great, it’s getting on to 2 am and I’m in the kitchen of Romito casale. Mamma has finally gone off and left me with the computer. I don’t mind the mixed metaphor so much. The plural of mzungu is wazungu as I’m sure you already know. If I had clung my bag mofre tightly to my chest in Barcelona I might not have gotten robbed, so I wouldn-t feel too bad about looking like a gormless mzungu. There’s nothing you can do. I like the picture. Love daddy
These are tiny jewels of description; you have an eye and a heart and a voice. The writing is intensely personal and the better for it.
But the good and bad news is that the reader, coming to it cold, is thrown in media res. We know the folks in the first one, which I greatly admire, were displace in post-election violence nearly 2 years ago. Is there a way, without losing the immediacy of your observations, to explain who they were and whether they have any hope of getting back there.
Also, some things need to be explained. When you say “the self-help mechanisms put in place by the chronically poor,” I’d like to know what one or two of them are.
Also, in general, there are fewer quotes and voices than there might be. After reading this, I have an idea what people look like and what they are doing, but not what they sound like and what they think.
Taken as a whole, there is a pointillism about this that is v. appealing, though the overall sense of anomie, of having wandered into a Beckett play set in Kenya, is unsettling. As journalism, it lacks one key thing — a cohesive passage that explains why you are showing us these things and why we should care. As pure writing, however, it gains power from the detailed observation, putting me in mind of the cinema verite quality of John Le Carre in the Constant Gardener or even Michael Herr in Dispatches.
You’ve got my attention and then some. Make me understand why.
great, it’s getting on to 2 am and I’m in the kitchen of Romito casale. Mamma has finally gone off and left me with the computer. I don’t mind the mixed metaphor so much. The plural of mzungu is wazungu as I’m sure you already know. If I had clung my bag mofre tightly to my chest in Barcelona I might not have gotten robbed, so I wouldn-t feel too bad about looking like a gormless mzungu. There’s nothing you can do. I like the picture. Love daddy
These are tiny jewels of description; you have an eye and a heart and a voice. The writing is intensely personal and the better for it.
But the good and bad news is that the reader, coming to it cold, is thrown in media res. We know the folks in the first one, which I greatly admire, were displace in post-election violence nearly 2 years ago. Is there a way, without losing the immediacy of your observations, to explain who they were and whether they have any hope of getting back there.
Also, some things need to be explained. When you say “the self-help mechanisms put in place by the chronically poor,” I’d like to know what one or two of them are.
Also, in general, there are fewer quotes and voices than there might be. After reading this, I have an idea what people look like and what they are doing, but not what they sound like and what they think.
Taken as a whole, there is a pointillism about this that is v. appealing, though the overall sense of anomie, of having wandered into a Beckett play set in Kenya, is unsettling. As journalism, it lacks one key thing — a cohesive passage that explains why you are showing us these things and why we should care. As pure writing, however, it gains power from the detailed observation, putting me in mind of the cinema verite quality of John Le Carre in the Constant Gardener or even Michael Herr in Dispatches.
You’ve got my attention and then some. Make me understand why.