OLD ARCHIVE | emerging-voices

Oksana Ponaida Reads Ukrainian Poetry

Oksana Ponaida reads Ukrainian poetry by Borys Humenyuk and Lyubov Yakymchuk. Oksana came to the UK under the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

_Rock bottom_, the last of Zimbabwe's Shona Sculpture pioneers

Webster Makombe

Mar 27, 20233 min read

_Rock bottom_, the last of Zimbabwe's Shona Sculpture pioneers

The name Zimbabwe is derived from the Shona phrase dzimba dzemabwe, meaning “houses of stone”, an homage to the ancient kingdom of the...

Dec 14, 20226 min read

Where are you from?

Where are you from? I have been asked this more times than I can remember. And having lived in several places, the idea of home is elusive.

Sep 20, 202210 min read

I Mourn A Different Mourning

The unease that trails the celebration in black Our personal identities - at times fragile, other times stubborn abstractions--are given,...

The India That Is: Story of the ‘Population Propaganda’

May 24, 20225 min read

The India That Is: Story of the ‘Population Propaganda’

A Dispatch from the Indian Affairs Series Manasa Narayanan is a journalist and writer, trying to navigate the mighty and confusing world...

Rachel Jacobs

Jun 29, 20216 min read

When Will We Ever Learn?

All good myths and fairy tales begin with a journey. The heroine takes their first step into the unknown, a new vision of the world is...

Sara LeVee Safyan

Dec 7, 20200 min read

Sara LeVee Safyan: "Maybe Home Again"

Samara Rosen

Dec 7, 20200 min read

Samara Rosen: "Directions From the Fire"

Rachel Jacobs

Aug 16, 20206 min read

Lives on the River

Lives on the River: Rachel Jacobs We’ve moved our narrowboat from our lockdown spot on Tottenham Marshes after a dramatic series of...

Josh Buchin

Aug 16, 20204 min read

The Fire This Time

The Fire This Time: Josh Buchin America is on fire. In truth, America has always been on fire. The fire has raged for 400 years. But now...

Samara Rosen

Aug 16, 20205 min read

Chalking It Up

Oakland, California; Spring 2020: Chalking It Up When COVID-19 hit Oakland, California, the first thing to go was toilet paper. Videos of...

“Black People are Not Allowed to Enter this Restaurant”

Yoknyam Dabale

May 9, 20202 min read

“Black People are Not Allowed to Enter this Restaurant”

I am not a stranger to racism. Racism is a global experience for African people, and Coronavirus is intensifying that reality. I am an...

Rachel Jacobs

May 9, 20201 min read

When This Tree Blossoms

Two years ago, the artistic project Performing the Future (devised by Frank Abbott and myself) considered public space with no agenda and...

Oct 22, 20196 min read

GUEST BLOGS

Brexit's Psychological Devastation

My world changed in June 2016. Against all expectations, my country voted to leave the EU. Over 46 years, we shared the tasks of building...

Sophie Chirongoma

Jul 3, 20191 min read

The Stones You See

Report on Zimbabwe's Cyclone Meeting with the survivors and examining the rubble covering the residential places where homes were...

Gillian Dalley

Jan 13, 20193 min read

That it should come to this

Human history, according to some historians and philosophers, is driven by an innately progressive force, be that [a] god in society, the...

Oct 9, 20182 min read

GUEST BLOGS

A conversation between ourselves

I see my dear friend and co-contributor (a.k.a. Rose, EV’s Managing Editor) is at a loss to know what is going on with the UK and Brexit....

WORDS

Jun 15, 20232 min read

When Photography Serves Film

Gülce Tulçalı is a London-based visual artist whose practice includes moving image, photography, and performance art. She visualises...

Photography & Resilience: by Jeremy Alvarez

Jun 15, 20232 min read

Photography & Resilience: by Jeremy Alvarez

I was born in a very small city, more like a town, in the Southern Philippines. I grew up on a farm and later moved to the capital,...

Jun 15, 20232 min read

Artwork by Noga Shatz

I usually just start working in my studio, using what’s available in the space. I begin with drawing and painting, experimenting with...

Jun 15, 20232 min read

Gülce Tulçalı Reviews Two London Exhibitions

British Espionage & Male Homosexuality: Ungentle Huw Lemmey in collaboration with Onyeka Igwe Studio Voltaire is a hidden oasis in busy...

VISUAL ARTS

Tess O'Bamber

Mar 27, 20233 min read

Q&A: Artist Charlie Wooley

Tess O’Bamber talks with poet and designer Charlie Wooley about how the pandemic affected her creative process.

Dec 13, 20224 min read

Q&A: Musician Shane Cullinan

Gülce Tulçalı talks with Shane Cullinan, musician and composer, about his experience of making an album during the pandemic.

Dec 12, 20221 min read

'Web of Hate' Documentary

Manasa's documentary Web of Hate explores the intersection of social media, hate speech and India's Hindu nationalistic politics.

Tess O'Bamber

Dec 12, 20222 min read

Enough is Enough is Enough

On 1st Oct, Tess joined the crowds at King's Cross, protesting our need for a competent government to handle the cost of living crisis.

STREET CHATTER

May 5, 202315 min read

Palestinian Voices: Aseel AlBajeh

On April 25, 2023, Emerging Voices hosted a zoomcast featuring Aseel AlBajeh, a legal researcher and advocacy officer for Al-Haq, a...

Palestinian Voices: Sally Abed, Standing Together

Mar 24, 20239 min read

ACTIVISM

Palestinian Voices: Sally Abed, Standing Together

Sally Abed was the featured presenter at an online event hosted Emerging Voices on January 18, 2023. Read edited excerpts from Sally.

Palestinian Voices: Huda Abuarquob and Nivine Sandouka, ALLMEP

Mar 24, 20232 min read

ACTIVISM

Palestinian Voices: Huda Abuarquob and Nivine Sandouka, ALLMEP

Zoomcast Notes: November, 2022 Warmest thanks to Huda Abuarquob and Nivine Sandouka for a passionate presentation on the peace building...

When War Ends, the Struggle Begins – We Are Not Numbers

Mar 24, 20235 min read

When War Ends, the Struggle Begins – We Are Not Numbers

The Gaza based group, We Are Not Numbers (WANN), will be regular contributors to the Palestinian Platform, along with others. As their...

PALESTINE

Mar 27, 20234 min read

Open Closed Open

Recently, three people close to me opened--or closed-- depending on how you see it. One was my brother-in-law Jim.

Dec 14, 20223 min read

Chronicles of an Elder: Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe, August, 2022 Zimbabwe is a beautiful, distressed, struggling country of 15 million. Its government is corrupt, its social...

Sep 20, 20223 min read

To Autumn

‘Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness’... From John Keats, 'To Autumn' This time of year, September, has always had an aspect of...

Conversations: Continuations and New Dialogue

Sep 20, 20222 min read

Conversations: Continuations and New Dialogue

In June, Emerging Voices presented a three part series on Zoom: Examining Palestine/Israel. This series will continue in October.

I Died in Hell. They Called it Passchendaele

May 24, 20222 min read

I Died in Hell. They Called it Passchendaele

From a poem by Siegfried Sassoon SQUIRE nagged and bullied till I went to fight, …. I died in hell— (They called it Passchendaele). My...

May 24, 20224 min read

Oh, What a Lovely War (Not)...

Part I This is my fifth war when I'm counting as an American. There was the Cold War; then Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. Those are...

Oct 27, 20219 min read

On Lamentation and on My Father

by Rose Levinson Photo by Julia Yee From William Carlos Williams Tract “I will teach you my townspeople How to perform a funeral. Or do...

Jun 29, 20215 min read

Tough Times

...the old is dying and the new cannot be born Antonio Gramsci, circa 1930 Emerging from the latest round of Covid-19 lockdown feels like...

Mar 23, 20213 min read

Chronicles of an Elder: Rivers of Time

“And to make an end is to make a beginning.” Little Gidding. T.S. Eliot I measure time by my years on earth. I measure time by the...

Chronicles of an Elder: Teach Us to Number Our Days

Dec 7, 20203 min read

Chronicles of an Elder: Teach Us to Number Our Days

If I live to my next birthday, I’ll be the age my mother died, forty minutes short of hers. My mother’s memory looms over me, as it has...

Rose Reflects: Black Lives Matter – 7 minute listen

Nov 16, 20201 min read

Rose Reflects: Black Lives Matter – 7 minute listen

Rose Levinson reflects on the recent impact of the Black Lives Matter movement and reads the poem 'Riot' by Gwendolyn Brooks.

Chronicles of an Elder: Post Lockdown Blues

Aug 17, 20203 min read

Chronicles of an Elder: Post Lockdown Blues

During the lockdown, even ageing was suspended. Everything stopped. No visits to doctors, dentists. No worries that my pains were heart...

May 10, 20201 min read

April 2020 Poem

Birthday party through a window Waving, singing, hands and lips on glass. The New Normal. On the sidewalk, I outstretch my arm Warning...

May 10, 20202 min read

An Old Woman and the Virus

I am that woman. And I hate being old. It’s not just because my seventies inevitably means death is closer. It’s because I hate being...

Dec 17, 20194 min read

ROSE'S WRITING

Post Election Thoughts from a Londoner

It’s no longer a ‘crisis’. It’s reality. Remain is dead. Brexit is the world we live in, normalizing fear and destroying ties that bound...

Oct 22, 20193 min read

Geographica

"Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion." Directive, Robert Frost, 1946 Harsh,...

Jul 3, 20193 min read

A Song of the South

The road is never straight, the way is seldom clear. I went to Savannah, Georgia, to take part in a Jewish wedding. I ended making a...

Jul 3, 20193 min read

Ruminations on Exhaustion

.".. in the centre of our lives, this time, this day... this spring among the politicians playing cards. In a village of the indigenes,...

Apr 9, 20194 min read

Remembering Things Past

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Tolstoy; Anna Karenina Family: Oxford English Dictionary: A...

Feb 18, 20193 min read

This is the way the world ends...

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. -- T.S. Eliot The Hollow Men 1925 Choking on Brexit, Trump, climate...

Jan 13, 20193 min read

Outside Looking In

Outsider, definition: one not involved with a particular group of people or organization, one who does not live in a particular place; in...

Dec 22, 20181 min read

Climate Breakdown

These pictures are from a demonstration at London's British Broadcasting Corporation headquarters organized by Extinction Rebellion which...

Nov 26, 20182 min read

The Days of Our Years

I've gone through life implicitly believing in key notions of the Enlightenment: reason, knowledge, freedom, skepticism. Sure there were...

Nov 14, 20182 min read

Three Cheers for the Home Team

The US midterm election is over. Democrats now control the House of Representatives. Republicans have a majority in the Senate. And a...

Oct 28, 20181 min read

100 Year Old Poem, For Today

"It is difficult to get the news from poems, but people die everyday for lack of what is found there" - William Carlos Williams

Oct 9, 20182 min read

American Rhino

Check the online definition. You learn a rhinocerous is a large, heavily built mammal with one or two horns on its nose and thick folded...

Oct 9, 20182 min read

ROSE'S WRITING

Brexit Blues

I’m weary beyond words at the ongoing disaster that is Brexit. Yes, I'm an American citizen who cannot vote in the UK. Fundamentally, I’m...

Sep 17, 20183 min read

Lament for My Mother, Florence

‘When I was a child, I spake as a child. …. My mother was angry when I came home from secondary school with a grade D in maths class....

Jun 7, 20183 min read

Identity and its Discontents

The recent furore over anti-semitism in political circles in the UK pushes me back again into that circle of identity: Jew. When asked...

Mar 5, 20182 min read