Music, Culture, Arts and Entertainment 9-26-2022

Writer’s Voice with Francesca Rheannon

This week, we talk about two novels about colonialism, both from the point of view of the colonized. First, we are honored to talk with last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah about his novel, “Afterlives,” just published in the United States by Penguin Random House. It tells the brutal story of colonialism in East Africa; first, German colonialism then, after Germany’s defeat in WWI, the British variety. It’s a brutal story, but not a brutal novel. Instead, it spins a profoundly moving and human tale centered on three young people who find love, caring and community despite the psychological and physical traumas the colonial system subjects them to.

Then R.F. Kuang tells us about her fantasy/slash/alternate history novel, “Babel, Or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translator’s Revolution.” It’s an alternate history of the British Empire just as it’s planning for the opium wars. In Babel’s version of history, magical inscriptions on silver bars provide the energy that coal did in the real British Empire. And the magic is driven by matched words in translation. It’s an intriguing concept—one that illuminates the power of language both to exert domination and spark liberation.

Monday, September 26 at 10:00 PM

Jim Motavalli

At 9:00 PM, Tommy Sands, the “Irish Pete Seeger,” who will be at Cafe 9 in New Haven October 18. He’s best known for the song “There Were Roses,” about the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. He will be joined, at the show and on WPKN, by Liz McNicholl, the Connecticut resident Irish bard.

At 9:30, a discussion of the new book “Bottled Water and the Breakdown in American Government” with its author, Manny Teodoro.

Then, at 10:00 PM an interview with jazz bassist Jeff Denson about the new album “Finding Light” with guitarist Romain Pilon and drummer Brian Blade.

Tuesday evening, September 27.