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Victoria Adukwei Bulley
VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY is a poet, writer and filmmaker. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and has held artistic residencies internationally in the US, Brazil and at the V&A Museum in London. A Complete Works and Instituto Sacatar fellow, her pamphlet Girl B (Akashic) forms part of the 2017 New-Generation African Poets series. She is a doctoral student at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is the recipient of a Technē studentship for doctoral research in Creative Writing.

Articles Available Online


On Water

Essay

Issue No. 29

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Essay

Issue No. 29

& we say to her what have you done with our kin that you swallowed? & she says that was ages ago, you’ve drunk...

Interview

Issue No. 26

Interview with Saidiya Hartman

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Interview

Issue No. 26

The first time I encountered Saidiya Hartman, she was a voice in salt., an award-winning play by artist and...

In May 2017, during the tense weeks leading up to the opening of negotiations on the terms of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker delivered a speech in Florence which drew applause from his audience, and scorn from British right-wing media Halfway through his speech, he switched language ‘I’m hesitating between English and French,’ he said, ‘But I’ve made my choice I will express myself in French because slowly but surely English is losing importance in Europe’   The move was mostly gestural – calculated, and delivered with a glint in his eye – but revealing nonetheless: our split from Europe would begin first through language The EU had once been happy to extend itself towards us, and to translate its edicts into our language Now, we would need to do the translating; the burden to understand and to be understood would be ours But why had we ever assumed it should be any other way?   In contemplating Brexit, and its questions of language, identity, nationalism, cooperation and compassion, we found we were in fact contemplating the issues of translation Our roundtable is a chance to grapple with these ideas and to explore how language, and by extension translation, has the power both to let in and keep out Or, as Khairani Barokka describes it, to be ‘absence, sanctuary and weapon’   During the course of the roundtable, participants talked about Brexit, colonialism and xenophobia, representation and accessibility, vulnerability and empathy Alongside a consideration of the work of professional translators, they discussed the often unrecognised (care) work of interpretation that happens in immigrant communities every day They noted the importance of oral cultures and multilingual texts, and the liberating power of not translating a text They recognised that we all live in translation   In her book-length essay on translation, This Little Art, Kate Briggs describes a somewhat similar language ‘switch’ to Juncker’s In Helen Lowe-Porter’s English translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, two characters suddenly start speaking French to one another, drawing the reader’s attention to the artifice of their reading experience ‘I come up against the belief I

Contributor

October 2018

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Contributor

October 2018

VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY is a poet, writer and filmmaker. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and...

Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s ‘Heads of the Colored People’

Book Review

October 2018

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Book Review

October 2018

Somewhere on the internet is a two-hour video of a lecture by the late writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins, author of the short story...

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feature

Issue No. 17

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 17

An Englishman, a Frenchman and an Irishman set up a magazine in London in 2010. This sounds like the...

fiction

June 2016

Beast

Paul Kingsnorth

fiction

June 2016

I stood in the river up to my knees and the river was cold. The water filled my boots...

fiction

Issue No. 14

Beetle

Joanna Kavenna

fiction

Issue No. 14

SKITAFLIT, DAY 49   704 Dawn Breaks above the grey-dusted grey-fronted houses 903 Well the office is looking just...

 

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