Tag: migrant writing

A Short History Of The Italian language

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by Moreno Giovannoni   Morè.   Morè.   Only an Italian can say that properly and there’s only one person left who calls me that. The rest are dead.   The first words I ever heard were Italian ones. The first word I ever spoke was an Italian word – papà. This was according to my poor mum who stopped speaking Italian when her vocal cords froze, together with the rest of her, in a nursing home bed, a few weeks before she died. We sat with her and exchanged the occasional Italian word. We spoke Italian words to her even…

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The double lives of writers

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by Roanna Gonsalves Most aspiring writers across the world face conflicting demands in the pursuit of a literary career. We must work to develop our skills as writers, get published, hope to achieve recognition from peers and from the literary establishment, gain a wider local and global readership, while at the same time trying to sustain ourselves financially usually from work other than writing fiction. In effect, we lead what the French sociologist Bernard Lahire calls a “double life” [1].   This mobility in and out of the field is such an ordinary aspect of writers’ lives that it is…

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“Humor is vengeance.”

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by Roanna Gonsalves The first time I heard the line “Humor is vengeance”, something surged in my brain and my body. I understood its outside as well as its inside, the pitter pat patter of its near perfect dactylic feet, the subatomic particles in its electric charge. Hunting it down, I found it in the second part of Paul Beatty’s Introduction to Hokum: An anthology of African American humour (Bloomsbury, 2006). I knew what Beatty meant by “Humor is vengeance.” I’ve channeled his words to explain my own work in The Permanent Resident, a collection of short fiction published in…

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