When we lived in Bergen, Norway, I would occasionally go to the KODE Art Museums to see pieces by Edvard Munch and other Norwegian artists. During one of those visits, I encountered the work of Nikolai Astrup, a modernist painter from Kalvåg. Walking through the galleries, I came upon his 1920 painting entitled Marsmorgen (March Morning). This work stopped me because it depicts a tree, with … Read More Upon Discovering the Work of Chaïm Soutine
+ ayad akhtar, Beyond the Door of No Return, david diop, france, Juan de Pareja, Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of Juan de Pareja, Portrait of Madeline, senegal
Last year, I picked up David Diop’s At Night All Blood is Black and devoured it in a single day. The novel details the experiences of Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese solider, during World War I, specifically as he fights for the French as a colonized subject. Diop’s novel grabbed me from the start and never let go, and after reading it, I knew that I wanted to read … Read More The Ways We Experience Art in David Diop’s “Beyond the Door of No Return”
A few days ago, as I am wont to do on occasion, I walked through the stacks at my local library, immediately making a line towards the French literature section. I did this, partly, because I had just read Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization and wanted to see if I could find some of the works by Didier Daeninckx, André Schwarz-Bart, and … Read More Ágota Kristóf’s “The Illiterate” and the Loss of One’s Self
+ france, jala, nayarit, photographs, photography
Over the years, I have, as many of you have as well, taken countless photos on my phone. I enjoy taking pictures, capturing a moment in time on screen. I do not view photographs as being a direct reality of what happened at that moment; instead, I view them as a staged (framed) moment that depicts a time, a feeling, a mood, not reality. … Read More Some of My Favorite Photographs That I Have Taken Over the Years
While many books contains first lines that we forget the second we pass over it, others remain with us for years after we initially read the book. Ellen Foster telling us, “When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy,” rattles … Read More “I understand, I shouldn’t have done it”: David Diop “At Night All Blood Is Black”
Interminable Rambling 