Losing-Winning, Shedding-Retrieving
Uddipana Goswami
Editor-in-Chief
This was an exciting issue for us at Mukoli to put together! It publishes the winning entries from our first ever contest – a contest that was based on the same values of openness and open participation that our name stands for.
We invited fee-free submissions from all over the world that represented a wide range of aesthetic traditions in multiple genres. We were overwhelmed with the response we received! We asked that the submissions be anonymized so that our genre-specific judging panels could impartially deliberate on each contribution, drawing on the plurality of cultural, locational, and disciplinary perspectives they represented. At the end of a prolonged collaborative and deliberative decision-making process, they finalized our winning entries. And here they are, in this issue, for your reading pleasure!
Being on one of the judging panels, I encountered the same dilemma that the judges on the other panels also faced: of selecting a few from the many that resonated with us as we read them. True, we had our submission guidelines and judging criteria, but being artists ourselves, we also understood that every work of art is a labor of love, deserving the same respect and acceptance as the next. Oh, craft matters, and connection matters, that much is certain. But at the end of the day, in a contest like this, not featuring in the winners’ list is happenstance; it is not a reflection of intrinsic worth.
It continues to be wintertime here as I finalize this issue. And this winter, the darkness is a few shades darker. As I engaged with the ideas of picking and choosing, winning and losing, I started thinking more deeply about the idea of losing. Losing not as defeat, but as shedding. What if we lost some of the hatred, some of the avarice, some of the misplaced ambitions that have brought us to this present moment of grim darkness across the globe? What if we redefined what it means to win and lose, and chose not to be in competition with the next person all the time? What if, instead, we picked ourselves to compete with in order to win back and retrieve our lost humanity?
Three years ago, I started Mukoli as a simple, small, and quiet effort in this direction. It survived because it received the unstinted support of Charity Butcher, our Editorial Advisor and Director of the School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding & Development at Kennesaw State University where the magazine is housed. For Charity and me, it has been a constant struggle to keep the magazine alive with the meagre funds that we have. We do not want to run a magazine that does not compensate the contributors who co-create it, but we work within a structure that severely limits our ability to do so. As a result, we have had to take the difficult decision of reducing our periodicity of publication for the time being, until we can find a stable and secure source of funding. Starting this year, and until further notice, Mukoli will be published once a year, but with the same zeal, the same passion, and always, with peacemaking in mind.
We need your continued support. Read and share the work of our amazing writers and artists, contribute to our future calls for submission, and if you are able to, donate to us!