Review

Still Lives: Mangoes Don't Grow in Manchester

Still Lives: Mangoes Don't Grow in Manchester

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no 26

Icarus is dead, Icarus is alive. He resurrects himself in all of us as surely he must, in that tiny seedling hope, reaching for a dream which lies beyond our grasp. This then is the premise of Reshma Ruia’s haunting novel, Still Lives (Renard Press, 2022), drawing the reader in immediately and imperceptibly into a brooding sense of loss, a palpable dissolution, a wounded self, searching through the gloaming.

I am not your Eve: Interrogating Male Colonial Privilege

I am not your Eve: Interrogating Male Colonial Privilege

By Selma Carvalho

Issue no 25

At the heart of the controversy lies Teha’amana, his muse, barely thirteen (or was she eleven) when forty-three-year-old Gauguin, by arrangement with her Foster Mother, took her as his ‘bride.’ Could Teha’amana give her consent in such an arrangement? And if we assume some diluted and distorted form of consent, did she have any agency in this action?