Another Sun (Conversations with Mayra A. Rodriguez Castro)

A lyrical interrogation of the legacies of slavery and anticolonial movements, featuring contributions by Françoise Vergès, Aimé Césaire, Wole Soyinka, and Danielle Legros Georges.

In 2005, Françoise Vergès and Aimé Césaire published Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai, a seminal conversation centering on Césaire’s life and the origins of his anticolonial politics and writing. Now, a generation later, poet and writer Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro revisits that interview with Vergès, unearthing stories of Vergès’ childhood in Réunion, her political formation and early sense of international solidarity, the long history of resistance to French and British colonialism and US imperialism, and the importance of feminism that is decolonial and antiracist. Rodríguez Castro and Vergès’ wide-ranging conversation insists, too, on the profound links between poetry and politics, building on Césaire’s insistence that “justice listens at the gates of beauty.”

Featuring an introduction by Rodríguez Castro and poems written in the wake of and against empire, by poets including Danielle Legros Georges, Wole Soyinka, Ishion Hutchinson, Clarisse Baleja Saïdi, Aimé Césaire, and Jean Érian Samson, Another Sun is a luminous, eclectic text shaped by ongoing struggles.