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Drawings

Lee Tribe

Issue 131, Summer 1994

 

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More from Issue 131, Summer 1994

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  • Fiction

    • Rebecca T. Godwin

      Keeper of the House

    • Rick Moody

      The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven

    • Alice Munro

      Spaceships Have Landed

    • Melissa Pritchard

      The Instinct for Bliss

  • Interview

    • Yves Bonnefoy

      The Art of Poetry No. 69

    • Alice Munro

      The Art of Fiction No. 137

  • Poetry

    • Agha Shahid Ali

      A History of Paisley

    • Ingeborg Bachmann

      Two Poems

    • Maureen Bloomfield

      Two Poems

    • Cathleen Calbert

      In Praise of My Young Husband

    • Anne Babson Carter

      Three Blocks from San Marco

    • Jane Cooper

      Seventeen Questions about King Kong

    • Alfred Corn

      Insertion Arias

    • Mike Decker

      The River

    • Ben Downing

      Three Poems

    • John Drury

      Two Poems

    • Clayton Eshleman

      Homuncula

    • Irving Feldman

      The Little Children of Hamelin

    • Stephen Gibson

      The Bra

    • Marilyn Hacker

      Cancer Winter

    • Geoffrey H. Hartman

      Four Poems

    • Stella Johnston

      Julian

    • Caroline Knox

      Kilim

    • Philip Levine

      Two Poems

    • James Merrill

      Tony: Ending the Life

    • Gary Mitchner

      On The Western Edge

    • Peggy Penn

      Two Poems

    • Bin Ramke

      Art. Love. Geology

    • Kay Ryan

      Matrigupta

    • Grace Schulman

      Bestiaries

    • Reginald Shepherd

      Three Poems

    • Kay Sloan

      Breakfast at Keseberg's Diner

    • Jordan Smith

      The Dream of Horses

  • Feature

    • Elizabeth Bishop & May Swenson

      Correspondence

    • Umberto Eco

      How to Travel with a Salmon

  • Notice

    • George Plimpton

      Notice

  • Art

    • Michael Scott

      Enamel on Aluminum

    • Lee Tribe

      Drawings

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This week, we’ve lowered the paywall on Italo Calvino’s Art of Fiction interview, a short story by Deborah Love, and a poem by Rohan Chhetri.

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Redux

The Art of Nonfiction No. 10

By Kwame Anthony Appiah
 

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Appiah in New York, 2018. Photo by Yael Malka

Fifty years ago, at a harp recital in Gloucester­shire, a retired British military officer with a clipped aristo accent came across a brown-skinned teenager. “I say, old chap, do you speak English?” the officer said.

As a story in Yale’s New Journal recounted, the young man—Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah—replied, “Why don’t you ask my grandmother?”

“Who, may I ask, is your grandmother?” the retired officer said.

“Lady Cripps.”

Lady Cripps was Isobel Cripps, the widow of Sir Stafford Cripps, a Christian socialist and Labour politician who had been chancellor of the exchequer and the Crown’s ambassador to the Soviet Union; he was known for his stalwart desire to relinquish Britain’s imperial possessions, from Calcutta to Accra. In 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, Stafford and Isobel’s daughter Peggy married Joe Appiah, kinsman of Ashanti kings and a leader of the Ghanaian independence movement. (The marriage would help inspire the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.) A year later, the Appiahs’ first child and only son was born.

When Anthony was growing up in Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti region of Ghana, the Appiah household was a locus of political and literary conversation. Among the visitors were the historian and activist C. L. R. James, the Pan-Africanist George Padmore, and the novelist Richard Wright. Joe Appiah instilled in his son a sense of global citizenship and family honor. As Anthony once wrote, “I found myself remembering my father’s parting words, years ago, when I was a student leaving home for Cambridge—I would not see him again for six months or more. I kissed him in farewell, and, as I stood waiting by the bed for his final benediction, he peered at me over his newspaper, his glasses balanced on the tip of his nose, and pronounced: ‘Do not disgrace the family name.’ Then he returned to his reading.”

Appiah earned a double first degree at Clare College, Cambridge, and then a Ph.D. in philosophy, the first African at the university to do so. He is perhaps best known, among nonphilosophers, for his work on cosmopolitanism and the nature of identity in a globalized world, though his bibliography and his range are vast. He is the author of sixteen books (including three mystery novels, which he considers, in Graham Greene’s terms, the “entertainments”). Although his earliest works are best enjoyed by professional philosophers, his writing for decades has been sparklingly lucid; each book wrestles with problems immensely relevant to modern life: identity, race, sexuality, nationalism, liberalism, our capacity to live together on one planet. For instance, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992), in its nine essays, provides a memoir of his father, examines the varied fates of African nation-states in the postcolonial era, and criticizes the very idea of race as a human category. Everywhere in his work, Appiah urges readers to see the multiplicities of our identities, which both define our individuality and describe a commonality. There is never a trace of dogma or ill will. He is the teacher—patient and erudite—­you always wished you had. And now you do.

Through these efforts Kwame Anthony Appiah has become one of the most celebrated thinkers of his generation; in 2012, President Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal for “seeking eternal truths in the contemporary world.” He has held faculty positions at Yale, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Ghana, in Accra; he is now a professor of philosophy at New York University. Appiah also lectures all over the world and writes the Ethicist column in The New York Times Magazine. He and his husband, Henry Finder, the editorial director of The New Yorker, live in an apartment in Manhattan and an eighteenth-century farmhouse in Princeton, where sheep can be found gamboling near the barn.

Appiah’s is a protean, rigorous, generous, and elegant mind; he is a multilingual scholar whose interests range from probabilistic semantics to political theory and, in his Times column, such problems as a troublesome in-law or a violent house pet. As one might expect from someone whose ancestors include leading figures at the court of Ashanti back to the eighteenth century and left-leaning aristocrats in the Cotswolds, Appiah is often noted for his fluidity and grace.

This interview began in January 2020 in front of an audience at the Morgan Library. Our subsequent exchanges were by email. At the Morgan, Appiah was winning, his way of telling a family anecdote captivating. And yet this was an instance when charm was a way not of concealing but of revealing. Appiah is a liberal in the most profound sense, a philosopher whose concerns are deeply contemporary and yet reminiscent, in decency of spirit, of some of his intellectual heroes, including Mill and Montaigne. It is hard to imagine a mind of greater rigor or amplitude.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about Kumasi and your family’s place in the city.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH

Kumasi is the second city of Ghana, after Accra, and it’s quite big. So, obviously, it’s not like a village where everybody knows everybody. But, given who my grandfather was, and given who my father was, and given who my mother was, pretty much everybody in town knew who we were. Kumasi is in the middle of the Ashanti region of Ghana, and my father was Ashanti—his father was the king’s brother-in-law, when I was a child, and a cousin who was like a sister to him was married to the next king. But, in part because of these connections, even though my mother was obviously from elsewhere, it would never have occurred to people to question her right or our right to be there. It was a big deal when the United States had its first biracial president, a dozen years ago, but Ghana’s head of state, for the last two decades of the twentieth century, was Jerry Rawlings, whose father was a Scotsman. He was my color, and nobody cared much one way or another.

Fiction

From the Archive, Issue 236

Interview

Aracelis Girmay

Episode 19: “Crucial Handshakes” (A Celebration of Issues 233 and 234)

, February 2021
This bonus episode revisits and remixes the virtual launch events for Paris Review issues 233 and 234, summer and fall 2020—no Zoom room required! First, Eloghosa Osunde reads the opening of her story “Good Boy”; next, Aracelis Girmay reads Lucille Clifton’s “poem to my yellow coat”; then Lydia Davis shares her short piece “The Left Hand”; translator Patricio Ferrari recites “Crater of the Beginning” by Portuguese poet António Osório; Jamel Brinkley reads an excerpt from his story “Witness”; Rabih Alameddine reads from his story “The July War”; Emma Hine presents her poem “Cassandra”; and the episode concludes with Girmay’s awe-filled recollection of her visit to Clifton’s archive, plus her rendition of Clifton’s poem “bouquet.”

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