We’re excited to share that Code Noir by Canisia Lubrin was featured in The New Yorker! A stunning collection that blends poetry and fiction to explore history, identity, and the legacy of the Code Noir.
They write, “This collection of “fictions”—many too strange to be called stories—is filled with disappearances, deaths, and gnomic pronouncements. Lubrin, a St. Lucian-born Canadian poet, writes that “the murderers in this draft are those who write the laws,” referring to the titular seventeenth-century French edict that governed the traffic and ownership of Black people. Text from these regulations appears between Lubrin’s pieces, hauntingly drawn over by the artist Torkwase Dyson. The collection displays tremendous stylistic breadth: one work simply describes seventeen dogs, another features a mathematically gifted conch shell, and others are closer to poetry, with only a few plotless lines. The over-all effect is a dizzying, disorienting view of “history’s wide grave.”
Canisia is represented by Samantha Haywood.
Congratulations, Canisia!