1970). Published by the DC-based Black revolutionary press Drum and Spear, it was gifted to me by a friend and abolitionist comrade, Abdulrahman, met in the Paris Sudanese refugee camps, a little over a decade ago. This is a collection of \u2018miraculous weapons\u2019<\/em> (Cesaire), of \u2018poems that kill (…) poems that wrestle cops into alleys<\/em>\u2019 (Amiri Baraka). Nizar Qabbani narrates his metamorphosis \u2018From a poet of love and longing \/ To one who writes with a knife\u2019<\/em> (\u2018Reflections on the Tragedy \u2014 I Mourn (1967)\u2019), joining a fellowship of poets that \u2018sharpen pencils on [their] ribs\u2019<\/em> and \u2018explode mines in words\u2019<\/em> (\u2018To the Poets of the Occupied Territories\u2019). What strikes me the most is the tenderness of the address, in poetic offerings of solidarity in struggle. ‘My brothers’<\/em>\u00a0says Salem Jubran in \u2018American Indians.\u2019 Tawfiq Zayyad opens his poem \u2018Cuba\u2019 with \u2018My friends\u2019 <\/em>sending to kindred lands of resistance, \u2018greetings \/ Scented kisses \u2014 delicious bozes of sweets (…) \/ And songs of magic.\u2019<\/em> Al-Qassem in \u2018Patrice Lumumba\u2019 calls the Congolese fallen revolutionary, \u2018the poet of freedom,\u2019<\/em> while Hadia Abdul-Hadi in \u2018From Vietnam,\u2019 asserts family ties between Palestine and Vietnam, as frontlines of US imperialism. In all these places, Mahmoud Darwish reminds us, \u2018each dawn has a date with revolution.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Chrystel Olouko\u00ef<\/strong><\/a> is an artist, film critic and curator, broadly interested in experimental cinema, queer cinema and Black continental and diasporic cinema. They hold a PhD in African and African American Studies from Harvard University and work at the University of Washington as an assistant professor of Geography. Their work engages imaginations of the night in Lagos, as well as the afterlives of colonial technologies of temporal discipline.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Reading<\/p><\/div>

Song of a Prisoner<\/em>, Okot p\u2019Bitek (Third Press, 1971)

Civil Wars<\/em>, June Jordan (Touchstone, 1995)

On Call<\/em>, June Jordan (South End Press, 1985)

Enemy of the Sun<\/em>, eds. Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb (1970, Drum and Spear Press)<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Please note the views published in\u00a0What I am Reading Now…<\/i>\u00a0are personal reflections of the contributors.
These may not necessarily represent the views of the University of Dundee.<\/span><\/p>

Readers who wish to make a donation to support\u00a0Medical Aid for Palestinians can do so\u00a0here<\/a>.
<\/span>\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>

Home<\/a><\/p>

Previous<\/span> Issue: Aurella Yussuf, September 2024<\/a><\/p>

Next Issue: Ajamu X, November 2024<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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about projects What I am Reading Now\u2026Chrystel Olouko\u00ef October 2024 \u00a0 ‘I plead drunkennessI am intoxicatedWith anger’ (Dung of Chicken) Anger, as a structure of feeling, aptly portrays this season of grief, in the midst of unrelenting genocidal violence unleashed in Congo, Palestine, Sudan, and many other places. Ugandan poet Okot p\u2019Bitek pleads with insurrectionary …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":271,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4216","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/271"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4216"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4272,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4216\/revisions\/4272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}