The acclaimed Nobel-prize winning writer Toni Morrison dealt with narratives that were inherently uncomfortable. Her most well-known work, Beloved, challenged conventional norms in a way that was both thematic and literary. Beloved is the fictional account of a formerly enslaved woman literally haunted by the ghost of her eldest, deceased daughter. Despite employing magical realism, the novel is nonetheless brutally realistic, to a nearly unrelenting degree. Elements of the supernatural are...

“April is the cruelest month,” once wrote the 20th century poet T.S Eliot in what would become one of his most acclaimed works, the sprawling anthology called The Waste Land, “breeding/lilacs out of the dead land/mixing memory and desire.” Eliot referred to the advent of spring post-First World War, a time of negotiated peace nonetheless made tragic by the shadow of past violence, during which in the poem, Eliot conducts a vividly melancholy search for meaning. Although the April of this year...

In West African tradition, a unique fixture of local communities was known as a djali , a specialized societal role that served a unique set of varied purposes. Functionally, djalis held a multitude of positions - ranging from acting as direct aides to kings to accompanying villages and sometimes even particular families. The latter was more common by far, as the role they performed was that of a narrative historian, using oral and musical conventions to record and reference the course of...