ascendmagazine-blog

[ascendmagazine-blog]

Schedule for submissions are out! We're releasing submission dates ahead of time for anyone to have more time to create! Check out more submission dates for other issues at http://ascendmagazine.weebly.com/submit.html

[ascendmagazine-blog]

Ascend Magazine is now accepting submissions for Issue 3!

• theme: revolution

• guidelines: http://goo.gl/eZOeqS 

• submission deadline –– June 1st. 

• womxn of color + non-binary people of color only!

We’re also accepting non-fiction pitches for our blog on a rolling basis!

Blog submission guidelines are here.

Thawra is a small zine we’re also curating. We’re seeking work from Arab womxn and non-binary Arab people. There is no theme, so all work is acceptable.

Deadline: May 31st.

For more information, click here.

We hope to see you and your work in our inbox very soon!

[ascendmagazine-blog]

Thawra: Calling All Arab Womxn and Non-binary People

الصوت المرأة ثورة / The voice of the woman is revolution

While Ascend is currently on hiatus, Thawra is a special project, a mini project of sorts underneath the larger Ascend umbrella.

We are currently accepting submissions of art by Arab womxn or nonbinary Arab people at ascendspecialprojects@gmail.com (please note that this is a different email than our usual submissions email).

Our voices our often silenced, only amplified when they fit a certain agenda. We want to hear your voice. Speak to us--about anything. Thawra does not have a specific theme. Instead, it seeks to be more of an anthology of work by Arab womxn & non-binary Arab people.

For deadlines and submission guidelines, keep reading.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Please send all submissions through email. Any other form of submission will be dismissed and please send to the ascendspecialprojects@gmail.com email. Note this is different than our magazine submissions address.

The subject line of your email should read THAWRA SUBMISSION - PROSE (for example). If you are submitting in multiple mediums, please email each submission separately.

In the body of the email, please include a bio. The bio is nothing intense, include the basics: your name, pronouns, a little about yourself, social media handles. Then, introduce your pieces’ titles (which should be included in the attachment as well) + any relevant information you would like us to know about your pieces.

If you wish to remain anonymous or use a pen name, please note as much.

Submissions should be sent as attachments. Please send written work in docx or pdf format, preferably Times New Roman 12 pt font. Each poem or story should start on a new page with a title. All photography and visual art submissions should be submitted in jpg or png format; please DM us @ascendzine on twitter if there is an issue with this.

RULES:  

Poetry - up to 5 poems

Short Stories - up to 2, each no more than 2500 words

Essays - up to 3, each no more than 1200 words. If you would like to pitch an idea for an article or essay, send it to ascendspecialprojects@gmail.com with subject line: PITCH

Photography & Visual Art: no limit

As of right now, please send all written submissions in English. Only poetry will be accepted in Arabic, but please provide a translation. If you are unable to provide a translation of your poem, let us know and we’ll see what we can do to help! We apologize for any inconvenience this causes--we’ll keep you updated if anything changes.

If you have any questions the best way to contact us is Direct Messaging us on Twitter or sending your question through email to ascendspecialprojects@gmail.com

DEADLINE: May 31st, 2017

We look forward to your submissions!

[ascendmagazine-blog]

Ascend is officially expanding! We invite all women, gender non conforming, and nonbinary artists of color to join our team. Apply to be an editor today:  https://t.co/xYb7B5IzS3

[ascendmagazine-blog]

Interview with Jumana Al-Qawasmi from Watan Palestine

Ascend recently interviewed Jumana, an inspiring Palestinian artist who is known for her shop Watan Palestine.  Jumana spoke of her experience in exile and how she views resistance and art.  

How is your experience in the diaspora shaped by exile?

 I'll be honest, I'm still not quite sure how I approach this and don't feel especially comfortable on saying things that I'll very likely look back at and think "oh my god, I was so naive, magically idealistic, condescending in ignorance, etc.).

How does exile and diaspora influence your art?

I think diaspora, for one, influences the entire main motive behind Watan and my art: that these pieces serve as a sort of totem (à la Inception) that reminds you of and connects you back to home, no matter where in the world you may be.

Do you view art as a form of resistance? Why or why not?

I'm still conflicted by this, I think. On one hand, art can definitely be an affirmation of existence, a preservation of culture, a form of resistance, and more; it can be used as a tool, like science and organizing can be for others. But on the other, art is something many of us can create because we are at a certain level of privilege. Here I reference the idea of Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs", or the idea that humans have certain prerequisite needs they need to reach before they are "fulfilled" enough to reach higher levels of self-actualization. Simply, we need to be feel safe before we can be able to create and innovate. So I suppose it comes down to context and intention, to put it generally.

  On the about page on Watan, you say that your aim with creating this shop is to reconnect Palestinians with their culture, how do you go about this? What does that look like, exactly?

I wouldn't say that Watan is a way of reconnecting Palestinians with their culture; that comes off as assuming they aren't connected to begin with -- but how can a person be entirely disconnected with a culture? Instead, Watan operates at a few levels: 1) it aims to create a visual archive of bits of Palestinian heritage (think an Instagram-version of Wikipedia), 2) it encourages individuals to go beyond the surface of images and icons and really research on their own history, and 3) compiles resources for something easily accessible (both on and offline). From what I've seen, just presuming to "reconnect Palestinians with their culture" in the scope of a shop tends to be manipulative (i.e. "buy our [insert item] because it's in honor of Mahmoud Darwish!") and I want to do my best to ensure Watan stays far away from becoming anything like that.

Watan means homeland in Arabic, do you consider Palestine home? If so, how does that shape your experience in the diaspora?

When I think of home, I inevitably think of "community". For me, to say that Palestine is home automatically subsumes everyone I'm lucky enough to count as part of my community. Do I dream that one day I can go back and live in Palestine? Of course! It's a beautiful place (and I dream of building a public library surrounded by olive and orange trees in Akka) and a place I plan to one day live in inshallah. But when I dream of that day, I always envision my friends and family living around me as well. 

What is your al-Nakba story? 

My grandparents on both sides of my family were born in Palestine. My mother's side came from Yaffa. My grandfather's family left Palestine for economic reasons and moved to Kuwait; he later came back to Palestine, married my grandmother, and went back to Kuwait. As consequence, my mother was born in Kuwait and later moved to Jordan in 8th grade. My father's side lived in Barkusia in Al-Khalil when the Nakba happened (though my family is originally from the main city in Al-Khalil). My grandfather fled on July 9th, 1948, which was the first day of Ramadan that year, if I remember correctly. When they fled, they couldn't take anything with them so my grandfather actually ended up starving to the point of temporary blindness. It wasn't until my great-grandfather got his hands on a bit of animal fat a few days later that my grandfather got his sight back. Both sides of my family still live in Jordan.

Does Watan seek to preserve Palestinian culture through art or is it also a new form of expression for a new generation of diasporic Palestinians? 

Why not both? :) Watan is definitely interested in archiving Palestinian history in our own way. So, in a sense, we're hoping to preserve Palestinian heritage in a kind of online catalog. At the same time, it's done so with an intention of serving the diaspora. But for us to really get to that point, we have to get through a lot of old first. Imagine a paper you have to write. You can't possibly get to the new, your arguments, without going through the old, yes? You can't possibly synthesize a vision of the new without knowing the old.

Tell us about your library project. (What it is and the purpose) 

So we just opened our first studio storefront a couple weeks ago (finally!). We aim to use this space as a studio space for our work, a storefront for people to be able to visit and buy things in person, and as a community space to hold events, workshops and more. In essence, what we're trying to explore is the possibility of building a Palestinian institution here in the Chicagoland area. Though this community here is the second-largest community of Palestinians in the US, there really isn't much in the way of Palestinian/Arab institutions here (though this isn't to detract from the wonderful work already happening, of course)! The library, then, is a part of the effort to build something for the community. The idea for the library actually came from SJP UCLA and their Alex Odeh library! Watan's library, the Palestinian Women's Library, aims to collect any and all books on Palestine. I hope one day that it numbers in the thousands of books; we can dream, right? This library is free to the public and builds on our hope to create something permanent for our community. 

What is your favorite piece from the collection and why? 

Oh gosh, this is always so hard to answer. I think, at the moment, it has to be either the Qabbeh tatreez crewneck sweatshirt or our Kuffiyeh phonecases. Suffice to say, I've always got a bit of Watan on me at all times. 

Thank you!

I loved these questions and they've definitely been taking me some time to grapple with and continue to grapple with.

[ascendmagazine-blog]

T-Minus

by tasneem maher

i have learned

over the years that

ghosts leave marks:

the muscle memory of a handshake,

or the green paint that

my sister smeared over my bed.

when i leave this house,

i will not be a

ghost,

i will be a

void,

nothing.

they will paint over

the scratches of my pencil &

they will fill in the holes

from which i have hung myself,

from ceilings in

pictures & papers;

i am a paper person,

spread thin over these walls.

(the elastic limit is

the point at which an

objects becomes broken or deformed)

i am broken,

deformed.

when i am pried

from these walls –

when i am no longer

a part of them,

i cease to exist.

i become a

void,

nothing.

when i am no longer

a part of these walls,

then what am i?

i am a parasite &

this house is my host:

i have echoed the

skeleton of this place,

twined my roots over

the foundations of this home

over a decade, slow, visceral,

i attach myself and wonder when

bayt came to mean anchor.

when i leave this house,

i am a

void,

nothing,

for  a parasite cannot

survive without its host.

sometimes, i believe in rebirth &

sometimes, i believe in disintegration

.......... 

photograph of the West Bank in Palestine, taken by Rawan Shahin

about the author: tas(neem) maher is a jordanian-palestinian poet/writer who ends up inserting more physics-related metaphors into her writing than she intends. when she isn’t grappling with schoolwork or cooing over her cat, she’s writing and planning out her novel.

/ @odysseans on tumblr and @mythosgal on twitter

.........

You can read more diaspora related art in our second issue: https://issuu.com/ascendmagazine/docs/ascend_2__1_

[ascendmagazine-blog]

“The books that I recommend in [the First Nations list] are ones that can counter that bias in several ways. One, they’re not stereotypical [depictions of Native people]. Two, most of them are set in the present day, which is important in countering what we see in a lot of children’s and young adult literature, which says that we vanished, we didn’t make it to the present day, and of course we did. So I selected books by Native writers because when teachers are using books by Native writers, or libraries or parents are, they can use present tense verbs in talking about them. So they would say for example, ‘Cynthia Leitich Smith IS a Muscogee Creek writer; she’s a citizen of the Muskogee Creek Nation.’ In doing that, just using that little bit of information, they bring us Native peoples out of that remote past into the present.” –Debbie Reese

[ascendmagazine-blog]

As you sit down this thanksgiving remember and give thanks to the indigenous people risking their lives to protect clean water.

[ascendmagazine-blog]

I am thankful for the Native Americans who continue fight for their rights and their land and refuse to abide by the societal expectations of pretending nothing terrible happened to their ancestors on this holiday

[ascendmagazine-blog]

On Thanksgiving

Dear U.S.-based Friends - This Thursday is Thanksgiving, a day on which we remember an almost entirely fictional encounter between the settler-colonists in Mâsach8sut and the local Wampanoag people.  While the details of the Thanksgiving story are largely mythical, it is true that the settler-colonists would have died without the aid of the Wampagoag in those first few years.  If we go to the heart of the story we’re remembering a moment where Native people helped non-Native people survive. Now it’s our turn. You’ve probably heard about the Water Protectors in North Dakota, trying with all their might and main to stop an oil pipeline crossing the Oglala Aquifier and going beneath the Missouri River.  Millions of people downriver of the crossing depend on the Missouri for their drinking water - the Lakota at Standing Rock reservation would be the first and most drastically hit. The protectors have a phrase: Mni Wiconi - Water is Life.  They are standing between the company and the river for all of us. There are thousands gathered at the three camps that make up the Water Protector presence.  Local law enforcement has violently tried to disperse the camps - they have attacked Protectors with rubber bullets, sound canons, concussion grenades, and high-pressure hoses.  The Water Protectors have done nothing wrong.  The land on which the pipeline is to be built belongs to them - the Supreme Court upheld it as such in 1980 when it agreed with the Lakota that the U.S. government had broken the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which promised the Oceti Sakowin (the seven council fires of the Lakota) the Black Hills region forever. On Sunday night, after dark, when temperatures were at 27F, local law enforcement attacked one of the camps.  (Warning for graphic video of the confrontation at the next link.)  A concussion grenade exploded on one female protector’s arm - she was flown to Minneapolis, and it looks like her arm may have to be amputated.  An elder went into cardiac arrest and had to be resuscitated by camp healers.  26 people were injured badly enough to be taken to hospital.  Many hundreds more were hurt. Local law enforcement is knowingly risking killing people.  You don’t spray people with high pressure water hoses when the temperature is below freezing because you want them to back off; you do it because you want to cause hypothermia.  Amnesty International has decried the attack as an attack on human rights, and has appealed to local law enforcement to stop these tactics.  The United Nations has condemned what’s going on.  Oh, and Protectors are being arrested for “rioting.”  Mmmhmm. Once again, Native people stand between non-Native people and catastrophe, and this time we have to do more than be passively grateful.  This Thanksgiving, could you pass the hat at your dinner table for money to send directly to the camps? If you raise $5, and everyone did it, that would be an enormous influx of resources. Those resources would enable camp leaders to buy the supplies that are most needed - medical equipment (local law enforcement road blocks make getting anyone out of the camps by ambulance very tricky); below-zero-grade sleeping bags; camp heaters; winter-ready tents etc., as well as provide legal counsel to those who have been arrested. You can donate at the following places: To Standing Rock Directly (The tribe is funding the portable bathrooms, trash pick up, and other infastructure) To the Sacred Stone Camp legal defense fund To the Red Warrior Camp (direct action camp within Oceti Sakowin) legal defense fund The Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa school at camp To Oceti Sakowin Camp (the main camp) directly All of these have been verified - your money really is going directly to the causes listed. Please think about the encounter at the heart of Thanksgiving as you gather with your nearest and dearest (and those you don’t feel so near and dear toward) on Thursday.  Give back.

[ascendmagazine-blog]

Strategies for Decolonization

(1) Deconstruction and reconstruction. This refers to destroying what has wrongly been written—for instance, interrogating distortions of people’s life experiences, negative labeling, deficit theorizing, genetically deficient or culturally deficient models that pathologized the colonized Other.

(2)  Self-determination and social justice.  This refers to the struggle by those marginalized by Western research hegemony to seek legitimacy for methodologies embedded in the histories, experiences, ways of perceiving realities, and value systems.

(3) Ethics. There is a need to recognize—and where none exists, formulate, legislate, disseminate, and make known and understood internationally— ethical issues and legislation that protect indigenous knowledge systems.

(4) Language: recovering and revitalizing, validating indigenous knowledge and cultures of the historically marginalized, and thus creating space to decenter hegemonic Western research paradigms.

(5) Internationalization of indigenous experiences. Struggle collectively for self-determination.

(6) History. People must study the past to recover their history, culture, and language to enable a reconstruction of what was lost that is useful to inform the present

(7) Critique. There is a need to critique the imperial model of research, which continues to deny the colonized and historically marginalized other space to communicate from their own frames of reference.

- Linda Tuhiwai Smith, University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand.

[ascendmagazine-blog]

David Thompson believed his Ojibway heritage and his university degree with special qualifications in native language instruction would give him job security as an Ojibway teacher in Ontario’s public school system.

He was wrong.

During a round of job cuts this year, Thompson was bumped out of his full-time permanent job teaching high school Ojibway with Lakehead Public Schools in Thunder Bay, Ont., by a man who is a specialist in business studies and has no professional qualifications in any language.

The teacher currently doing the job is not Indigenous and does not speak Ojibway, Thompson wrote in a complaint filed with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.

“It’s a total insult to our youth to put someone in front of the classroom to teach Ojibway, who is not Ojibway, who is not affiliated with the culture or brought up with it,” said Thompson, who was raised by his grandparents at Rocky Bay First Nation in northwestern Ontario.

Continue Reading.

[ascendmagazine-blog]

Kanazawa Shōko: The story of how a girl with Down Syndrome grew up to become one of Japan’s top calligraphy artists. (Nippon.com)

[ascendmagazine-blog]

trans women of color are literally the reason we have a queer rights movement and have always been a major factor in all forms of social revolution. trans women of color are the most important people and nothing you say will change that.

[ascendmagazine-blog]

Earlier I called up the offices of several state senators

I spoke to several staffers and asked if their bosses planned to join the growing list of senators voicing their opposition to Steve Bannon being on White House staff

Do you know what one of them asked me?

“Are you keeping a list of senators who don’t speak out?”

We can put pressure on these officials.

Organize an event, get some friends together, order a pizza for lunch and start making calls.

Call their state offices. And then call their DC offices.

Don’t send an email. Don’t write a letter. Call.

And if they say nothing, put them on a list. We will remember who they are and what they didn’t do.

[ascendmagazine-blog]

hey, do you have any advice on reading for prose & poetry (like for a magazine)? what should you look out for? and what kind of advice should you give?

The key is constructive criticism. Find the areas the artist needs to improve and find the areas where they excel. Be open and honest and look for authenticity in their words. You’ll know good writing when you see it.

Good luck!

[ascendmagazine-blog]

i am 1/11 qwoc behind @kerosenemgzn. since donald trump became the president-elect, we have felt useless sitting on our hands. that’s why we’re creating CONTRA, a collaborative anti-trump chapbook ― our art meets your art.

it’ll be free. i want to print it up and hand it out at all future protests / demonstrations i attend. i’ll put it up on payhip for $0 and talk about it till my lungs collapse.

the channel is open to any and all of you from marginalized groups (my fellow lgbt fam, my undocumented homies, all the women of color, the working class, the disabled, and all your wondrous intersections).

we want your protest art―anything anti-trump, anti-white supremacy, anti-system. your political cartoons, your rally photography, your election poetry, think pieces, manifestos, and personal essays. all of it.

don’t filter yourself. we want your anger and pain. we want to validate and uplift your voice and thoughts. be as unfiltered and unrestrained as you want.

email anything and everything to KEROSENEPROJECTS@GMAIL.COM by nov. 30th. this is informal + lowkey so just send us your work and your name.

let your art be your activism.