Editor’s Note
To spend time with the works in this issue is to create, in this present moment, new coordinates of being. A safe locus where definitions and meanings pass between the reader and writer. All that this exchange entails: The accuracies and inaccuracies of self-invention and identification. The simultaneity of experience. The overlap of recognition and insight. That is the aim here. That is what became clear to me as the works came together.
This issue isn’t a definitive contemporary body of work that attempts to suggest womanness in 2023. It lives within the context of work that has come before it and work that will come after it. Yet it offers fresh takes. It brings news and perspectives that are missing, urgent or need reiteration.
The voices here, new, old and assured are contemplating individuation or asserting self-identification to varying degrees. The poets turn to science, sex or loss to communicate what is most urgent to them. They are ironic, philosophical, raw, diaristic, gut-punchy, experimental or all the above.
One writer wonders how a name acquires its status in society, and what self-identification means. Another writer suggests that self-identification is in fact pre-destination.
There is the immersive and image-rich recounting of a traveler’s walk that shifts between ecological inquiry and self-probe. At some point, the writer wonders: What happens when two women encounter themselves in nature, without a mediating language? What information passes between them? How does this mode of knowing become codified/preserved?
The places where women encounter each other in society are frequently unsafe. When they are safe at all, this safety is not assured, and subject to disruptions. A character in one short story comes to a moment of unsafety, where she witnesses a terrible injustice and is immobilized by it. She is removed from it and yet fully cognizant of the scene, the scale of it, and the knowledge that she can only witness.
The works here have in common a grasp of mythology, voice, and rootedness. They each determine their own form and reveal what information they choose or see fit.
I’m thrilled to share this issue with readers. Enjoy!
Kechi Nomu
Guest Editor, The Women Issue
Cover Art by Abisola Gbadamosi – Emi Ni
WORKS
FICTION
NON FICTION
POETRY
VISUAL ARTS
Abisola Gbadamosi
