Three Poems: ‘Charleena Chavon Lyles’, ‘Spotted Owl’, ‘Economics’

This collection of poems is based in working-class life through an intersectional lens on the west coast of the US. It includes a documentary poem to a young Black woman, Charleena Chavon Lyles, who has been elegized by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in Seattle. It draws on news articles and an obituary to support its truth claims and aims to counter the official police report and support the global, working class, BLM movement. ‘Spotted Owl’ is a poem that talks back to the opposition between loggers and the forest, in part from the point of view of an old growth tree. It highlights the intimate relationship between trees and owls and between blue- collar workers who directly work with natural resources and the environment. ‘Economics’ is about work beyond capitalism, through a focus on the relationship between bees and a chaste tree and the Irish word for labor, saothar. In sum, these poems address the lived experience of class through the author’s vantage at this place and time, from the US west coast.

New Critical Essays on Toni Morrison's God Help the Child

American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s 11th novel, God Help the Child, released in 2015, set in contemporary times, explores the relationship between a financially successful, beautiful young Black woman with a haunted past and an intelligent disaffected young Black man who is equally alienated from his past. This collection of essays, edited by Morrison scholars Alice Knox Eaton, Maxine Lavon Montgomery, and Shirley A. Stave, and including essays by well-known Morrison critics Evelyn Schreiber, Mar Gallego, Susana Vega, Anissa Wardi, and Justine Tally, explores the novel’s themes and tropes through a multiplicity of critical and theoretical approaches. The first of the collection’s three sections focuses on the issue of trauma in the novel. The various essays featured here delve into the thorny topic of childhood neglect and sexual abuse, considering how the main characters carry the burden of the pain they experienced into adulthood. These essays probe the healing achieved in the novel through various approaches, all focused on arriving at an understanding of Morrison’s sense of what healthy adulthood entails. The collection’s second section considers Morrison’s narrative choices in her novel, concentrating on the formal experimentation that occurs within the text. The authors in this section reflect upon the myriad ways in which Morrison's novel relies upon intertextual play in the creation of a fictional cosmology that engages the reader on multiple levels. Essays included in the collection's final section turn attention to God Help the Child in terms of the novel's signifying relation with earlier Morrison texts, bringing into sharp focus the predominant concerns throughout Morrison's fictional canon, from her debut work of fiction, The Bluest Eye, until the present.

Racialized Emotional Labour: The Weight of Blackness in White Spaces

At the age of 17, from April 2016 to September 2016, I worked part-time at a yacht club on Toronto Island as a maintenance worker. I worked alongside another individual in the maintenance department, and we were both of Afro-Jamaican descent. The club had a predominantly white membership, with few customers who were people of colour. The staff was also mostly white, and there were only five other people of colour who worked there besides us, and none of them were black either. I found that, while interacting with members, I faced racialised remarks and assumptions based on my position as a maintenance worker and as a young black woman. To remain professional and avoid validating any of their racist assumptions, I employed a high level of emotional labour and restraint. In discussions with my Jamaican colleague, I found he faced similar racialised comments; he also felt it necessary to employ emotional control to uphold a palatable image. However, I also found that the non-black employees did not employ the same level of emotional labour. This is not an isolated experience. I have also had to engage in emotional labour in other workplaces. Moreover, it is common to hear about Black employees, especially Black women, performing emotional labour for non-black customers. Black female employees must employ more emotional labour when working in predominantly white spaces, especially in racialised occupations.

The Street

This 1946 novel dramatizes the difference between law and justice as experienced by a young black woman in Harlem.

A case of recurrent acute aortic syndrome: Beyond emergency diagnosis and treatment

Introduction: Acute aortic syndromes (AAS) are emergency conditions with a common pathway but various clinical manifestations. In order to reduce the extremely poor prognosis, these syndromes require a rapid diagnosis and decision making.Case report: We report the case of a young black woman with recurrent aortic dissection (RAD), presenting to the Emergency Department (ED) with an atypical symptom: ankle soreness. After the surgical treatment, several exams were performed in order to investigate underlying conditions for recurrence: after a first suspicion of tuberculous aortitis, the final diagnosis was Takayasu’s arteritis.Discussion: The aim of this article is to underline the extremely heterogeneous presentation of AAS that worsens the already complicated process in diagnosing the syndromes. Despite uncommon signs and symptoms, identifying patients with a high pre-test likelihood for the disease is crucial to promptly get a correct diagnosis. Once the diagnosis has been confirmed, since AAS may be a spy for important systemic diseases, conditions such as congenital disease, autoimmune and infectious aortitis need to be excluded and treated to prevent any recurrence or systemic implications.

I Am Not Beyoncé: Tackling the Issue of Race Representation Head On

On my last night of a six-day sojourn in the Twin Cities, I gave a reading at The Loft Literary Center and shared this statement made by a young Black woman, Ysa, whom I had met at Juxtaposition Arts earlier in the day.Ysa and two of her fellow artist-apprentices shared with me the creative process behind the impressive mural they recently painted on their block. My morning presentation at the arts center was sponsored by Umbra Search, a free digital platform that provided research assistance when the young women needed to study graphics from the Black Panther Party’s newspapers. The mural features a mother and child in the traditional sacred pose, but the child in this scene is female and these haloed figures have brown skin and Afros. Beams of light radiate outward, made up of hundreds of small black-and-white photographs of Black women who have made a contribution to the community as well as those who have lost a loved one to violence.

I am from a fantasy, where Freire quotes become reality

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to show the viewpoint of two youth artists, researchers and activists who use spoken word and graphic arts to represent their research. Design/methodology/approach As a bilingual Spanish-speaking Latina and a young Black woman, the authors use artistic expression as a way to voice themselves and to give voice to the work they do as members of two youth research collectives. As individuals, they are members of two different youth participatory action research groups with different goals and ways of making sense of the world. But these groups have also come together to collaborate on issues of shared importance. Findings As youth artist-activists, the authors’ work could stand on its own, but they believe that they are stronger together. They have created a conversation of images and voices that represent the strength they have when they can be themselves. They work together to make a world one deserves to live in. Originality/value The authors’ work originates from within and is influenced by their experiences in the world, by the communities surrounding them, by those who love them, by those who have come before them and by the challenges that are thrown at them. They believe that their words and images have value because they do.

Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe: Re-narrating Roman Britannia, De-essentialising European History

Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe (2001) contributes to the imaginative disentanglement of the traditional British ethnicity-and-nation nexus and questions the related founding myth of racial purity by featuring the character of Zuleika, a young black woman who is born of Sudanese parents in Roman London. Through the depiction of Zuleika, Evaristo offers a subversive reshaping of some versions of the official British national history in the context of a wider revision of the European classical past. However, in spite of its temporal setting, Evaristo’s historical novel simultaneously engages with contemporary issues of gendered racialisation and national belonging. In its highly orchestrated poetic prose, Roman Londinium and today’s London are imaginatively interwoven. This enables the reader to correlate Zuleika’s attempts at negotiating her right to citizenship in the Roman empire to contemporary Black British feminist politics, committed as it is to resisting structures of sexist and racial discrimination at play in present-day Britain.