The Pinch, our co-sponsors and judges in 2010 will be working with us again this year. Contest winners will receive not only free participation in one of our exciting writing programs abroad, but also publication in this fine journal.

 

The 7th Annual Writing Contest for Study Abroad is now open.

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Guidelines

Please note that these are the complete guidelines. Queries are not necessary.

Submission Deadline: January 31, 2011.

Eligibility, Contestants: The contest is open to anyone writing in English who has not yet published a book of 45 pages or more in the genre of application, except faculty and administrators employed by the University of New Orleans.

Eligibility, Work: Work submitted must be unpublished and eligible for publication in the sponsoring journal.

Entry Fee: An entry fee of $25 must be paid for each submission. Fees can only be paid online using the link below. No checks or cash can be accepted.

Submission Format: The submission process is entirely electronic. No paper manuscripts can be accepted.

Multiple Submissions: Applicants may submit multiple applications in one or more genres, however each application must be complete with entry fee. Payment for multiple submissions may be made in aggregate (see below), but each submission must be uploaded separately.

Submission Limits and Format: Prose submissions should not exceed 4500 words (about 15 pages double spaced). Prose submissions may be excerpts from longer works or a complete story or stories, so long as the length limit is adhered to. Poetry submissions should not exceed 5 pages and may include a maximum of 3 poems. The submitted work must be unpublished at the time of submission, though it may be under consideration. The author's name must not appear anywhere in the work, including in headers or footers.

Acknowledgments: Acknowledgments by email query only. Each applicant will be emailed a list of winners when the contest has been decided, around the end of March.

Submission Procedure: To begin the process, click "Register" in the menu at the left. Once you are registered and logged in, you will see detailed submission instructions below. (Note: even if you entered the contest last year, you must register and select a new username this year.)

Questions and comments may be emailed to contest@unopress.org This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

END OF CONTEST GUIDELINES

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Payment

Use the paypal link below to select your number of entries and pay the fee. Please note that you do not need a Paypal account to pay by this method, but may pay with any credit card. Paypal is one of the safest, most secure ways to pay on the web.
We will be matching your payment information with your registration information. You will need to notify us This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it if payment is made under a different name than your contest registration.

1 Entry $25.00 2 Entries $50.00 3 Entries $75.00 4 Entries $100.00

Paris Short Story Contest :

deadline November 30 !

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

Paris Writers News is launching its first contest for the Best and Most Delightful Stories about

Paris

Twelve stories will be selected for publication in a collection of short stories about Paris.

Love, hate, expectation, desire, dreams, discovery and disappointment in the world’s most beautiful city. All themes, periods and approaches will be considered.

What we’re looking for: a great story, well-told. Humor, wit and luminous prose, please apply!

All authors welcome, published and unpublished.

Prize: 200 euros plus publication of top 12  stories


Entry fee: 10 euros (Paypal)

Submission by email, in text of mail (no attachements please) to pariswritersnews AT gmail.com

Deadline for submission: November 30, 2010

After a preselection by the Editorial Committee, twelve distinguished judges from the literary community will each select one story for publication.

The Best and Most Delightful Stories about Paris will be published in paperback, e-book and POD in the fall of 2011.

 

For more info and contest updates, go to Paris Writers News.  

To submit your short story, please send your text IN THE BODY OF THE EMAIL (no attachments, no links) to  : pariswritersnews  AT  gmail  DOT  com
We accept payment through Paypal;   (click on "ajouter au panier" which means "add to basket" )

 

Kent State University -

Excellence in Action

Chapbook Competitions

Wick Poetry Center > Competitions & Scholarships > Chapbook Competitions

2010 Chapbook Competitions for Ohio Poets

Poets currently residing in Ohio may enter the Open Competition. Poets currently enrolled in Ohio institutions of higher education may enter the Student Competition. In spring 2011, two to four manuscripts will be selected for publication in the Wick Chapbook Series, and the honor also includes a reading at Kent State University. Maggie Anderson is the general editor of the series.

Entry Requirements

• Poets may enter only one of the competitions. There is a $15 reading fee for each manuscript sent to the Open Competition. A check or money order should be made payable to the Wick Poetry Center. There is no reading fee for the Student Competition. Manuscripts must include 15 to 25 pages of poetry, typed on one side only, with no more than one poem per page. Only clean, legible copies are accepted.
• Two title pages should be included. The first must list the poet's name, address, email, and phone number as well as the title of the manuscript and the name of the contest to which the manuscript is being submitted (either Open Competition or Student Competition). Poets entering the Student Competition should indicate the name of the school in which they are enrolled. The second title page should include only the title of the manuscript. The poet's name must not appear anywhere on the manuscript. Entries are judged anonymously.
• The manuscript as a whole must not have been published previously, but it may contain poems that have been published individually; these should be listed, with publisher, on a separate acknowledgments page. If the manuscript is accepted for publication, the poet must obtain permission from previous publishers.
• The manuscript may be submitted simultaneously to other publishers, but poets must notify the Wick Poetry Center immediately if the manuscript is accepted for publication elsewhere.
• All manuscripts will be recycled after judging. For notice that the manuscript has been received, poets should enclose a self-addressed, stamped postcard; for notice of the final winning selections, poets should enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Winners will be announced in spring 2011.
• Manuscripts must be postmarked between August 31 and October 31, 2010. No late entries will be considered.

All submissions should be sent to:

Wick Poetry Chapbook Competitions
301 Satterfield Hall
Kent State University
P.O. Box 5190
Kent, Ohio 44242-0001

Sierra Leone: Forna On Aftermath Characters

Scottish-Sierra Leonean writer Aminatta Forna talks with the BBC's Bola Mosuro about the history professor and British psychologist characters in her book, The Memory of Love. Helon Habila's review in the Guardian, however, dwells on a different character:

Others, like Agnes, end up in the lunatic asylum. Of all the stories of loss in the book, none is so harrowing as hers. She witnessed her husband's beheading by rebel soldiers, lost two daughters and, when she returns home after the war, she finds her only surviving daughter married to the soldier who beheaded her husband. They all have to live together, victim and perpetrator, and pretend it never happened. But there is no fooling the mind. Agnes periodically loses her senses and wanders away from home.

 

>via: http://bombasticelements.blogspot.com/2010/06/sierra-leone-forna-on-aftermath...

____________________________________________________

The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

 

 

A depiction of the brutally uncertain aftermath of war impresses Helon Habila

• Helon Habila
• The Guardian, Saturday 8 May 2010
• Article history

Aminatta Forna's brilliant new novel takes an oblique look at the Sierra Leonean civil war of the 1990s. Instead of focusing on the gruesome details of killing and looting and the sectarian politics behind it all, the novel examines in clinical and psychological detail how people survive the memory of war. Despite its horrors, war at least provided some certainties; people survived from day to day. Now the future lies before them and they are uncertain, filled with memories of loss and shame, often pushed into a state of fugue. Forna describes this as a "dissociative condition in which the mind creates an alternative state. This state may be considered a place of safety, a refuge." It is a coping mechanism, often involuntary. Some characters, such as the retired university professor Elias Cole, try to review their history for posterity, hiding the dark moments, emphasising the good ones. Some, including the idealistic young doctor Kai Mansaray, would escape to America – if only he could drop the heavy baggage he is carrying.

1. The Memory of Love
2. by Aminatta Forna
3. 

Others, like Agnes, end up in the lunatic asylum. Of all the stories of loss in the book, none is so harrowing as hers. She witnessed her husband's beheading by rebel soldiers, lost two daughters and, when she returns home after the war, she finds her only surviving daughter married to the soldier who beheaded her husband. They all have to live together, victim and perpetrator, and pretend it never happened. But there is no fooling the mind. Agnes periodically loses her senses and wanders away from home.

On one occasion she ends up in the care of Dr Adrian Lockheart, a visiting psychologist from London. Most of the story takes place in a hospital, highlighting the central theme of healing. The doctors are mostly expat volunteers, like Adrian, from the same western countries that averted their eyes while Sierra Leone burned.

Adrian is one of the four central characters in the novel and functions as a conduit through which we encounter the stories of the others. On his deathbed, Elias tells Adrian of his obsession with the beautiful Saffia, wife to Julius. "Elias seemed to him to be a lonely man in search of a peaceful death. Adrian might have been a priest, an imam, counsellor or layman." Elias's story is one of love turning to loss even before it begins. When they love, the characters do so passionately, jealously, because they know how ephemeral love can be. Love is taken away from them when it is sweetest, like that between Kai Mansaray and the beautiful Nenebah, or between Adrian and the local girl Mamakay. Kai reflects: "Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love."

Forna writes like a scientist, not only in the accuracy of her descriptions but in the way she selects which incidents to highlight, turning each scene into a metaphor that reverberates with meaning beyond the event itself. One character can't walk, and the doctors are carefully breaking his legs and putting them back together to help him do so. This procedure becomes a symbol for the nation, determined to regain the use of its legs after the crippling civil war.

Forna's writing is not lyrical; you feel that what she is reaching for is economy of phrasing, aptness of imagery, exactness of description, and she achieves that perfectly. This is a remarkable novel: well researched, well thought out, well written – the kind that deserves to be on the Booker shortlist.

Helon Habila's Oil on Water will be published in August by Hamish Hamilton.

>via: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/08/memory-love-aminatta-forna-review

 

___________________________________________________________

 

Wartime loves and betrayals: Aminatta Forna's new novel casts a fresh light on old war wounds

By Arifa Akbar

RICHARD MILDENHALL

Memories: Aminatta Forna's latest novel focuses on personal responsibility and political repression

There is every reason a visitor ringing Aminatta Forna's doorbell might expect to hear the tocsin sound of dogs barking in the background as she treads towards the door. She has spoken of her two beloved lurchers in past interviews and recently wrote a moving Granta essay about stray dogs in Sierra Leone - where she was partly raised – in which she described how the sliding scale of humanity towards these lost, bedraggled beasts was symptomatic of kinship during social unrest. "In a time of lies," she added, in reference to the country's near decade-long civil war, begun in 1991, "I found honesty and loyalty among the dogs."

But Forna is, surprisingly, not accompanied by her lurchers as she appears at the door of her South London townhouse. "They died," she says, hands in the air. Mab, who at 15 was blind ("I'd be leading a blind dog up the street instead of the other way round!"), went first, and then, a year ago, Tonkolili, named after the Northern province in Sierra Leone, suffered what some would view as a reassuringly middle-class death: a heart attack in the midst of a dinner party, surrounded by, one imagines, a brood of mourning friends, bottles of red wine and a polenta dish.

"It was sad but it was also a little farcical," Forna says , in strikingly clear enunciation - perfected at Malvern Girls College as a boarder, she reveals later - which holds no hint of the rhotic R's of her Scottish mother, nor the African lilt of her late Sierra Leonian father.

It is a voice that would have been perfect in her former career as a BBC TV journalist. She worked on The Late Show, before giving it up in 1999 to write The Devil That Danced on the Water, a Samuel Johnson Prize-nominated memoir of her childhood which recalls her dissident father's disappearance, imprisonment and death, when she was just 11. That was in 2003, after which she turned to fiction with Ancestor Stones – although some insisted on reading this as an extended memoir.

With the publication of her latest work of fiction, The Memory of Love (Bloomsbury, £17.99), based in Sierra Leone and dramatising the nation's fractured sensibilities in the aftermath of the civil war, she wants to clear up a few enduring errors.

She was, most definitely, not the female protagonist of Ancestor Stones - Abie - who goes to Africa to trace the family trajectories of four aunts, as many reviews mistakenly suggested. "Everyone thinks I have a coffee plantation in Sierra Leone but I have a cashew crop project. I wrote about a woman who owns a coffee plantation! When you are talking about a woman writer coming from a hot country, there's a complete assumption that she is writing about her own life.

"I don't see anyone doing that to Ian McEwan or Sebastian Faulks. Does anyone assume McEwan was stalked by someone with an erotic obsession (Enduring Love), or that he didn't have sex on his wedding night (On Chesil Beach)? It's because we are always assumed to be testifying in some grand way. It's maddening!" she says, jumping up from her seat in the kitchen and pacing, agitatedly, as if cursing the reviewers for these ants in her pants.

For all these false claims of autobiography informing her fiction, she says the book was, ironically, an example in which life imitated art. "The model for [her cashew farm] the Kholifa Estate, was the fictional one. Through the process of writing, Ancestor Stones came the idea for it - cashew nuts were more viable than coffee."

Her research for The Memory of Love was typically first-hand - guided perhaps by her journalistic training. She took her field work to a psychiatric hospital and an operating theatre in Freetown, following specialists, talking to patients and observing amputations for the novel, in which the drama partly revolves around the patients' memories of civil war horrors, which are as raw as their physical wounds.

"I broke my Achilles tendon in 2004 in Sierra Leone and I didn't want to go main city hospital. More people come out dead than alive," she jokes.

"It was soon after the war and the other nearest hospital was run by Italian volunteers. A hospital is a good place to set various dilemmas. I went back (after I recovered) and I kept asking them 'can I go into the operating theatre?' I'm a doctor's daughter. I'm not squeamish at all. The first operation I saw was an amputation above the knee. The leg was put in a bucket on the floor. It's funny what the body looks like on the inside... a Sunday roast."

Forna also examinesWestern perceptions of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), mainly through the character of Adrian Lockheart, a British psychologist who hopes to heal minds. The question his presence poses is whether the European therapeutic model can be applied to a country like Sierra Leone. "There were certainly many ill-advised attempts to do that and they didn't work," says Forna. "There was a psychologist who went into a village to talk about their experiences openly and ended up increasing the anger. It's civil war, so you're living with the people who did this to you afterwards."

One storyline hammers this idea home most starkly. The character of Agnes "was based on a true story. I heard about a woman who came back from a refugee camp in Guinea to find her daughter married to the man who had killed her husband. It's such an extraordinary situation because it's civil war. It's literally on your doorstep and in your house. I wanted to ask what this would do to you."

As well as being a story about love and war, it is an ideological examination of personal responsibility in a time of political repression, focusing not only on the idealists who died for their cause but the justifications by those who betrayed these ideals for the sake of personal preservation.

This latter discussion of betrayal is one that is currently raging not just in Sierra Leone but in other countries which have shaken off authoritarian regimes, says Forna. "When I talk in Germany and South America and Spain, no-one has difficulty in grasping what I am talking about."

The idea came to her even before she had published her memoir. "I was having lunch with a friend of mine from Argentina in 2000. I told her I was writing an account of my father's life and death. She had grown up in the years of the Dirty War in Argentina. She was in her forties at the time, but during her thirties, she had begun to look at her father and ask herself 'when so many people went missing, how did you manage to survive with your career in tact?'" This question is one of her novel's key themes. The character who betrays the cause – Elias Cole – is representative of those who chose to take the path of least resistance.

"A friend of mine in Sierra Leone confronted her father a few years ago. Her father said he couldn't have done anything" against the ruling party "because he had children. But I said to her my father had children and he would have said the opposite thing, that he had to do something because he had children. You have to stand up because you have children, even if your children lose you."

What The Memory of Love captures most lyrically, alongside the betrayal, is the firebrand generation of African intellectuals of the 1960s, educated in the West, who returned to their home countries filled with ambitions to make the world a better place.

"That generation offered Africa phenomenal hope." The writerWole Soyinka "called it the 'renaissance generation'. When I was growing up, I was surrounded by them, people I never met again. They had such a passionate idea of a better world. I thought everybody in the world was like that. A lot were killed or imprisoned. Barack Obama's father was part of the renaissance generation, given a scholarship out of Africa, a belated attempt by the UK and America to prepare the country for independence - by taking the brightest out... So was Soyinka and my father. They came back with a very clear-eyed view of colonialism."

Forna – who at 45 is fresh-faced, ebullient, undimmed by a decade of insomnia – herself appears to have found a sense of home even while shuttling between cultures. She lives in London, but helps run the school in Sierra Leone that her grandfather founded in the 1920s (the Rogbonko Village School, whose funding campaign was supported by The Independent in 2002) as well as the Kholifa Estate cashew plantation, and she teaches at the university whenever she has the opportunity.

Her childhood appears to have contained far more shuttling. She divided her time between her father's home in Freetown and boarding school in Britain after her parents split up when she was a child. Her father's story, a devastating one which ended in his hanging, is one she interrogated in her memoir - she said then she wanted to know who had killed her father - although of course it will never be fully exorcised.

Although the memoir received considerable critical acclaim in the Western world (some compared her voice to the Orange Prize-winning Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Vanity Fair magazine later named her as one of the most promising new writers in 2007), but the impact in Sierra Leone was unprecedented. Her exploration of her father's death opened up a Pandora's Box among her generation, who began asking questions they had not dared ask before. "It was like a bomb. I broke the silence and it was nerve-wracking for me. I didn't know how it was going to go down but it absolutely galvanised a generation.

"I gave talks at the university and people were standing in the aisles. It re-wrote history. It wasn't just about my father. There were plenty of other people who were excised from history. Now they are all coming back into it."

So what now, for the so-called "African writer" who hates this limiting classification. "What makes you an African writer?" she says. "I'm half Scottish!"

There's a finished children's story, based in Mexico City - and featuring a dog! - and a future walk on the Scottish side, with no sight of Africa on the horizon. "I'm thinking of writing about the Shetland and Orkney Islands. My mother has been doing research into the family - and we were Viking offspring."

Feminist Africa: How Africom contributes to militarisation in Africa

by Sokari on October 15, 2010

Scholar/activist Amina Mama discusses the evolution of a pan-African feminism, much of it in the African diaspora, and also how it links to feminist and anti-capitalist movements in other areas such as Haiti. How is AFRICOM, contributing to militarization on the African continent? What other trends are increasing militarism on the continent, and how are feminists responding?

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Amina Mama, is chair of Gender and Women’s Studies at U.C. Davis and Global Fund for Women’s Africa programs.

In another interview Cynthia Enloe talks gives an excellent explanation of militarism and how it impacts on all our lives; She also discusses how militarism depends on women’s participatio. ; If audio doesnt work listen here

Women’s Magazine – Equality Only With Justice and Peace – August 30, 2010 at 1:00pm

Click to listen (or download)

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Ugandan director Caroline Kamya

on her award winning film, Imani

Interview by Don Omope |

Photos courtesy of Caroline Kamya

> Screen shot of Actress Rehema Nanfuka in the award-winning film, Imani.

IMANI is the debut feature film by award wining documentary filmmaker Caroline Kamya, born in Uganda, lived in Kenya and studied documentary filmmaking at Goldsmith college London - Caroline brings a different approach to filmmaking – an approach influenced by her experience living abroad and her background in documentary storytelling.

The film Imani, which is a product of Caroline’s tenacity and drive, won the best film in an African language at this 6th African Movie Academy Awards which took place this year in Nigeria.

African screens’ Don Omope speaks to Caroline about her film, her approach to filmmaking and the Ugandan film industry.

 

Tell us about the Ugandan film industry.

The Ugandan film industry is still in its early stages; we have got three different types of films being made in here.

1) There are those who make short experimental art films for the art house crowd. 

2) There is Cina-Uganda, which is like the Nigerian Nollywood pop films shot in a week and edited in a week. 

3) We also have the type of film I make, which is cinema film aimed at local and international film audience.

 

 

> Stephen Ocen in Kamya's Imani.

 

Why these characters, a break-dancer, a maid and a child solider?

The three main characters reflect Uganda society, most families in Africa have maids, it’s just common and I have always being intrigued by the way people treat those that work in their homes and how the maids feel themselves.

The child soldier, Gulu is a part of Uganda were there has been conflict for many years but the war is over and most film about Uganda don’t reflect this, they still look at Uganda from the view point of Idi Amin or child soldiers.

Break dancing has been going on for many years but it just kicked off big time in Kampala and people now make a living from it, so I wanted to also reflect this in the film, though my initial idea was to make a documentary about them.

 

> Screen shot from Kamya's Imani.

 

 

How long did it take to shoot the film? And how did you go about funding it?

I raised the initial funds for the films myself; I saved some money from producing content for brands, NGOs and fixing for the BBC and Channel 4 when they come filming here in Uganda. I also applied for funds from the Global Film Initiative.

We started filming in 2008, we film through November and December, then we edited through January and February 2009.

What was your budget?

Well we spent about 100,000 pounds on the film.

 

> Kamya & Rehema Nanfuka at AMAA.

 

 

Your film is popular in Uganda and also internationally, you won the AMAA for best film in an African Language. What’s your response to this?

I was chuffed Don, you just caught me a couple of days after our VIP premiere. I went back to my box office to check on my publicity materials and heard a few people ask that they would like to see my film Imani and my heart was filled with joy, and skipped a beat for a minute, to hear that at home is so powerful and I think any African filmmaker will understand the way I felt at that moment.

For people to pay three pounds to watch a Ugandan movie over Blockbusters films from the States is a big deal and it’s amazing.

 

 

> Behind the scenes of Kamya's Imani.

 

You shot your film using the RED camera; can you talk us through your production experience?

I travelled to Vancouver were I mange to shadow a director on the set of a HBO production, I had a chat with the crew about my film and the camera assistant said he was interested and suggested we shoot my film on the RED camera and that’s how it all happened.

We didn’t have much money but we had lots and lots of passion. We got a camera, a focus puller, a camera operator and a really wicked fantastic D.O.P, Andrew – this was his first feature film, so he was happy to volunteer on the shoot.

We paid for his ticket and that of his crew and everyone worked for free. Making films is not easy even in Hollywood but boy, in Uganda we have no film infrastructure, our actors were not trained we had to teach them what to do it was a crazy but very wonderful filming experience.

What would you define as your filmmaking style and philosophy?

I have been influenced a lot by my background as a documentary filmmaker; the way I inter-cut the three main characters will be familiar to anyone who has seen my previous works as a documentary filmmaker.

I didn’t want to plan everything with military precision before hand, so I got my material and started to work with it, which is pretty much my style.

What other projects are you working on?

I am working on one Swedish projects which is called Doc’s Lab were they select filmmakers from all over the world and get them to work with Hollywood filmmaker, so I will be going to Sweden a couple of times this year to submit a projects for that programme.

What films have influenced you as a director?

Many African filmmakers from the 60s and 70s, especially francophone filmmakers like Ousmane Sembene and more recently Abderrahmane Sissako who made the film Bamako, he was actually a mentor of mine when I was doing the Director’s lab in Kampala.

I have also been influenced by filmmakers from Europe and America.

Where have you screened Imani?

We had our world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2010 and the local premiere in Uganda just recently on the 6th of May.

October 17, 2010

Poetry week! Today: 3 Women of the Harlem Renaissance

By admin

Jupiter Hammon, the first African American to publish poetry in the United States, was born on this day in Long Island, New York, in 1711. In honor of Hammon’s birth, today is Black Poetry Day.

All week I will be featuring the work and biographies of a female poets from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Today, I am printing excerpts (and featuring a poem) from an essay on Poets.org.

Double-Bind: Three Women of the Harlem Renaissance

by Anthony Walton

The women poets of the Harlem Renaissance faced one of the classic American double-binds: they were black, and they were female, during an epoch when the building of an artistic career for anyone of either of those identities was a considerable challenge. To the general reader, the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance is more than likely embodied in the work of two or three writers: Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and of course, Langston Hughes; Jean Toomer‘s beautiful poems from Cane might also be added to that list. But behind these names, and such signal poems as “Incident,” “If We Must Die,” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” lies another body of work that is also worth of study, acclaim, and respect.

This work includes poems of homespun wit and sophisticated irony; of family, politics, and existential unease; of love, betrayal, and heartache; of racial pride and world-weariness. These poets were, given their true prospects, painfully ambitious. In addition, they carried the burdens of “the race”: self-consciously creating a literature for a people only recently out of slavery; not writing anything that could be construed as revealing, embarrassing or humiliating, not only to African Americans as a group and themselves as individuals, nor anything that deviated from the constrained Victorian social patterns in which all women in our culture found themselves living at that time; and, perhaps most crushing of all, being obligated to write in ways that “proved” blacks and black women were as literate and articulate, as capable of education and cultivation, as whites.

These burdens grew out of the expectations of the Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, as it is also known. As Alain Locke, one of the pioneering theorists of the movement, wrote in his seminal essay “The New Negro,” the writers of the Renaissance would join musicians (Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson,) actors and dancers (Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker), and visual artists (Aaron Douglas and May Howard Jackson) in educating the world in true African American capability: “The especially cultural recognition that they win should in turn prove the key to that reevaluation of the Negro which must precede or accompany any considerable further benefit of race relationships.”

Things did not quite work out that way: the Renaissance, splintering from its own success and losing momentum as white patrons and curiosity seekers moved on to newer fashions, collapsed completely in the face of the Depression. The lives and careers of poets such as Jessie Redmon Fauset, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Georgia Douglas Johnson have, in the history that has been written since, been relegated to the precincts of specialists in African American literature. Yet, in the face of what must have been corrosive psychic costs, in terms of the circumscription of their true ambitions and selves, the achievements of Fauset, Bennett, Johnson, the other women poets of the Harlem Renaissance stand among the most heroic in the twentieth century American poetry. (read more at Poets.org)

The Heart of a Woman
by Georgia Douglas Johnson
The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn, As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on, Afar o'er life's turrets and vales does it roam In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home. The heart of a woman falls back with the night, And enters some alien cage in its plight, And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

Haiti's 1.3 Million Camp Dwellers Waiting in Vain
By Correspondents*

Residents of the Sentra Park Camp listen as Marie Lucie Martel, 21, talks. Credit:Haiti Grassroots Watch

GRAND GOÂVE, Oct 15, 2010 (IPS/Haiti Grassroots Watch) - Rosie Benjamin is just one of over 1.3 million people living in Haiti's 1,354 squalid refugee camps. She and 1,200 others are jammed into 300 tents and plastic tarp-shacks on a soccer field in Grand Goâve.

Like about 70 percent of Haiti's refugee camps, the residents here are on their own. Apart from water deliveries, they get nothing from the government and the massive humanitarian apparatus on the ground. No food. No jobs. And no news about their future.

"We went to City Hall, we didn't learn anything. We went to Terre des Hommes, nothing," Banjamin said. "So far we haven't gotten anything. Nothing. We are sitting here and we have no idea what anyone is thinking."

Benjamin and her neighbours live on money from relatives overseas, share what food they have, and every now and then a non-governmental organisation (NGO) drops off some bulgar wheat and vegetable oil, but that's about it. Some of the children – many of whom will likely not go to school this year – even have orange-tinted hair.

Asked about that obvious sign of malnutrition and other conditions, Deborah Hyde, a member of the U.N. "Shelter Cluster" – a U.N.-mandated management team tasked with trying to coordinate the NGOs working on the shelter issue – said that in March, most food distributions stopped because, she said, the Haitian government requested that the NGOs cease the handouts.

Besides, she added, "[M]alnutrition is unfortunately something that has been here since the 1980s."

Hyde said that she felt some camp residents actually had a place to live, or could find one. Instead, they stay because, she said, "to be perfectly frank, are afraid they will miss a [food or aid] distribution."

But Benjamin and her neighbours say nothing could be further from the truth. Some camp residents are homeowners but they do not have the means to destroy their hulk of a home, truck away the rubble, and rebuild. Others are renters. Benjamin, like almost two-thirds of Haiti's homeless, rented her home. That means that she can't move her family back home until her landlord makes repairs.

Benjamin said nobody is in her camp by choice. And no wonder - recent reports document increasing expulsions, gang activity and sexual exploitation, unsanitary conditions and putrid, inadequate latrines.

And so, despite the massive flow of donations – from citizens and governments – to humanitarian agencies, nine months after the catastrophic earthquake which killed some 300,000 people and devastated the capital and other major cities, most of Haiti's "internally displaced people" are exactly where they were on Jan. 13: crammed into cardboard, canvas and plastic shantytowns, exposed to hot sun and to the frequent downpours and storms of Haiti's infamous "rainy season".

Last month, a storm touched down in the capital Port-au- Prince, killing six people and destroying 8,000 tents.

The apparent stagnation of resettlement efforts has led camp residents like Benjamin to assume there is no plan for the internal refugees.

But there is.

A three-week investigation by a new "reconstruction watch" effort, Ayiti Kale Je/Haiti Grassroots Watch, unearthed one. Unfortunately for Benjamin and her neighbours, however, it is a plan that is unlikely to succeed.

Crafted by U.N. agencies and the NGOs, the plan has three options:

• Return homeless to their neighbourhoods of origin, but into better-built and better-zoned houses;

• Convince some to move to the countryside;

• Put the rest in new housing developments on new land.

On paper – Haiti Grassroots Watch obtained the Oct. 5 draft of the "Strategy of Return and Resettlement", translated from French – the plan seems sound. Put families into safe "transitional shelters" or T-Shelters – wooden or plastic houses – while more permanent, earthquake-safe structures go up in properly planned rebuilt or new neighbourhoods.

But there are many challenges, including the fact that so far, the government hasn't officially bought into it.

Shelter Cluster Coordinator Gehard Tauscher said the lack of coordination and participation at the national level is a real roadblock, noting he wished "all layers of the government would come together and speak with one voice."

"I wish they would lock up all of the people in a nice place for a weekend – the U.N., the agency people and the national government – and not let them out until they make decisions," he said.

There are so many other obstacles, almost every step of the plan appears difficult, if not nearly impossible, to implement.

Take the T-Shelters, for example. First of all, there are over 300,000 families who need safe shelters. The agencies and NGOs are planning to build only 135,000. What about the other 165,000 families? And where will the shelters be put?

That's not an insurmountable challenge. NGOs can try to negotiate leases for families like Benjamin's. But but who will pay the lease?

That leads to another - Haiti's "land problem".

Haiti's land tenure system is "a bordello… a complete disorder that has been going on for 200 years," according to Bernard Etheart, director of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform.

Ever since Haiti's independence, dictators have stolen, sold or given land to their families and allies. Many "owners" do not have titles to prove their ownership, while some parcels have two or three "owners", all with "legal" papers.

Added to the land issue is another roadblock – quite literally. There are an estimated 20 to 30 million cubic tonnes of rubble around the capital and Haiti's smaller affected cities that experts say will take years to clear.

In its three-article series, Haiti Grassroots Watch ran through the plan and pointed out the challenges, concluding that the problem of Haiti's 1.3 million homeless can't be dealt with until the underlying structural issues are tackled.

Dr. Paul Farmer, the U.N. Deputy Special Envoy for Haiti and also co-founder of Partners in Health, put it this way: "[W]hat happened on Jan. 12 is aptly described as an 'acute- on-chronic' event."

Sanon Renel of FRAKKA, the Front for Reflection and Action on the Housing Issue, a coalition of camp committees and human rights groups that advocates for the right to housing, echoed Farmer.

"The NGOs don't have a solution to the country's problems. We need more than a short-term solution. We need another kind of state - a state that serves the majority," he said.

In the meantime, camp dwellers are getting impatient. Benjamin's neighbour, 21-year-old Marie Lucie Martel, said she was tired of seeing the NGOs "making tonnes of money, driving expensive rental cars".

"I have a message for the government and all the NGOs. If they don't take care of us, we will revolt. They won't be able to drive down this highway. They will call us violent – they will call us all kinds of names. But we are being forced to do this, because 'hungry dogs don't play around'," she warned.

*Read the complete series, see accompanying videos and listen to audio podcasts at Haiti Grassroots Watch – http://www.haitigrassrootswatch.org. Ayiti Kale Je (Haiti Eyes Peeled, in Creole), Haiti Grassroots Watch in English and Haïti Veedor (Haiti Watcher in Spanish), is a collaboration of two well-known Haitian grassroots media organisations, Groupe Medialternatif/Alterpresse (http://www.alterpresse.org/) and the Society for the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS - http://www.saks- haiti.org/), along with two networks – the network of women community radio broadcasters (REFRAKA) and the Association of Haitian Community Media (AMEKA), which is comprised of community radio stations located throughout the country.

(END)

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