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Kevin Brazil
Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Art Review, art-agenda, Studio International, and elsewhere. He is writing a book about queer happiness.

Articles Available Online


Alvaro Barrington, Garvey: Sex Love Nurturing Famalay

Art Review

October 2019

Kevin Brazil

Art Review

October 2019

The unofficial anthem of this year’s London Carnival was ‘Famalay’, a bouyon-influenced soca song that won the Road March in Trinidad & Tobago’s Carnival...

Essay

October 2018

The Uses of Queer Art

Kevin Brazil

Essay

October 2018

In June 2018 a crowd assembled in Tate Britain to ask: ‘What does a queer museum look like?’ Surrounded...

Suicide without a cause, or silent sacrifice for an apparent cause which, in our age, is usually political: a woman can carry off such things without tragedy, without even drama — Julia Kristeva   I   I return to a former self, ghost or shadow self emerging from a glimmering light;   Woolf’s ‘luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’   Life as circularity, inevitable return to a womb-like space, a space of the maternal?   Where do the dead go after they die? What nether region do they inhabit?   Where did the Hakka people come from? Peripatetic tribe from north-east China   She comes from people without a home, or fixed position She is condemned and doomed to wander looking for her place in history   I conjure up the past, delving into the recesses of unknown memory and time   I am returning to the source The original source The point of all our origin But these origins go further back beyond Western tradition, beyond the story of holy innocence fabricated in the myths of Adam and Eve, and the notion of a God the father And it does not reside in the maternal womb either, that place of warmth and nurturance, which begins with love   I invite mystery I return to our innate energy, excavating deeply layer upon layer of our consciousness   I breathe in the light; I inhale deeply and exhale   Where is the point of our origin?   I am digging deep I have to go further than the surface of things, back through space and time   I uncover hidden treasure buried for centuries, and carefully retrieve it for future purposes   Filtering through the coloured papers of memory, those delicate, fragile and carefully processed pieces of our past and history felt in my bones and body   In the beginning there was the Word And the Word is me My words become me, and I become the word, a flurry of mixed phrases, half-spoken sentences, articulate in their gibberish   I try to find the language that defines me, become a whirling dervish, caught up in a veil of spinning letters They fly around me, and I try to catch them   In the beginning there was

Contributor

July 2018

Kevin Brazil

Contributor

July 2018

Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London...

Nora Ikstena's ‘Soviet Milk’

Book Review

August 2018

Kevin Brazil

Book Review

August 2018

Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena opens with two women who cannot remember. ‘I don’t remember 15 October 1969,’ says the first. ‘I don’t remember...

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Interview

March 2017

Interview with Bae Suah

Deborah Smith

Bae Suah

Interview

March 2017

The Essayist’s Desk, published in 2003 and written when its author Bae Suah had just returned from an 11-month...

Interview

Issue No. 4

Interview with Ahdaf Soueif

Jacques Testard

Interview

Issue No. 4

In 1999, Ahdaf Soueif’s second novel, The Map of Love, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, eventually losing out...

feature

Issue No. 9

Leaving Theories Behind

Enrique Vila-Matas

feature

Issue No. 9

I. I went to Lyon because an organisation called Villa Fondebrider invited me to give a talk on the relationship...

 

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