What I'm Reading #31

I know I've shared before how wonderful the periodical, Virginia Quarterly Review is, and having just received my latest (summer 2010) issue, I'm disposed to say it again. Every issue comes with a dominant theme and this issue is sub-titled: "Inside Iran, A Special Symposium Of Writers From Iran". There are essays, as well as, photographs and poems. I've only read one of these so far, "Lust, Devotion, & the Binary Code" by Kamin Mohammadi. As a gay man who first tried to imagine an adult life in the late 70's in a rural town in southern Michigan...I felt a strange tinge of recognition.

Other essays, stories, poems, graphic novels, photographs, and reviews fill the rest of the issue.

The one that I've just finished is referred to as a Dispatch. It's title's "Island in the Sand" and speaks of the author's (Anthony Ham) journey to an ancient and fading village in the heart of the Malian Sahara called Araouane. It is a journey from Timbuktu that on a map encompasses a mere 250 km, but in the hands of this skilled writer (and photographer) we travel through both space and time back to the inception of Islam. Through the eyes of his Taureg friend, Azima, we see the world of this nomadic people as it teeters on the verge of extinction crushed between nationalism and modernity. Baba, his faithful Songhai driver, opens a door onto the world of ethnic strife that has torn at the fragile social constructs of the modern nation of Mali since it's creation from the clothe formerly known as French West Africa. And it is through the gentle observations and unquestioned hospitality of Mohammed Bashir, the imam of Araouane, that we see the fierce devotion to place that is both honorable and baffling at once.

In a nutshell, reading articles like this not only expand my understanding of the world, but enlarge my heart's capacity to cherish it.

A second dispatch in this issue is a collaboration between photographer Andre Lamberton and poet Kwame Dawes. Lamberton recorded images from the inner city neighborhoods of Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, and New Orleans; and Dawes set the images to poetry. It's a devastating act of grace. Neither my mind nor my heart will ever be the same.