Dear Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I want to let you know that you saved a young boy. I want to let you know that you revealed a young boy to himself. I want to let you know that you made a young boy see himself. I want to let you know that you made a young boy feel seen. I want to let you know that you led a young boy towards healing. I want to let you know that you gave a young boy a voice. I want to let you know that you made a young boy see the world better. I want to let you know that the young boy began to seek for more, that the young boy became a citizen of the world, that the young boy decided not to die again, that the young boy began to walk with a surer gait, that the young boy decided to give life a chance, that the young boy began a journey of seeking for the meaning of his life.
Dear Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I want to let you know that a young boy is still alive because of you.
Nearer To Ourselves
For Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
When our stories were far-fetched
You brought them closer to us.
When our stories meant only one thing
You made them versatile.
When we didn’t understand well,
You cared to explain.
When the stories were one-sided
You made them balanced.
You made us inquisitive.
You made us ask questions
You gave us a mirror to peek at ourselves.
You lighted up the gifts!
You said no to the silences.
You sat down,
Bore the pain,
Heard the calling.
And you answered the calling,
So that others could hear theirs too!
Isaac Dominion Aju is a Nigerian writer whose works have appeared in different literary publications. In the analysis of his creative nonfiction in Penned In Rage Journal (UK), his work was compared to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half Of A Yellow Sun on the theme of identity.
Examine Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s feminist speculative utopian fiction “Sultana’s Dream” with textual references and critical perspectives.
Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream is a hallmark experimentalist avant-garde Bengali Renaissance story-telling of magical fantasy and surrealistic utopian fiction, chronicling the documentary testament of women’s revolutionary envisionings toward salvation from patriarchal misogyny within the cosmos of western colonialism. Sister Sara’s acquaintanceship is a blessing of that silver lining foretelling of women’s rights’ movement awareness campaignings throughout the post-futility of egalitarian feminist microcosmic world in Ladyland. As a pioneering forerunner of womens’ literature, the then authorial narratorial personae is considered as a heretic, heathen, pagan, agnostic and sceptic idolatress for her groundbreaking canonical narrative, “Sultana’s Dream”.
Sultana’s exploratory adventure of the utopian wonderland of a promised land of New Jerusalem unravels the audacity and resoluteness of Her Royal Highness’s sovereignty and integrity. The Queen of the swargiya’s boldness, fierceness and aggressive traits are lionized for emerging triumphant victor transcending predatory perpetrators in the visages, masques, personages and imagoes of imperialistic masculine feuding lords. Banishment of zenanas and patronage of mardanas satirically extrapolates the decline of male authoritarian dominance and subsequent uprising of the female reign to throne. This subversion of power polity is a swashbuckling spectacle and furthermore witnesses dilapidation of crumbling hierarchies upheld by traditional conventions of the then milieu. For instance, the domiciling of police commissioners and magistrates into the boudoirs underscores the core essence of female utopian officialdom that doesn’t peremptorily trials lawsuits at the expense of innocent residents of the city of naivety and gullibility. Hence, Sara’s repartee to Sultana’s conspicuous persiflage entails transcendental philosophic humility and altruism, “It is our religious duty to love one another and to be absolutely truthful.”
Despite veiling purdaah of pardanashin culture, women of aristocracy and elitism exhibit unsurpassing charisma in juxtaposition to their countervailing counterparts as showcased by the stalwart public intellectualism/educationalism and iconoclastic socio political treatises of the authoress. Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s memorial engraving of Sultana’s Dream enmeshes her modernistic and realistic perspectives of femininity to meteoritic and nebulous phenomenological transformation in the era of scientific revolution and technological progress. This is starkly evident in the embellishments of the accolades and laurels achieved by the Headmistresses and her legion of distinctive comradely school girls in establishing the hall of fame solar and hydroelectric power projects energy schemes. Collective welfarism of the cooperative society is fostered by the solidarity and fraternity of the utilitarian feminist utopia. Restoration and reformation policies abolishing stereotypical obsolete gendered expectations limelights the contributory significance behind the crusade of the wave of feminism that was published in the then The Indian Ladies Magazine Madras (1905).
In this fairyland masculinity is emasculated because of the castration threat [penis effect] and commodification of femininity by the male gaze is thus dismantled. Hence voyeuristic perspectives of masculinity are inverted aftermath of fetishization and libidinization of the masculine objects of feminine subjectivity. The extradition of male in the mardanas have secluded them in a mirror image of the traditional culture of purdah. Effeminacy of men have transformed the role of the women as lionesses and tigresses captivators of “veteran mannish” through male enclosure enchantment. The male characters are deprived of their autonomy and agency through demasculinization and the female characters are overpowered with their calibre and intellect. “Solar ovens, rainwater harvesters, water balloons and pollution free hydrogen aircrafts” are exemplary facets of the ecocritical feminism harboured by the clairvoyance of the Queen of Ladyland: “We dive deep into the ocean of knowledge and try to find out the precious gems, which nature has kept in store for us. We enjoy nature’s gifts as much as we can.” Koh-i-Noor and the Peacock Throne are prospects of metaphorical power relations, power polity and power dynamics that the Ladyland’s Queen disavowed but avowed passive resistance and peace mongering with a consortium of mardanas.
Further Reading, References, Podcasts and Endnotes
Chapter Title: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932), Women’s Political and Social Thought, An Anthology, Hilda L. Smith and Berenice A. Caroll, Indiana University Press 2000.
Wikipedia Reading
A Brief Textual Analysis of Sultana’s Dream, Sudeshna Majumdar, Assistant Professor of English, Rampurhat College
Matthew Kinlin: Five years on since the original publication, what motivated you to return to and expand the book into Midnight Double Feature: Director’s Cut?
Kenneth M. Cale: Sweat Drenched Press, its original publisher, asked me a couple of times to expand Midnight Double Feature, but I turned them down. However, we noticed there was an issue with the print-on-demand version of MDF, and, as we would have to do another proof anyway, I reluctantly said I would try to do something with it. Soon after that, I hit upon a structural idea which really excited me, and this version of MDF grew from there.
In the original, there were two cinemas, a sci-fi one and a horror one, with a double-bill playing in each. In the expanded version, the two new screenings doubling the length of the book. These are not new genres, though. These are the familiars of the original cinemas, and they share stylistic and thematic elements with the original ones. This gives a symmetry to MDF’s overall shape which wasn’t present in the original. It’s palindromic almost. MDF feels like a complete, finished work to me now. I was so glad C22 wanted to put it out after the demise of Sweat Drenched.
MK: You’re known mainly for digital collage and glitch art. Midnight Double Feature: Director’s Cut combines both handmade and digital collage. Can you talk a little about that?
KMC: A lot of the doubles in MDF are intentional, but something that wasn’t really planned was that the book marked an important change in my work, my transition from analogue collage to digital. The book is almost exactly is half and half. “Trapperkeeper” and “Time’s Wound” were the first wholly digital pieces I did. I remember being struck by the possibilities of glitch and digital and really excited by them. I’ve been exploring those possibilities ever since.
MK: I liked the neon ENTER at the start of each section. It felt perverse and nocturnal, akin to something like the opening credits to Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void or Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive. We are being ushered into a secret space. What were your intentions here?
KMC: A threshold for the dweller. The turning of a page as the opening of a door. Besides, what poet can resist a liminal space or two?
MK: In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes, “When the image is new, the world is new.” The bookopens with the beautiful line, “At night, these images slip through the skylight of the mind.” Can you speak about this impressionistic approach?
KMC: I guess the idea comes from Jess Walter’s novel, The Zero. In Walter’s novel, which is about the aftermath of 9/11, the main protagonist suffers from amnesia. The gaps in his memory echo the great holes in the ground where the Twin Towers used to be, and the events of the novel take place in the vicinity of Ground Zero. With MDF, though, it’s more the imagined trauma around a series of events may or may not have taken place. And as we move from cinema to cinema, we’re mapping out this psychic terrain. And as were in among the shadows and the fragments, an impressionistic approach felt the way to go.
MK: In The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa writes, “Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality – it’s all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I’m attending here is a show with another set. And the show I’m attending is myself.” What are we watching in Midnight Double Feature: Director’s Cut?
KMC: The detritus of memory. Guilt or denial ravaging the mind like fire through a forest. The refusal to acknowledge your own actions and culpability. The mind has a way of revealing itself to itself, and if we choose to look away, it will find more engaging ways of bringing things to our attention. Here, that’s through the cinemas. We often watch shows or films as a distraction. But we can only distract ourselves so much for so long.
MK: I kept returning to this short line, “Now is collapsing.” It seems to capture the disruptive elements of your work. You later describe being, “Caught between non-word and non-thought. Between non-thought and non-image. So I linger.” How are you exploring the present?
KMC: The “Now is collapsing” line comes from “Outer Malad”, and that poem was partly inspired by Phillip K Dick’s novel, Martian Time-Slip. The present, or the very fabric reality as we know it, suddenly giving way like a sinkhole is a very PKD concept. Where he would externalize the exploration of that idea, I went internal. With MDF, when I was writing these poems, I felt a growing sense of darkness on the horizon and within us as a society, and I think these poems are exposing that darkness to the light in that hope of exorcising it. Sadly, our daily lives have only accelerated further since these poems were written and that darkness has deepened. The information overload keeps in a constant state of flux, a low-grade feverishness too. I wonder what effect all that has on our psyches. How does this horror and chaos and misinformation we experience as we scroll through image after image on our devices impact us? We all know we could do more to stop these terrible forces who have wormed their way into power – how does our subconscious cope with our own complicity in their actions? These are interesting questions, and ones without easy answers. “Between non-thought and non-image” could be us continuing to hide; but it could also be the last sanctuary we have from the reach of these dark forces.
MK: Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me looks at the ceiling and replies to Donna Hayward, “Why are you so interested in who I’m going to see at night? Night-time is my time.” What is your relationship to night?
KMC: An ambivalent one. I’ve always been attracted to cityscapes at night. I spent about five years living in Asia, and one of my favourite things was exploring cities like Seoul and Osaka when the sun went down. I loved the neon and night air, and I think that’s had a huge impact on my collage aesthetic. On the other hand, I’ve suffered from periodic bouts of insomnia for as long as I can remember, so I’ve spent many nights lying in bed unable to shut off the thought-tap. It’s probably why I’m such a fan of Beckett. I see a lot of Beckett and insomnia in MDF.
MK: William Gibson opens Neuromancer with, “The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Your writing has a dayglo feel with descriptions such as, “u were a fever of fever of brilliante, minarets, coin slots.” There’s a similar blurring of the biological, technological and erotic in your glitch art. What is the appeal of these accelerated elements?
KMC: I’m not sure. I never go into the creation of collages with a preconceived idea of an overall composition, or even with specific images in mind. Usually, I’ll just flick through photos until I come to one that grabs me, then work quickly and instinctively from there. Of course, there will be things you gravitate towards more than others – certain images, colours –but I really try not to question or overthink things. I’m often surprised by what I come up with. I attempt a similar thing with the poems, but the process is slower and more exploratory, the editorial voice harder to please.
MK: The goddess Venus appears throughout Midnight Double Feature. What is her role?
KMC: Right now, I see Venus as a kind of Virgil figure to whoever our Dante is in MDF, guiding them towards integration, or oblivion, or both. But my thoughts on Venus change each time I come back to the work.
MK: This expanded Director’s Cut of Midnight Double Feature features an ending that substitutes J.G. Ballard’s Marilyn Monroe, scorched with radiation burns in The Atrocity Exhibition, for Michelle Williams. You describe, “Michelle Williams supine across Martian landscape. Michelle Williams as landscape.” Can you discuss the coda?
KMC: “Coda” came from watching a film called My Week with Marilyn. In that film we are watching Williams, who experienced the tragic loss of her husband Heath Ledger only a year or so before filming this movie, playing another tragic figure, Monroe, shortly after she suffered a miscarriage in her own life. There are many echoes and reverberations going on there, but I think the poem is mainly about our relationship to the 20th Century. In The Atrocity Exhibition, it’s important to remember that Monroe and Reagan and Kennedy were all contemporary figures when Ballard wrote it. Reagan, for example, wouldn’t even be president for another decade or so after those chapters were written. So – why not use a contemporary actress like Williams for the landscape instead someone like Marilyn Monroe, who died decades earlier? We need to investigate contemporary figures imaginatively to make sense of the world around us, to fully understand what we’re dealing with. Also, I think there’s a need to get out from under the 20th century and its ideas, “the doldrums of past imagination”. Although we’re 25 years into the 21st century, it feels like we are still operating within the framework of the 1900s, still playing by its rules in material ways. It’s like we’re so spooked by the present, we’re afraid to look to the future, and so we end up looking backwards, and holding onto these mid/late-20th Century cultural icons like Monroe or The Beatles like talismans, hoping that they will somehow how lead us unscathed to the 50s and 60s in this century, rather than properly confronting the past as it manifests in our present. Obviously, by heavily referencing The Atrocity Exhibition, a book written in the late 1960s, there’s a fair bit of irony going on in “Coda” too.
MK: Lastly, if you could screen a double feature at the end of the world, what two films would you show?
KMC: Tarkofsky’s Nostalghia. Jim Henson’s Muppet Treasure Island.
Matthew Kinlin lives and writes in Glasgow. His published works include Teenage Hallucination (Orbis Tertius Press, 2021); Curse Red, Curse Blue, Curse Green (Sweat Drenched Press, 2021); The Glass Abattoir (D.F.L. Lit, 2023); Songs of Xanthina (Broken Sleep Books, 2023); Psycho Viridian (Broken Sleep Books, 2024) and So Tender a Killer (Filthy Loot, 2025).
from Symphony No. 13 (deconstructed idyll idol) from Insignificant Figures
A form extant a slow movement through dissonance sonorities sought in faces staring from inside the framed photo uncertain partitions terminating a past in a blur the eye returns to observe a door open intermittent light and other faces unravelling sparrows caged in memory threadbare fragments leaving forms tenuous if barely discernable footsteps and voices orchestrating the environs a room surrounding a quantum fog greyed out embers iron filings and a blank wall as a presence to reflect the edge of a frame eschewed time aligned to gravity’s passage to synergistic perturbations of a theoretical singularity cosmic veils in flesh and bone stalemates in blood and cellular stigmata and to define this space as elemental to observe an open doorway light traversing corridors a sift through sallow interiors windows as grey overtaking the blue or to speak of one who is immune to these changes surpassing the blood brain barrier to usher in speculative destiny a surrounding spatial waste a singularity sought in all but a physical constitution a palliative depth that remains the unplumbed hinged mechanism rusted over … +++++++++++++++++
Substances to differentiate a vase a ledge a table of chairs an unopened door holes in the floor and sun elongating
two rectangular voids in a brick façade “and that we have found
ourselves here again removed into an intimate echo’s effacement of days landscapes and the horizon a world of imaginary numbers having only half heard a parody of voices a colloquy of memories a dissolving into worlds indistinct and made nameless by fate” in this a song reaching beyond touch maybe another dimensional plane abstract musings dissonance and counterpoint a Bach fugue resonating sublimity points and promontories of relativity a widening berth to turn the ship unobserved through the window a crescent moon arisen silhouetted winter branches and hearts given the confines of loneliness assembled in rooms two by two talking of worlds that intimately refuse to cohere to sight to repeat the many words that have since been deemed as inarticulate as shadows angled on walls of flaking paint
The glimpses of a nothingness conceived in flimsy husks of faith fated nocturnes recalling a logos lost behind a fence -line’s torso -moon drift altering the presence of a Sunday morning where they are talking of the dead rising on the final day where a relative measure is to be achieved with the intervention of myth or fact negating Einstein’s law or in a garden of olives where Christ is said to have wept here a variable has been removed from an equation the perpetuation is an unknowable hypothesis as the sun recedes on the ecliptic the season draws down a solo oboe through the fabric constituting an aspect in a continuum hidden in plain sight another anomaly of presence a synthesis of elements flowers in a vase ocean through a window aspects of objects sooner seen dispersing on a landscape or through the alcove of a room prayers to invisible demigods
penitent rags of fleshly supplication clinging to internal deserts and this draining aridity surrounding every heartbeat its reticent ocean a choral ecstasy hymns to the unborn held in limbo’s cellular memory a non -terrestrial realm coalescing forms in a stasis of voices … ++++++++++++++++ from Fractal Labyrinth
33
Descriptions forged in temporality hazy sun through grey clouds each moment’s duration a change in perception too many variables where place names abandon a landscape where the lay of the land follow s contours through lines of sight through annular spaces in the flux of the irredeemable quantum occurrence or the mnemonic concretions that travel from the past an altered awareness negating the clockface and its ageing manifestation the habituated intransigence of place now in an oblique presence…the present
returning through the (r)evolving door hazy sun through grey clouds
34
This window seems less comprehensible for all it refuses to let in though there is no mystery to this no clock to denote the arrival of entropy entering the terrestrial environs no hesitation to exit through the doorway to emerge onto an empty landscape to know no objective reality observation cannot resolve no primordial beat of the heart at birth leaving only conjecture to work through the physicality of space the atoms existing in the absence of thought in the opacity of images in the subtle echoes sounding in the slow drain through clutter and accumulated debris through the inaudible illusions sufficient in their being apart from what the eye can resolve
35
Noting these clouds …
before the sun sets and that there will be no equilibrium to the visions entering the darkening room no transparency allotted to the opaque eye moored to the precision of a physical existence and in this room there are stains on the wall facing north one can detect magnitudes in flux complications of structure dimensional boundaries that ebb and flow and grayed spaces retained for faces of the dead… toward what end is it needed to return here again to extinguish the candle to bleed an intoxicating breath into a sacrosanct realm to feel beneath the epidermis fractal bits of vibratory echoes a consciousness of voices without breadth without blood without a physicality of decay
