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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

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The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater isn’t only a fine debut novel that announces the arrival of an exciting and talented new literary voice, it’s also a book that asks Western readers to reconsider what we’ve been taught to think about gender identity and mental health, not to mention how internal experience might be understood as well as expressed on the page   Freshwater is the story of Ada, who, like Emezi, is born to a Nigerian father and a Tamil mother Ada’s father Saul is a doctor, and his wife Saachi is a nurse They meet and marry in London, but shortly thereafter move to Umuahia, the city where Saul was born, as was his father before him It’s important for his child to be born here too, we’re told, ‘blood following paths into the soil, oiling the gates, calling the prayer into flesh’   While her children — Ada has an older brother, and a younger sister — are still young, Saachi leaves them in the care of their father while she moves to Saudi Arabia, ten years of her life ‘contracted away’ in the desert ‘And this is how you break a child, you know,’ we’re told ‘Step one, take the mother away’   Ada begins cutting herself when she’s twelve, boasting to her classmates at school about what she can do: ‘She raised the blade that she had taken from Saul’s shaving supplies, that double-edged song wrapped in wax paper, and she dropped it on the skin of the back of her hand, in a stroke that whimpered The skin sighed apart and there was a thin line of white before it blushed into furious wet redness’ At sixteen she’s digging into her arm with a shard of glass from a broken mirror At twenty she steals scalpels from the veterinary school classroom where she’s studying to keep slicing away at her scarred flesh By now, she’s living in America And it’s here, in her dorm room in Virginia, that she has a first damaging sexual encounter:   “You need to get birth control pills” His voice was calm, a pool of quietly congealing blood with a

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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Art

May 2013

On the Margins

Sean Smith

Art

May 2013

feature

December 2012

Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim

Dylan Trigg

feature

December 2012

The title of my essay has been stolen from another essay written in 1919.[1] In this older work, the...

poetry

November 2013

Shine On You Crazy Diamond

George Szirtes

poetry

November 2013

And so they shone, every one of them, each crazy, everyone a diamond shining the way things shine, each...

 

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