Hell’s Hundred Days
The Rwandan genocide was carefully planned and executed by the Hutu-dominated government. Through 1993 and early 1994 it held peace talks with the opposition Rwandan Patriotic Front. UN peacekeepers were dispatched to establish an interim government and elections. The talks were a smokescreen. The regime had no intention of power sharing. ‘Ironically, in the months before the 1994 genocide, the accords generated much optimism and were seen as a model that offered the prospect of peace and democracy,’ Blewitt writes. She adds in a rueful, bitter tone: ‘Little did we know that all the while the government was planning the killing lists.’
Max Dunbar reviews Mary K Blewitt‘s You Alone May Live.
Maintenant # 12 – Jürgen Rooste
For me it seems more like Kafka’s world. It has always felt as though Beckett enjoyed himself, it was a game through and through… I consider myself to be a realist. Although I sometimes head into nightmares and fantasies, but my aim is to capture something what one might call “real”. At least an attempt towards reality. They have called me a critic, a drunk, a wanna-be. I’m all that. My purpose is to capture some language and some faith, some trouble… I often let the language speak for me, I often tend to tell these stories no-one should hear about me. I never get too far from the truth. I tend to leave marks on the snow in the shape of a stupid rabbit. So, one could actually follow me to my real life, hunt me down. But no-one really cares, because I seem to be such a… stupid beast… I like “intellectual gangs”, but I have never found my place there. While I’m active, everybody thinks I’m among the leaders and I enjoy myself, I always tend to run things and make stuff happen. But I actually I feel better as a loner…
In the twelfth of his Maintenant series SJ Fowler interviews the Estonian poet Jürgen Rooste.
Two Poems
a commie with an artist’s soul was taking refuge
together with other war-despisers and artists
in zurich
there — in the midst of cafes and cabarets
there — in the midst of wine craze and opium passion
in the city of erotic charges
and electric discharges
dadaism was born
and Lenin — that artistic soul —
(for haven’t there been enough
clowns and artmakers
clairvoyants and charlatans
among them bloody dictators) —
there Lenin saw Duchamp…
By Jürgen Rooste.
Beauty & the Beat
Coming soon from Blackheath Books (3:AM Publisher of the Year 2009), The Beat Anthology 2006-2009. More info here & there.