Red Earth
"In Michael Salu’s Red Earth, writing becomes a virtuosic act of listening. Salu listens to history’s castoffs—slaves thrown overboard, soil used up and abandoned—so that the relationship between historical hierarchies of power and contemporary crises of ecology gently becomes obvious as if of its own accord. This amidst the strange and irresistible ether of Salu’s polychronic forms and tones, as echoes of the Divine Comedy leak into the Orphic narrator’s radio talk show. As in the classic novels of Daniela Hodrová and Ahmet Altan, Salu’s floating polyrhythms seem almost to weave themselves, crossing historical eras, terrestrial deserts, ocean depths, and metaphysical thresholds—a polyphony of voices from all the dimensions of the world."
—Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of The Box
"The emergency we've made for ourselves as a species begs for books like Michael Salu's haunting and beautiful Red Earth. At once vast and intimate, galactic and rooted in the earth, this book reads like a genre unto itself. Here are the sonics of poetry and the choral qualities of theatre. Voices swirl and speak, then are lost to the wind. Memories appear and dissolve before nostalgia can snatch them into tidy orbits. To enter this book is to enter a cosmic reckoning with finitude, a record, a warning, and a psalm of our time."
—John Freeman, author of Wind, Trees
"Red Earth is a radio show on low frequency. Like a ghost walk at the crack of dawn it writes a different grounding and earth into being. Attuned to the quiet frequencies of colonial afterlives, our guides Manto and the narrator, descend into Hades like Orpheus, taking their listeners on a journey to hear the voices unheard in the earth—bony voices in the half light, raw with grief and petrified accounts of deep earth wounds. The methodological brief is to listen intently and hear in the earth different stories. In Red Earth, Michael Salu brings a warm and uncompromising look at pain, Christianity, the arts economy of ‘black as bling’, AI, virtual worldings, hardened realities and all the psychic contradictions of late-night colonial earth. Rather than the didactic pronouncements of terrible violence and its on-going presence, the writing bids us to come with, in an elegiac remonstration of the intimacies of encounters…Red Earth is a literary journey fellow with Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to my Native Land and Franz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, and Salu’s autoethnography is equally as impressive and unique in the tremor of its language and urgency of its questions. Stay tuned, a major talent has just launched a show that everyone should listen to."
—Kathryn Yusoff, Author of A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
Buy from:
Calamari Archive
Asterism Books
Bookshop.org
or order from your favourite bookshop
—Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of The Box
"The emergency we've made for ourselves as a species begs for books like Michael Salu's haunting and beautiful Red Earth. At once vast and intimate, galactic and rooted in the earth, this book reads like a genre unto itself. Here are the sonics of poetry and the choral qualities of theatre. Voices swirl and speak, then are lost to the wind. Memories appear and dissolve before nostalgia can snatch them into tidy orbits. To enter this book is to enter a cosmic reckoning with finitude, a record, a warning, and a psalm of our time."
—John Freeman, author of Wind, Trees
"Red Earth is a radio show on low frequency. Like a ghost walk at the crack of dawn it writes a different grounding and earth into being. Attuned to the quiet frequencies of colonial afterlives, our guides Manto and the narrator, descend into Hades like Orpheus, taking their listeners on a journey to hear the voices unheard in the earth—bony voices in the half light, raw with grief and petrified accounts of deep earth wounds. The methodological brief is to listen intently and hear in the earth different stories. In Red Earth, Michael Salu brings a warm and uncompromising look at pain, Christianity, the arts economy of ‘black as bling’, AI, virtual worldings, hardened realities and all the psychic contradictions of late-night colonial earth. Rather than the didactic pronouncements of terrible violence and its on-going presence, the writing bids us to come with, in an elegiac remonstration of the intimacies of encounters…Red Earth is a literary journey fellow with Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to my Native Land and Franz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, and Salu’s autoethnography is equally as impressive and unique in the tremor of its language and urgency of its questions. Stay tuned, a major talent has just launched a show that everyone should listen to."
—Kathryn Yusoff, Author of A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
Buy from:
Calamari Archive
Asterism Books
Bookshop.org
or order from your favourite bookshop
Cybernetics, or Ghosts?
Edited by writer and artist Michael Salu, fifteen of today’s most daring writers from across the globe read and respond to Italo Calvino’s seminal essay ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’ with rich and expansive works of fiction.
In Calvino’s essay, first delivered as a lecture in 1967, he provocatively suggested that writing could one day become a computationally reducible process, speculating that machines might eventually become sophisticated enough to reimagine the singular author’s human’ parameters’ and write literature with the same dexterity as us. What, then, will become of the human author? With the digital age now spanning decades and computation determining almost every aspect of our lives, do we think clearly and imaginatively enough about our relationship with machines?
As a human echo to the datasets driving artificial intelligence, Calvino’s prescient ruminations catalyse the ideas in this anthology, creating a networked artwork reminiscent of the experimental literary group Oulipo. Contemplating the many ways myth and technology shape the human condition and reflecting on the power and importance of stories, Cybernetics, or Ghosts? offers a rich, intricate web of collective storytelling full of humanity, ingenuity and critical ideas.
Contributors:
∀ i, Iphgenia Baal, Steve Barbaro, Blake Butler, Lisa Hsiao Chen, Tice Cin, Innocent Chizaram Ilo, Shingai Kagunda, Kelly Krumrie, Andrea Mason, Kuzhali Manickavel, Geoffrey Morrison, Rion Amilcar Scott, Simon Okotie, Mandy-Suzanne Wong.
ORDER (EU & UK): http://surl.li/aouryz
ORDER (USA): http://surl.li/pkziay
Kindle Edition: https://amzn.eu/d/bMMrF8h
or from your favourite bookshop
In Calvino’s essay, first delivered as a lecture in 1967, he provocatively suggested that writing could one day become a computationally reducible process, speculating that machines might eventually become sophisticated enough to reimagine the singular author’s human’ parameters’ and write literature with the same dexterity as us. What, then, will become of the human author? With the digital age now spanning decades and computation determining almost every aspect of our lives, do we think clearly and imaginatively enough about our relationship with machines?
As a human echo to the datasets driving artificial intelligence, Calvino’s prescient ruminations catalyse the ideas in this anthology, creating a networked artwork reminiscent of the experimental literary group Oulipo. Contemplating the many ways myth and technology shape the human condition and reflecting on the power and importance of stories, Cybernetics, or Ghosts? offers a rich, intricate web of collective storytelling full of humanity, ingenuity and critical ideas.
Contributors:
∀ i, Iphgenia Baal, Steve Barbaro, Blake Butler, Lisa Hsiao Chen, Tice Cin, Innocent Chizaram Ilo, Shingai Kagunda, Kelly Krumrie, Andrea Mason, Kuzhali Manickavel, Geoffrey Morrison, Rion Amilcar Scott, Simon Okotie, Mandy-Suzanne Wong.
ORDER (EU & UK): http://surl.li/aouryz
ORDER (USA): http://surl.li/pkziay
Kindle Edition: https://amzn.eu/d/bMMrF8h
or from your favourite bookshop
What Lies Beyond the Red Earth?
An essay exploring the British-born Nigerian author's Red Earth project.
AI, subjectivity, colonialism and dreaming of equitable computational futures.
SIGNED by the author.
ORDER FROM TANGERINE PRESS
AI, subjectivity, colonialism and dreaming of equitable computational futures.
SIGNED by the author.
ORDER FROM TANGERINE PRESS