Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh
Thomas Glave
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 1617751707
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Named a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Nonfiction!
Included in the 2014 Over the Rainbow list
Selected by Publishers Weekly as a Pick of the Week (July 1st, 2013)!
Selected by The Airship/Black Balloon Publishing as a Best Book of 2013
"This collection is wide-ranging, moving from the Caribbean (Jamaica in particular) to Cambridge, England, and from poetry to sex to discrimination."
--Library Journal (BEA Editors' Picks feature)
"A profound compassion for racial and sexual minorities, the oppressed, and the colonized, informs [Glave's] searing, beautifully evocative collection of essays...He captures the languor and seductiveness of Jamaica...A graceful and original stylist, Glave highlights the marginalized--calling on the descendants of people who toiled for the Empire as slaves and colonial subjects to never forget their past, and, in effect, to those who profit from that past to acknowledge their complicity. Ultimately, his work is critical, yet filled with generosity and compassion."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Thomas Glave surely is one of the bravest of contemporary authors...He is a fearless truth-teller whose essays in Among the Bloodpeople are fully, unhesitatingly engaged with his and our world."
--New York Journal of Books
"This is a collection that will leave you with chills; you will return to it not only for its sheer beauty, but also for its raw honesty, pain, and passion."
--Lambda Literary Report
"Glave writes beautifully...his...voice deserves our attention."
--The Gay & Lesbian Review
"A wonderful anthology, interspersing personal essays with more academic-leaning articles."
--CCLaP
"Glave remarks on the state of an island as he sees it, and of a people whose legacies bear out in astonishing ways, employing prose that soothes while its subject matter sears genteel sensibilities."
--Caribbean Beat
"Glave crosses boundaries of genre and community, speaking with extraordinary candor and vulnerability variously as the American son of immigrants, as a Jamaican, as a professor, as a queer boy from the Bronx...What unifies these identities and these essays is the ferocity of Glave's voice, his sentences that can feel like living, untamed things."
--Towleroad: A Site with Homosexual Tendencies
"I didn't know [homosexuals in Jamaica] were disemboweled with machetes. And I didn't consider one could be poetic about fear and anger and isolation. But the touchingly phrased sentences don’t soften the impact of reading about murder and political corruption. Instead, it eats at you because it makes you attentive to every word, feel the pauses as Glave takes a breath and speaks with the pulse of his heartbeat."
--Reeling and Writhing and Fainting in Coils
"With Among the Bloodpeople, [Glave] has given us a book as beautiful as it is necessary."
--Next Magazine
"After stunning readers with his story collections Whose Song? and The Torturer's Wife, the O. Henry- and multiple Lammy-winner now returns to nonfiction in Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh."
--Band of Thebes
"Glave's texts examine themselves, change course, and raise questions about their own assertions. Glave's hatred of oppression is balanced by his love of writing."
--Ithaca.com
Thomas Glave has been admired for his unique style and exploration of taboo, politically volatile topics. The award-winning author's new collection, Among the Bloodpeople, contains all the power and daring of his earlier writing but ventures even further into the political, the personal, and the secret.
Each essay in the volume reveals a passionate commitment to social justice and human truth. Whether confronting Jamaica's prime minister on antigay bigotry, contemplating the risks and seductions of "outlawed" sex, exploring a world of octopuses and men performing somersaults in the Caribbean Sea, or challenging repressive tactics employed at the University of Cambridge, Glave expresses the observations of a global citizen with the voice of a poet.
Exodus: Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century
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You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom
A Coming of Age - Albania under Enver Hoxha
unspeakable.) And so in imagining this desire, conjure for a moment if you will the occasionally invoked wanderer in the desert, who in his wisest moments will surely not pray for water; for he will know—or, aiming to keep his psyche intact throughout the stresses of such extreme privation, will need to know—that water’s actual appearance would loom before his parched imagination as the cruelest sort of taunt. In wisdom and humility, he will settle instead merely for the sight, just there, off
at him, over his ridiculous head)—just maybe, I could do it too. Someday. Somehow, he dared to think. Little ridiculous, pathetic, stupid faggot. Sitting there thinking. Dreaming. And reading. But keep it all to yourself, he thought, far from harmful hands and contemptuous eyes. And so he read you for years, Lady. Read you with devotion. With the devoutness in the pursuit that was, for him, virtually prayer. (But also escape. God help him—help me, Jesus Lord, to escape.) And watched you. Watched
respectfully and sometimes playfully as “Daddy,” knows, but also does not know—for in spite of the reverers and hagiographers who would seek to mythologize the likes of him, he is not infallible. Every old black person or village elder does not, in fact, possess infinite knowledge, and it is our job—among one of many of our jobs as writers—to search out that interior life with all of its disappointments and triumphs, and render it, not slavishly nor hagiographically, but faithfully—truthfully,
Without the obstacle of clear but durable barriers. Let me have an effect on you and make you remember me. Let me look at you and feel that I have touched you irrevocably in the most receptive place imaginable, and that now, more than ever—not only because of this, and because of so much more—you feel that way about me. As I—as you— But the truth is that I have no idea at all what will happen next. Nor does he. Nor might any of the other hes who may or may not traverse this terrain. I have
of—ironically—Cambridge’s “Idea of the University” speaker’s series. As the event began, the dissenters in attendance were loud but peaceful, shouting Willetts down; the minister decided to cancel his talk shortly thereafter. While administrators’ feathers may have been ruffled, no bones were broken, and the protesters brilliantly demonstrated not only the power and possibilities of conscientious dissent in a supposed democracy (one of the ideals of true democracy), but also opened a portal,
