tribe:write issue 1

ISSUE 1 TRIBE WRITE 1

2 TRIBE WRITE ISSUE 1

And so we finally begin this chapter in the world of tribe. It has been wonderful reading through the wealth of submissions we have already received over the past couple of months, and I hope that you find this first selection presented for you as pleasurable and exciting as I do. We felt it was important for the pieces to connect to the author on a personal level, and so have included photographs of workspaces and inspiration from some of our contributors alongside their writing, as well as some wonderful artwork from our talented illustrators.

On top of the submissions, we showcase some entries from our ongoing 1story project, taking inspiration from Hemingway, who once wrote what he deemed the shortest story ever written, ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ We took to twitter and asked you to try your hand…

We also have an interview with lyricist Kieran Haynes and the first of two in-terviews with pioneering musician Lydia Lunch, who has paved the way for countless creative minds with her dark, honest lyrics and spoken word. Lydia was awe-inspiring to speak with and her uncompromising attitude is just what tribe:write strives for. For more from Lydia, look out for her previously unpub-lished photographs, which she will talk about in a future edition of the visual arts magazine.

We couldn’t have picked a better time to release our first issue of tribe:write here in the South West. I have been fortunate enough to attend Ways With Words festival in Dartington this past week, which saw everyone from P.D. James to Jang Jin-Seong, the exiled former court poet of Kim Jong-il pass through the beautiful – if somewhat drenched – grounds. Look forward to a blog post following soon. And of course next weekend holds the Port Eliot festi-val, with Ali Smith and John Cooper Clarke speaking amongst others.

But wherever you are in the world, I hope our first issue inspires you.

Tilly Craig

Editor

WELCOME TO tribe:write ISSUE 1Director

Mark Doyle

Production Editor

Ali Donkin

Editor

Tilly Craig

Design

Simon Howe

Contributors

Obinna Udenwe, Joanna

Larsen Burnett, Michael

Sping, Meggie Wood,

Ayana Edwards, Guy

Phenix, Dabaluthethwa

Tfwala, Tilly Craig, Rose-

bud Ben-Oni, Teresa Arm-

strong, Alister Gardiner,

Molly Taylor, Felicity

Notley, Chioma Iwunze-

Ibian, Heidi Corbally, Irina

Serban, Jordan Rogers

Contact

To Submit:

[email protected]

To say hello:

[email protected]

Full contact details can be

found on our website.

www.tribemagazine.org


MamA's Razor

- Obinna udenwe

reptile nature

- micheal spring

the nightly news

- ayana edwards

the young men

- guy phenix

my electronic deceiver

- dabaluthethwa tfwala

lydia lunch

- interviewed by tilly craig

the amaranthine thread (excerpt) - rosebud ben-oni

the badger

- alistair gardiner

apology

- molly taylor

kieran haynes

- interviewed by felicty Notley

splashing tails

- chioma iwunze-ibiam

foxes

- heidi corbally

watching the walking night

- irina serban

#1story

- various contributors

4

8

12

14

18

20

24

28

29

30

46

50

54

56

CONTENTS PAGE


MAMA’SRAZORS


Mama delivered babies. At nights, when we slept on the small bed

made of logs, with smelly torn mats spread on them, and fought for space with mosquitoes; I would hear sudden footsteps and shouts. And then the mat serving as the door would be yanked open by sweaty arms. Running feet would rush in, and mama would wake.

They were terrible nights. We lived in a hut made of mud and the roof finished with raffia. The floor was plastered with cow dung and the walls were dec-orated with paintings from the smoke that always rose from the cooking tri-pod just by the corner of the room.

I was always awake before mama, be-cause I had gotten accustomed to the running feet that came every other night. Even when the crickets made chirpings, I would still wake, thinking they were coming. Mama would rub the back of her wrinkled palm on her weary eyes and shoo me out of the room.

“Go to mama Ezinne’s hut,” she would say. But she never knew that I wouldn’t go to my stepmother’s hut. I would sit by the side of our cracked hut, just beside the ujirisi tree and listen to the wails of the woman in labour, the soothing and calming words of mama, and the persuasive words of the wom-en that brought her. The men among them would stand in front of the hut, panting and pacing. If the moon was up, I would be able to see fear in their eyes.

After a short time, I would hear the cries of a baby – a piercing wail that would jostle me from my half sleep and I would stand and wait by the door. The men would jubilate and ex-change handshakes. Mama Ezinne and papa and others in the compound would troop out and converge in front

of our hut, congratulating the women and the men.

Mama would come out and go to the back of the hut where she kept her little shrine. The shrine had seven clay pots with feathers and dried chicken blood on them. Each time mama delivered a baby girl, the baby’s father would bring a fowl, and if it was a boy, they would bring a cock and mama would kill it at the shrine and allow the blood to drop on the pots. I would squat beside her and watch. After chanting and thank-ing Agbara for safe delivery, she would give the chicken to me and I would call Ezinne’s brother to help me roast it. I was mama’s only child.

Mama always made sure that blood never touched one of those pots, the one that was always covered. It con-tained mama’s delivery tools. Specifi-cally, the razors she used in cutting the placenta. After delivery, mama would come out of the hut and collect one of the numerous rusty razors in the spe-cial pot and use it to cut the placenta and return it later.

That was the part I enjoyed most. I loved the razor blades and the magic they could perform. Because of the ra-zors, I was loved by the other kids. Dur-ing the day times, when we played at the square, I would collect one of the razors from the pot and others would admire it and we would use it to cut our nails and use it to cut our mangoes and oranges.

BY OBINNA UDENWE

ILLUSTRATION BY JOANNA LARSEN BURNETT


AUTHORS OWN PHOTOGRAPGH


REPTILENATURE


I arrived at their flat one day to find Keith making an alligator from papier maché. He did this kind of thing for a living; con-structing props for films and theatre, ad-vertising gimmicks, window displays. I watched him for a while, laying the wet newspaper strips across the wire frame. It was nearly life-size. He looked pretty engrossed in it. I went downstairs to talk to his wife. A week later it was there on the table, dry-ing, its skin still showing old, fuzzy head-lines. It looked as though it was wearing grey pyjamas, but I could see that when it was painted, it might look pretty life-like. “What’s it for?” I asked him. “It’s a totem,” he said. Now that he was sleeping in a separate room from his wife, it would ward off unwelcome visitors, snap at their heels, make it uncomfortable and dangerous for them to stay. He had a wild look in his eyes when he told me. He showed me the paint he was going to use; green and grey, with bright yellow and black for the eyes. I left him to it and gave his wife a lift into town. Keith persuaded his wife to go on an ocean cruise to see if they could possibly have a future together.

The next time I went round, Keith was making tea in the kitchen. “Go on inside,” he said. He sounded excited. I found the alligator in the bathroom. I patted its stiff, painted head absently, worrying about my teeth in the mirror and thinking that I would have to tell Keith sooner or later about the affair I was having with his wife. The alligator didn’t stir, or make a sound. A tap dripped in the silence. “What’s the alligator doing in the bath-room?” I asked Keith. “Something’s happened,” he told me put-ting down the tea and grabbing me by the lapels. “It must have been when we were out at sea, miles from land, under the stars. Just like the alligators.” “But, what? What’s happened?” I said, concerned that he might have gone out of his mind. But it was worse than that. He bent forward and whispered in my ear. “An egg,” he said. “Fertilised.”

BY MICHAEL SPRING

ILLUSTRATION ON PREVIOUS PAGE BY JOANNA LARSEN BURNETT

ILLUSTRATION OPPOSITE BY MEGGIE WOOD

For years, Keith and his wife had been trying for a baby. Everyone knew that. It had put a big strain on their relationship. Finally, they both de-

cided that it wasn’t working. Her eggs refused to fertilise. Their prospec-tive family was still born.


THENIGHTLYNEWSBY AYANA EDWARDS


the night’s black fingers

taunted them

and brought them out of their houses

black boys

troubled by the night and causing the night’s troubles

rushing black nose bleeds and

boiling black blood

blue black eyes swollen and puffy black lips

from fighting

so damn hard

and being angry

all of the time

black skin made irrelevant and dangerous

and most prominent

simultaneously


pick and prod at those wounds

that absorb everything like black holes

and point to the black earth to which they will soon return

devils conjure black magic

that stirs brown irises black and back again

and still


do not let go

each night a report

is stripped from packed grains of obsidian

and amethyst

stretched like black asphalt

and written in fluid black ink

the news inside of a black box

of last night’s black night drama

and a photo array of guilty brown faces.

THENIGHTLYNEWSBY AYANA EDWARDS


THEYOU-NGMEN


Based on an event from the book In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

I was standing in a frozen state of mixed emotions as I looked at the picture of Per-

ry along with the grim article; the only word that stood out was ‘murder’. The phone rang; I knew it was David before it got to the second ring. I grasped he too must have read the paper this morning; it wasn’t like there was much else to do in Deerfield. A mere ten miles West of Holcomb, along the Booko-ver Rd, a long way from my last goodbye to Perry in Circle City, Alaska and many years.

“Have you read the Garden City Telegram this morning?” stated David in his usual di-rect way, knowing quite well I had from the delayed answer to his question. “Yes” I re-plied, he replied knowing my answer before I stated it. “Perry would never have done this” a tinge of emotion starting to creep into his voice. “Perry wouldn’t hurt anybody, he couldn’t, he wouldn’t” now that tinge had grown into a cracking of the dam as his emotions began to evolve into something all together more dangerous; anger.

“Calm down David, I will be around in 20 minutes. I just need to let Sally know where I am off too, then I will call at yours”. I put down the phone knowing full well I wasn’t going to tell Sally anything, I just wanted a few minutes to compose myself. This couldn’t be true. Perry Smith was not a criminal, let alone a mass murderer.

David is a faithful friend, many would say not to trust his kind, but I do not judge peo-ple based on the darkness of their skin. We make an odd couple what with me being a red head but we make a great team. Today we were going to be a team rectifying a po-lice injustice.

David was waiting on his porch when I pulled up, coat in hand. He jumped in the

car, we were heading to Garden City no matter what I was thinking. We needed to see Perry for ourselves.

We spent the journey there reminiscing about Perry and laughing, perhaps with rose tinted glasses, at the friendship that we had had with him. The decision was made. There was no way we were leaving Perry Smith, our friend, to take the blame for a crime he never committed.

We knew the buildings layout rather well having been taken on the ‘behave or you’ll end up in here’ tours when we were younger. We reckoned they would have split the two of them up. Perhaps we would be lucky and Perry would be in the woman’s cell. An es-cape from there would be at least possible, but why the need for the escape of an inno-cent man. It dawned upon me at this stage that deep down I knew it was true, how much do you really know anyone? I darned not say my thoughts to David, he was set on Perry’s innocence and there was no chang-ing his mind.

We arrived outside Finney County Court-house and took a look around. We figured out what floor the cells would be on and started to stake out, for the chance to catch a sighting of Perry. We spent a few hours doing this.

Then he appeared, it seemed as though it was in slow motion and our proximity to him below the tree gave us the perfect op-portunity to catch his eye. We caught it al-right, the eye of a murderer. Not the eye of a friend, a person who we knew, not even that of a stranger. These were the eyes of some-body who had done wrong.I looked at David, I was unsure if he felt the same. We smiled up at Perry thinking per-


haps our being there would serve as some sort of reassurance that people were think-ing of him. He did not seem to recognize us, perhaps because of the years or maybe because of the person he had become.

We headed off to the car to try and sort out a of plan of escape that I had no intentions of following through with. I began to probe Da-vid to see how he felt about Perry. “So was he as you expected him to be?” David took his time to answer me, pondering methodi-cally around his head for a suitable answer. “I....Well he kind of shocked me. He looks a lot different yet he has hardly changed since we saw him last, if that makes any sense”. “He looks like a murderer” I finally forced it out and quickly glanced at David expecting him to recoil in horror. “He does, doesn’t he?” was David’s response. We talked a while before planning on coming back again tomorrow.

Our view points never changed in the hand-ful of times we subsequently went back to see Perry Smith. He was a murderer, not the carefree friend we had known in Alaska. Something had changed in him. David and I never discussed Perry Smith ever again and thinking about him is seldom done. I cannot however claim to have not been saddened when I heard the news regarding April 14, 1965. No matter how bad a person is, no-body should have the right to take a life, other than our Lord, Jesus Christ.

BY GUY PHENIX

ILLUSTRATION BYJOANNA LARSEN BUNETT

PHOTOGRAPH OF AUTHORS WORKSPACE


MY ELECTRONIC DECEIVER

I grew up a believer of your portrayals till I lost hopeI would try to emulate what you made me believe was most dopeSamuel leading a good lifestyle yet working a menial jobSomeone losing a child and yet failing to sobAn employee embezzling funds and yet no probeRandomly shooting in public yet one is a copAll this and more till I grew to understand that nopeIt is mere acting! It is just a soap!!!

I remember the Robocop days Astronauts journeyed to the sun, unscathed by its raysFuses, cables and electric current. Man, in my mind were strange wild waysRobots drove cars at lightning speedIncubators enhanced human brooding from just a simple seedAliens graced the shores of earth. Oh what a breed!You should have seen how hard I tried to emulate the aliens’ diction It would take ages for me to stomach that it was just scientific fiction.

I have viewed questionable African expeditionsExpeditions somewhat meant to promote attritionPerfidious journeys to the Sub Saharan regionBig hypocrites and master deceivers on a missionI have watched wars. I have watched so many a legionI am your addict. I have even installed a satellite dish-in,A top of the range 3D versionOnly but to improve my scope and visionI am so addicted to you my televisionYou are one of my listed hobbies in my CVYou are my entertainment, my beloved T.V.Long live!! Long live, my beloved T.V.

BY DEBALUTHETHWA TFWALA PHOTOGRAPH OF AUTHORS WORKSPACE


LYDIALUNCH

Lydia Lunch is something of an underground powerhouse. With an in-timidating list of past and current projects, she has utilized every aspect of creativity possible in order to explore and deliver her brazen, guttural war-cry.

In the late 70s she co-founded seminal No-Wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks with James Chance. She went on to collaborate with everyone from Sonic Youth to Marc Almond whilst simultaneously entering the domain of spoken word with her company, Widowspeak. She has also written and starred in numerous films, such as Richard Kern’s iconic and subversive ‘Fingered’ and ‘The Right Side of My Brain’. Not content with that, Lunch has since written both plays and books whilst still making music and touring with her band, Big Sexy Noise. Her most recent foray has been a se-ries of photographs, which we will be showcasing in a future issue of tribe magazine. Interviewed by Tilly Craig.

Tilly Craig: You’ve said before that you want to focus on delivering an under-standing of pain and getting through that, rather than painting a palatable relief for people…

Lydia Lunch: Absolutely, although some people do find relief in it’s way. That’s why I can continue to create because wounded people need to be whispered into their ear sometimes and sometimes they need to use my voice as that, that screams out against the ever-present en-emy and I’m very happy to be that vehi-cle for them, of course, and that’s why I continue. It’s interesting; Big Sexy Noise just played Paris last weekend. It was at a long passageway shopping mall in an art gallery. It was three stories down with stone walls, stone steps and it was a big exhibition with lots of fantastic art mostly of women and others as well… the other species… and Big Sexy Noise played on this balcony, it was great but what I was

saying is that what I do, I do for the three or four other people in the audience that came crying to me about how much relief and power they’ve taken from what I’ve said and what I’ve said to them person-ally and in trying situations for them and that’s so wonderful.

TC: I’d like to ask you about audiences because you have said that you’re not re-ally interested in playing to the masses or huge audiences, do you think audiences have changed for you? And do you think the way that you use their energy has changed? Or is that something that has remained a constant?

LL: I think what’s interesting is that what I do is highly aggressive, that is always go-ing to be there. Even in my gentlest mo-ments there’s something distinctly and intensely passionate and only because there’s so few of us women that can dis-play that publicly without being a prosti-


LYDIALUNCH

tute’s parade or on a major record compa-ny and pretending they have power when it’s clearly ridiculous. And because, unbe-lievably so, its an oddity when women can show such passion and aggression. I think that the audience recognizes or is aware that it’s not them I’m confronting as much as the powers that be and the justice and the patriarchy. When I first started doing spoken word people just thought it was purely a verbal boxing match and, yes, it would get physical but I think there’s more awareness and it is so obvious how many lies we have to hear everyday. Its in-teresting, the size of my audience hasn’t changed and sometimes I think they’re recycled bodies baring the same souls, which is fine, aren’t we all? I have such a salon mentality about what I do that I will just continue to do it and those that need to hear the truth and need to find some beauty in a force of nature are go-ing to come to me and that’s it. That’s all I care about. And inspiring other people whether its people I collaborate with or whether its people that are inspired to create because of what I’ve done.

TC: Talking about collaborators, a lot of your collaborators and influences in fact, have been white and male; do you think now that there are more strong women emerging? Or are you still more drawn to masculine energies?

LL: Well, I have worked with Karen Fin-ley, the African-American poet Wanda Coleman, Carla Bozulich of the Geraldine Fibbers and Evangelista is just below my feet now, literally, in the apartment below staying in Barcelona for a few months. I’ve worked with Kim Gordon. I have an occasional thing called Sister Assassin with Jessie Evans, a great female saxo-phonist and Beatrice Antolini, a young Italian percussionist. I’m playing Lisbon with Beatrice this weekend in fact. So within creation I’m not looking for men or women, I’m looking for whoever has the right energy for that project. And now

I’m doing videos with Elise Passavant, a French artist who is with me in Barcelona and we’re illustrating the songs for my coming album with Cypress Grove. There are more men in music of course but it’s really about the personality and about the person and of course I always want to work with more women.

TC: It just seems that there’s an under-lying white male power and that’s really hard to escape in any form.

LL: Exactly, when people say why aren’t there more women in whatever, I always say, “well, maybe they’re too smart and they’re becoming surgeons or architects”. Possibly they realize that music is a mas-turbatory losing game unless its some-thing in your blood that you really have to fucking get out y’know? And I always like to say “If you don’t have a vision don’t give it a sound” Wouldn’t that have prevented a lot of rotten records from being made?

TC: I think that so many people bang on about feminism and re-appropriation of words like ‘bitch’ and ‘cunt’ without really understanding why, and not really having a rhyme or reason for it but just wanting to ‘burn their bras’ I guess.

LL: At this moment in time, what I think is so depleting and disgusting is the amount of middle-aged woman, running around in leotards doing bad dance music and being considered the most powerful ‘cre-ative’ women in the world. They’re pro-moting ridiculous fashions to bad, over-produced music that has no fucking soul and its been gobbled up. That has been presented as the empowerment of wom-en and to me is the most puke-worthy and also the most disheartening. I don’t need to name names but they know who they are and its fucking ridiculous.

TC: Well that’s what is so unique about you is that you’re unapologetic which really makes all the difference, in that


“If you don’t have a vision don’t give it a sound”

you’re not trying to create this fodder for the masses…LL: And its interesting y’know. I mean I’m not famous, I’m infamous but I’m not fa-mous enough to have paparazzi, I always figure you don’t stalk the stalker. Because I have willingly revealed and confessed my behaviours and I’m not like that train wreck crashing into a bank, as I like to call her, Courtney Love. It’s not like I hide my transgressions, it’s that you’re not going to see me falling down in public with no panties on. At the same time, the other horror of these moments is reality TV. I don’t have a Facebook, I don’t do Twitter, I always say I’m a twot I don’t do Twitter, I like assbook not Facebook.

TC: I probably should, but I can’t get my head around it!

LL: Of course there are many Lydia Lunch Facebook pages. They’re not mine; I don’t go on that shit. I always knew they were spies from the get go.

TC: It’s parasitic, I don’t trust it.

LL: It’s disgusting. Did you by any chance catch this fantastic documentary from the UK called Black Mirror? This three part series was so fantastic, particularly the X-Factor/American Idol episode. What’s amazing is that it’s the creators of Big Brother that have caused this society. It’s so fucking disgusting. Look at the Japa-nese; of course they’re pro-technology, they live online, but the reverse of this is that they become recluses and don’t leave their house and the last thing they want is ‘star power’, whatever that is.What I do is best consumed on a one to one basis or in an intimate environment. Not as some random lines on a page on-line, going out to the fucking black void of not even the universe. I think what I continue to do is so personal that it will always be at the same level, and it’s going to hit people personally and it’s going to hit those that need to see or hear and for

that I’m thankful.

TC: Because you’ve been talking about im-provisation and that obviously goes hand in hand with jazz…you’ve said before that a free mind equals the purest mind, so have you ever considered automatic writ-ing and what is your opinion on it?

LL: Well, yeah I think almost everything of what I do is what I call in-camera editing. When I set out to write something I don’t have cohesive notes of unpublished mate-rial or copious songs that haven’t been re-corded, I’m very economical, although I’m highly prolific in the sense that if I need a lyric I write a lyric. Usually I can write my lyrics in ten minutes but only when the song is ready to come. So kind-of what I do is automatic writing, but I just know when to wait. My process takes a lot of pacing, a lot of walking around, a lot of smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. Then when it hits, it comes out, whether it’s a song, a story, an essay or whatever. Like a longer story or essay I’ll write in maybe three sessions. Often if I’m record-ing a vocal I record it in one or two takes, like automatic singing. So in a sense what I’m always doing is automatic writing but I don’t force it. You can’t do that, so when it hits it’s ready and that’s just the way that I create.

TC: I’d like to know your take on modern poetry. A friend of mine once described the worst of it as ‘like watching someone masturbate badly’. Would you agree?

LL: Yes, but it doesn’t have to be. I mean, look at someone like John Cooper-Clarke. I was at a poetry festival a month or so ago in Wales and there were some really great people and again for the most part, if you don’t have a vision don’t write a fucking poem about it! I think for a lot of great writers, even though the writing might be good on the page, to bring essence to the words on stage is a very difficult thing indeed. I’m working on a piece that I’d


“If you don’t have a vision don’t give it a sound”

like to do next year called ‘Dirty Old Man’ where I’m the dirty old man, reading some of my favourite dirty old white men, to be able to show their words to people that maybe haven’t read them yet. I would love to do a one-woman play based on the writings of Henry Miller, Hubert Selby, De Sade or even Bukowski.

TC: You’ve said before that you’re a fan of Anaïs Nin, who I also really like but agree with you that the writing can be a bit ‘prettyfied’…

LL: It’s just not hitting me where it counts. I did a record called ‘Our Fathers Who Aren’t In Heaven’ where I read Hubert Selby, Henry Rollins and Don Bajema. And actually I just released a very limited vi-nyl out of Austria with Philippe Petit and I’m reading a passage from ‘Black Spring’ by Henry Miller. I think this could be re-ally good because you’ve read, I’ve read and some people with technology they read for two minutes a single page and then they’re on to the next thing and they haven’t had the time to read some of these absolutely stunning, life saving passages.

TC: I pay my rent working in a bookshop because I have to be around books, I just need to be around words.

LL: I understand. Words are by far to me the most important thing and as I said be-fore; as important as the image is the title of a photograph. So yeah, it’s something I’m really contemplating for next year, I think it could be really good fun. I remem-ber once I was invited to read at an open-ing for someone’s art exhibition in New York and they wanted me to read a Kafka story called ‘The Gate’ so I read it and people said “Did you change the story?” and I’m like “No I read it as I thought it should be interpreted” I think that’s good storytelling.

TC: I think telling peoples stories in the way that you perceive them is very im-

portant and not done often enough.

LL: You can count on me sister.

TC: Finally, I saw somewhere that you have a recipe book in the pipeline? That seems quite a departure…

LL: My book will be called ‘The Need To Feed’ I mean it’s more than a cookbook, although certainly it has recipes. I got my name from stealing food in New York from ’76 to ’77 and feeding the hungry. It was tough times then so I would just start cooking. When you’re on tour, even if it’s great food you just have to stop eating stuff that other people have touched, so its more a hedonists guide to food and re-working recipes to be healthier and tell-ing about the nutritional value but also telling arcane details about the history of food. Each chapter has a very sassy, sexy intro like the meat chapter. I don’t really eat meat that much although some people do, it’s called ‘The Killer Inside Me’. The chapter on really hot recipes is titled ‘This Is Gonna Hurt You’ its kind of funny and speaks of the history of chili peppers and Bakanalia and Greek party food. Detoxing is covered as well because I grew up near so many super food sites that I thought about simple soups and juices that you can put together without too much trou-ble, just to detox for even just a weekend. It’s really fun and it’s simple things. Look, one of the reasons people are dying from cancer, besides the air and the water, is because they’re eating horrible fucking food. I think food is a matter of respect and intimacy as well. Cooking for some-one, handling it, cooking it, you’re getting your DNA on something they’re eating and its alchemy, it’s witchery and that’s all just part of my witchy nature.

INTERVIEWED BY TILLY CRAIG


LOLAEspana...I’ve nothing left to give you. España...from fireside to inferno...what have you done with my heirs? Speak the name I bled in staying for you, speak those years, España......and I’ll beat this heart alive yet... Speak the men who came from beneath the last light, and fed the night to braziers in the sky. For years, I stood aside as they devoured thousands... Tell me I was there...

(Lola breaks free from the restraint. She stands.)

LOLA (CONTINUING) I came from the most savage of Andalusia: Baza, Fonelas, Guadix. I came from my all over. My mother was a crown of light, clean and endless. Longago they’d thought us nobles. And I was their Egyptian princess. Aye, alma mía, speak me and I will regret nothing. Tell when they crippled me a tundra and took away my trees.

(Esperanza arises.)

LOLA (CONTINUING)When they regrew me in cinders and tossed my bones to the sea. When they came for my mother and told me, ‘I’m still picking my teeth for you, Lola Heredia—’ La Perdida!

(Esperanza and Lola come together and struggle.)

LOLA (CONTINUING)La Perdida... they say we’re too hard-featured to tell apart. That my songs were nothing more than curios for the tourists. My children, olive pits crushed on the bars’ floors where I sang. They came, they listened and yet they still claimed, “one Gypsy born is another life given away.” Then they lit fire under our feet and made us dance until we burned.

(Lola falls into Esperanza.)

ESPERANZAIt’s the fever again.

LOLABut I am still here.

~

Fade in. One chair is draped with a bright purple shawl. In it sits LOLA, a Cale (Gypsy) survivor of Franco’s Spain. She is sickly yet sit-ting upright, wrapped tightly in a blanket (like a straight-jacket) with a black shawl around her. Her granddaughter ESPERANZA lays across the second chair, facing the audience with her eyes shut.

From THE AMARANTHINE THREAD by Rosebud Ben-Oni


ILLUSTRATIONS BY TERESA ARMSTRONG


ESPERANZASettle down. You’re making it worse.

LOLA I am known. I’ve left my mark on gentlemen and poets, and as far as the Argentine. Gypsy.

ESPERANZAShhhhh.

LOLAAmericans love this word. Gypsy.

ESPERANZAThey’ll hear you.

LOLAThey say my mother still screams in the confessionals.

ESPERANZAStop it.

LOLAThey say we were rounded up and shot down in a sugar mill in Baza.

ESPERANZAYou’ll get me thrown out of here.

LOLA (falling to her knees)Let them hear... for how long did I howl... I will never hide again.

ESPERANZAYou shouldn’t even be here.

LOLANo one came but they heard me... from Baza to Guadix, I screamed... I was lost in an hour...

ESPERANZAWhy don’t you leave me alone! Just leave me alone!

LOLATell them what has happened, La Perdida..

ESPERANZAQuit calling me that!

LOLAEsperanza... You’re all I have left—speak me before they come back and burn me into the horizon... Help me... whispers caught in my throat, my lips, too dry to drink. I cannot recog-nize him, but I cannot forget him. He was too many for us. Time was against many of us, those who were God-deniers, those who were Communists, those who were simply born undesirable. Tell them I was here...


PERFORMANCE STILL FEATURING IRELIZ NEGRON AS ESERANZA AND OLIVIA SCHLUETER-COREY AS LOLA


THE BADGER(After Derek Mahon)

We stood on the edge of the forest path,facing nor th so the moss was hiding,struggling to conjure conversation, standing idly,the cries of cars breaking through the throng.

The badger that we’d found was long since dead,lying between footfalls engraved in the mud,and we wondered why it was here on the trail.

The prints were ancient, which led us to thinksome animal had dragged the poor corpse hereand it lay sleeping, its guts spilling secrets.

…let the wind drop now or the clouds par tor rains wash the bastard devils away,for if nature has allowed this, a funeral would be nice.

BY ALISTAIR GARDINER


APOLOGY

Don’t try to pocket the sky as it falls,Dropping, coughing, wetting out linesIt did not draw.We may be here and be aware of it,We may kiss and bend, clappingAt the strangeness of it all,Whistling when we have nothing sincere to say. But before spring comeswith its proud and pale germination,The seed we pressed in my skin will reject itself,Stretching, yawning,Asser ting its small ability to live apar t.The clocks on their crippled walls will forgetThe lazy easiness of the chaseWhen you bought me cakes in different coloursOr sat, eager as a magpie,At the foot of my bed. The tide is always at the beckon of the moon,It cannot argue against the unsaid rulesOf ‘I can feel it’ or ‘I can not’.

BY MOLLY TAYLOR


I am lucky enough to have known Kieran for some years and recently I got to won-dering about how the creative process of writing a song works. He agreed to let me ask him some questions.

When you write a song, what hap-pens? How does it all come about in your head? Does one thing come first?

KH: It depends upon the song. I fre-quently start with the music because I guess I’ve always felt like I have a greater ability to play with the words and to shape the words how I wanted to, so I would be more likely to write the words to fit with what the music suggested in terms of ideas, in terms of emotional twists and turns.

Do you have an idea what the song’s going to be about when you write the music?

KH: Often, no. I just have a store of things floating around in my head and sometimes they collide together and they seem to go together. And I have pieces of music that I’ve had for five or six years that I’ve never been

able to find quite the right idea for. And sometimes you then do. Did you ever grow crystals in jam jars when you were a kid? You start with one tiny bit which might be an im-age or it might be the music and that then grips on the end of your string and then gradually takes shape. And hopefully you manage to direct it in a way that you’re pleased with into something that entertains you and is going to entertain other people.

I think increasingly I want to have more of a conscious effort in choosing that first starting bit, the little crys-tal that’s going to grow, rather than that being a very arbitrary event.

I think maybe it was Ezra Pound who haunts me, who said something to the effect of: anybody can make pret-ty sentences, but to make pretty sen-tences that mean something that you actually want to say is more of a skill. And I think it is. What I’m trying to do at the moment is to know exactly where the song is going before I be-gin. And I don’t know whether that’s going to work or not.

KIERAN HAYNES / singer songwriter

interviewed by

FELICITY NOTLEY / writer


IMAGES COURTESY OF KIERAN NOTLEY HAYNES


If you want to have a bit more control over what comes out, does that mean you are trying to put a message across?

KH: I’ve tended to write a lot of songs for particular situations in my life, not that they didn’t have any re-lationship with the rest of the world or my feelings about it but they fre-quently served a particular purpose. I like that but I kind of want to move beyond that. A lot of my previous songs have been more about love and relationships and I want to be writ-ing things that are a little bit more overtly socially engaged. Not so much protest songs as broad, human-itarian cries.

But that’s a slightly different thing from the need to know where I’m go-ing to when I begin. I’ve got a lot of different song-writing demons I’m battling at the moment and I’d proba-bly be doing better not to think about them at all! It might be better just to get on and write the things. I heard Leonard Cohen talking on Jarvis Cocker’s 6 Music Show a little while ago and basically his response to these things was just to say you shouldn’t really meddle too much in the fine fairy-tale mechanics of song-writing, otherwise they might break.

Yeah, that’s kind of my attitude. It’s a bit dangerous to do that, isn’t it?

KH: Yes. But I guess it is to some extent because I never feel happy do-ing what I’ve done before. I want to write something that is in some way, if not better than what I’ve done be-fore, an extension of it or different


and I feel it’s not an area that I’ve ex-plored previously.

Do you sometimes have an idea and then, after a long period of time passes, it all comes to fruition later?

KH: Yeah, certainly. I put out a re-cord last year and some of the songs

on there I had almost finished ver-sions of probably about six or seven years before. And it took those extra six or seven years for them to actu-ally become finished versions. And it’s sometimes just an additional idea that’s missing. Sometimes it’s just a way of solving a problem in terms of giving it a strong enough ending or you can’t get a line to scan, or you end


up really attached to an idea, as I’m sure you appreciate, for a very long time. It’s only when a sufficient amount of time has passed for you to realise that you need to get rid of that idea that the song can work as a whole.

So is it the words that tend to change or is it the music?

KH: It tends to be the words. I guess. The music does change too, and sometimes the problem with the song will be solved when you come up with another section of music and that will impact on the words somehow and it will all shoot off in another direction. But it’s of-ten the getting words right that takes time. And some-times the music helps with that and sometimes the mu-sic hinders that!

If I knew how to rectify the difficulties I was having with songs as I went along then I would have anoth-er finished album. I can’t really explain what makes things work. You just sort of vaguely know when they do.

Do you go back and rewrite things, a bit like when you’re writing a “whodunnit” and you have to go back and make sure everything works? I’m think-ing about the way the verses develop. Sometimes there are quite clever things hidden in there. Does it all come out in a linear way?

KH: No!

… Or do you deliberately go back and…?

KH: I spend a lot of time unpicking and re-stitching things. And sometimes I’ll write the whole of the song, pretty much. But I won’t really have a central idea that I feel is interesting enough and then suddenly it’ll strike me and I’ll sort that out and I’ll know then how to reshape the other bits of it and then it’s a case of going in and rewriting lines and shaping it, if it’s


The first verse of ‘...’

Back when time was just a twinklein the eye of the great, great grandfatherclockthe sky contained the words of one longstoryand the moon was a ( and a ) and a big .

And Orion’s belt, was a space for … I don’tknow what

You see Orion’s shining belt, was oneinterstellar dot-dot-dot


The first half of Master Of The Alphabet:

A B – that’s as far as some girls getthey never C, D E F Gee, Huh, I betyou’re not that dumb...

J K – peut-être tu peux parlerfrançais ?Voici une fille gentille qui j’aime baiserL M N O je t’aime, oh je t’aime ma chérie

P Q the cheerleaders to shout and spell outhow great we R... S T U know it’s true!V W! Drive me to the sea!I never want to be your XY can’t everything be so e... Z !


going to have a narrative.

I’ve noticed that you read quite a lot of stuff. Quite academic things …

KH: Like what? (laughs)

You just told me that you’re reading The Story of Art. Gombrich.

KH: Yes, but I guess that’s fairly unusual for me. I have a copy with a dedication inside which my grandfather gave me in fact when I was seventeen. My History of Art A level teacher failed to turn up to classes so I ended up doing Politics instead. I was speaking to my friend Rog-er, who also writes songs, and he’s got a song about an-other book by Gombrich, A Little History of the World, aimed at children. Anyway, a number of factors in my life pointed my head back in the direction of this book, so I’m reading it for that reason rather than out of any great urge for more academic inspiration.

Also when I spoke to you before you were reading something Ancient Greek…

KH: The Greek Anthology? Well, yes. But that again … I think mostly things are where I’m exploring the off-shoots of other things that I like. The Greek Anthology turns up in one of my favourite Richard Brautigan books, where it’s being read by a couple who are struggling with a relationship due to STDs and that’s a sort of sub-plot to a story about a papier-mâché bird and some stolen bowling trophies and … I guess I was interested in why the Greek Anthology had been chosen by Brautigan as a book for them to read.

youtube.com/watch?v=L5FikX1aXPk

I think it’s always interesting to read work that was writ-ten so long ago that it is hard to imagine, and then to find out that actually people’s lives and concerns were funda-


mentally very similar to the way they are now.

Obviously you draw inspiration from all sorts of places. I’ve got one song that has deliberate allusions to Pale Fire, by Nabokov, and it was probably reading that that helped me finish the song. I had the song as a collection

of different ideas, all with different lines that had effects in them that I liked or had plays on words. Once I’d had the insight and I had the ex-tra input I had the whole idea for the song.

After that you look at it in the light of the new sun that illuminates eve-rything and you try and draw in the shadows in the way that they should go in relation to your new source of light.

Which song was that?

KH: Hospital Post.

Ah. You introduced it as the fine line between love and mental ill-ness I think. There’s this one verse about a playground on fire …

KH: Yes.

For me, that verse just stood out on its own and it was quite a painterly image, very visual. I really liked the image, irrespective of the context or anything else. I found it really interesting because it seemed quite different from a lot of the verses and the way that you normally seem to write. It felt almost like you were breaking free.

KH: In the context of that song, it’s almost like a mo-

‘Hospital Post’, Verse 1

They told us today was the first day ofspringand wheeled us out into the lightof a garden that’s longlike a haiku gone wrong – strung outwith military spite

And though no shoots had burst fromthe fists of the earthand the hills still had knuckles of whiteI know that the tilt of our axis willhelp them relaxand I know that it’s good that you write


ment of escape in my mind, in terms of how I view the song anyway. Then there’s a sort of idealistic wish fulfilment and so it takes place in a slightly fantastical setting.

And it’s nice that the narrative of the song gives me the space to have a scene like that in it. And I think it’s sort of important because it’s a breathing space towards the end of what’s otherwise quite an overwrit-ten song. It’s quite dense until that point, and then it becomes slightly less heavy with references and slight-ly more direct, even if it is doing it in a figurative way.

Hospital Post has allusions to Pale Fire book and a very brief allusion to Brautigan as well. It’s one of my favourite stories of his. But I had to give up lots of lines for that that I re-ally liked because, you know, they just don’t work in the end. You can write verses and verses and then you have to pick the ones that fit more than the ones that you like the best, or at least that is how I tend to work. Probably you could equally make a fascinating song out of just picking the lines that you liked the best, but it would be a different thing. It’s not really what I aim for at the moment. I’d quite like to feel more liberated, to write just a little bit more scattershot.

It is a strange song, that one. For a long time it seemed impossible for us to play it badly, which is a good qual-ity in it. I’m not sure if that’s true


I wrote Jenny not long after moving down to Falmouth. A friend saw a photo of me holding a ukulele in my new seaside home, and commented that I should really be performing songs about lovelorn sea creatures, ac-companied by a girl with a thick fringe and a melodica . I probably I took the suggestion rather more seriously than he intended.

Lyrically, it‘s meant to be a kind of two-stage song. The first section relates the tale of Jenny the octopus and her heroic, if ill-fated, love for a young pirate called Billy; in the second section, the singer reveals how he and his lover dreamt up the story of Jenny and Billy during the early days of their own relationship, and how the story has stayed with him as that relation-ship has progressed and fal len apart. I‘ve always loved songs that take unexpected turns– songs where verse four hurls you out onto very different streets from those you were navigating your way through back inverse one .

Jenny was an octopusshe lived deep in the ocean just likeevery good octopus shouldand Jenny was the best

She knew the secrets of the sandshe was always keen to lend a handor a tentacle to her fellow man (oroctopus, I guess)

Yes – Jenny was an octopusand her friends all knew she was inlovewith a pirate boy who dwelt abovethe ever-rolling waves

She longed to take her tentacleand smash it straight up throughthe hulland hold him till her ventriclesbeat in time with his

But Jenny was an octopus, nota giant squid

Billy was a buccaneerhe knew his tradehe knew no fearthough he was not advanced inyearsand he shed his tears for home

and after darkon silent feetacross the sleeping deck he’d creepand hold a lantern to the deepwhere Jenny swam alone, oh…

…uh-oh!

One summer nighta Spanish tar spied his candle fromafarthe grapeshot flewpoor Billy knew the sea rushthrough his heart

When Jenny saw his lantern fallshe used an arm to plug each holecarried him off through the shoalsof dead men to the shore

knowing, if he lived, that Billywouldn’t sail no more

When the doctors woke him upBilly let an eight-armed tear fall tothe floor...Jenny was an octopus we met in anaquariumback when our hopes and careswere youngand we were barely old

Jenny was an octopus we told eachother stories ofeach time we finished making loveand we were feeling cold

Jenny was an octopus I dredged upas a sign of trustin a hallway with your teeth half-brushedand your eyes full on the door

Oh Jenny is the octopus stillwrapped around my heartand she’ll just plug the holes asbest she can until I’m safe ashore

Jenny is my octopus – I’m notsailing anymore


any more, but when we recorded it for the last record we left it to the end and we pretty much knew it would be fine. There’s just something about it. It’s sort of to do with the mean-dering of it and possibly … It’s one of my less autobiographical songs, but at the same time that means that there is a point which I really feel my-self, maybe that gives it more weight. I don’t know. That would apply to the section towards the end. It’s the character in the song saying it, but also to some extent it’s me too.

I remember asking you when we were on the 24 Hour Comic pro-ject whether the chess song was a waltz.

KH: And I probably told you that I didn’t know!

Yes, you did. And you said I would like to think that people would want to dance to my music!

KH: Well, I think that’s a wish that most people have.

So, my question is: Do you go, I’m playing the blues, I’m playing this or that, it’s within this genre, this is a particular dance … Or do you just make up songs?

KH: For the most part I have very little understanding of musical the-ory, which also extends to rhythms that are used in particular dances. I’m vaguely aware of what a waltz

I will meet you when I’m nineyears oldin a park where the swings are onfireand we’ll play in the dust as theroundabouts rustand the trees hold the telegraphwire


you’re going to deliver it.

KH: That’s granting me with a level of control over my performance that I think isn’t necessarily there! But okay, in theory…

So, does that give you more licence with meter and things, so that you can put extra words in because you know that you’re going to pause and slow down at this point?

KH: I guess so. Usually the final stages of, I think, most creative pur-suits when you work at something, when you’ve just finished it you’re not very pleased with it and then you have an amount of time where you come round to liking it again. But also in terms of songs you get good at playing it and it’s usually – It’s usually the fine tunings of the words, rather than the music, so I’ll often have a line that doesn’t quite fit when I’m playing it and, after I’ve played it for about a year the performance will slowly settle down. The way that I sing it will slowly change to accom-modate the idea that I wanted in there in the first place. I’ll get my line in that really shouldn’t scan, but, after that amount of time I’ve worked out how to do it. But it’s not really a con-scious process. It’s like the way fur-niture settles over a period of time, or your shoes give and become more comfortable.

I can spend months during the early stages of writing something with

rhythm should be.

But I mostly just make things that please me or that stretch my abili-ties on the guitar or whatever instru-ment. So I might write it in what seems to me like a different time sig-nature, even if I don’t know what the time signature is, just for the sake of learning how to move my fingers in new ways. But I can’t sit down and think, ‘Oh, I’m going to play this one as a bossa nova!’ That’s a little bit beyond me at the moment. Maybe I should learn!

In my first band I used to write songs that were much more about the music and the words were sort of throw-away things that were put in because the sound of them was right rather than the meaning. And that was a lot of fun.

These days I’ve been writing songs where the music is probably made to follow the lead of the words. Or at least that’s where I’m trying to focus people’s attention. It’s a question of which one you try and make go, ‘Look at me!’ At the moment I try and do that with the words rather than the music and I think it’s probably pos-sible to do it with both, but maybe I’ll get there eventually.

I think you already do. When you’re performing, you have an advantage in a way because it’s your song and you’ve written it. But you also get to choose how


getting that line to work and not be able to sort it out. It’s only with the repetition of actually playing it and performing it that it comes good.

I think if you are somebody who reads your poetry out loud in public, then the same rule does apply to some ex-tent. In terms of reading poetry or even prose, I think you find ways into making it express as much as it can do, in the way that you want it to.

If I’m reading something out loud that I’ve written, I always feel I can cheat a little bit, because I can give it the emphasis that I want to.

KH: That’s not cheating! That’s just being very good at reading. I wouldn’t look at it that way!

Have you ever written poetry that was meant to stand alone?

KH: I’ve written a couple of things. They tend to be quite short. Only in the last couple of years have I writ-ten any poetry that stands alone that I actually am at all fond of, but it all tends to be fairly brief. I don’t like things to be wasted. I tend to feel I’m not doing my job properly if I can’t justify the reason why a word is there. Which is a shame, and I’m hoping at some point to step out of that mindset and make a much more free record. I wrote something I liked called, The Incredible Adven-tures of My Clockwork Robin. I’ll see if I can remember it. I goes …


The Incredible Adventures of My Clockwork Robin

I found a clockwork robin.I wound it up. It spunAnd flew away with a whirr and a skirr to the land of the pocket-watch sun.I had hoped that it would stay.

So yes, usually, my poems are quite brief.


SPLASHINGTAILS


Their eyes lock.

“Wait!”

Mma calls out as she drops her half-eaten wrap of bean-cakes in the al-ready littered market place. Wiping hands on wrapper, she snakes through the noisy throng of children hawking vegetables in trays, of women haggling over the prices of food items, of traders calling out to prospective customers.

“Nne!” Mma calls out again. Three women turn around. One of them, a teenager, tries to balance a bag of sachet water on her head. Then, Mma remembers that Nne – meaning mother - is a generic name in her little part of the world. But Mma is sure those eyes, profound like her late mother’s, those eyes which locked with hers in this busy market place, aren’t ordinary eyes. Mma recognized them even at her daughter’s birth –twenty-five years ago. That was why Mma had named her Nne.

“Wait, Nne!” Mma cries again, tap-ping Oluoma on the shoulder. Oluoma swings around, her dark skin gleaming with sweat and oil.

“Pardon?” Oluoma asks in a high-pitched voice with an impatient lilt. She frowns and hisses. Mma flinches at the sound of the lady’s bourgeois Nigerian accent, at the sight of her long fake eyelashes batting in disbelief. Mma stutters,

“Nne, my child. Thank God for bringing

you back to us after sixteen years of searching.” Clasping her hand in prayer, she sings thanksgiving songs. “I’d al-ways known God would safeguard you and lead you home!”

Mma stretches out her hands. Reach-ing out, she touches the lady’s high cheek bones, her gritty, greasy, sweat-ing palm smudges the lady’s smooth brown, rosy cheeks.“Hey! What do you want woman?” Oluoma flinches, jerks back, brushes off Mma’s hands. Flies buzz around them. Traders stare up briefly from the wares until buyers came around to haggle over prices. Young men threat-en to shove them aside with stacked wheelbarrows. They shift away from the blast of sunlight, into the shade of a stall with a basin of catfish making splashes with their tails.

Mma squints, fighting back tears.

“Nne, ah, have you forgotten me so soon? I, your own mother who nursed you, cleaned you up when you first menstruated at nine? Oh God, the riots tore our hearts to pieces, espe-cially when we had to relocate without you. We searched everywhere, even your school. Your teacher, Mrs. Pam, said the men came with guns and kidnapped some of you. We published posters, asked friends and church members. Everyone promised to search, but nothing.”“Madam, I’m not your –“Oluoma stut-ters. She’s confused, feels her life is being invaded. Briefly, she wonders if this harassment is a new ploy devised


by her husband’s political opponents.

Mma interrupts with a short dance. Rhythmically stamping her heels on the ground, she wriggles her waist, shakes her hips. She announces to the other traders like a town crier, “I have found my daughter!” She screams in her thin voice.

Grabbing stainless steel plates, she chimes. Market people gather, stare at them.Oluoma furrows her brows. Dropping her shopping bag by the stall, she rum-mages through her big bronze-coloured handbag.

“You’re so big now. But you haven’t changed so much. But I recognized you the moment I saw you: You’re a chip of the old block. See, you have your Papa’s high cheek bones.”

“Madam, stop this embarrassment. There must be a mix up.” Oluoma whines, pulling out a Blackberry phone with a maroon-purple casing –the same colour as her nail polish. Her gold wed-ding ring gleams in the blazing Satur-day afternoon sun; it’s blinding glitter catches Mma’s attention. Mma opens her mouth to speak but finds the words stuck in her throat like Eve’s apple.

“I’m not your daughter. Get away from me!” Oluoma screams as she moves into the crowded sunlit path. She di-als a number, talks into the receiver. “Please come. Quickly.” She says eyeing Mma.

Mma apologizes profusely; tells Oluoma that she’s sure they’re mother and child. Oluoma waves her away with the ease of a person used to dismissing people, with manicured hands. Mma watches her gesture and remembers the girl she used to be.

Suddenly, five hefty bodyguards ar-rive; enquiring about the Oluoma’s safety. Oluoma says she’s alright as she mops her wide forehead with a white handkerchief. Mma cries and swears by her mother’s grave that Oluoma is her missing daughter. The men shove Mma aside; and lead Oluoma away. After a few steps, Oluoma turns to Mma, says, “I hope you find your daughter.” Then she walks away, among the shielding bodyguards. Mma wails, “Don’t do this to me, Nne!” She throws herself for-ward with arms outstretched,

Onlookers barricade Mma. Oluoma enters a Montero jeep parked by the market gate; and looks back at Mma, Their eyes meet again, just before one of the bodyguards shuts the door.

BY CHIOMA IWUNZE-IBIAM

AUTHORS OWN PHOTOGRAPGH


The aesthetics are what help them: their thick, jungly fur with differ-

ent tones of autumn in every strand; their cat-like yellow eyes that follow every move its prey make, like a car-toon ghost-in-the-painting watching over a haunted house; the way they glide through the space in an effortless dance with their long, lean limbs. Their tails, so thick and bright and perceiv-able, ever so gently dipped into a tin of white paint.

They look like England: All ruddy and dirty and proud and weathered and camouflaged perfectly into the land-scape.

But for me it hasn’t just been about the way they look. I remember the first time I felt my affinity with them. I was a small child in the back seat on my mother’s car, she was driving incredi-bly slowly down a winding Devon lane behind some pinks on horseback who were holding up the ever snaking col-lection of cars that joined us. I asked my mother what was going on, “they’re here to kill foxes” were her words. I still have those words etched into my memory in her clear voice and it plays over and over in any time where I feel I, or my values are being threatened. I

felt like I immediately understood the fox more than the human and felt pro-tective and maternal towards it, even at a young age. I wasn’t obsessed with its fluffiness or its cuteness. It was its heart and spirit. How it battled. That was how I wanted to be. Defiant.

No one liked me at school. I was a bit odd. Not in a trendy odd way. In an odd, odd way. I like to tell my favour-ite anecdote of show and tell to people in order to to describe how odd I actu-ally was: I never brought in new toys or things to show off (I didn’t actually have many toys, maybe if my parents were rich I wouldn’t have been so odd), I merely brought stuff I found interest-ing. A lychee was one of my first show and tells and much to the sniggers of my fellow students I found myself en-thused by its prickly and hardened shell but how wonderfully perfumed and delicate it tasted, the juxtaposition was exciting for me. At least my parents bought lychee’s.

My second show and tell was when I brought in the stitches from my ear operation in a little jar. I thought they were interesting because they were what was stopping my brain from fall-ing out of the back of my ears. No one

FOXES


else did. Nor did they believe that my brain was going to fall out.

A bit like a fox panic killing a coop full of chickens, I felt defeated and conquered. I re-vealed myself and it was apparently odd and uncomfortable to some and yet completely nat-ural to me. I don’t think my teachers particu-larly liked me either because they kept having to deal with my angry mother and her constant questions “Why did Heidi come home with mud in her bag?”, “Why has Heidi got bruises up the back of her legs?”, “Why does Heidi sob every morning and beg not to go to school?”. Rather than deal with those questions they ex-cused themselves and the children with a sim-ple shrug and excuse: “she just doesn’t fit in”.

Like how some people don’t understand foxes. So they attack and vilify them to make them and the idea of them easier to deal with. They twist their own discomfort and turn it around to make the animal the miscreant and not them. I now know why people did that to me, just as how I know why people kill foxes for fun. Be-cause they do not want to try and understand, they do not want to try and live in harmony with this being, they do not want their own se-curities being threatened. It is easier to simply destroy.

I’m ok now, just like I know the fox will be. It takes a lot of hunting to kill a species and there sure is a lot of support for them.

I’ve got my friends and the foxes have me.

BY HEIDI CORBALLY

ILLUSTRATED BY JOANNA LARSEN BURNETT

PHOTOGRAPH OF AUTHORS WORKSPACE


Watching the Walking NightAt dusk, there is a certain moment when half of

the sky gets darker, and the other half seems to forget to turn off its light. That moment dresses itself in an eerie silence even if one is in the mid-dle of the busiest towns. It’s a silence that has the rumour of an abyss opened to swallow the hustle of the day. Something, even if not visible, stands still as if waiting for the night to cover the whole place. One can hear the breath of that something—short and rhythmical, trying not to disturb the darkness that prepares itself for the walk.

Night is beautiful: with long, dark hair in which planets are hanging, revolving while making a hushing sound that eases hearts of their worries. For that sound is heard only by the hearts, which, once, were particles of dust swirling in the dark-ness above. Night loves to wear the Moon on her forehead, its glow exalting her beauty. She never forgets her cape embroidered with stars. The dark blue velvet of her cape is dragged slowly, respect-ing the last rays of light. Everything reels with ease, softly, afraid of altering the eternal movement of the unseen.

Yet, all this unperceived movement comes to a standstill, frozen at the sound of a voice piercing the dusk.

“I can’t live without you, but, oh, at the same time, it’s so diff icult to have you close. Your pres-ence challenges my days; your absence steals away their magic. You keep asking me to be faithful to you, you set tasks so hard to achieve, you push me to and fro, you steal my peace, and I can’t force you into silence, not even with my silence. Your voice be-comes a whisper when I ignore you, but you keep talking and talking, until you give birth to a storm inside me. This is not the way to treat me! You have to respect my need to stay away from you!”“Then, why don’t you f ind peace when I become a mere whisper and leave you alone with your whims? Why do you struggle to make me come back?”

“I keep asking myself the same question. I have no other answer than you must have put a spell on me when I heard your voice for the f irst time. There’s something unearthly in it, it has a rhythm that is familiar to every f ibre of my body; you are in every cell of my being. Rejecting you would be as if betraying my soul. You are the voice of my soul, it’s memory. I cannot take you out without losing my-self, and the magic that pervades everything you touch. I don’t know you, but something inside me

longs for your presence. Sometimes, I don’t want you, I hate you because you destroy the comfort of an easy life, but I can’t tear you apart from me. I’m stuck with you, and I have to f ind a way of liv-ing with you, without really owning you, because you belong to me, but you are free. Your freedom makes me soar, too. Only you can make a slave out of me while giving me the f light.”

“I always give you space to breathe! Maybe, you’re so thirsty for my presence that your depend-ence on me suffocates you, and not my voice. You have to learn how to listen without depending, how to belong to me without losing yourself, how to walk with joy when you hear me whispering or shouting. What I ask from you should become your compass, but not the pre-determined road. You have to choose in freedom when to answer to my requests and when not to. And when I become silent, it will be the time when we’ll have to go on a long journey together embraced by the Night with a shining Moon on her forehead. Until then, rejoice that you have me here, talking to you day and night. Listen and walk with me!”

The Night turned her face towards the girl who, now, wipes away a silent tear, glimmering at the touch of moonlight. She wanted to take that tear and make a star of it, to remind the girl that she was not alone, and tears were only the soul’s words that can shine somewhere, on somebody else’s sky. But the Night was far too high to be able to reach the tear, so, in her try to lean over, she lost a star from her cape. The girl started smiling at the sight of the falling star and made a wish:

“I’d rather be the slave of your voice, heart, than lead a life in meaningless silence. I wish your words to f ly and catch all the falling tears, trans-form them into loving thoughts and give them back to the stars, scattering them above and hanging them with sparkling threads of light in the hair of the walking Night, for all to hear them and know the thrill of journeying with your voice by their side.”

The Night smiled and sent a soft breeze to caress the girl, who fell asleep dreaming of the Moon.

BY IRINA SERBAN

ILLUSTRATION BY JORDAN ROGERS


He loathed its rhythmical reminder of his tran-sient life. The alarm rang for him that day. He had to get up and start living.

Irina Serban - @IrinaSerban facebook.com/thewhisperingvoice

#1STORY

I’m dizzy in my moth-er’s womb. I’m a night-mare to my father’s sperm. The only grand-parents worth a damn went into the ground first.

Cerpin Taxt - @merddln333studio737.blogspot.com

Neck, badly bruised from the crushing blow of a thundering knee. But her lifeless face still looked on with disdain. He screamed.

GET Crucial Films - @GETCrucialFilmsfacebook.com/getcrucialfilms


“her arms and legs danced, her eyes entranced; her face seduced, and henna dipped fingers drew your attention to every part of her”

Peggy Kerwan - @MissPeggyArtistflickr.com/people/miss_peggy

Electric fans hummed and sweating lips murmured silent prayers as men crossed themselves and hoped for the best.

Robert Harris - @RobHarris1987leakylibido.wordpress.com

The first Amazon review of the trap said ‘Smart mice can figure these out.’ I’m living proof.

Chris Ford - @ctfordliterateprogrammer.blogspot.co.uk


tribe:WRITEsubmit work:[email protected]

say hello:[email protected]

We are currently looking for intern correspondents from around the world. If you would like more information about how to be part of tribe then please email Tilly at [email protected]

tribe:write issue 1

Documents

issue of tribe

world of tribe

mamasrazors issue

tilly craigeditorwelcome

story project

shortest story

chioma iwunzeibian

heidi corballywatching