The Political Pen
with Kagiso Lesego Molope, Jordan Abel and Saeed Teebi
Hosted by Jamie Chai Yun Liew
If humanising Palestinians without purposefully tugging on heartstrings is what Teebi set out to do, he has accomplished his goal with aplomb. His stories — original, intelligent and finely nuanced — present characters who, although vastly different, are united in a uniquely Palestinian form of loneliness, one that stems from feeling out of place in a world that sees them as a nuisance
We close the Fall Edition spotlighting three authors whose work explores the ways community is shaped and defined by history and political violence. Writing from and about occupied territories, these three remarkable talents speak to a universal need to be free.
In her award-winning novel, Such a Lonely, Lovely Road, Kagiso Lesego Molope explores the cost of coming out in South Africa. All his life Kabelo Mosala has been the perfect child to his doting absent parents, who show him off every chance they get. But Kabelo’s one wish has always been to get as far away from the township as he possibly can and never come back. A few weeks before he leaves for university, however, he forms a close bond with Sediba, one of his childhood friends, confirming his long-held suspicion that he is gay. Against all odds, the two young men make their way back to each other, risking scorn from the community that raised them.
From Jordan Abel, the acclaimed, boundary-breaking author of NISHGA comes, a hypnotic exploration of land and legacy. Reimagining James Fenimore Cooper’s nineteenth-century text The Last of the Mohicans from the contemporary perspective of an urban Nisga’a person whose relationship to land and traditional knowledge was severed by colonial violence, Jordan Abel explores what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory and complicates popular understandings about Indigenous storytelling. The result is a bold and profound new vision of history that decentres human perception and forgoes Westernised ways of seeing.
Saeed Teebi’s intense, engrossing collection,, plunges into the lives of characters grappling with their experiences as Palestinian immigrants to Canada. A doctor teaches his girlfriend about his country, only for her to fall into a consuming obsession with the Middle East conflict. A math professor risks his family’s destruction by slandering the king of a despotic, oil-rich country. A university student invents an imaginary girlfriend to fit in with his callous, womanising roommates. A refugee who escaped violent circumstances rebels against the kindness of his sponsor. These taut stories engage the immigrant experience and reflect the unique experiences of the Palestinian diaspora.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
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