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Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is the author of Harmless Like You and Starling DaysShe is the winner of The Authors’ Club First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award. Her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice, an NPR 2017 Great Read and shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. She is the editor of the Go Home! anthology.

Articles Available Online


Cathy Park Hong’s ‘Minor Feelings’

Book Review

April 2020

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Book Review

April 2020

Before beginning Minor Feelings, A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition, an essay collection by the poet Cathy Park Hong, I sat with...
The White Book feels as if it is being whispered: each paragraph seems to come from some deep and interior place Han Kang wrote it whilst living in Warsaw, though in the book the city is never named explicitly Instead it is only a white city, white for its snow and white for its stone ruins In an interview with Granta, Kang said that when writing this book, she imagined her prematurely dead sister had lived and visited the city ‘in my place’   Photographs are interspersed throughout In some, a woman appears, her face obscured by shadow In others, only her hands are visible She holds a child’s gown She holds a pebble-like object covered in salt The photographs are of white objects, but in contrast to the white pages, they are startlingly grey The specks and splashes of whiteness are surrounded by shadow The woman seems trapped in darkness Who is this woman supposed to represent? The narrator? The ghost of the sister? The novelist Kang? All or none of the above?  The literal answer is that they are photographs of a performance by Kang, shot by the photographer Choi Jinhyuk But within the pages, they seem to carry the spirit of characters — and the novelist herself   The text is a loose collection of thoughts, scenes, and images Few are longer than a page They are gathered into three sections — ‘I’, ‘She’, and ‘All Whiteness’ ‘I’ follows the narrator considering the colour white and describes her sister’s passing ‘She’ imagines the sister’s life Some subsections describe what the sister might have done—having an X-ray, finding a pebble, attempting to befriend a dog Others contemplate white things—seagulls, a dead butterfly, a lace curtain   Both ‘I’ and ‘She’ are pensive and slightly sorrowful At first, this similarity is disorienting: it is hard to see where one perspective ends and the other begins Slowly, the reader realises that this muddling is the point The concern of the narrator is not whether the sister would have been a vastly different person, but what it means to replace one life with another Her mother would not have

Book Review

November 2017

Han Kang’s ‘The White Book’

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Book Review

November 2017

The White Book feels as if it is being whispered: each paragraph seems to come from some deep and...

Anna Boghiguian’s art has always been about a kind of looming: the hover of histories, their asphyxiating weft Throughout her forty-year practice, the Cairo-born artist has consistently traced the struggles of civilisations by researching colonialism, labour, and philosophical thought to produce shambolic works that suggest a restlessness, a need to pick up and go Boghiguian’s nomadic existence is integral to her artmaking, which is decidedly site-specific (Critics like to point out the ‘portability’ of her work, as though her oeuvre were a sort of luggage) She roams from country to country, often staging exhibitions that consider issues relating to the region she finds herself in In ‘The Loom of History’ –bewilderingly her first major solo show in the US – she sticks with this approach, overwhelming visitors to the New Museum with cutouts, drawings, paintings, collages, and installations that chart the brutal evictions and exploitations of the cotton industry, to which we owe no less than the global capitalism of today   In lieu of traditional wall text, Boghiguian has scrawled meditations and informative passages in yellow paint on black walls that resemble schoolroom chalkboards They tell the origins of American slavery, of French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville’s trip to the US and his vision of democracy, of the Dutch West India Trade These passages bear established interpretations, and so run the risk of appearing intellectually rote (‘The history of the modern world changed completely with age of exploration,’ begins one paragraph) But their blatancy is indicative of a deeper malaise that permeates Boghiguian’s work More damnable than history, she suggests, is a willed deafness to it Hence this exhibition’s auricular motif, the human ear, which features in visceral paintings, collages, and sculpture as an instruction to listen   The neatness of these narratives and lessons is contrasted by the troupes of paper cutouts – not-quite-lifesize and scruffily painted with encaustic – that huddle in the centre of the gallery Held in place by wooden sticks, these ancient Romans, rightwing protestors, enslaved cotton pickers, soldiers, and arriving immigrants bristle with aching life – the rhythms of harvesting cotton, the drudgery of factory toil, an

Contributor

June 2016

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Contributor

June 2016

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is the author of Harmless Like You and Starling Days. She is the winner of The Authors’ Club First Novel...

The Giving Up Game

fiction

December 2016

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

fiction

December 2016

The peculiar thing was that Astrid appeared exactly as she did on screen. She was neither taller nor shorter. Her smile had the same...
Harmless Like You

fiction

Issue No. 17

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

fiction

Issue No. 17

Interstate 95, September 2016   Celeste sat on the front seat wearing her black turtleneck sweater. She had three sweaters: black, blue, and festive....

READ NEXT

feature

December 2013

The Horror of Philosophy

Houman Harouni

feature

December 2013

An article published in this same venue opens with a grievance: ‘We lack the philosophers that we require for...

Interview

April 2012

Interview with Grant Gee

Evan Harris

Interview

April 2012

As the theatre is relit and the credits roll on Grant Gee’s latest film, Patience (After Sebald), an essay on...

poetry

June 2014

Oeuvres

Edouard Levé

TR. Jan Steyn

poetry

June 2014

1. A book describes works that the author has conceived but not brought into being. 2. The world is...

 

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