Jess Martinaitis

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. And the novel is one way of denying the official, politicians’ version of truth.

Their moves are at once personal and driven by a desire to connect; and if these artists do not expect to feel wholly at home anywhere in the world, neither do they assume America is the only, or the best, place to exercise their collaborative gifts.

But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, pe... See more

In 1975, Muhammad Ali gave a lecture at Harvard University. After his lecture, a student got up and said to him, "Give us a poem." And Mohammed Ali said, "Me, we."

Writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by an urge to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge – which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capabl... See more

After asserting that “the Negro problem in America is not beyond solution,” Wright dropped a parenthetical that portended a core tension in his future work: “I write from a country—Mexico—where people of all races and colors live in harmony and without racial prejudices or theories of racial superiority. Whites and Indians live and work and die her... See more

It’s no secret: Black culture drives pop culture. It is “the original avant-garde,” as Felipe Luciano, a former TV producer, has said. But I sometimes wonder if appropriation is a prerequisite of Black culture going mainstream.

For almost 20 years, I have considered myself a student of "negrophilia". This means that I spend much of my time scrutinising how white and black people relate to each other, trying especially to understand their attraction to each other.