Kapok: Revue de création littéraire & artistique [Kapok: Journal of Literary and Artistic Creation] has sent out a new call for papers for an issue organized around the theme: “Magma Connections.” The deadline for photographic or textual submissions is October 1, 2022. [Also see the description of the journal below.]

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Number 1 MAGMA CONNECTIONS

Like a geyser flowing through the tumultuous layer of the earth’s crust, the urge to write manifests itself when it is least expected. Unpredictable, irrepressible, and incompressible, the desire to write emerges like the epiphany of a new language stammering, through its first words, the awareness of being unique and sovereign in the world.

Such is the fate of the islands, which are said to be majestic, sibylline, volcanic, or basaltic, in this meta-archipelago known as the “Caribbean” or “Island America”. On the surface, the beauty is revealed to the fresh eyes of those who want to see the tropical exuberance, the delight of the coasts, the magic of the exotic. But the surface is only a lure, or at least the extreme protuberance of a subterranean world that decides its fate and evolution, at every moment, in every meeting place. Let’s go into metaphors, let’s dive into the underground world.

A few hundred meters below the ocean floor, tectonic connections are established, renewed or undone according to the plate tectonics well known to the scientific world. Here, on this page, the fate of new identities, aesthetic connections, magmatic links – magma connections –, presiding over the formation of a diasporic consciousness, is decided.

Yes, Kapok is its emanation. Mapou, Fwomajé, Ceiba: so many terminological variations of this sacred tree, memory of ancient times, witness to the passage from one world to another, drawing its sap from the fertile substratum of the New World. The spirit of the undiscovered World is housed and unfurled there, spreading its subtle essences throughout all the strata of this «new region of the world» where everything is connection, resurgence, remanence, syncretism and reinvention.

Let us therefore assume the aesthetic Caribbeanness that is its foundation and let us lend to literary, artistic and stage writing the power to bring to the surface the quintessence of the talent, sometimes budding, but always real, that is expressed through the archipelagic and magmatic creation of the Peoples of the Sea. This first issue gives them all the latitude … and the scope.

Contributions to this beautiful enterprise can take the form of textual or photographic articles (image width: 1,500 pixels min.), videos (MP4 transfer link) or sound recordings (WAV format). Textual articles must be formatted as MS-Word files (DOCX files).

Authors wishing to participate in this adventure are invited to send their contributions to the Editorial Committee, by 1 October 2022, to the following e-mail address: kapokcontributions@gmail.com.

PRESENTATION OF THE JOURNAL: KAPOK is an international magazine created by the Association Mélanges Caraïbes. The concept of this magazine is based on the symbolic value of the cocoon, enclosed in the shell that envelops the seeds of the Kapokier, a vegetable fiber that is rot-proof, impermeable and inflammable. From this fact, it invites a creative thought that extracts from the artesian sources of Amerindianity, from its infinite conception of the cosmogonic cycles of nature, the telluric process, of force and fertilisation of the pantropical forest, master beam of our deepest identity.

That concept of the KAPOK undeniably brings the vision of semination by the kapok flakes that cover the seeds, but it also refers to the thought of the cosmic tree, pillar of the World, axis mundi, rite of ascension, vectors of myths and symbolics, which circularly connects Caribbeanness with Americanness, Americanness with the «Tout-Monde» [All-World]. Since there is no fruit without trees, nor trees without roots, Kapok is the substance of the Kapokier or the Fromager or the Ceiba pentandra, tree of life that nourishes, tree that heals and nourishes our most hidden imaginaries, and raises, from the beginning, the notion of creation and palingenesia, that is to say a process of destruction in its incessant movement of (re)construction in the not very humid and sterile terrain of the galloping globalisation. It is to this incandescent aspiration and this desire to resize aesthetics that this review is essentially directed.

• Director of publication: Frédéric Lefrançois
• Editor-in-Chief: Jean-Marc Rosier
• Associate editors: Alain Héloïse, Jacqueline-Manuela Ledoux
• Fiction/Essay Editors: Jacqueline-Manuela Ledoux
• Performance Arts Editor: Alain Marraud
• Poetry/Theatre Editors: Gérald Désert, Jean-Marc Rosier
• Visual Arts Editors: René-David Nelzin/ Ronald Cyrille
• Sound Arts Editor: Lucien Gratté
• Reviews Editors: Gérald Désert/ Frédéric Lefrançois