Creative NonFiction "True Stories, Well Told" might be a good translation, or description, for the Documentary Literature of Kyushu: 記録文学. Creative NonFiction sounds a lot more invitings somehow, more like fun, less like work. Maybe the writings of  Michiko Ishimure, Eishin Ueno, Matsushita Ryuuichi and others is a bit of work though... This article by Madison Smartt Bell is kind of fun though, in spite of everything I guess...

... there was a song that played in my head, sometimes with hallucinatory clarity, a simply structured number by Boukman Eksperyans, with few chord changes and a back-beat guitar figure that very closely followed the drum, and over this a sonorous refrain:
...
The verse, which also was simple and repetitive, spoke of the pain of being forced to accept foreign culture and the practices of foreign power.
...
Like any establishment of consequence in Port-au-Prince, St. Martial is a walled fortress, enclosing a church; a seminary for priests; a school that runs from elementary grades through the lycée level; a vast collection of books and documents on the Haitian Revolution, the slave trade, and Carribbean history in general; and the station Radio Soleil. Along with creating priests for the whole country, St. Martial turns out secular intellectuals who speak perfect, elegant, 18th-century French and have an astonishing clarity of vision; many of the most important writers and thinkers of Haiti had been educated here, and so had the lead singer of Boukman Eksperyans. St. Martial was an amazing concentration of spiritual power, which could sometimes translate itself into political power, via the radio beacon, among other means. The place was a great power node of liberation theology. Some of Aristide’s most powerful orations had taken place as broadcasts of Radio Soleil, notably the one he delivered from a mobile microphone, in a hail of bullets, as a popular demonstration outside the Duvalierist prison Fort Dimanche was murderously repressed by army troops.

- #^https://creativenonfiction.org/writing/soul-in-a-bottle/

#BoukmanEksperyans #HaitianMusic #MadisonSmarttBell #CreativeNonFiction #DocumentaryLiterature #記録文学

#^Soul in a Bottle - Creative Nonfiction

A beautiful book came in the mail today. The Japanese title is hard to translate in less than a few sentences, but it's by #KazuyukiKawahara, one of the four pillars of Kyushu's #DocumentaryLiterature #記録文学 genre. His newest big books spans gaps left from over 50 years of writings on the beautiful mountain hamlet, #Toroku that was poisoned by arsenic mining and production. It's an honor to receive the book and include it with similarly beautiful and important works.
#川原一之 #土呂久