Turkana ST

The Sunday Times November 2013

Early morning in Nairobi “This is the rainy season,” a pilot says “difficult flying in Kenya now, Nairobi is high, 2000 feet and the weather patterns are unpredictable, but it is still early, at some point there will be a gap and when it comes, take it.”

A handful of blue, we take a right hand turn out. I hold the map on my knees and watch the green lines of the GPS. In the lull the sky is open, all around this space it is grey; the clouds are opaque and ponderous. “Storm clouds,” Tamiko says, “we will have to avoid them, how high are the peaks, we can probable only go up as 6500feet because of the cloud cover, we may have to fly around them.”
We sidestep a storm, and fly over the Nairobi suburb of Karen, named for Karen Blixen; then the Ngong Hills, the clouds are heavy around the four raised knuckles, from the ground they are benign, now they are malevolent. Below us Hog Ranch, the sometime residence of Peter Beard, khaki cloth walls hold within them many journeys. I could die in the Ngong Hills; disappear in the indifferent sky, and who would know. (continue reading…)

http://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/mandy-charlie-and-mary-jane-an-anti-novel-review/

Mandy, Charlie and Mary Jane: A Novel by
Stewart Home (Penny Ante Editions, Los Angeles, 2013)

Who reads Stewart Home? Home will say “very few, people are cowed by the malevolent society
in which we live, they believe in its values for they have no other frame of
reference, they fear it as they can think of nothing to replace it, they cannot
question it for all questioning challenges its essence.” (It is very postmodern
to say something for another; after all they may have said it, will say it or they
may not have and never will. What is verisimilitude?). But no matter here is
Stewart Home’s novel (or 245 pages of text) (continue reading…)

Queer Africa – New and Collected Fiction (Modjaji Books – April 2013)

Winner of the LAMBDA Literary Awards- Anthology Category 2014

(A Boy is a Boy is a …)

It is 1985; the train is crammed, full, full of lithe brown clothed service men. He approaches
the ticket counter and buys a one way ticket to Johannesburg, then he walks up the single
lined platform. A sign hangs above the platform, it reads ‘Johannesburg: Departing 16h15’. It is four o’clock; a
train from somewhere has already arrived. It shudders on the platform, smoke rises
from beneath it, from silver steel manacled tracks. (continue reading…)

Sunday Times May 2013

(Central Kalahari Game Reserve)

The earth beneath me is far away, I can touch her and yet I am enclosed, this is a retinal experience, visually sensuous, no sound but the engine, no smell but perspiration, no taste but salt, 5500 feet above the ground and I look out. Arid semi desert below me, blue sky surrounds; an uneven landscape, small hills that are shrubs, bumpy green, and the sky, an uneven blue; hills in the sky, scatterings of cloud. (continue reading…)

He calls himself Rillke, after the poet Rainer Maria, he has just added another ‘l’ to the name, words are a game,
and this game is a killer, a cryptic clue, he plays with words as he plays with
people, all names, (continue reading…)