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Victoria Adukwei Bulley
VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY is a poet, writer and filmmaker. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and has held artistic residencies internationally in the US, Brazil and at the V&A Museum in London. A Complete Works and Instituto Sacatar fellow, her pamphlet Girl B (Akashic) forms part of the 2017 New-Generation African Poets series. She is a doctoral student at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is the recipient of a Technē studentship for doctoral research in Creative Writing.

Articles Available Online


On Water

Essay

Issue No. 29

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Essay

Issue No. 29

& we say to her what have you done with our kin that you swallowed? & she says that was ages ago, you’ve drunk...

Interview

Issue No. 26

Interview with Saidiya Hartman

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Interview

Issue No. 26

The first time I encountered Saidiya Hartman, she was a voice in salt., an award-winning play by artist and...

I want you to be in my writing Maybe not you exactly Someone like you Will you like this version of you? Maybe not Will you recognise this version of you, as you? I hope so She has some of your qualities I say she because you are a trans woman, and it’s something about trans women that I’m writing Maybe you are central to it, or maybe incidental Either way, you figure in the text What makes me think I know anything about you? And what makes what I think I know something I can put in a piece of writing to which I own the rights?   As it happens, I’m a trans woman too Yay for girls like us! We’re at the bar at Mood Ring I buy us drinks Once our server is out of earshot, we dish I’m sorry you got harassed on the subway That happened to me just last week Oh, we saw the same surgeon His office never returns your calls It’s hilarious that we both fucked that other trans girl – she sure gets around Ah, but you have some stories I don’t Now, honey, tell me all about your pain   Wait, something’s wrong here If this is our shared story, why do I need you to tell it so that I can write it? Because of things we don’t have in common I’m white, middle-class by origin, with a good education, living in an apartment my partner and I own I transitioned late after securing a comfortable life In a word: bourgeois A bourgeois life brings relative freedom from pain But it’s boring This is the dilemma constitutive of bourgeois literature So I look to you for a good story I have the luxury of having feelings about other people’s feelings To feel, but also to judge, at some remove It will be your story, in my text – and my copyright It’s the business of bourgeois literature to stake claims to property rights over others’ pain   I don’t know that a book can even make a claim

Contributor

October 2018

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Contributor

October 2018

VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY is a poet, writer and filmmaker. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and...

Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s ‘Heads of the Colored People’

Book Review

October 2018

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Book Review

October 2018

Somewhere on the internet is a two-hour video of a lecture by the late writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins, author of the short story...

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fiction

April 2014

Chiral

Paul Currion

fiction

April 2014

I cough while the technician tinkers with the projector, although the two are not related, and I wonder why...

poetry

Issue No. 20

Two Poems

Nisha Ramayya

poetry

Issue No. 20

JOY OF THE EYES   The future is not the beginning, but the forerunner, of a new intense-formation.  ...

poetry

January 2014

Letters from a Seducer

Hilda Hilst

TR. John Keene

poetry

January 2014

At her death in 2004, Brazilian author Hilda Hilst had received a number of her country’s important literary prizes...

 

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