Mailing List


Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

feature

July 2015

Rose McLaren

feature

July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?’ ‘Oh, I don’t...

feature

May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

feature

May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

It is a story told in every Creole family I know in Mauritius It is often narrated during a long drive: a window rolls down and a hand gestures to stanzas upon stanzas of sugarcane, or bungalows on the coast, or valleys now privately owned ‘This used to be ours,’ says a parent ‘They took it We lost it’   There are several common stories of the taking The Creole child of a white man is forbidden from inheriting his property An illiterate widow signs acres of land to corrupt notaries, who promise that her progeny will be taken care of Families are chased out of their homes   These are old stories, learned by rote and handed down like a relic, a warning: Look at all we had Look: you could lose everything too   With time and pain these stories often become nebulous – sometimes on purpose   My mother’s way of coping with her family history is near-absolute silence; she fears, perhaps, that poverty and stigma will return to plague her once it is spoken out loud Details of her life are sparse and often excruciating A lower middle-class upbringing The shame of having bronze skin with a white surname On my mother’s side of the family, my great-grandfather was a wealthy white man, who had many mistresses; one was a woman of African descent, his maid They had several children together and eventually married My great-grandmother loved her husband fastidiously They brought up their children in the big house; my grandfather and his sisters carried the white name, though, according to my mother, it would have been a kindness if my great-grandfather had given them my great-grandmother’s maiden name instead My great-grandmother would hide in another part of the house when my great-grandfather’s white friends would drive up the Montagne Longue mountain to see him   My mother took me to Montagne Longue only once, when I was around five years old I remember that she was with her eldest brother, and that we were in the region to visit a friend My uncle probably decided we should look at ‘our’ land again, though there was no former

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

feature

Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

feature

Issue No. 6

I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we...
Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

feature

February 2012

Rose McLaren

feature

February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer half way through Zona. Such...

READ NEXT

Art

Issue No. 12

After After

Johanna Drucker

Art

Issue No. 12

So many things are ‘over’ now that all the post- and neo- prefixes are themselves suffering from fatigue. Even...

poetry

Issue No. 3

The Far Shore

Michael Hampton

poetry

Issue No. 3

Windblown: gone with the summer wind. Windblown: gone with the autumn wind. Windblown: gone with the winter wind. Windblown:...

fiction

September 2011

In the Aisles

Clemens Meyer

fiction

September 2011

Before I became a shelf-stacker and spent my evenings and nights in the aisles of the cash and carry...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required