Braiding Sweetgrass

From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.

Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, [...] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land.

Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,” Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.” These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”

In the late 1970s, Lindiwe Mabuza, a.k.a. Sono Molefe, sent out a call for poems written by women in anc camps and offices throughout Africa and the world. The book that resulted, published and distributed in Europe in the early 1980s, was banned by the apartheid regime.

Authorised by the editor, this re-issue of Malibongwe re-establishes a place for women artists in the history of South Africa's liberation. These are the struggles within the Struggle: a book that records the hopes and fears, the drives and disappointments, and the motivation and resilience of women at the front lines of the battle against apartheid. Here we see the evidence, too often airbrushed out of the narratives of national liberation, of a deep and unrelenting radicalism within women; of a dream of a South Africa in which not only freedom reigned, but justice too.

Many bulbous plants have been dubbed ‘heralds of spring’, but none is more deserving of the title than those carrying actual megaphones to spread the word – daffodils. To know a daffodil is to love a daffodil. Come join our cult.

Including:
I Like the Daffodils – An introduction by Lou-Lou van Staaveren to the genus Narcissus, with amazing photographs by Elspeth Diederix from her garden.
Dafs in Art History – Painters, poets and writers all over the world, have been inspired by the daffodils’ dual aura of macabre and threatening elegance.
The Daffodil Society – The members of The Daffodil Society in the UK promote the genus Narcissus for everyone’s greater pleasure. Photographer Luke Stephenson followed them to various shows where their flowers are reviewed.
How to follow your nose – Philosopher Christopher F. Julien invites us into his fragrant garden where scent mixes with memories with drawings by Pom Koolen.
Artist Tina Farifteh digs into her personal archive and writes a beautiful account of her memories growing up in Iran, and how daffodils have become a staple for New Year’s celebrations and a symbol of hope.

Cover and inside cover by Lou Buche
Centrefold miniatures by Jesse Fischer

The white cubical house, the vernacular architecture in the Aegean Archipelago, knows no author. Its capacity to resist harsh climatic and topographic circumstances has been improved and adjusted through time and seems today close to perfection. The white-washed Cycladic House has become iconic to the image of Greece through the construction of national and tourism narratives. What happens when an architect steps into this process of anonymous transmission of skills? In 1966 music composer, architect, and engineer Iannis Xenakis articulated a response to this tradition and designed, from his base in Paris, a holiday house on the island of Amorgos while choosing to remain absent throughout the construction process.

CONTENTS

Constructing through Absence
by Hulya Ertas

Meteorites
by Mâkhi Xenakis

Summer Home for François-Bernard Mâche by Iannis Xenakis, 1966–74
by Sharon Kanach

Villa Mâche: a harsh hijack against the space of the sun
by David Bergé

Traveling to the Cyclades: Modernist Projections
by Dimitra Kondylatou

Iannis Xenakis, Selected Projects from Critical Index
by Sven Sterken

A Textbook for the Ecocene is a how-to guide for connecting to self, community and planet. The Ecocene is an emergent and imagined geologic era where all humyns are living in reciprocity with their ecosystems again. Each textbook chapter shares practical exercises to try at home, Earth-centered theory and spirituality, and interviews with Black and Indigenous Earth warriors—cultural workers generating planetary liberation in their everyday lives. These testimonios from Johanna Iraheta, Bruje Fuego, Raquel Lemus, Patty Denisse, Jasmine Nyende, Queen Hollins and Olivia Chumacero shine with wisdom and advice for new and seasoned Earth stewards alike. Created originally as Sarita Dougherty's DIY PhD Dissertation, A Textbook for the Ecocene is a curricula for eco-feminista educations, DIY degrees and planetary destinies. We are activating the Ecocene right now, one step at a time. What we pay attention to grows.

Self-published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Women's Center for Creative Work. Edited by Simone Krug, copy edited by Gowri Chandra and Demi Corso. Designed by MJ Balvanera, Riso-printed by Neko Natalia.

SARITA DOUGHERTY (she/her, they/them) is a painter, parent, collaborator and educator of Cajun, Irish and Andean descent. Sarita is a cocreator of The School for the Ecocene Cooperative, offering a DIY PhD and more programs for planetary liberation. She currently lives and cultivates habitat on Ohlone Land. Sarita’s book, A Textbook for the Ecocene, is a continuation of her Artist Residency at The Feminist Center for Creative Work in Fall 2018.

‘Five Devours’ is a short essay in five parts about need and food as a part of speech, about speech’s relationship to nourishment and hunger; the currency between eating and speaking, expending and consuming.

12 pages
150 x 200mm
risograph printed 
edition of 150