Other Articles & Essays | Glen Retief
In formal English, if you essay something, you try it out, as in, “I essayed a smile.” In the tradition of personal and public commentary, essays show a writer trying to figure out the world and their own relationship with it.
Here is a selection of Glen’s essays, on topics ranging from ownership to water to the meditations of Basho, the seventeenth century haiku master.
OTHER ARTICLES & ESSAYS | GLEN RETIEF
Here is a selection of Glen’s essays, on topics ranging from ownership to water to the meditations of Basho, the seventeenth century haiku master.
- “Ghost Fish,” in Michigan Quarterly Review, a special issue on African literature.
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“As a South African American, I dream of my countries standing together for human rights.” Daily Kos
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“A Tender, Complicated Ode to Birding in Postcolonial America” from Riverteeth
- “Listening to Ravens’ Cries in the Great Houses of Chaco Canyon” from Perceptive Travel.
- “An inner dialogue about a Somali in America.” A review of Said Shaiye’s Are You Borg Now, for the Mail and Guardian.
- “A poetic, resonant nightmare about LGBT rights and climate change.” A review of Alastair Mackay’s It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way, written for the Mail and Guardian.
- “Communalism in the Veld,” an examination of South African ownership traditions in the Anthropocene, published in the Yale Review
- “Level Seven: Notes on a Thirst” about the 2018 Cape Town water crisis, from Kenyon Review Online.
- “South Africa’s Climate Change Struggles Offer a Grim View of Our Own Future” from The New Republic.
- “Life in South Africa Amidst the Omicron Surge” from The New Republic.
- “A timely catalogue of failure.” This is a review of C.A. Davids’s novel, How to Be a Revolutionary, from the Mail and Guardian.
- “The Prepared Dance,” a meditation on the relevance of Basho to contemporary travel writers. This essay appeared in print only in Hotel Amerika, but you can order a copy of the issue here.