An Interruption

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The Review

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An Interruption
Guy Gunaratne

On the poet Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Nisha Ramayya suggests a voice that ‘speaks from many directions’. Writers of colour have long understood that to speak in hostile spaces requires originality and a plurality of voices. Jean Rhys, George Lamming and Linton Kwesi Johnson, with their use of vernacular and nation languages, recognised the power in exceeding accord. In challenging hostility with the din of invention, they gestured toward bountiful new territory.

For contemporary writers, whose engagement with language is often misinterpreted as representational politics, or ‘urban’ (read: non-white) self-expression, their legacy serves as affirmation, even permission, to exceed partitions, and to interrupt formal arrangements. I can recall Kamau Brathwaite’s well-known provocation: ‘hurricanes do not roar in pentameter’. Brathwaite suggested that an interruption – to a word, a sentence, or tradition – was, in fact, requisite for new literary discovery.

It’s in this spirit that we publish our first edition of The Review. The message to our industry in doing so is not one of corrective, or response, but rather collective self-assertion. We been here. By staying attentive to the chimerical, disobedient, and unruly voices among us, we also ensure that originality and plurality remain at the heart of our culture.

In our inaugural issue, Colin Grant invites writer and translator Shara Atashi to consider two new books that weave together tapestries of the self from writers Emma Dabiri and Catherine Joy White. Irenosen Okojie brings the young novelist Shani Akilah together with writer Yvonne Singh to review Jyoti Patel’s debut novel, and Karen McCarthy Woolf’s latest. Will Harris invites poet Nisha Ramayya to reflect on matters of dispossession and transformation in new works from Bhanu Kapil and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh. Illustrator Sharon King-Chai, brought in by Margaret Sturton, considers Flavia Z. Drago’s intoxicatingly strange new picture book. While Kiran Millwood Hargrave invites writer Jasbinder Bilan to review Hiba Noor Khan’s extraordinary young adult novel, which recounts a true-to-life rescue of Jewish lives by Muslim members of an anti-fascist resistance.

One of our regular spaces will be held by Sarah Shaffi, who casts an attentive eye over recently published and forthcoming books for Notable. Another is The Last Word, where we hold space for essays and extracts that speak to the most vital concerns of the moment. For this issue, we conclude with Palestinian-Icelandic writer Mazen Maarouf, whose essay ‘Postcard’, runs like a ripple, back through its pages.

This is a first edition that speaks from many directions. As with any cacophony, what is discerned lies in relation rather than representation alone. My thanks to our editorial board, Sunny Singh, Colin Grant and Jamilah Ahmed, as well as House of Thought for bringing us home.

© Guy Gunaratne

Guy Gunaratne

Guy Gunaratne is the author of Mister, Mister (2023) and In Our Mad and Furious City (2018) which was the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.