I’m delighted to have a creative nonfiction essay about decolonisation in the spring issue of World Literature Today titled Goldilock Syndrome. The issue commemorates the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre but also emphasizes the current state of black multicultural vitality in the 21st century, anchored in the US but rippling out on a global scale. You can read or download my essay below in PDF format. The full issue is great and can be purchased here.
Image is African Guernica by Dumile Feni
Thank you for defining the non-existent soul 🙂 and for exposing Goldilocks for the soul-thieving usurper of personhood that she was 🙁
I knew Goldilocks in two of her male reincarnations during my childhood. More about them below.
Born in the USA in 1938 of first generation Italian-American parents, whose families were extremely disrespectful toward each other, I did not need to identify a foreign entity who usurped my personhood. My maternal and paternal families provided the character assassination of each others’ personhood !!
However, my personhood was much more available to me than to the two male Goldilocks who were Anglo-Saxon classmates of mine and who made my childhood even more miserable than World War II, which robbed us of our childhood.
The male Goldilocks classmate, who my mother admired, unknown to her, was a deviant sociopath whose mother was constantly saturated in alcoholic addiction. He died of the disease himself in our mid-fifties.
The more estranged Goldilocks classmate was much more violent, imitating his alcoholic parents who died in a murder-suicide when his father killed his mother and himself during our grade school years.
Goldilocks might have been wishing to be someone else, like me, whose parents gave me unconditional love and everything else they were able to give me and my sister, never even hinting that we might owe them anything except to love them back.