New Onsite Essay: Under the soil, the people

In June 2012, I saw resplendent herds of cattle along the Sudan-South Sudan border. We toiled together along muddy roads as cloudbursts announced the definitive end of the dry season. The rain seemed to erupt from the very air around me, as if it had grown tired of its liquid burden. It was difficult to see more than five metres ahead.

What I could see were those cows. In Pariang County, on the southern side of the border, one particularly proud herder drove his cows ahead of him, as we slipped and stumbled in the mud. The small brown cows of the Baggara Arabs, out of place in South Sudan and struggling in the rain, mixed with the large black bulls of the Mbororo, their skin slick and glistening, and jostled with the prized cattle of the Nuer, their horns decorated with tassels, and with whom the young cattle-guards stole whispered conversations, as if with illicit lovers...

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Influence: Three and a Half Metaphors

During my youth, I thought of influence as a type of combat. In the pleasant years of literary apprenticeship, one reads endlessly, and some of the writers that one reads are elevated out of the library and placed in the arena. There, the young writer does battle with his masters, pitting his words against the ages. He undergoes a multitude of false starts: derivative works, displays of words carved out of the masters’ examples; one day, he hopes to forge a weapon with which to slay his influences: words that would emerge as his own. This, I thought, was the history of literature: a history of battles, in which each unique voice conquered all the voices that attempted to speak through it. This is a young man’s dream of writing: influence as metaphorical combat.

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just stay put and keep quiet

From Roman military encampments to contemporary refugee settlements in South Sudan, all camps share the same passion for order. Notice I don’t mention the inhabitants; it’s the camps that want the clean lines and right angles that push us – strangers huddled together – into community.

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On Hunting

People get hunters all mixed up, and think they are looking for what is rare or elusive – the thing that might give them the slip, and scurry away down some furtive alley if it were not for the hunter’s state of constant awareness. On the contrary, for the hunter, there is too much world, and all of it is clamouring for attention. Nothing rare or elusive here.

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