#segun-idowu

#segun-idowu

Valeria Luiselli, an acclaimed author, discusses the intricacies of Julio Cortázar's 'The Night Face Up,' highlighting its themes and narrative structure that intertwine reality and dreams.

Eshu's proverb tells both a story of reparation and of ancestrality by joyfully bending spacetime conventions and accessing subjects from the past with present actions.

Eliades Ochoa's aura is so powerful that under the generous rays of sunlight streaming through the large window on this March morning, he evokes a Western film.

The best argument I can make for why I like reading fiction in translation is because it facilitates the psychedelic experience of encountering someone else's subjectivity twice over. The translator must act as a prismatic filter, faithfully attempting the impossible task of replicating someone else's experiences and ideas. To read in translation is to read two stories in harmony with each other: The one the author wants to tell and the one the translator has brought into your linguistic world.

No single musician better represents that contribution and its nearly forgotten history than pianist Sidney Porter. From 1941 until his untimely death in 1970, he cast a 6'8" shadow over Portland's jazz scene as both a performer and nightclub owner. Two months after he died, more than 3,000 people filled the Hoyt Hotel in a 10-hour show of respect that included 20 bands and more than 160 musicians.

The only thing most people know about epiphytes, if they know about them at all, is that they're rootless. That's not quite true - they develop highly specialized root systems adapted to wherever they land. In Epiphytic Elucidations at Patel Brown Gallery, Calgary-based artist Marigold Santos takes this fact as more than a metaphor. The exhibition uses epiphytes - plants that grow on other plants without harming them - as a framework for the expansive ways diasporas form through material labor.

The photos, in Ollie's words, lean towards "quiet symmetry". The photo Man on Bike, a particuarly pleasing shot which shows a figure stationary, seemingly pausing to take a call, is often mistaken as staged. According to Ollie, it's "entirely serendipitous". He continues: "I was wandering through Ikoyi when I saw him stop, completely unaware of me, and everything just aligned - the colours, the posture, the stillness."

Throughout many immigrant experiences, stories collected from family members can be a starting point for migrants. The memories gleaned from parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles-who crossed dozens of borders at great risk and with immense pain-can settle into the consciousness of new host communities for decades. For the migrants, these stories and memories represent the first step into a new world and contain lifelines with the potential and promise to build new, resilient identities and a sense of belonging in often hostile environments.

Walking through Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imaginationat the Museum of Modern Art, I noticed that the exhibition didn't have definite sections or texts, and the wall labels abstained from naming the nationalities of the photographers. It was an invigorating experience to be in a show that eschews geographic boundaries set up by Western nations, as well as rejects a cause-and-effect narrative that centers Western colonialism as a framework for understanding African aesthetic production.

From Senegal to Somalia and Egypt to South Africa, credit alert notifications from fintech apps such as Western Union or WorldRemit often set the mood for the rest of the day, week or even month. Transfers from workers within the continent and the diaspora to their relatives are often referred to as the black tax, whereby one person's salary and relative success can become the safety net for a whole extended family.

It was the first Wednesday of December and the last One-Page Wednesday of 2025. Hosted by Portland novelist Emme Lund (The Boy with a Bird in His Chest) at the Literary Arts bookstore, the free monthly event is an open mic that functions more like a public writers' group. Students, aspiring writers, and National Book Award-winning authors hang out and read aloud one page from a work in progress.

I think there's a deep loneliness to her life that cohabiting with her brother kept at bay-and, now that he's gone, she is forced to face it. As more of Kim's letters are delivered, Helen becomes invested in the narrative they form, as if she were piecing together a puzzle, one that, in some ways, echoes her own past. Kim's family is Muslim, from Pakistan.

Because, let's face it, creative work does require some form of faith. It is a tumultuous thing to launch an idea into a vast nothingness and hope that it makes a light bright enough to be found by others. Luckily, these luminaries were my light, and I hope they may become yours as well, and - more so - that these snippets lead you to more of their work.