Giulia Colato
Edited by Veronica Vivi
Illustration by Maia Walcott
“You have to tell the world that North Korea is like one big prison camp . . . If you don’t speak up for them, Yeonmi-ya, who will?” (Park 264). After her mother said these words, Yeonmi Park decided to put aside her insecurities, her fear and the shame she felt and to write about her life.
Are you passionate about inclusivity in education and the arts? Keen to make a difference and uplift voices that are normally unheard or shouted-over? Project Myopia is looking for two new members to join our team: we’re searching for a new Social Media Intern and an Outreach Intern! Read on for more information…
Laura Hackshaw
Edited by Veronica Vivi
Artwork by Maia Walcott
Moonlight has been an unprecedented and much needed piece of art which transcends the basic categories and labels that accompany the ideals of it simply being a unique ‘independent’ movie or at its most reductive, a movie about what it is like to be a young, black, gay boy becoming a man. Moonlight is about running through doors with your eyes closed not knowing how to find your way to the other side. It is about the fear, the panic, the discomfort and the frustration of having to come to terms with your own identity when your identity itself is based on societies preconceptions and expectations of who you should be, how you should talk, walk and who you should love – all before understanding how to first love yourself. It is profound because it transforms and challenges common ideologies surrounding black male-hood; black male tenderness and affection, the redemptive power of mentors, music and community and how these all shape the people we become.
Elroy Pinto
Edited by Ketaki Zodgekar
Artwork by Camilla Anvar
Kumar Shahani is one of the finest film makers in the post-Independence era of India. He was born in Larkana, Sindh in Pakistan, and raised in Mumbai after his family lost their ancestral home after Partition. In 1966, he joined the Film and Television Institute of India under the tutelage of Ritwik Ghatak, the great Marxist film maker from West Bengal. Ritwik Ghatak’s own preoccupations had been with the idea of Myth, folk tales, and the layering of sound, music, and noise within the cinematic realm of melodrama. Shahani spent time learning with the finest polymath from India – D.D. Kosambi. In later years, Shahani was to learn music first from Neela Bhagwat and then rigorously under Pandit Jal Balaporia. In sum, Shahani only made four full feature films, a handful of documentaries, several short films, and Khayal Gatha, a film which was never fully realised as a complete documentary or feature in categorisation. However, Shahani’s ambitions stretched beyond this: his primary concern was to formulate a vision of cinema that explores the Epic form. In the years that followed, Shahani’s work continued Ghatak’s practice; eventually leading him to master his own Idiom.
Oluwaseun Matiluko
Edited by Maria Torres-Quevedo
Artwork by Olivia Twist: YesOliviaTwist
I am currently in the final year of my Law degree. When the time came to select the modules I would study this year I decided to pick the modules in which I knew I would feel represented and seen. Although I enjoyed the previous years of studying ‘Contract’, ‘Tort’, ‘Criminal’ and ‘Property Law’ I felt the need to expand my horizons; to study something that I had never had the opportunity to study before and probably would not have the opportunity to study again. So, alongside my modules ‘Equity Law’ and ‘Employment Law’, I elected to study modules in ‘Sex, Gender and Law’ and ‘Law and Race’. I had one more option left, and I was struggling to fill it when I spoke to my good friend Sheila. She had seen an open module listed on our University website– ‘African-American Music in the 20th century’– and when I clicked on it I immediately smiled. A module focussed on the music that I love but also drew on its West African heritage seemed to perfectly intersect with my interests and my personal heritage and so I jumped at the chance to study it. I am so grateful that I did.
We held a workshop on liberating and decolonising the academy and curriculum two weeks ago at King’s College London – thanks to everyone who was able to attend! Here’s some of the feedback our co-founder Toby Sharpe collated from the event and some photos too… and make sure you read to the end of the post for information on some exciting events coming up soon!
Vaishali Bhargava
Edited by Muireann Crowley
Artwork by Kelechi Hafstad: Kelechi Anna Photography
“Remember, dear reader, I write from a land where people wrap up newborn babies in clumsy rags and deck the dead in incredible finery.” (Kandasamy 24)
Literature encompasses several paths of inspiration for me and I tread one of them in the Indian author, Meena Kandasamy’s debut novel The Gypsy Goddess (2014). This is a whimsical fictional narrative based on the bloody massacre of 1968 in the Kilvenmani village, located in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, India. Without striving hard for authenticity she inspires me to write dramatically in the right parts while holding reader’s attention. Her pen isn’t afraid of unveiling that which decorum usually hides and carries “the tales of their cunts and their cuntress and their cuntentants . . .” (Kandasamy 67) for she is on a fearless mission.
Hello from the Project Myopia team! We hope March has been a good month for you – many of you will be hard at work writing essays or putting the finishing touches to dissertations. We are so excited to announce some amazing free events we’ve got planned for the coming month – read on to find out more…
Erin Hutton
Edited by Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevado
Artwork by Natasha Ruwona: https://www.behance.net/natasharuw40cf
I read Noughts and Crosses when I was about thirteen. It is the first powerful book that I can remember reading. However, re-reading my slightly battered copy at eighteen was a very different experience. It was easier to understand that good people, like the characters in the book, could react so badly to violence. The terrorism in the story is painfully similar to current news headlines. Finally, after studying the fight for Black American civil rights at school, I could clearly see where Blackman got her inspiration. The scene where nought children face a mob of angry crosses to get into a decent school could have been drawn straight from the textbook photos of Little Rock Central High School, Arkansas, 1957. This seems especially important when one considers the things people said to the author as she was writing: “‘Slavery is in the past’, ‘Why d’you want to rehash something so painful?’, ‘Why do black people always harp on about slavery?’”(Penguin Random House, 2016). Perhaps, if books like Blackman’s were studied at university level, people would be less likely to have these attitudes, especially if the novel’s stark confrontation of cruelty made them consider that their comments are insulting. There are many example of history where people have ignored atrocities as they occurred.
Evianne Darcy
Edited by Ketaki Zodgekar
Artwork by Kelechi Hafstad: Kelechi Anna Photography
The timeless, multilayered Diary of a Madman by Lu Xun tells the story of a now-recovered “invalid” (Lu 21), who had previously fallen ill to a “persecution complex” (21), through which he became convinced that everyone around him was a cannibal, be it his brother, neighbour, or the children of the village in which he resides. In his delusional frenzy, the “invalid” believes he is serving time for trampling on “Records of the Past” (22), and that the local village children are being taught to “Eat people!” (24) He even suspects that the words of an antiquated book and the neighbour’s dog – descended from wolves – are conspiring to eat him too. Eventually, instead of being eaten, our madman cowers under the “weight of four thousand years of cannibalism bearing down upon” (31) him.
In an ending which parallels Macbeth, Lu Xun’s madman surrenders to the all-consuming cannibalistic heritage of bygone feudalism, which usurps his village. He realises that he has gone so far into his mania – spurred by his vandalism of documents pertaining to his country’s history – that returning would be pointless. Despite his fleeting uprising, which was dismissed as insanity, he will never be truly human. As a child, he ate his little sister: the reader discovers that the madman himself is a cannibal.
