Time Is A Mother

From award-winning writer Sarah Schulman, a longtime social activist and outspoken critic of the Israeli war on Gaza, comes a brilliant examination of the inherent psychological and social challenges to solidarity movements, and what that means for the future. 

For those who seek to combat injustice, solidarity with the oppressed is one of the highest ideals, yet it does not come without complication. In this searing yet uplifting book, award-winning writer and cultural critic Sarah Schulman delves into the intricate and often misunderstood concept of solidarity to provide a new vision for what it means to engage in this work—and why it matters. 

To grapple with solidarity, Schulman writes, we must recognize its inherent fantasies. Those being oppressed dream of relief, that a bystander will intervene though it may not seem to be in their immediate interest to do so, and that the oppressor will be called out and punished. Those standing in solidarity with the oppressed are occluded by a different fantasy: that their intervention is effective, that it will not cost them, and that they will be rewarded with friendship and thanks. Neither is always the case, and yet in order to realize our full potential as human beings in relation with others, we must continue to pursue action towards these shared goals. 

Within this framework, Schulman examines a range of case studies, from the fight for abortion rights in post-Franco Spain, to NYC’s AIDS activism in the 1990s, to the current wave of campus protest movements against Israel’s war on Gaza, and her own experience growing up as a queer female artist in male dominated culture industries. Drawing parallels between queer, Palestinian, feminist, and artistic struggles for justice, Schulman challenges the traditional notion of solidarity as a simple union of equals, arguing that in today’s world of globalized power structures, true solidarity requires the collaboration of bystanders and conflicted perpetrators with the excluded and oppressed. That action comes at a cost, and is not always effective. And yet without it we sentence ourselves to a world without progressive change towards visions of liberation. 

By turns challenging, inspiring, pragmatic, and poetic, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity provides a much-needed path for how we can work together to create a more just, more equitable present and future.

The Decent Of Alette is a rich odyssey of transformation in the tradition of The Inferno. Alice Notley presents a feminist epic: a bold journey into the deeper realms. Alette, the narrator, finds herself underground, deep beneath the city, where spirits and people ride endlessly on subways, not allowed to live in the world above. Traveling deeper and deeper, she is on a journey of continual transformation, encountering a series of figures and undergoing fragmentations and metamorphoses as she seeks to confront the Tyrant and heal the world. Using a new measure, with rhythmic units indicated by quotations marks, Notley has created a spoken text, a rich and mesmerizing work of imagination, mystery, and power.

Alice Notley is a poet whose twenty previous titles include The Descent of Alette, Beginning with a Stain, Homer's Art, and Selected Poems. She wrote the introduction for her late first husband Ted Berrigan's Selected Poems. She lives in Paris.

Published 1996.

David Wojnarowicz, one of the most provocative artists of his generation, explores memory, violence, and the erotism of public space—all under the specter of AIDS.

Here are David Wojnarowicz’s most intimate stories and sketches, from the full spectrum of his life as an artist and AIDS activist. Four sections—”Into the Drift and Sway,” “Doing Time in a Disposable Body,” “Spiral,” and “Memories that Smell like Gasoline”—are made of images and indictments of a precocious adolescence, and his later adventures in the streets of New York. Combining text and image, tenderness and rage, Wojnarowicz’s Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is a disavowal of the world that wanted him dead, and a radical insistence on life.

The new and revised edition features a foreword by Ocean Vuong and a note from the editor, Amy Scholder.

Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas, co-editors at INCA Press (along with Irena Borić), are the guest-editors of this issue of OEI: it contains essays, artworks, and archival materials by 21 artists, theorists, writers, and artist-run spaces (mostly from the Americas).

The subject of the issue is art and neoliberalism, and it encompasses essays, images and other works by Dorothée Dupuis, Max Jorge Hindered Cruz, Luciano Concheiro, Yvonne Osei, Diego Bruno, John Riepenhoff, Suhail Malik, Good Weather, The Luminary, Bikini Wax, Beta-Local and more.

This stunning collection of poems by the Algerian poet Jean Sénac (1926–1973) was originally published when he was forty-one. Sénac represented the hope of the new generation of Algerians who were celebrating their independence from France after 130 years of colonialism, and in the tradition of René Char and the early Albert Camus, he portrayed an Algeria whose land and people would finally sing with their own voice. 

Sénac celebrates revolution, love, and the body, beginning with the resonant verses: “And now we’ll sing love / for there’s no Revolution without love.” He sang, as well, of beauty: “No morning without smiling. / Beauty on our lips is one continuous fruit.”

Translated by Jack Hirschman

Published on the centenary year of Pasolini’s birth, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper is a dual edition that stages a dialogue between cinema today and Pasolini’s timeless films and words.

The two complementary volumes slide into one another, forming a unique set that evokes and celebrates Pasolini’s enduring influence. The smaller book features his epic autobiographical poem ‘Poet of the Ashes’, in a revised translation by esteemed poet Stephen Sartarelli; the larger book comprises original tributes by vital filmmakers from across the contemporary cinema landscape.

Twenty filmmakers shared personal reflections in the form of essays, poems, photographs, drawings and more: Catherine Breillat, Luise Donschen & Helena Wittmann, Jia Zhangke, Radu Jude, Payal Kapadia, Alexandre Koberidze, Dane Komljen, Mike Leigh, Mariano Llinás, Roberto Minervini, Valérie Massadian, Luc Moullet, Ben Rivers, Angela Schanelec, Ulrich Seidl, Basma al-Sharif, Deborah Stratman, Anocha Suwichakornpong and Gustavo Vinagre.

Algeria, Capital: Algiers by Anna Gréki is co-published by Pinsapo Press and CUNY Lost & Found, translated by Marine Cornuet, and introduced by Ammiel Alcalay.

Anna Gréki (1931-1966) was an Algerian poet of French descent. A member of the Algerian Communist Party, she was arrested and imprisoned for her participation in the Algerian liberation struggle in Algiers, in 1957. Algérie, capitale Alger, a collection of poems written during Gréki's imprisonment, was published in 1963 in a French and Arabic bilingual edition. Algeria, Capital: Algiers makes this work available to English readers for the first time.

"Anna Gréki was a particularly inconvenient pied noir—not loyal enough for the French colonists and too compromised for the Algerian nationalists—and so she was shunted to the margins of Algerian literary history. Nevertheless, it’s time she takes her place at the center of that narrative, and these accomplished translations constitute a necessary English-language introduction to this secret garden of Maghrebi poetry. Gréki’s poetry is electrified by the heady heights of the war of liberation, but arguably it finds its truest expression in her paeans to the wild hills and impregnable peaks of the Aurès mountains, where she was born and where she found a sense of peace which otherwise eluded her in her brief life." —André Naffis-Sahely

“Nothing happens here but everything burns.” From the prison where she was tortured by French authorities in 1950s Algeria, Anna Greki stays in touch, feverishly, with “this world of vulnerable flesh.” Addressed to her friends and comrades in struggle, to the land and the leaves and the birds, these poems defy “the war, this male ax,” invoking the future with “a trust so total / I can almost touch it.” Marine Cornuet’s translation deftly conveys Greki’s intimate language of the senses, to “transcribe with words what is done without them.” —Omar Berrada

"How fitting that a bilingual edition of Anna Gréki’s poems should be published now: a French poet born in Algeria, anti-colonialist (imprisoned for that) as Algeria battled for independence, writing in French, like Kateb Yacine, to show her freedom from French hegemony, but also her freedom as a woman writer to forge a transcendent and engaged poetics." —Marilyn Hacker