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Rage Letters, The
By Valérie Bah
Translated by Kama La Mackerel
An exhausted security guard dreams of home. A sculptor and a pothead have great sex -- in the shadow of wax ex-lovers. A diversity workshop devolves into a familiar nightmare.
Throughout this deadpan collection, determined, damned, and triumphant characters appear and reappear, ... Read more
Overview
An exhausted security guard dreams of home. A sculptor and a pothead have great sex -- in the shadow of wax ex-lovers. A diversity workshop devolves into a familiar nightmare.
Throughout this deadpan collection, determined, damned, and triumphant characters appear and reappear, and their links become clear over the course of the fragmented narrative. The author playfully traces the portrait of the intertwined lives of a group of Black queer and trans friends as they navigate the social violence, traumas, and contradictions of their circumstances.
Originally published in French in 2021 by les Éditions du remue-ménage, as part of the Martiales collection, the stories in Bah's The Rage Letters -- set in Montreal and beyond -- are sometimes brief, often conversational, and always generative of possibilities through the characters' desire, rage, and acts of rebellion.
Valérie Bah
Valérie Bah is a Tiohtià:ke-based filmmaker and writer whose work explores intergenerational trauma & healing, as well as mundane/radical acts of survival. Couched in magical realism, Val's narratives are driven by Black feminist thought and lived experience.
Kama La Mackerel
Kama La Mackerel is a Montreal-based Mauritian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist, educator, community-arts facilitator and literary translator who works within and across performance, photography, installations, textiles, digital art and literature. Their art practice is intertextual and intertextural. They have exhibited and performed their work internationally and their writing in English, French and Kreol has appeared in publications both online and in print. Their debut poetry collection ZOM-FAM was published by Metonymy Press in 2020.
Reviews
Press coverage for the French edition, Les enragé. e.s:
"Les enragé. e.s describes, in a spirited language, the happy obstinacy of those who, despite setbacks, refuse to let their joy be diminished by the violence of a society that tolerates them only at the price of their silence or their obedience. "
-- Le Devoir
"I wanted to relate to something unique to our generation of Black, queer and trans people that our parents didn't necessarily experience. It was important for me to talk about both the shitty jobs and the burnout and the magic of our everyday lives. " -- Valérie Bah, from an interview with Journal Métro
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What are some of the books ALU staff can't wait to get their hands on this 2023 Spring season? Discover (and preorder!) some of our faves in this sneak preview.
- Dimensions 200 pages, 5.25 x 8 x 0.5 in
- Published August 15, 2023
- Publisher Metonymy Press
- Category Fiction
- Keywords Literary
Other titles by Kama La Mackerel
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