To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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21st-century poetry
Writings of resistance from poets in exile
MEHRANGIZ RASSAPOUR: 'Hollow medals of heroism/Fame without ownership/Fetid mornings of whorehouses/Ridiculous faces of religion... Faithful torturers/Shredded protests/Mouldy jobs/Shining historical defeats...'
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
“OUR native soil never allows us to forget,” wrote the Roman poet Ovid when he was in exile by the Black Sea. For Salman Rushdie, exile is “an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back,” while Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once said that although he had two languages, “I forget which of them I dream in.”
If the 21st century is characterised by exile, emigration and violent displacement, what are the implications for poets who must leave their native languages behind? And what language do they dream in?
Jennifer Langer, the editor of Resistance: Voices of Exiled Writers (Palewell Press, £9.99) brings together in English the voices of 80 writers who have known imprisonment, war, persecution, emigration, refuge and exile in the first two decades of this century.
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