Reading Loving Others, Othering Love 

Starting this Valentine's Day, SAVVY.doc’s newly founded Refractions Reading Group invites you to a four-iteration shared reading circle where we approach writer, translator, and scholar Mara Lee’s multimodal lyric essay Loving Others, Othering Love with intertextual awareness.

In a poetic and meticulously braided narrative, Lee carefully explores “the interdependence of love and racism” [1] as she elegantly drifts between her own poetry, an inventory of incident records from public transportation, parallels between Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and mass shooter Elliot Rodger’s manifesto, and her critical analysis of a link between one of Claudia Rankine’s poems and Frantz Fanon’s description of a train ride in Black Skin, White Masks.

We will do our reading ahead of the gatherings and the group will come together for conversation and analysis of themes, personal connections to the text, our reading experiences, and a myriad of refracted examples from literature, film, and real-life events that bear meaning to our shared reading.

This reading circle is accompanied by SAVVY Contemporary curator Sagal Farah and the poet and librarian Rahma Omar.

Rahma Omar is a poet and librarian whose writing explores how marginalisation shapes bodies and dreams. She is currently working on Gången i Fosie, a poetry manuscript set in Malmö during the 1990s and the early 2000s. Omar uses the collaborative and interactive Shared Reading method in her work as a librarian.