Reposted by Jordan Grey
Worth reading @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social in full. We hear about "truth and reconciliation," but if we want to prevent a return to fascism after we regain power, we need "memory, truth, and justice." We must build a political culture, a national mythos, oriented against MAGA crimes. No amnesty.
bostonreview.net
Truth Without Reconciliation
Why did Brazil’s democratic institutions hold firm while those in the United States so quickly wilted?
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![In late 1934, Langston Hughes, already established as a leading voice of literary Black America, traveled to Mexico City, where he stayed for more than five months and began translating short fiction by prominent Mexican and Cuban writers. These stories, as he wrote to a friend, explore “the revolutions and uprisings, sugar cane, Negroes, Indians, corrupt generals, [and] American imperialists,” and are “mostly all left stories, because practically all the writers down here are left these days.” But when Hughes proposed publishing the stories as a book, to be titled Troubled Lands, his agent discouraged him from further pursuing the project and it remained unpublished, until now, with only a handful of the translations making their way into contemporary magazines. This volume presents Hughes’s translations of these stories together for the first time as he originally envisioned. Edited by Ricardo Wilson, the book also features an introduction and brief biographies of the included writers.
Troubled Lands features thirty-three stories by eighteen writers, including Rafael Felipe Muñoz, Nellie Campobello, Lino Novás Calvo, Luis Felipe Rodríguez, Germán List Arzubide, Pablo de la Torriente-Brau, and Juan de la Cabada. The collection depicts Mexico in the wake of its revolution and Cuba in the years between the brutal regimes of Machado and Batista](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:wlamchyb2ae65fgx75sfaqsq/bafkreiabxdfrb2572rx2ljk6uqrs7rv3krxgs675zbq6n6ykrnysls47yi)
