Within capital, across patriarchy, under dictatorships: what language is available for us to oppose or repurpose the structures that shape/alienate us? Inside violence, in everyday life and in all that binds us, language is a murky, shape-shifting battlefield in which opposition is contaminated by the language of that which we oppose. What material conditions dictate the way we write ourselves into the world?

Dictation is the formation of obedience and the fascism of grammar (say, if writing in a coloniser’s language, a ‘dead’ language, in an official register, or when slang is co-opted). Dictation is the imposition of words diligently written down, but also purposely corrupted, subverted, unfaithful, or misspelled along the way. If dictation is instruction, we are interested in how it connects to dictatorships, inside and outside writing.

What or who orders us to write, or to stop writing? What are the dictatorships of language, genre, the publishing industry, or readership itself? What dictatorships exist even in alleged freedoms? What freedom exists within constraint?

This is an open call for texts of prose, poetry, fiction, and/or essay forms, in English and/or in Arabic. Please send your contributions to makhzinmagazine [at] gmail [dot] com.

Prose : Up to 2000 words
Poetry: Up to 4 pages
Deadline: February 15, 2017