Notes from the Middle World

What is the place of the artist and writer in a globalized world? In dialogue with the voices of the dead and the living—Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama— internationally distinguished South African artist, activist, and writer Breyten Breytenbach's new collection of essays traces the collisions between utopia and disaster, political trauma, and the renewal of hope. Notes from the Middle World is a beautiful and heartwrenching book. These essays include a glimpse of a buried language created in the Hunan province by and for women, an open letter to Nelson Mandela reflecting on the perilous state of post-apartheid South Africa, and existential and linguistic explorations. Against the conformity of power, Breytenbach takes readers on a journey through the "Middle World," an imagined space beyond borders and exile, toward an embracing vision of justice for the "un-citizens" post-modernity has dispossessed.