Cambodia’s trade union leaders, alongside young environmentalists fighting to preserve the country’s environment, have been imprisoned and censored for demanding just ecological policies and labor conditions. As the Cambodian monarchy continues to harpoon advocates with falsified charges ranging from conspiracy to “disbelieving a court decision,” movement leaders continue to demonstrate, knowing the people’s struggle for personal and environmental dignity transcends the carceral means of the state. · THE VERTICAL Reportage · Phnom Penh Cambodia’s trade union leaders, alongside young environmentalists fighting to preserve the country’s environment, have been imprisoned and censored for demanding just ecological policies and labor conditions. As the Cambodian monarchy continues to harpoon advocates with falsified charges ranging from conspiracy to “disbelieving a court decision,” movement leaders continue to demonstrate, knowing the people’s struggle for personal and environmental dignity transcends the carceral means of the state. Sophie Neak, Hang On, no.18 (2015). C-print photograph. Paean to Mother Nature ! In Cambodia, activists are facing a crackdown on their fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly. The state is particularly targeting those advocating for environmental and labor rights, and as civil society space continues to shrink and tolerance for dissent wanes, the government is increasingly resorting to arrests to silence perceived opposition. “We have fallen deeply in love with nature, and we don’t want it to be destroyed by corruption. People’s livelihoods depend on natural resources, and they don’t want to lose their land, their home, their culture. We understand them, we feel the pain, so we want to protect them. Our lives are inspired by nature, and that motivates us to take the risk of standing here.” These are the words of a young activist from Mother Nature Cambodia , a youth-led environmental rights organization that launched in 2012. He requested to remain anonymous due to fear of reprisal. Since the organization’s launch, its members have campaigned on a raft of environmental issues in Cambodia, leading to multiple arrests, members being jailed, and authorities attempting to silence their voices. In July 2024, 10 young Cambodians were sentenced to between six and eight years in prison, convicted on charges of plotting against the government and insulting the king. Three of them, including Spanish co-founder Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson , who was deported for his environmental activism in 2015 and permanently banned from re-entering Cambodia, were sentenced to eight years in jail and fined USD2,500. The others were handed six-year terms. Five, including Gonzalez-Davidson, were sentenced in absentia. Ahead of the verdict at Phnom Penh Court of First Instance, 26-year-old Long Kunthea, who has already been imprisoned for her activism, told a group of supporters who had gathered around her that she would not be silenced, encouraging her peers to remain undeterred. “May you all not be hopeless but continue your work in protecting the environment, your rights, your land. Although we are in jail, we will be strong. They can only arrest our bodies, but they cannot arrest our will and conscience,” she said. The sentencing has been condemned by various international organizations, who are lobbying for the release of those imprisoned. “The verdict is devastating for the 10 activists, who face between six to eight years in prison for their efforts to protect Cambodia’s environment,” said Bryony Lau, the Deputy Director for Asia of Human Rights Watch, in a statement in 2024. “It also sends an appalling message to Cambodia’s youth that the government will side with special interests over the environment every chance it gets.” Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for Research, Montse Ferrer, said in a statement that the convictions were “another crushing blow to Cambodia’s civil society,” adding, “Mother Nature Cambodia is a renowned activist group that has brought attention to environmental degradation fuelled by long-standing corruption in the country. “Instead of listening to young leaders at the forefront of the environmental movement, the Cambodian government has chosen to jail those that dare to speak out. The government has shown time and time again that it will not tolerate any dissent.” Attempts to silence the defenders Since 2012, Mother Nature Cambodia has lobbied on environmental issues from illegal sand dredging and lake-infilling to pollution and protesting against mega hydropower dam projects. The organization has successfully campaigned to halt the Chinese-led construction of a mass hydropower dam in Areng Valley in southwest Cambodia, that threatened the Indigenous community, as well as the delicate ecosystem of the area. Mother Nature Cambodia also played an instrumental role in ending illegal sand dredging operations in Koh Kong. Mother Nature’s philosophy has resonated strongly with Cambodian youth keen to protect the environment for future generations. The environmental defenders, however, have also repeatedly been targeted by authorities. “The main environmental issue is the corruption in the systems, and these diseases are getting harder to solve because environmental crimes are happening all over the country under development projects,” a member of Mother Nature anonymously told SAAG. However, the arrests and intimidation have failed to dampen spirits, instead fuelling members’ determination to continue their mission. “We must empower and mobilize youth in the country to speak up. They must speak up against repression as we continuously demand an end to devastating actions against nature. We stay focused, resilient and innovative,” he said. “People’s voices are needed to lobby the government to give our friends back their freedom. We won’t stay silent if our friends are still not free. We, Mother Nature Cambodia, are demanding power for the people, not the regime.” In September 2023, Mother Nature Cambodia became the first Cambodian organization to win Sweden’s Right Livelihood award for its “fearless and engaging activism to preserve Cambodia’s natural environment in the context of a highly restricted democratic space.” Fighting for the disappearing rights of workers It’s not only environmental activists whose voices are in danger of being silenced. Recent years have seen a targeting of Cambodia’s union leaders, who have been peacefully advocating for workers’ rights amid claims of human rights abuses, unfair dismissals and wages, and mass layoffs. On September 16, trade union leader Chhim Sithar, 37, was released after serving two years in Prey Sar, a notorious prison on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. Sithar is the head of the Labour Rights Supported Union of Khmer Employees (LRSU) and was charged with incitement to commit a felony. Sithar led a year-long series of peaceful protests that started in December 2021 against the mass layoff of 1,329 employees at NagaWorld—a casino giant in Phnom Penh—during the pandemic. Hundreds of workers took to the streets outside the casino in protest of the dismissals, with LRSU demanding 365 union members be reinstated and that all those who lost their jobs receive fair compensation from the Malaysian-owned casino. In May 2023, Sithar was sentenced to two years behind bars (having already served almost two years), for incitement to commit a felony, while eight other union members were handed lesser suspended sentences or monitoring orders. “They were convicted for simply exercising their rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, protected by both the Cambodian Constitution and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ratified by Cambodia in 1992,” UN Human Rights Office spokesperson Jeremy Laurence said in a statement . “The rights to peaceful assembly and association include the right to hold meetings, sit-ins and strikes, and the right of individuals to interact and organize among themselves to collectively express, promote, pursue, and defend common interests.” Cambodian authorities have maintained that citizens have the right to exercise freedom of speech and hold peaceful gatherings, as stated in the law, and arrests are only made when laws are broken. Khleang Soben, LRSU Secretary General, joined 70 Cambodian civil society organizations and many international organizations, including Amnesty International, HRW, and the US Department of State, in lobbying for Sithar’s release while she was in prison. “Until now, I’m curious about why she was detained as this is a labor dispute between workers and the company,” she told me. “But they accuse worker representatives of inciting social chaos. For me, it’s too much and unexpected that they turn the victim into the perpetrator. It’s very unfair.” In April 2024, Sithar’s “fight for democracy and respect for human rights” earned her the Swedish government’s annual Per Anger Prize, which celebrates courage, capacity to act and engagement. “She is a vital source of support for Cambodian women who are forced to work under appalling conditions. They are demanding to have their voices heard and their rights respected at their places of work,” the judges said. Sithar’s case is one of a series of targeted attacks by authorities. Despite this, Soben remains determined to ensure Sithar’s voice is not silenced, and pledged to continue the fight for the rights of her members. “Recently, we’ve seen the arrest of many youth and union activists. Saying I’m not afraid isn’t completely true. But I won’t give up as it’s a valuable job that benefits many Cambodians,” she said. “Union work is undervalued and it is unsafe when we stand up for workers and refuse to undertake activities that exploit the labor force and workers' interests. We will continue our nonviolent demands until there is a solution. Even if I am scared, it won't stop me.” Yang Sophorn, President of the 16,000-member strong Cambodia Alliance of Trade Union (CATU), also came under fire during the NagaWorld protests. On 4 August 2022, authorities accused her of conducting illegal activities and threatened her with an unspecified punishment for supporting the ongoing strikes. “We know that when we work in this field, there are a lot of people who are not happy with us, but we still do it for the sake of our members and to fight for their rights. The reason we continue this work is because of love, passion and wanting to help people in need,” she said. “It’s an injustice” “I’ve had violence committed against me and been arrested many times, but I still take on the challenge because I work for the rights of people. I’m not involved with politics, only labor rights. I suffer and have a lot of pressure to stop, but I have no choice. I have to promote the rights of workers,” Ath Thorn told SAAG. The former president of the Cambodian Labour Confederation (CLC) , a role he served for 18 years until May, and president of the Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers Democratic Union (CCAWDU) , Thorn has spent the majority of his working life fighting for the rights of garment factory workers. He launched CCAWDU in 1997 while working in a factory, in response to the unfair treatment he witnessed from his employer. “I saw and experienced a lot of labor abuse, violations and cheating on the ground. There was nobody to respond to these problems. So, I established the trade union to address the challenges and negotiate with the employer.” During his time serving as union leader, however, he has been the victim of multiple legal actions and arrests, violence, threats, and intimidation. “As an independent, democratic trade union, we work to promote workers’ interests and benefits, and the authorities and companies abuse us,” he said. “Some of us are arrested and charged, violated and discriminated against, beaten and dismissed without pay. So, there are a lot of cases against us, and a lot of pressure and challenges.” A 2022 HRW report, ‘ Only “Instant Noodle” Unions Survive: Union Busting in Cambodia’s Garment and Tourism Sectors , based on interviews conducted between March and June 2022, found “widespread violations of workers’ rights to register, form and join independent unions at garment factories, a casino and other places of business.” On May 7, Mam Rithy, Vice President of CLC, became one of the latest voices to be silenced when he was detained after Phnom Penh Municipal Court convicted him for “inciting to commit a crime” and “disbelieving a court decision”. The charge against the well-known advocate for the labor rights of Cambodian factory workers was in relation to a video he posted on Facebook on February 24, 2022 commenting on the arrest of a female union leader in Sihanoukville in relation to a Chinese casino. The 35-year-old was handed a 1.5 year prison sentence and a two million riel (USD480) fine. “Vuthy has now been in jail more than four months and did not expect to be detained for long. It’s really tough for him and an injustice,” Thorn said. While the threats to these activists remain real, it has only served to strengthen their fight. “The arrests only make people get mad at the violent injustice to innocent people without any sense,” a Mother Nature member stated. “We have to strengthen our mental health and capacity-building to keep inspiring more people to become defenders. The more they arrest our members, the more defenders rise up. We will always be here, fighting for environmental justice.”∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Reportage Phnom Penh Climate Cambodia Mother Nature Unions Environmental Science Environmentalist Youth Youth Protest Censorship Ecology Labor Policy Movements Climate Security Community Security Freedom Free Speech Labor Rights Civil Society Civilian Activism Corruption Natural Resources Mother Nature Cambodia Anonymity Imprisonment Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson Deportation Banned Phnom Penh Court of First Instance Hope Political Will Human Rights Watch Amnesty International Dissent Hydropower Dam Hydropolitics Areng Valley Indigenous Spaces Ecosystem Koh Kong Future Generations Empowerment Silence Disappearance Worker Rights Prey Sar Labour Rights Supported Union Khmer Employees Peaceful Protest Monitoring Victimization Targeted Attack State Government Narrative Cambodia Alliance of Trade Union CATU NagaWorld Protests Injustice Violence Political Violence Cambodian Labour Confederation CLC Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers Democratic Union CCAWDU Garment Factory Labor Abuse Arrest Threats Intimidation Union Busting Capacity-building Environmental Justice Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 25th Feb 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Palestinian-American actor and playwright Sadieh Rifai confronts the mental toll of occupation, war, and the American dream in her world premiere, The Cave. Palestinian-American actor and playwright Sadieh Rifai confronts the mental toll of occupation, war, and the American dream in her world premiere, The Cave. Poster, and photos of the play, courtesy of A Red Orchid Theatre (AROT) . Artist Chicago AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 10 Feb 2025 th · BOOKS & ARTS REPORTAGE · LOCATION The Mind is a Theater of War Sadieh Rifai has performed on Chicago’s premier stages, working with the likes of Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwrights Tracy Letts and Stephen Karam. Following the preview performances of her playwriting debut at A Red Orchid Theatre (AROT), where she is an ensemble member, we spent precious dwindling hours discussing theater as a collaborative form, the Islamophobia of the 1990s, and what it means for her to stage a play that explores (among other things) the haunting afterlife of violence under occupation, in the shadow of Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Ahsan Butt Tell me what it was like being in the room with Tracy Letts workshopping August: Osage County , which, of course, went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. How did you get there? Sadieh Rifai When I first came to Chicago, I auditioned for the school at Steppenwolf, where the ensemble members taught viewpoints, and Sheldon Patinkin, who helped invent Second City, led the improv sessions. It was an incredible experience. After I finished there, I was asked to audition for a new play by Tracy Letts, August: Osage County . I had no idea how important it was going to be. I auditioned, but they wanted a Native American woman for the role. Still, they asked me to participate in the workshop. It lasted about a week and included Michael Shannon, who would later become my fellow ensemble member at AROT, Mike Nussbaum, the oldest living actor before he passed, and Amy Morton, one of my favourite actors. Sitting at that table, I learned so much. Tracy opened up about the play, explaining that it was based on his life—his grandfather had committed suicide, and this was the story of that. I remember him saying that when he showed the play to his mother, she told him, “Thank you for being so kind to my mother.” That always stuck with me because if you have seen the play, you would think that woman is a monster. But Tracy was so vulnerable in the room. The title of the play came from a poem written by his mentor. Before that, I had always assumed that playwrights did not want even a single word changed—that every line had to be said exactly as written. But in that room, I saw true collaboration. Amy Morton would ask, “Can I cut this word? It is getting caught in the sentence.” Tracy would say, “Cut it, cut it.” There were things he fought for, but in other moments, he was so open. That experience made me aware of what I wanted to create one day. I wanted to write my own story. But I did not yet have the confidence to do it. Still, it was my dream to build something like what they had in that room. AB Did you always want to be in theater? SR At my wedding, my younger brother told a story about our childhood. We grew up in our grandparents’ house in Galesburg, Illinois, which was an old schoolhouse. It had an auditorium, classrooms that became our bedrooms, and even lockers. The building was run-down but magical. There was also a stage. We used to put on puppet shows, slipping behind the curtains to perform. He asked, “Do you remember this?” When I said no, he just went, “Great, glad I brought it up.” My brother is incredibly smart. He could do no wrong as a student. I, on the other hand, am dyslexic. I was never a good student, never understood. But one day, my mother took me to see Jesus Christ Superstar . Ted Neeley was performing—he was the original Jesus—and Carl Anderson, the Judas from the movie, was there too. Afterwards, we got to talk to Ted Neeley. He was the nicest guy, telling us about filming in the Middle East. I think my mother knew early on that I was not going to be some kind of scholar. The things that interested me were always art, music, and theatre. And acting, though I was not good at anything yet, there was a part of me that just knew I could do it. We also lived in Vegas when I was young. My mom was a change-girl, and my dad worked in another hotel. She would take us to see this show called Splash— women dressed like mermaids, holding their breath underwater, and performing synchronized swimming routines. We also saw Sigfried & Roy , all the magic shows, David Copperfield . For us, until it became a dangerous place, when my cousin was murdered, it was like the schoolhouse: magical. Milla Liss, H. Adoni Esho, Aaliyah Montana, and Kirsten Fitzgerald in The Cave by Sadieh Rifai at A Red Orchid Theatre. Photo by Evan Hanover. AB Your play, The Cave , follows a mixed family like your own, a Palestinian father and Swedish-American mother with two kids, who also move from Las Vegas to a more suburban, white town after the murder of their nephew (the kids’ cousin). The father, Jamil—under the strain of the tragedy, their new life, the specter of a coming war, and past experiences he’s never talked about—begins to hear voices. Some may see it as a post-9/11 play because Islamophobia is such a prevalent theme, but the play is set in the ’90s, during the first Gulf War. For those of us, who are…a bit older, we remember what that time was like. What was your experience during the period in which the play is set? SR I still remember one of my teachers taking me in front of the classroom and saying, “This war is happening and Sadieh’s family believes Sadaam Hussein is in the right. And we are fighting that. So just know that is what her family believes.” There were other instances where she wouldn’t allow me to sit near other kids. I knew she didn’t like me and that’s a weird thing to know when you’re a kid. It’s difficult to explain to people who don’t want to believe it. But my parents believed me. They had a parent-teacher conference and whatever happened behind closed doors with that teacher led to me and my brother being home-schooled for a while. We knew we were being blacklisted within the community. At first, everyone was friendly. But then we stopped getting invited to birthday parties, and parents wouldn’t let their children play with us. I don’t know if we’ll ever know the reason. Maybe it was because they saw my dad dressed in a thobe and assumed he was radical. Maybe they were afraid of Islam. But a friend of mine, Sara, recently showed me a 1990 Atlantic cover—a brown man with a beard, the words “The Roots of Muslim Rage” plastered over his face, an American flag reflected in his eyes. Seeing that image was important to me because that was the climate back then. The propaganda was thick. Of course, after 9/11, it only got worse. AB What was your dad’s attitude toward assimilation? SR My father never wanted his children to erase their culture. He wanted us to fit in, but he also wanted to ensure we understood what it meant to be Palestinian. We had loads of Palestinian shirts. Even if we got sent home for wearing them, he would say, “Wear the shirt. If they send you home, we will change you.” He wanted us to learn Arabic, go to Friday prayers, know the Quran, understand the beauty of the religion. And we were interested in McDonald’s and the mall. Even when he tried to do things we enjoyed, like taking us to the mall, he would still have to pray. I remember him stepping into the JC Penney bathroom and coming out to do a short prayer. And I remember turning red, convinced everyone was looking at us. Now, I think that is beautiful, but at the time, I was embarrassed. Natalie West, John Judd and Aaliyah Montana in The Cave . Photo by Evan Hanover. AB What drew your parents together? SR Honestly, they both had a lot of growing up to do. They met young. There was an excitement in meeting someone so eager to learn about another culture. And my mother was unlike any woman he had ever met. She did not take shit from anyone. She rode motorcycles. She grew up in Knoxville, Illinois—this tiny place—with a lot of poverty. She had no wealth, no prestige. And then my father came into her life and saw her for who she was. There was nothing on paper that said they should match, but they just got each other. They loved razzing each other. They laughed a lot. When you spend your whole life with one idea of what the world is, and someone comes along and completely changes the narrative, that is thrilling. They learned from each other. AB There are many biographical similarities between your father, Shawki, and Jamil, the father in the play. Is Jamil your father? SR Jamil isn’t my father, but they share traits. They are also at different points in their lives. I do remember my dad at the time the play is set, but not in the way he is now. There was such a heavy burden on his shoulders then; he was a different person. My dad now is very light. He is more of a storyteller and prankster. He can tell a joke, and it will last ten minutes, with the punchline being Ross Perot—so old and outdated—and he will be crying with laughter. But that was part of who he was then too. My mom tells this story: when she met my dad’s brothers for the first time, she wanted to make a good impression, so she asked my dad how to say “It is so nice to meet you” in Arabic. My dad told her a phrase. She went up to each of my uncles and said it. My dad was laughing so hard. She turned to him and asked, “What did I just say to them?” He said, “You told them they have shit on their mustache.” AB That’s so interesting to me as a writer. There’s a memory aspect to it, because Jamil isn’t who your father is now, and it feels like there’s maybe a fog around that period…and then it’s also necessarily an act of creation, because you have to fit the character to the play. SR I had a conversation with a friend, a director in the ensemble, Shade Murray. I was having a hard time writing dialogue between Bonnie and Jamil. I said, “I cannot remember the things my parents would talk about.” He said, “You do not have to write your parents. You are married. You know what it is like to be in a marriage. You know what those conversations are.” I noticed that I was pausing the writing to try to find what they would have said—something I did not have access to because we were sent out of the room for difficult conversations. Aaliyah Montana and H. Adoni Esho in The Cave . Photo by Evan Hanover. AB Jamil has a romanticism about Palestine. Did your father as well? SR My dad was born in Hebron, seven years after the Nakba. He was one of ten kids. He only speaks in short stories, never with detail. But he told me once that he was holding his newborn sister when his mother said, “Run.” He said people had come into the house. There was screaming. They had guns. And he held his sister, running, not knowing where he was going. He would have been four. That was one of those moments that changed him, experiencing real fear. Having his mother tell him to leave—not knowing if that meant it was the last time he would see her. He tells another story from when he was older. A soldier came up to him and said, “I want to meet with you, Shawki,” They were trying to get information from him. They kept offering him tea, coffee, cigarettes. He said he felt that if he accepted anything, he would be cooperating with them, that he would be used as a spy or a pawn. So he put three cigarettes in his socks to make it clear he did not want anything from the soldier. When he first came to the United States, my uncle picked him up from the airport. They were driving when a police officer pulled them over. My dad immediately reached for all of his paperwork. My uncle said, “Shawki, I was speeding. They are not here to check your paperwork.” My dad realized then that there were no checkpoints everywhere. He had assumed every state had them. So he would just drive, drive, and drive. There was safety in that. But he never wanted to lose his citizenship. He had to go back every four years. By that time, he was already an American citizen, but he needed to fly back and stay long enough to renew his citizenship. Many people could not afford to go back and lost theirs, but he always made a point of it, no matter our financial situation. He loves Palestine and hates it. There is the desire to be there—and then, when he is there, the realization that he is under occupation. Photos of Sadieh's father, Shawki, courtesy of her. AB How did you write this play? SR I was at a low point in 2020. I was not working as an actor. At one stage, my husband and I moved to Indiana, and I took a job at Trader Joe’s. I struggled with depression, and it became overwhelming. I kept listening to podcasts where actors and directors would say, “Just write it; write the bad play.” But the idea had lived in my head for so long that I was afraid to put it on the page. I did not even know what software to use. I did not feel intelligent enough to structure it properly. Then I started, slowly. A paragraph, then another. Eventually, I had a scene. Then I thought there should be a scene before it, or after it. It was such a gradual process, and it took a long time. I was terrified to show it to anyone. Kirsten Fitzgerald, our artistic director at AROT, and my friend Jess McCloud kept encouraging me: “Just write it, even if it is bad—you will have written a play.” Kirsten even said, “If you need some money, we can find some through AROT to help you keep writing.” That allowed me to reduce my hours at Trader Joe’s. AROT kept asking when I would have some pages, and I kept saying it is not ready. That went on for a year. When I finally handed in a first draft, it was not even a play—just twenty chaotic pages. But they trusted me and told me to keep going. They gave me another check, and I wrote another draft, then another. I think I am on draft thirty now, and I still have rewrites to finish before tonight. Guy Van Swearingen and Aaliyah Montana in The Cave . Photo by Evan Hanover. AB Does your acting experience help? SR As an actor, I know when something is overwritten. If a line does not fit naturally in your mouth or keeps slipping from memory, it means something is off. During workshops, I can hear when dialogue should be condensed or when more context is needed. I am always thinking from the actor’s perspective because I have been that actor in the room. When actors make a “mistake” and swap out a word, it is usually because they have instinctively chosen a better one—something that flows more naturally. AB Your career, and the plays you have been involved in, tell a dark and compelling story about America. You were in the world premiere of The Humans by Stephen Karam, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Tony Award winner for Best Play. I saw it in Los Angeles, and it unsettled me. There is an explicitly haunting moment, but more than that, the play feels like a failed exorcism of post-9/11 American anxiety. The Cave carries a similar ambient anxiety, but its source is inverted—it is the experience of the “other” in America. What is your relationship to this country? SR I consider myself very lucky that Stephen Karam is a friend. I love him dearly, and he is a genius. When we first received the script for The Humans , we knew it would have a major Broadway run, but we began with a Chicago production, where Stephen made significant revisions. I remember getting goosebumps reading that play. He had already written successful works, but this one was deeply personal, full of uncomfortable moments. We all knew from that first table read that it would resonate powerfully. It takes you on a journey you are not prepared for. But my relationship with America is complicated. You are referring to these quintessentially American plays, yet I have also played Dorothy three times. I loved playing her, even though I knew I did not look like her. I wanted to capture her hope, innocence, and dream-like qualities. Even in The Humans , they are all Irish. Stephen told me there are darker Irish people in Ireland! I love that I have been able to play these roles, albeit with a caveat. As for American culture, it is everything I know—SNL, Sesame Street. If I am overseas and Arachnophobia is playing in Arabic, I can sit through it and understand it completely. The language is irrelevant; I know the beats. I am American—for better or worse. AB Are you feeling pressure putting this play up? SR I do not sleep at night. Some of the things I think about—things AROT would rather I did not dwell on—my mind refuses to let go of. They are investing a lot of money into this play. It’s a large cast. It’s a world premiere, which means no one knows what this play is yet. Even the word “Palestinian” appearing in flyers and emails is enough to be seen as taking a side. We have two young actors—amazing young women—and I feel an instinct to protect them. When I see news reports about fake bombs being planted at venues where Middle Eastern singers are set to perform, about death threats and targeted violence, it is really scary. It was suggested that, since I love podcasts, we should pitch my family’s story to This American Life . My immediate fear was for my father and family in Texas. Not only am I worried about this new play going up, about whether it will be received well in the city, or about the theatre potentially losing money, but I am also worried about people being harmed. And I do not want to disappoint anyone. During rehearsal, someone asked me, “Are you afraid people will think Jamil is a bad man?” That is something I have thought about for over a decade. I do not want anyone in this play to fit into simple categories of good or bad. People are a combination of millions of things that make them human. The last thing I want is to paint someone in broad strokes—as a good person, or a good father. What matters to me is that we see Jamil trying. Milla Liss, H. Adoni Esho, Kirsten Fitzgerald, and Aaliyah Montana. Photo by Evan Hanover. AB Given the last year of day-after-day, live-streamed genocide, during which most American theaters have proven their irrelevance, what do you feel and what do you wish for the future of the form and its institutions? SR The silence speaks volumes. It’s the realization, within your own group of people, of who doesn’t stand by you. I have watched babies in incubators cry and starve until they are black and decaying. I feel as though I’ve seen the worst in humanity. As someone who seeks the good in people, it is the worst sort of darkness I can imagine. I had a friend say, “You can’t spend hours watching those videos,” and I thought, how dare you . All we can do is witness: witness somebody’s pain, understand that it's real, somebody screaming for their children. That’s all I can do right now, besides marching and boycotting. In fifteen years, I hope there will be no hesitation in putting these stories on stage. That when the genocide is in history books and taught in schools, theatres will feel compelled to tell Palestinian narratives as part of their regular programming, rather than treating them as a special selection. There are many theatres eager to stage plays by non-white playwrights. AB Will you feel a bitterness if that future comes to fruition and theaters begin tackling this genocide fifteen, twenty years from now? SR It is something I long for so much that I hope I would only feel relief. The history of being a woman has taught me that we fought for centuries to secure the rights we have now. I know others struggled before me, and I hope, when that time comes, we will acknowledge that there was a period when our voices were silenced, when we were afraid to tell these stories. I hope to sit in those theatres and see how far we have come. The Cave opened on January 30 at A Red Orchid Theatre in Chicago . The regular run begins on February 13 and continues till March 16. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Interview Chicago Palestine A Red Orchid Theatre Sadieh Rifai American Dream Theater of War The Cave Palestinian-American Actor Playwright Occupation Gulf War Conflict Nakba Theater Play Islamophobia History Mental Health Premiere Storytelling Memory Middle East United States Assimilation Migration Culture Biography Community Family Tracy Letts August: Osage County Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

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 / باریک الگ Jayeeta Chatterjee and Chemould CoLab Dreaming With Open Eyes (2023) Woodcut Print and Nakshi Kantha Stitch on Saris Artist Lucknow AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 18 Oct 2024 th · FICTION & POETRY REPORTAGE · LOCATION مادری زبانیں SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Poetry Lucknow Motherhood Femininity Labor Urdu Urdu Literature Mother Tongue Language Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

From Assam’s National Register of Citizens offices to Lahore’s streets, trans and queer communities confront policing, displacement, and erasure while continuing to build worlds of resistance, care, and possibility. · THE VERTICAL Essay · Assam From Assam’s National Register of Citizens offices to Lahore’s streets, trans and queer communities confront policing, displacement, and erasure while continuing to build worlds of resistance, care, and possibility. "A Coat of Our Arms" (2025), digital illustration, courtesy of Priyanka Kumar. Trans Counterpublics P ooja Rabha, a tribal transgender woman from the Charaideo District in Assam, trembled as she told SAAG about a haunting scene from her visit to the National Register of Citizens (NRC) office. The office was swarming with border police and old heaps of paper documents. When called to the service desk, Rabha was asked to provide all the details of her origins, including a birth certificate, land document, and bank records. She stood behind her mother, her heart racing with anxiety. “I knew they were looking at my body,” Rabha recalled. Within minutes of standing there, a border police officer approached her and mockingly asked, “Are you a boy or a girl?” She froze. The officer screamed, “Go stand in the boys’ line!” NRC inspection and verification is a lengthy process and typically incomplete without biodata, photographs, and documents proving lineage. For many transgender people in Assam, the process is especially resource-consuming due to the need for consistent documentation that reflects their current identity. Many find this difficult, particularly if estranged from their families or if their official documents still reflect their birth-assigned “dead” names. Critics also believe the NRC is effectively a xenophobic exercise to identify and deport undocumented immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh—many of whom arrived in Assam following the 1971 war of independence. In 2019, the process excluded approximately 2 million people from citizenship, creating severe consequences for Assam’s transgender population, who face disenfranchisement alongside others left off the list. In Rabha’s case, even the discrepancy between her gender presentation and the gender identity indicated on official documents is enough to arouse suspicion. Should people like Rabha fail to be verified under the NRC, they are essentially rendered stateless: at best, unable to vote in elections , and at worst, likely in danger of imprisonment at a detention center. Unfortunately, transgender marginalization for political gain is not new in modern day India and Pakistan, where many Hijra and Khwaja Sira communities —an umbrella term in Urdu for transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people—share a rich history in connection to the land. A Long-Held Colonial Legacy Pre-colonial India demonstrated openness to sexual fluidity. Themes exploring gender and sexuality can be seen in ancient texts such as the Vatsyayana Kamasutra, Jain religious writings from the 5th century, Sufi poetry from the 13th century , and erotic literature from the Mughal period in the 17th century. In fact, many researchers and historians of South Asian studies have also highlighted links between queer desire and the sacred. Shayan Rajani, for instance, delves into the documented homoerotic relationship between Madho Lal Hussain, a 16th century Sufi mystic from Lahore, and a married Brahmin man. Rajani explains that while the relationship was considered unconventional, even transgressive, it finds a home within the religious canon when seen through the lens of Sufi thinkers and practitioners. Across various written accounts, and in Persian verse, this queer relationship was understood through “Metaphorical Love”—a Sufi literary tradition in which the imagery of human love is used as a metaphor to describe love for the divine. This same elevation of queerness is seen in Vinay Lal’s explication of the ancient Indian epic the Ramayana , particularly how many hijras connect to the epic through their resistance to categorization. In the story, as Rama prepares to go into exile with Sita and Lakshmana, he instructs his subjects, “Men and women, please go back and perform your duties.” Per Lal’s interpretation, hijras, identifying as neither men nor women, would have remained at the same spot of his departure, where they would greet Rama upon his return fourteen years later. For their devotion, they would be blessed by Rama. In both Rajani and Lal’s analysis, queerness is deeply woven into the fabric of the region, through spiritual, literary and cultural traditions. Their work demonstrates the relatively expansive ideas of queerness in the erstwhile Subcontinent. However, the colonization of the Indian subcontinent by the British East India Company, brought with it a steep decline of the Khwaja Siras’ cultural significance alongside a wave of discrimination through the Criminal Tribes Act (CTC). Under the Act,. Khwaja Sira were criminalized based on a strict, orthodox understanding of gender roles. Men wearing female attire and homosexuality were deemed punishable offenses. This legislation effectively enforced gender norms, while picking away at artistic traditions that embedded queerness within them. “They [the British] criminalized our bodies back in the 18th century,” Pakistani trans activist Hina Baloch explained to SAAG. “So branding us as foreign agents or ‘others’ has a very colonial politics attached to it.” Although the CTC is no longer in effect in present-day Pakistan and India following their independence, its influence persists as a key colonial legacy, shaping societal attitudes and laws. Queer Rights Amid Religious Conservatism In Pakistan On May 19, 2023, the Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan rendered the Transgender Persons Act of 2018 incompatible with Islamic principles. This law had allowed people to choose their gender and to have that identity recognized on official documents, including national IDs, passports, and driver’s licenses. The recognition meant that transgender people could press charges for cases of discrimination and exercise their political right to vote while showing up as their authentic selves. While activists like Baloch are currently in the process of appealing the court’s decision, the reality is that the Khwaja Sira community remained the victim of violence and dehumanization even while the bill was in effect, she said. “We never had faith in our judicial system, and to a large extent, we saw this coming.” In recent years, the Pakistani government, fueled by netizens’ religious uproar, has curtailed many forms of queer and trans expression in the country, creating a firm bedrock of support for the overturning of the Transgender Persons Act. As Hussain “Jaan-e–Haseena” Zaidi, a trans-feminine artist based in Lahore, told SAAG , “By being very public about your queer identity, you’re inviting other people to criticize and try to discipline you back into their framework of being a Pakistani.” This sentiment is echoed in the backlash against the film Joyland , which depicted a love affair between a man and a transgender woman, in November 2022. Spearheaded by prominent figures from Pakistan’s religious right, including fashion designer Maria B and religious evangelist Raja Zia Ul Haq, the mudslinging evolved into what seemed to be a broader campaign about the religious and cultural identity of Pakistan as a nation. Hashtags like #JoylandvsIslam gained traction, with critics denouncing the film as part of a foreign-funded agenda to destroy Islam. The discourse included other extreme reactions as well, such as equating transgender identity with pedophilia . [Embedded] “The filthy venture named ‘Joyland’ is in fact promoting a one-way ticket to hell. The West has shortlisted this LGBTQ+ film for the Oscars as it openly mocks the teachings of Islam. We must reverse all decisions and actions based on the Transgender Act 2018.” ( Tanzeem-e-Islami ) While Joyland was ultimately allowed limited release following significant cuts of ostensibly vulgar material, it remained banned in Punjab , Pakistan’s most populous province . In a country where any violation of the harsh blasphemy law can result in punishment by death, accusations of being “un-Islamic” or “mocking the teachings of Islam” can have dire consequences. Moreover, vigilante justice is common in blasphemy cases, which are increasingly settled with violence outside the courtroom, with mob and targeted attacks against those accused. On March 17, 2024, a violent mob of over 100 men attacked and severely wounded transgender women in Gulistan-e-Johar, Karachi. According to Shahzadi Rai , a transgender woman present at the scene who is also an elected official of the Karachi Municipal Council, the incident originated at a local marketplace. A member of the Khwaja Sira community had politely requested a shopkeeper to exchange a torn banknote. However, a nearby man responded with sexually suggestive comments, implying she engaged in sex work. “Mind your own business,” the woman retorted. The situation escalated as the man proceeded to verbally abuse and physically assault her. Within moments, said Rai, the commotion attracted a mob hurling transphobic slurs, inappropriately touching the women, attempting to tear their clothes off, and threatening them with death. The mob accused them of “ruining society, “dirtying our neighborhood” and threatened to burn them all. As of 2021, at least 89 people have been extrajudicially killed due to blasphemy accusations over Pakistan’s seven-decade history, and the numbers have further risen since. At this point, policing blasphemy is woven into the social fabric of the nation. In Haseena’s words, “There’s this normalized [policing] which can range anywhere from verbal to violent harassment. And this can be from family, people you know, or random strangers.” This normalization of vigilante-style policing coupled with dehumanizing smear campaigns on social media has resulted in what Baloch calls “a very systemic and organized transphobia.” Ultimately, trans erasure and persecution is equated with strengthening the religious morals of the nation. “The Pakistani state has failed the Khwaja Sira community on violence,” Baloch added. “There is domestic violence like honor killing and homelessness [that] we face from our birth parents. Then, there’s intimate partner violence at the hands of our boyfriends and partners. And then there’s casual everyday violence.” In India, The Trans Body in Conflict With Hindutva Logic On the other side of the border, Dominic Amonge, a 34-year-old trans woman recounted an incident during her university days when, prior to her physical transition, she was raped during her stay at a men's paying guest (PG) house in Guwahati, India. Seeking justice, she approached the Station House Officer, but according to Amonge, the officer dismissively stated, "That's because it's your fault; you are queer." "I dealt with it," she said. "I lived with the abuse." Dominic Amonge is not alone. Sumitra Ghosh, a 22 year-old non-cis passing trans woman, faced similar challenges in Guwahati. Her landlord evicted her after discovering she was undergoing hormone therapy, assuming she would engage in sex work. In reality, she was on the verge of completing her BA 3rd Semester. With few housing options, as many metro states of India still demand cisgender married couples or bachelor men, Sumitra reluctantly moved into a boys’ PG in August, 2024. Within days, however, her male roommate sexually assaulted her. Aniruddha Dutta explores the construction of an “elsewhere” within Hindutva rhetoric, highlighting how marginalized communities are framed as “foreign threats” to the dominant sociopolitical order. Dutta defines “elsewhere” as any group or identity that does not conform to the rigid boundaries of Hindu nationalism—this includes Bangladeshi immigrants, Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, and certain queer and trans people who do not fit within the upper-caste Hindu framework. Specifically, Dutta examines an incident from July 2021 where a brutal video of a trans woman named Ratna Chowdhury torturing a younger hijra circulated on WhatsApp. Without excusing the violence of the incident, Dutta traces how the event became a Hindutva talking point. As the case progressed, Dutta noticed that “Chowdhury was repeatedly singled out to direct blame towards Bangladeshis and Muslims and otherize them within hijra communities”—all while packaging it under the guise of safety concerns for trans individuals. Dutta notes that Hindutva may, at times, co-opt queer politics to project Hinduism as uniquely tolerant and inclusive. However, this assimilation can be slippery and rests on exclusionary and binary thinking—logic that would otherwise flatten Dominic Amonge and Sumitra Ghosh’s experiences into mere outliers or stereotypes. Trans women from Bengali or Muslim immigrant communities in Assam, for example, face compounded challenges under the current political climate. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government perpetuates ideas of a “foreigner-free” homeland for Assamese people, banking on middle-class Assamese anxiety to push the envelope for an updated NRC. While the 2019 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act , promised legal protections such as the ability to modify names on birth certificates, bureaucratic hurdles and the preoccupation with accurate citizenship continue to block progress in Assam. Trans women must provide proof of gender affirming surgery to update their legal identity, while those identifying as "transgender" must receive approval from the District Level Screening Committee. “Government offices demand an extra level of patience to deal with,” said Sumitra Ghosh, who struggled for months to receive her TG card (identity card for trans people) in Tezpur, Assam. “These offices are overburdened with work, and the employees either work slowly or continue to postpone their tasks until they become urgent. They rejected my certificates so many times in Tezpur,” she said. Often, due to additional document requests, “pictures, biodata proofs, and affidavits.” The stories of trans women like Dominic Amonge and Sumitra Ghosh illustrate that despite legal protections and selectively inclusive talking points, these women remain vulnerable to sexual violence, eviction, and systemic neglect by government officials. Their experiences also point to how queer people can easily slip between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” depending on the interests of the state. On September 11, 2023, Assam Railway Police arrested three Muslim trans women—Kusum, Durga, and Puja—for begging for change on the Bangalore Express train. The women were subjected to degrading and illegal bodily inspections . Despite trans people’s right to self-identify per the Supreme Court of India, the police falsely declared their trans identity as “fake” due to the absence of gender-affirming surgery. The media’s portrayal of the incident exacerbated the women’s plight. They were not only deadnamed and misgendered but also labeled as “impostors,” vilifying them in the public eye. The narrative largely appealed to the importance of pure, sanitized spaces—another prominent Hindutva talking point—and framed them as deceitful individuals, who were harassing passengers and collecting money under false pretenses. “With my queerness and gender, nobody needs to worry about my body,” asserted Durga in contrast to the circulated story. “Police are always worried about what’s between my legs more than myself.” Resistance Efforts On Both Sides Of The Border Faced with national erasure, queer communities in Pakistan and Assam have created grassroots initiatives that prioritize solidarity, joy, and community-care. In Assam, prominent trans activist Rituparna Neog leads the Akam Foundation , an organization dedicated to nurturing feminist education through community-building projects. Growing up witnessing the oppression of Adivasi children in Jorhat, Neog’s activism is informed by a commitment to radical compassion. Her organization’s initiatives include establishing free libraries in remote Assamese villages to break down barriers and educate communities on gender and sexuality. The foundation’s first library project, Kitape Kotha Koi launched in August 2021 and offers a safe and accessible space for learning. The focus is on library education and ensuring reading materials are free for those who need them most. Similarly, Palash Borah, a gay activist from Assam started Snehbandhan (Bond of Love) in 2015. Originally a support-based WhatsApp group of trans and queer people in Guwahati, the group has evolved into an officially registered organization. Major initiatives include activities like meet-ups and donation drives with Kinnar Trust and Donatekart . Currently, Snehbandhan is running a project with Azim Premji Foundation called Sahas to provide necessities like hormones, laser treatments, and registration certificates to the transgender community in Assam. "At first, I was nervous about all the activist talk and labels,” shared Dominic Amonge, who works for Snehbandhan. “I'm not a so-called activist. However, how else would I learn where to get a safe doctor or a good job?" Likewise in Lahore, Haseena founded Zenaan Khana in March 2023 following a slew of anti-trans attacks and rhetoric since the heated discourse on Joyland . Drawing on the region’s deep historical ties between art and queerness, Zenaan Khana positions itself as part of a broader artistic resistance. “Art is crucial in resistance movements because art has the power of providing a visual, auditory and literary toolkit,” said Haseena. One of Zenaan Khana’s goals is to create media that depicts queer and transness specific to the context of Pakistan, exemplified in one of its first projects: a series of photoshoots highlighting trans beauty, prominently featured on the group’s Instagram page. In one striking image, a trans woman is adorned in traditional jewelry, rings and henna, paying homage to the region’s aesthetics while questioning what types of bodies get to participate in this specific visual culture. “Our idea was to get photographers, stylists, and visual artists together to showcase queerness that is specific to the Pakistani context, and even pushing back against Western notions of LGBTQ+ identity,” Haseena noted. In many ways, “Ishq,” one of Zenaan Khana’s central ethos, captures the community-care politics at the heart of queer resistance. Ishq can be translated to mean an unending love filled with infinite possibilities. By anchoring itself in Ishq , the collective not only imagines a possibility for queer liberation in the Urdu language, but also expands the definition of the word itself to encapsulate the chosen families in queer circles, community building, and love beyond the binary—an ethos applicable on either side of the border. Whether through education, art, or funding, queer activists from Karachi to Assam demonstrate a shared commitment to queer liberation in the face of state-sanctioned erasure. Haseena neatly captures this pillar of resistance: “expanding people’s imaginations of queer and trans possibilities.” ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Assam Kashmir Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 24th Oct 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

For Roma feminist scholar Nicoleta Bitu, Roma identity is intrinsically linked to intersectional feminism. Drawing on the familial lessons of her upbringing and her exposure to political activism as she came of age, Bitu introduces a new intellectual framework of gender equality and women’s liberation—one that not only benefits members of her ethnic community but also enriches broader discourse on feminist theory. · FEATURES Profile · Bucharest For Roma feminist scholar Nicoleta Bitu, Roma identity is intrinsically linked to intersectional feminism. Drawing on the familial lessons of her upbringing and her exposure to political activism as she came of age, Bitu introduces a new intellectual framework of gender equality and women’s liberation—one that not only benefits members of her ethnic community but also enriches broader discourse on feminist theory. Anna Rabko, Roma night (2024). Digital illustration. Theorizing the Romnie When asked how she became a Roma activist and built an entire career out of it, Nicoleta Bițu replied, with her childlike smile: “Well, it's a long story…” Bițu grew up in an exceptional Roma family where both parents proudly displayed their Roma identity during the communist era, a regime that spanned four decades and, like the rest of Eastern Europe, ended in 1989. While many “integrated” Roma hid their identity out of shame and fear of social repercussions, Bițu's parents lived their Roma identity publicly, almost like a manifesto. “My father was born and raised in a hut,” Bițu recalled. At 13, he ran away from home, went to Bucharest, and enrolled in an automotive school with a boarding facility. At that time, the left-wing Romanian state was strongly encouraging poor people to pursue an education, which allowed Bițu's father to stay in a boarding school. He was later recruited for the non-commissioned officers' school and continued with evening Law Faculty. Bițu emphasized how Romania’s left-wing government was crucial in giving her father the opportunity to become a general. “I wouldn't be here with you today if that socialist state hadn't given him that chance,” she stated. “Do you understand how important it is for a state to take responsibility for the education of poor children, creating human resources?” Bițu laments the loss of social democracy, which she saw as a benchmark in the 1990s. The communist regime in Romania lasted from 1947 to 1989 . A hopeful project which—according to historian Alexandru Groza—stopped the royalty from leeching off society and attempted to eliminate social inequalities in Romania, it transformed—during its implementation stage (before ‘64) and in its last two decades–into one of the cruelest dictatorships in 20th-century Europe. “My father was dedicated to Romania, loyal if you will,” Bițu said, “and he remained left-wing until he died.” Sometimes he was even “too nationalist” for her taste, which would cause disputes between them. “The entire police force knew him as Biță Țiganu ( Biță The Gypsy ),” she added, “because, no matter what, he never hid his identity.” Bițu comes from both a family of Roma aristocrats—from her mother’s side—and one of traditional coppersmiths dressed in skirts, vests, and headscarves, from a compact Roma community. She believes this background is why her family reacted seriously to every injustice. When racial discrimination was not even a topic of conversation in Romania, she grew up hearing the word “racism.” For Bițu, what she saw in her parents’ house was also a form of activism. In Roma culture, you have an obligation to help the extended family, and she remembers that the four-room apartment, in a neighborhood almost devoid of Roma, was always occupied. “Some came to attend school, some came to go to the doctor, some cousins ran away from home because her husbands beat her,” Bițu recalled. “We were somehow a family with resources—not necessarily material resources—we were never rich—but [in] resources of information, networks, space [instead].” In 1977, Nicolae Gheorghe , who would become the father of Romani civic activism in Romania and Nicoleta Bițu’s husband, entered Bițu Țiganu ’s family. In the Romania of the '90s, society was marked by riots between Romanians, Hungarians, and Roma, leading to the destruction of hundreds of houses, deaths, and the displacement of large groups of Roma population. Hatred against others boiled in the blood of post-communist Romanian society. Nicolae, who had brought the necessary funds for rebuilding houses burned during an interethnic conflict, took Bițu to work with the Roma. She was 21 and it was her first year being an activist. One year later, in 1992, she was admitted to the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work in Bucharest, among the first generation that occupied the special places reserved for Roma students. “I was fascinated by Nicolae Gheorghe's personality,” she reflected, “though I don't think there was anyone who wasn't. But Roma activism was our inspiration. We protested. We went out into the field. Somehow, it gave you a sense of purpose. It was hard not to fall in love with him; I don't think I was the only one. He had extraordinary courage to fight everyone for the Roma.” At the age of 40, in 2010, Bițu began her Ph.D. at the National School of Political Science and Public Administration in Bucharest. Her thesis, Roma Women and Feminism, was the first in Romania to address the subject of Roma feminism. In 1993, she became one of the founders of the Romani CRISS center , an NGO that provides legal assistance in cases of abuse, remaining with them until she left the country for the first time in 1999. Bițu lived with her husband and two daughters in Warsaw, Poland, for seven years. For Biţu, the anchor remained her proximity to her community and her responsiveness to their suffering. “It didn't matter to me what non-Roma people said about us,” she said. ”Perhaps it was due to the dignity with which I was raised, that I didn't require validation from non-Roma individuals to know who I am.” Although she was very proud of her father as a public figure, Nicoleta Bițu strongly disapproved of many of his behaviors within the family. She believes her becoming a feminist was no coincidence—that the violence she witnessed (her father's against her mother) played a decisive role. She raised her voice at every opportunity, claiming she didn't believe a father who beat his wife could truly love his children. “I was very young when I started asserting this in the family,” Bițu recalled. “I had no contact with feminist literature back then, I was just reacting to injustice the way I was taught to.” As a student in 1993, she wrote her first essay about Roma women in conflicts and how they ensure the continuity of everyday life, based on her fieldwork from conflict-affected communities. “Little did I know that it was feminism,” Bițu reflected. There were also moments when Bițu clashed with some of her male Roma colleagues over how they treated her. In the 1990s, the tendency to control women's sexuality was pronounced, especially among Roma women, who were severely punished for engaging in sexual relationships outside marriage. “I was the subject of such discussions where I was called a whore,” confessed Bițu, who then started reading everything she could find on the subject of women’s rights and female sexuality. In 1998, at a meeting of Roma women in Budapest she met the directors of the women’s program at the Soros Foundation in New York, who invited her overseas the following year. Bițu was 28 at the time but had over nine years of activism experience, with just two breaks, worth three months each, to breastfeed her children. It was only in New York that Bițu received her first real feminist books from one of the directors with whom she developed a deep friendship, including bell hooks, Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Davis, and Kimberlé Crenshaw. “My bible was Ain't I a Woman by bell hooks,” shared Bițu, for whom the book provided answers to many of her personal questions in the Roma movement. “I never let go of that book; I felt that woman was speaking to me.” In 1999, Bițu presented the first report to the Council of Europe on the situation of Roma women in Europe and has since continued tirelessly on the path of feminism. Her discourse has evolved over time, she said, from blaming Roma culture to focusing on racism and later on misogyny. “When I first heard the concept of intersectionality, the sky lit up for me,” Bițu reflected. “These were such moments of enlightenment that helped me reinterpret and reach a nuanced discourse, sufficient to do justice to my people, but also to help me understand myself, as a person and a woman, from a historical and intersectional perspective.’ When she began her Roma feminist trajectory, she was called a traitor to her people for “distracting attention from the racism against Roma” to address a portion of it towards Roma feminism. “Intersectionality somehow gives you the opportunity to analyze the problem as a whole,” Bițu shared. “It gives me the example of early marriages, which are not just about misogyny but also about historical racism.” Early and forced marriages are still a problem in Romania. The 2021 census revealed that 521 girls aged 11 to 14 were living in so-called “consensual unions.” Although this type of abuse is not unique to Roma communities, it is believed to be partly an inherited consequence of the so-called “right of the first night ” of Romanian landowners over their Roma slaves, during the centuries-long Roma slavery on Romanian territory. To prevent their masters from exercising this right , Roma families often preferred to marry their daughters at a very young age. For Bițu, feminism has brought to light a historical perspective that did not exist before. From the way she understood feminism and the responsibility she felt over reconstructing the suppressed identity of her people, she turned towards art, culture, and historical documentation. During the last decade and a half, Nicoleta Bițu’s life has been marked by the construction of spaces, identity, and culture, different from the traditional, oral ones, that are lived in communities. She contributed to the Roma digital archive, European Institute of Roma Art and Culture, and the Roma Museum. “Unfortunately, today there are [even] fewer women in the Roma movement than there were in my time,” Bițu claimed. “It's a very tough men's world,” she continues decisively, almost with anger. “It's very hard to stand upright. I'm talking about myself now. I can't speak for others. The thing is, they [men] won't accept you as an equal, and when you reach the same level as them, you become a danger, and they come after you.” Are there any Roma male feminists in Romania? “No,” she answered. “Nobody. In words only, yes. But not in their personal lives and inner beliefs.” In 2019, Bițu migrated to England without a concrete plan. Initially, Bițu worked at a product packaging warehouse, in her own words, “experiencing humility in a dignified manner.” However, her path took a significant turn when she attended a job fair organized by a foundation dedicated to aiding the homeless. There, she applied for a position as a social worker and secured an interview, eventually joining the team in central London devoted to assisting 120 Roma individuals experiencing homelessness. Bițu couldn't help but question the twists of fate that led her back to a similar situation, thousands of kilometers away from home. Her family teased her about the irony of her journey, yet she came to realize that she hadn't left behind her people, but rather expanded her engagement with the Roma movement beyond Romania. With newfound determination, she dedicated the next four years to establishing a comprehensive service focused on supporting Roma living on the streets of London, proudly securing its funding until March 2025. In 2023, a spate of assaults targeting women sleeping on London's streets within three months signaled societal shifts: Brexit, the ascent of the right-wing, and the passing of anti-migration legislation , akin to a tightening noose around Bițu’s neck. Last year, she returned home; after feeling she had been away from her daughters for too long and preferring to spend her remaining years with them. Bițu is presently on hiatus, yet she vows to remain steadfast in the Roma cause until her last breath. Her time in London taught her that regardless of her whereabouts or endeavors, she cannot escape herself or her work as a Roma activist. Numerous Roma feminists are marked by Nicoleta Bițu’s work and personality. One of them is Ionela Pădure. She met Bițu in 2005, at the age of 19, and described her as the first Romani feminist voice she remembers. “For me,” Pădure shared, “Nicoleta Bițu was, and still is, a complex Roma woman because she embodies all these roles: the mother of two beautiful daughters, the wife of Nicolae Gheorghe, an intellectual, and an activist–roles that, in Romania, were often seen as vulnerabilities. Yet, she knew how to juggle them, turn them into strengths, and carve out a space for herself in a male-dominated world, all while coming from a traditional community. To this day, she remains a dedicated mother, an activist working on the ground, and an intellectual who writes academic articles.” Pădure comes from a family of settled Roma, musicians, and blacksmiths. She holds a degree from the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris and has taught French at a college in France. However, she decided to return home to teach the Romani language in a village 40 km from the capital. Recently, she left formal education and, together with her husband, founded CPCD Vizurești, an NGO that organizes activities for village children, including Indian dance, drumming, Romani language lessons, boxing workshops, and more. Pădure described Bițu as a reference point for younger Romani women activists, who are just at the beginning of their careers—a mother they can talk to about anything. “Knowing she’s by my side gives me a sense of security,” Ionela said. She also credits role models like Bițu for helping her imagine herself and set new expectations. “I, too, married young and wanted to be a mother,” Pădure reflected. “Meeting Nicoleta and seeing her embodying all those roles made me realize that I could also make them all.” Oana Dorobanțu, similarly, is a queer feminist author, former journalist, human rights communication expert, and co-editor, together with Carmen Gheorghe, of one of the key books examining anti-roma racism in Romania. She doesn’t want to be called an activist or a feminist. “Shouldn’t we all be activists and feminists?” Dorobanțu asked, refusing to define herself. “I don’t know how words could ever do justice to all the admiration, respect, and love I have for this person,” she said, referring to Bițu. “I met Nico when I was 27, and she was by my side in the period after I decided to publicly acknowledge that I am of Romani ethnicity. The fact that she immediately accepted me as a Romnie (Roma woman in Romani language) was of great support for me.” For Dorobanțu, Bițu “embodies feminism.” She believes that all Romani feminists, not just in Romania, owe Bițu a great deal. "Many may see her as being in the shadow of her husband, Nicolae Gheorghe, who was also a major activist,” Dorobanțu noted, “but they were together because they were equals in every sense." One of the things Dorobanțu learned from Bițu is that there is no room for pride in activism, that you get involved in the movement for liberation, not for a résumé, ego, or reputation. She also learned that it’s important to know when to step back from the fight and when to return stronger, when to stay silent despite insults, and when to fight back. “Nicoleta was never didactic or pedantic,” Dorobanțu recalled, “but she influenced us indirectly through her nature, her charisma, and her way of being.”∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Profile Bucharest Roma Romnie Feminism Activism Political Activism Liberation Gender Equality Politics of Ethnic Identity Feminist Theory Nicoleta Bitu Communist Era Eastern Europe History Leftism Democracy Romania 20th Century Europe Bita The Gypsy Aristocracy Community Injustice Nicolae Gheorghe Civic Activism Riots Civil Society Conflict Interethnic Conflict Political Science Roma Women and Feminism Romani CRISS Center NGO Violence Domestic violence Feminist Literature bell hooks Simone de Beauvoir Angela Davis Kimnerle Crenshaw Council of Europe Misogyny Racism Intersectional Forced Marriage Right of the first night Suppression Reconstruction Space Place Identity Tradition Oral History Archive European Institute of Roma Art and Culture Roma Museum Roma Movement Migration Homelessness St. Mungo's Anti-migration Legislation Academia Culture The Romanian Problem Hecate CPCD Vizurești Oana Dorobanțu Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 3rd Feb 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Since his electoral victory in 2014, Narendra Modi’s Hindutva brigade has attempted to render Muslims invisible through hypervisibility. Mob-lynchings "don’t just happen” to Muslims. Thook Jihad is to be expected. By applying microscopic, misinformative attention to Muslim businesses, homes, and livelihoods throughout the country, the BJP has forced Indian Muslims to constantly create hideouts for their humanity. However, as Modi’s monumental loss in the recent Lok Sabha polls indicates, Muslims refusing to accept the social and psychological invisibilization are already leading the charge for a brighter electoral future. Since his electoral victory in 2014, Narendra Modi’s Hindutva brigade has attempted to render Muslims invisible through hypervisibility. Mob-lynchings "don’t just happen” to Muslims. Thook Jihad is to be expected. By applying microscopic, misinformative attention to Muslim businesses, homes, and livelihoods throughout the country, the BJP has forced Indian Muslims to constantly create hideouts for their humanity. However, as Modi’s monumental loss in the recent Lok Sabha polls indicates, Muslims refusing to accept the social and psychological invisibilization are already leading the charge for a brighter electoral future. Saara Nahar Play (2023) Watercolour on Paper 22 x 30 inches Artist Madhya Pradesh AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 10 Jan 2025 th · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION Bulldozing Democracy When I was a child I was fascinated by the bulldozer that visited my street everyday and picked up trash from a nearby dumpyard. Bulldozers served as a good spectacle for us kids. We were intrigued by its ability to pick tonnes of trash in a matter of minutes. If you look up the term, “JCB ki khudai” (Bulldozer digging) on YouTube , you'll find dozens of innocuous videos with millions of views. In recent years, however, that imagery has changed. Today, these bulldozers produce the most horrid spectacle for kids and adults alike. Many Indian Muslims see the bulldozer as akin to an armoured tank, a tool of terror, seeking to uproot what holds their families together and stores their tangible memories and artefacts—their home. In recent years, the bulldozer has transformed from a harmless machine to a super villain serving extrajudicial punishment to its victims without trial. What stands in the way of its unrelenting arm is “enemy” territory, and the bulldozer shows no mercy. A few months ago, a dozen Muslim homes were bulldozed in Madhya Pradesh for allegedly storing beef, and men were jailed under the NSA (National Security Act) in what many Muslims widely perceived as vengeful action by the state government. In July , a Muslim man committed suicide after his home was demolished in an anti-encroachment drive in Lucknow city in Uttar Pradesh, in which hundreds of homes were demolished in a Muslim majority neighborhood. The Indian state suggested that displaced people buy alternative housing, similar to their statements on resettlements in 2015 . Other adjoining posh neighbourhoods were also meant to be demolished but were spared after an intervention by leaders of the ruling BJP and protests by the locals. In August, a sprawling 20,000 square feet bungalow—that belonged to Haji Shahzad Ali, a Muslim and former leader of the Congress party in MP—was bulldozed after he was accused of violence. A 2024 estimate by the Housing and Land Rights Network ( HLRN ) shows that government at the local, state, and federal levels demolished 153,820 homes in 2022 and 2023, resulting in the forcible eviction of more than 738,438 people from rural and urban areas across the country. Muslims were among the worst victims of these bulldozer drives. Illegal housing is a prominent issue in India. Ghettoisation, socioeconomic inequality, and mass migration to metropolitan cities like Delhi and Mumbai adds to the problem of illegal housing. News outlets have reported between 55,000 and 65,000 illegal housing developments in India between 2016 and 2024. The issue becomes uniquely problematic when homes of Muslims are selectively targeted and are considered a fight against “ Land Jihad. ” Every now and then, there's news of a major demolition drive against the so-called “illegal homes” belonging to Muslims. Similar to the Haji Shahzad Ali case, the demolition is alleged to happen as a response to crime. Later, however, the public is informed that the demolition and the crime are unrelated, although the way it plays out is as explicit revenge. The mainstream media hails it as quick justice, all while the underlying principles of natural justice are openly violated. In November 2024, the Supreme Court of India finally passed a strong verdict against these arbitrary bulldozer drives putting an end to the retributive demolition drives, but by now much damage has already been wrought. What about those who’ve already fallen victims to this “lawlessness?” After every forced demolition and eviction, I used to wonder where these people are meant to disappear off to? They can't bury themselves underground or dive into the sea, but we hardly hear of them once the dust of the bulldozer's destruction settles. As much as this violence instils fear, it can never successfully lead to the psychological and physical retreat of an entire community. This may make you wonder—what is the best way to invisibilize over 200 million people? Bulldozing is only a symptom of the malaise that plagues India today—a cog in the larger machinery of violence. You cannot press a big red button and expect them to immediately disappear for once and all. You can’t erase them through force and violence. So, what do you do then? A real life solution to this rather troubling rhetorical question has been developed by the Hindutva nationalist forces, who relentlessly target Muslims throughout India. All while, encouraging non-Muslim citizens to distance themselves from the Muslims for their own safety. Let me demonstrate this with a recent example of the insidious way in which, through hypervisibility and violence, Muslims are forced to disappear from public life. A recent 'directive’ in the state of Uttar Pradesh asked eateries that were situated along the path of a Hindu pilgrimage to display their names. A move intended to make the “Muslim” identities of the servers, cooks, and owners clear to the buyers and discourage commerce. It started after an anti-Muslim boycott was called by a far-right Hindutva cleric, who accused Muslims of mixing meat in vegetarian food and thook jiha d —a conspiracy that Muslims spit in the food of Hindus to wage a holy war. Despite the dehumanising, absurd, and defamatory nature of this message, the state did nothing to counter the request and instead mandated shopkeepers to prominently display their names on their shops. Consequently, many Muslims were forced to shut down their shops to avoid conflict, police harassment, and mob attacks. Many faced economic losses. Some were fired by their employers after allegedly being pressured by the police. It's important to note that Uttar Pradesh is opposed to Halal food certification, which is limited to the nature of food (vegetarian or non-vegetarian) and not the identity of the person cooking, serving, or selling it. The government knows that most things that are Halal for Muslims are permissible for Hindus as well, and nobody can stop Hindus from selling them. Here, however, the state was adamant that merely displaying the religious identity of vendors and cooks can ensure the purity of food and protect the religious rights of Hindu devotees. The process is simple. First, a campaign is initiated to make Muslims seem impure, unhygienic, and Thook jihadists. Naturally, Muslims are compelled to refute these false narratives. Due to the meat sales facing on and off bans, many Muslim businesses already suffer without any compensation. To rub salt in the wound, Muslims who run vegetarian eateries get accused of mixing meat in the food. Subsequently, a demand for segregation is imposed, and Muslim businesses are singled out, marked as targets by the state—by the very state that falsely claims to be against mixing the rules of food with the rules of religion. Where's the escape from all this? It's a heads-you-lose and tails-I-win dynamic. If you’re a Muslim, you can't cook meat on holy days for Hindus. If you do then you are probably mocking someone. If you don't, then you are conspiring to pollute vegetarians. You’ll be targeted either way. While the order has faced backlash, and has now been stayed by the Supreme court, it's not a one-off instance. In the last decade, we have witnessed this strategy play out in real time with the spread of an all pervasive vitriol that targets every aspect of Muslim life in India—from the God they pray to, to the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the language they speak, and now their homes, jobs, and families. What is supposed to be an innocuous and essential activity for others becomes a malicious conspiracy for Muslims. Undoubtedly, this humiliation has been sustained through violence and victim blaming. In one month since the election results were declared on June 4 , at least 12 Muslim men were brutally lynched across India. Perhaps, even most Muslims with no knowledge of English now know the meaning of the rather complex English word ‘lynching’. It's something that worries all of them and yet it has gradually become so mundane that it outrages only a few of them. After the recent wave of attacks, many Muslims questioned the silence of a now significantly stronger opposition party and even forced them to raise their voice in Parliament. For the opposition parties, however, this silence was a matter of convenience. In the past, they sought Muslim votes by acknowledging the threat of Hindutva, but continued to do nothing. They gaslit Muslims into not saying a word. For their voices to be heard, Muslims need to make their votes count and use every platform to organise, speak, and negotiate. Modi's reduced numbers in the parliament in 2024 has already proven this. The growing menace that systematically works to erase Muslim voices from the national discourse through various forms of terror is comprehensive. Sometimes it is done through withholding online content and other times through threats and legal cases. This is what happened with the fact checker, Mohammad Zubair , who was arrested in six consecutive trumped up cases. He was recently booked under sedition for exposing a hate speech. Note here that the severity of action against the hatemonger is nothing compared to the charges against Zubair. In August 2024, two Muslim migrant workers from West Bengal were attacked by a mob of cow vigilantes in Haryana. One of them succumbed to his injuries. The other , however, managed to escape. Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini said that "It is not right to call it mob lynching,” because beef is illegal in Haryana. We don't know how the CM assumed that the two men had consumed beef. Around the same time, an elderly man was assaulted in a moving train by a mob on accusations of eating beef. On July 6 2024, the police in Uttar Pradesh booked two Muslim journalists for calling the murder of a Muslim man a ‘mob-lynching’. They were charged for creating communal unrest through malicious misreportage. All they did was report the family's version of the event. This is not an isolated incident in which those reporting on violence against Muslims have been targeted. On one hand, the Indian government has stopped publishing data on lynchings after calling its own methodology unreliable and on the other it attacks and tries to discredit every voice that investigates it. The few voices reporting on the lynchings are facing threats and censorship, gradually forcing them into silence. Indian Muslims see meanings twisted out of context everyday. For instance, a lynching is not reported as a lynching. Instead, it’s reported as the response to or punishment for a “robbery,” “child kidnapping”, or something similar. At the same time, a group of prominent right-wing clerics openly calling for genocide is dismissed and those calling them out might be booked under criminal charges. Reporting on this type of speech is considered “disturbing the peace.” The mainstream media has also shown little interest in these cases. The last decade saw a wave of hateful attacks through the news, social media, films, poetry, and music, to further invisibilise Muslims. Hate speeches are not confined to obscure corners, they dominate public discourse and are amplified by TV anchors and prominent social media influencers. A recent Human Rights Watch report pointed out that 110 out of 173 poll speeches by PM Modi contained Islamophobic remarks. Modi referred to Muslims as infiltrators and people producing more children. He even alleged that if the opposition won power, they'll give away the gold of Hindu women including their Mangalsutras to Muslims. Throughout the polls, BJP constantly published cartoons depicting Muslims as evil people eyeing the resources that belonged to Hindus. The PM’s message trickled down into the abyss of the bottomless cesspit, leading to more unhinged commentary by other leaders. This kind of hate mongering during elections is a first for India. It's a culmination of years of propaganda by WhatsApp troll armies and TV anchors like Suresh Chavhanke who dehumanise Muslims on live TV, and clerics like Yati Narsinghanand Giri who openly support the idea of a genocide of Muslims. The combination of these tactics seeks to marginalise Muslims and to systematically erase their presence in public life. The burden of proof and the onus to act in an "acceptable" way disproportionately falls on the Muslims. If they protest or turn bitter, that would reinforce negative stereotypes. Muslims must stay aware of these traps and not become silent. Be it the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests or the biggest political upset of Mr Modi's career in the recent Lok Sabha polls–in which he lost the majority in the parliament–Muslims have played a great role in these pushbacks. They have displayed resilience and resistance on many occasions which proves that they haven't given up on their citizenship. So, silence should not be an option. As a strategy, it is suicidal. Instead, they need to make their presence felt and reclaim public space. They must seek accountability from both the ruling party, as well as the opposition they voted for in large numbers. It's hard to predict how Muslims can break this cycle of violence and propaganda but what is clear is that they'll have to firmly stand up for themselves first if they want others to join them. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Opinion Madhya Pradesh Demolition Uttar Pradesh Hindu Extremism Hindu Fascism Hindutva Thook Jihad Halal Muslim invisibility hypervisibility Invisibilizing Muslims Citizenship Amendment Act mob-lynching Dehumanization Land jihad bulldozing bulldozers Ghettoisation Ghettoization illegal homes BJP National Security Act Religious Conflict religious divide Lok Sabha Archive of Absence Career Politicians Modi Civil Society Displacement Economy Vendors Construction Despotism Disappearance Dissent Enforced Disappearances Extrajudicial Killings Execution Forced Disappearance Ghost Workers Human Rights Violations India democratic backsliding nationalism democracy housing urban development Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Over the past decade, Maldivian families, drawn by a distorted vision of religious idealism, have burrowed anew in ISIS-held territories across the Middle East. Widowed mothers and orphaned children have quickly become victims of the abuse and deprivation rampant in IDP camps like Roj in Northeast Syria. As religious extremism continues to unravel the Maldives’ social fabric, the nation must reckon with the Maldivian women and children left to suffer under appalling conditions abroad. Over the past decade, Maldivian families, drawn by a distorted vision of religious idealism, have burrowed anew in ISIS-held territories across the Middle East. Widowed mothers and orphaned children have quickly become victims of the abuse and deprivation rampant in IDP camps like Roj in Northeast Syria. As religious extremism continues to unravel the Maldives’ social fabric, the nation must reckon with the Maldivian women and children left to suffer under appalling conditions abroad. "Anyhow" (2025), oil on canvas. Artist Maldives AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 8 Sep 2025 th · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION Voices of Roj “Nothing is nurturing about this camp,” Hajer said. “It does not educate us. It does not rehabilitate us. It breaks us, and it is breaking our children.” Hajer and her daughter are among roughly a hundred Maldivian detainees in Syria’s Roj camp, where they have lived for years under conditions that grow more degrading with each passing season. The al-Hol and Roj camps, run by the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES)—the civilian authority linked to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)—hold about 42,500 people, mostly wives, female relatives, and children of ISIS suspects. The urgent humanitarian and moral crisis faced by Maldivian women and children, along with others detained in camps like Roj, remains largely ignored, dismissed, or buried beneath layers of political hesitation and bureaucratic neglect. Recent global developments have only worsened the outlook. The re-election of Donald Trump in the US has accelerated aid cuts and diplomatic disengagement , contributing to a chillingly uncertain environment for repatriation efforts. The Maldivian government, like many others, has struggled to articulate a coherent policy for the return and reintegration of its citizens, leaving families in a state of indefinite limbo. Detainees remain voiceless, with little to no support from their countries of origin, caught in the legal web of global counterterrorism frameworks and domestic laws that need to balance humanitarian needs and national security risks. Hajer married Abdel in 2015, not knowing she would soon become a widow in a war zone. Immediately after their wedding, the couple left for Turkey and crossed into Syria without informing their families of their ‘exact’ plan. A year in, Abdel, Hajer’s husband, was killed in a safe house. Hajer was reluctant to discuss her circumstances in detail, an understandable decision given the gravity of her current situation and the threat to her mental and physical well-being. Now, she describes camp Roj as an “ open-air extortion prison ,” where detainees are forced to rely on remittances from relatives abroad to survive. Scorching 50 degree summers, sandstorms, and strong winds create constant health threats, especially for women and children. Water is often unavailable for days at a time, and electricity, when it comes, must be paid for and rarely lasts more than eight hours a day. Medical care is unaffordable and inadequate, even for the most basic needs. For the children born in war zones, this is all they know, but they are not immune to its psychological effects. Nights bring added danger. With no lighting, children are afraid to use distant toilets, resulting in bedwetting and other behaviours brought on by emotional trauma. Children are, too, being sexually abused and harassed. Hajer said children are “anxious, afraid, and broken.” They live under the constant shadow of fear, with their lives persistently at risk. In 2022, two Egyptian girls aged 12 and 15 were brutally killed in the annex of Al-Hol camp, their throats slit and their bodies discarded in an open septic tank. In another case, armed men shot dogs in front of children as an intimidation tactic. In a separate incident, women were dragged from their tents, beaten with iron rods, and soaked with freezing water. Rape and sexual violence are widely documented in these camps, used not only as a method of domination but as a weapon of war to instil fear, punish, and exert control. Victims include both women and adolescent girls, most of whom remain silent out of fear of stigma or retaliation. Their children returned from the ordeal sobbing and shaken, with no degree of normalcy to their expressions, no language to articulate the fear drawn into their young faces. Mothers like Hajer, along with other women in the camp, try to impose structure where none exists, often instinctively adopting young children who have been orphaned. They attempt to teach the children to read, ration food and water, and invent games from scraps of plastic and cloth. However, these efforts are frequently undermined by the suspicion of camp authorities, where even the slightest semblance of self-organisation is viewed as evidence of radicalism. UN Women revealed in May 2025 that nearly half of women’s organisations providing frontline support in crisis zones may shut down within six months due to funding shortfalls. The devastating conditions in the camps are only one part of a broader and more entrenched problem. To understand the barriers to repatriation and reintegration, it is necessary to examine not only policy failures and diplomatic stances but also the supposedly ‘measured’ political calculations that have driven prolonged inaction. Religious idealism The Maldives is better known for its year-round tropical allure and luxury tourism, but beneath the surface, rising religious extremism is destabilising social cohesion locally and its image internationally. Since the outbreak of the civil war in Syria in 2011, a concerning number of Maldivian men, women, and children have left the country to join conflicts in Syria, raising alarm about the growing influence of extremist ideologies. To some extent, it is a microcosm of the political extremities the world is experiencing. This trend not only threatens domestic stability but also carries broader implications for national security, tourism, and the visa-free international mobility enjoyed by Maldivian passport holders to 93 countries and territories . While many, like Hajer, embark on what they perceive as a spiritual journey to atone or reconnect with their faith, the motivations behind such departures are rarely straightforward. In the Maldivian context, daily life for many is marked by economic hardship, generational overcrowding, and limited opportunity, conditions that can push individuals toward radical paths in search of purpose. For some, it’s less about religious doctrine and more about dignity: a desperate bid to reclaim identity, agency, and purity in a world that seems to have left them behind. Faith, in this light, becomes more than a spiritual pursuit; it becomes a lifeline in the face of stagnation, social pressure, and the slow erosion of hope. Not everyone who left, however, can be considered a victim. Some left disillusioned with the government’s narrow or politicised interpretation of Islamic identity. In contrast, others were drawn by the promise of raising children in a more devout Islamic environment, one that, for many Maldivians, differs significantly from their own more moderate and diverse religious practices. Many were also misled by promises of employment, stability, and community, rather than out of allegiance to extremist ideologies like ISIS. Countless Maldivian men were radicalised by recruiters who preyed on legitimate grievances. Children, by contrast, had no choice at all, making their right of return particularly urgent. To take children away from their homes and communities and into a war zone under the banner of an extreme and violent version of Islam is a profound and tragic distortion of the core values most Maldivians hold dear. As highlighted by the UN’s experts on children and armed conflict and on counterterrorism and human rights, children associated with armed groups are victims first and foremost—entitled to protection, rehabilitation, and reintegration, not punishment or indefinite detention. This search for ‘nirvana’ can be understood through a theoretical lens that synthesises Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital. Turner’s notion of liminality, being in an in-between state, detached from the structures of ordinary social life, offers a framework for understanding how religious journeys serve as rites of passage. For individuals like Hajer who hail from ethno-religious nations like the Maldives, this spiritual mobility represents a space where old identities are suspended, and new, sacred selves are potentially formed. These movements are not merely about faith. It is about negotiating one’s place in a rapidly shifting social order. At the same time, Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital—the recognition, honour, and legitimacy one accrues through cultural or religious alignment—helps explain how religious idealism in the Maldives becomes a strategy of social navigation. When economic capital is scarce, and social mobility is limited, adherence to visible forms of piety can serve as a form of distinction. Religious idealism thus functions both as a means of personal salvation and as a public signal. In a context where modernity collides with tradition and where the state has a contested relationship with Islamic identity, personal piety can become a performative yet significant attempt to assert agency and reclaim moral clarity. In the Maldives, religious transformations are not only personal decisions but are situated within broader geopolitical anxieties, state governance, and the moral economies of globalisation. In this light, Hajer’s journey is not an anomaly but part of a patterned response to the contradictions of postcolonial modernity, where religious idealism emerges as both an escape and an embrace, a refusal of the present and a reimagining of what life could mean. A disturbing example of this rising extremism occurred in 2022, when Islamic fundamentalists stormed a government-organised Yoga Day event in Malé, attended by public officials and foreign diplomats. The attackers shouted religious slogans, destroyed property, and attempted to assault participants, claiming yoga contradicted Islamic beliefs. Investigations revealed the protesters had obtained flags from the office of an opposition political party. Incidents like this reflect a broader pattern of growing intolerance, politically fuelled extremism, and the weakening of moderate voices. This climate of hostility has also had deadly consequences for those who dare to speak out against it. Ahmed Rilwan Abdulla, a reporter for the independent media outlet Minivan News (later the Maldives Independent), was abducted and forcibly disappeared after receiving repeated death threats from Islamic extremist groups linked to al-Qaeda. His journalism, personal blog, and social media accounts criticised religious fundamentalism and violent extremism. Despite a decade of advocacy and demands for justice for “Moyameeha”, no perpetrators have been held accountable, leaving Rilwan’s family without closure and sending a chilling message to others seeking to challenge extremist views. Political context Following the dismantling of ISIS in 2019, Kurdish authorities assumed control of former ISIS-held territories, imprisoning male fighters and confining women and children to detention camps. Maldivian nationals initially held in Al-Hol were subsequently transferred to Roj camp, where 11 women and 33 children, along with six other individuals and their uncounted children, remain, according to direct reports from detainees. The conditions in Roj emphasise the ongoing diplomatic and humanitarian challenges faced by inhabitants, especially in the context of the Maldives’ ambiguous stance on repatriation, despite Turkey asserting administrative authority over Kurdish-controlled zones and expressing willingness to repatriate foreign nationals. The current Maldivian government has not made contact in months to verify the health or legal status of its citizens or to initiate repatriation procedures. This inaction contrasts with earlier efforts under former President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, whose administration approved an open budget through the People’s Majlis (parliament), trained personnel, and authorised the return of several individuals, including six adults and their children. Of these, five were released from the National Reintegration Centre (NRC), and children were sent to live with extended families within six to eight months. Under the current administration of President Dr Mohamed Muizzu, despite campaign promises and meetings with returnee families, no concrete updates have followed. This has raised suspicions of deliberate obfuscation, possibly to avoid exposing domestic recruiters or politically sensitive ties. The Maldives also lacks a comprehensive and systematic reintegration policy. Current efforts fall short of addressing the complexity and depth of religious fundamentalism. Existing initiatives focus narrowly on apprehended violent extremists, while broader patterns of extremism, often embedded in spiritual discourse, online spaces, and social networks, remain largely unaddressed. There is no consistent, nationwide framework; instead, the issue is treated selectively and reactively. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism driven by foreign influence, internal vulnerabilities, and successive government’s failure to curb the spread of extremist ideologies has allowed fundamentalist Islam to dominate and fuel growing support for Salafi-Jihadism , further complicating efforts to counter extremism. The effects of the one-sided limit to freedom of expression in the country are elephantinely apparent: extremists are free to spread hate as long as it is laced with religion, shunning those promoting equal rights in an open, inclusive and just society. Civil society, which could play a vital role in prevention and rehabilitation, is constrained by limited protections and lacks the operational space to act meaningfully. NGOs and civil society actors are cautious of speaking out, often only doing so under conditions of confidentiality due to fear of reprisal and lack of state protection. Targeted attacks in the past, such as MP Dr Afrasheem Ali’s assassination, the enforced disappearance of journalist Ahmed Rilwan , and the brutal killing of Yameen Rasheed, have created a climate of fear and silenced people who dared to speak out. Moreover, the unlawful de-registration of the Maldivian Democracy Network in 2019 has set a dangerous precedent for local human rights groups. State institutions such as the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) provide only rudimentary public messaging that does not align with contemporary radicalisation dynamics. Donor-funded programs, including those under USAID, are frequently framed in a way that often oversimplifies the issue with superficial messaging, such as ‘be good to your neighbour,’ failing to address the deeper ideological and structural drivers of extremism. The approach taken tends not to see the forest for the trees. In reality, state-led programming on countering violent extremism is not functional at a meaningful level. Both the government and society appear to be in denial about the scale of the problem, further complicating efforts to reintegrate returnees especially amid widespread public hostility and fear. The legal framework governing these issues was clearly defined in 2018, where under the Maldives’ Anti-Terror Law (2018) , travel to designated war zones without prior government approval is criminalised and punishable by five to seven years of imprisonment. Syria, by presidential decree, is officially recognised as a war zone. Before this legislation, however, it was relatively easy for Maldivians to travel abroad to join ISIS or affiliated groups. The state’s delayed or selective approach to repatriation emphasises the tension between legal obligations, political considerations, and international diplomatic responsibility. Personal stories, such as that of Hajer, bring the human cost of these political and legal entanglements into sharp view. Quiet recruitment and blind spots Efforts branded as ‘whole-of-society’ initiatives in the Maldives are poorly conceptualised and often superficial, lacking the depth and nuance required to counter extremism meaningfully. Public education campaigns have failed to equip families and communities with the tools to identify early warning signs. In many cases, families mistook increased religiosity for spiritual growth, unaware that it could signal a more profound ideological shift toward extremism. Compounding this is the government’s failure to build public trust or support for reintegration initiatives. Without a national dialogue or sustained public outreach, returnees are often placed back into hostile or unsafe environments, such as victims of domestic abuse being returned to the same communities, resulting in re-traumatisation and failed reintegration. The state has provided no clear communication regarding where returnees are held, under what conditions, and for how long which has instigated suspicion and public resentment. These shortcomings are accelerated by the state’s inability to address extremism within its own institutions, particularly prisons and mosques. A 2019 report by Transparency Maldives revealed widespread and well-organised recruitment networks operating within the prison system, often more effective than community-based recruiters. One-on-one interviews with inmates exposed the extent to which recruiters wield control and influence behind bars, using religious narratives and psychological manipulation invoking guilt to indoctrinate others. Mosques have also become spaces of quiet recruitment, especially among disaffected youth, including those awaiting GCSE results. Tactics employed include offering communal meals, job promises, and a sense of belonging through social events. Academically inclined individuals are groomed for technical roles, while others are positioned as ideological foot soldiers. Despite the seriousness of these dynamics, civil society engagement has been inconsistent and largely ineffective. For example, after a brief focus on prison recruitment into extremism during the 2022 National Human Rights Day, there has been no meaningful follow-up or public reporting. The lack of a coordinated, transparent, and informed approach across both community and institutional spaces continues to leave critical vulnerabilities unaddressed, undermining any sustainable counter-extremism strategy. Return and reintegration While Maldives has an ambiguous stance on the repatriation of the victims, its silence is louder. The absence of consistent public communication, the lack of a formal repatriation policy, and the visible deterioration of previously initiated reintegration mechanisms all indicate a system that is either unwilling or unable to confront the realities of return. The NRC, once a promising facility has now become emblematic of institutional neglect. Initially designed to provide trauma-informed, phased rehabilitation for returnees, starting with psychological assessments and skill-building programmes, the NRC saw moderate success with the first batch of returnees. Children were able to access safe spaces and basic routines, and families received some level of structured support. However, this fragile system quickly crumbled under the weight of poor planning, untrained staff, inadequate community sensitisation, and shifting political priorities. The location of the centre next to Maafushi jail also stigmatises it and options for an all-round holistic space are few. The second group of returnees, which included over 20 individuals, arrived to find a drastically underprepared NRC. Staff shortages, a dearth of leadership, and inadequate infrastructure resulted in inconsistent care and oversight. While the first group benefited from relatively humane conditions and structured support, the second group faced bureaucratic delays, limited communication with the outside world, and deteriorating mental health among detainees. These discrepancies have led to deep resentment and perceptions of injustice among returnee families who had consistently fought for their return. Worse still, the blurring of lines between victims and potential perpetrators, particularly during the early police evaluations, led to significant safety concerns. Vulnerable women and children were placed in close proximity to individuals not yet cleared of extremist affiliations. This created an environment ripe for intimidation, blackmail, and re-traumatisation, undermining the very premise of reintegration as a protective and rehabilitative process. It is not easy for the NRC to employ capable personnel, as the role involves working with vulnerable individuals and carries significant risk and responsibility. Civil society groups, which could have provided supplementary support, were kept at arm’s length due to state mistrust and opacity. Reintegration in the Maldives is not a coordinated, strategic process; it is an afterthought shaped by a legal and institutional system that often operates with duplicity and discrimination. Without clear policy guidelines, adequate staffing, or genuine community preparation, the state is setting returnees up for failure. The uneven application of laws and the classist biases embedded within the Maldivian legal system further undermine efforts as reintegration becomes another arena where privilege dictates outcomes. Reintegration cannot be reduced to short-term containment, bureaucratic box-ticking, or campaign promises. It must be a long-term, holistic approach with sustained community sensitisation that confronts inequalities rather than enables them. Abandoned by the state? Nowhere is the failure of reintegration more visible or more tragic than in the lives of the children affected by this crisis. For those who have been brought back to the Maldives, the conditions they return to are often far from restorative. For those left behind in conflict zones like Roj Camp, still clinging to hopes of repatriation from their country of origin, the situation is even more dire. The NRC, while initially framed as a place of rehabilitation, unfortunately functions more like a detention facility. This reality has drawn sharp criticism from the Human Rights Commission of the Maldives (HRCM) and mental health professionals, particularly regarding the presence of children within such a setting. These concerns are not merely symbolic. Detaining children, even for reintegration, violates their rights and places them in an environment that accelerates existing trauma rather than alleviating it. Children require environments that are safe, caring, and psychologically secure. The NRC, with its history of surveillance, limited freedom, and uncertain status for its occupants, does not offer such conditions. Mental health practitioners have warned that exposure to these institutional settings, especially without proper safeguards or child-focused services, risks deepening emotional distress and delaying recovery. The long-term psychological effects on children subjected to such environments are significant, including increased risk of anxiety, attachment disorders, and chronic trauma. For those still stranded in conflict zones, particularly in camps like Roj, the cost of inaction is even higher. These children, some born in Syria, others taken there as infants, have lived through war, witnessed violence, and endured years of neglect. They are not stateless in a legal sense, but are emotionally unanchored and existentially adrift. Their developmental years unfold in conditions marked by fear, deprivation, and the constant threat of violence. Hajer, like many others, is not a product of ideology alone but was shaped by the very society that now hesitates to bring her home. Her fate was as much a response to her environment as it was a consequence of her circumstances. In an increasingly religiously conservative state, where both fundamentalists and liberals find themselves alienated, the space for belonging is shrinking. Both ends of the political spectrum feel excluded—one for not conforming, the other for questioning. The inequality and alienation that drove them to leave is the same one that prevents them from returning. The economic hardship and political instability that drove families to the margins remain unaddressed. The longer the Maldives delay their return, the greater the risk that these children will interpret their abandonment as deliberate. This sense of betrayal, of being forgotten or judged for choices they never made can become a powerful source of grievance. Left unaddressed, it could fuel a new cycle of political violence. The very young people the state claims to be protecting may, in time, come to see that state as the reason for their suffering. This is not a hypothetical risk. Extremist ideologies often root themselves in personal trauma, as well as a perceived loss of identity or dignity. For children growing up in camps with little to no education, healthcare, or hope for reintegration, the appeal of groups that offer purpose, belonging, or revenge can be dangerously persuasive. The moral argument is clear: no child should bear the consequences of their parents’ decision. The legal argument is equally compelling: as a signatory to multiple international conventions, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Maldives must ensure that these children are protected, repatriated, and rehabilitated in a child-sensitive and rights-based manner. Continuing to delay their return is not just a policy failure; it is a human rights violation and a reflection of our lack of shared humanity as a nation. More dangerously, it is the planting of seeds for future instability. “I hope this helps us,” Hajer reiterated, echoing her hopes for repatriation that extended far beyond the confines of Roj Camp as she chose to lay bare their current status, risking her life. It is a question that demands an answer not just from policymakers, but from the entire nation. The new governing administration in Syria does little to clarify the fate of those stranded in camps like Roj, offering no substantial legal framework or accountability for the displaced, leaving them in a dangerous limbo, neither protected nor prosecuted. The cost of waiting is not merely diplomatic or logistical. It is deeply moral. Each day that passes without action compounds the trauma of those stranded abroad and deepens the wounds of those returned without proper support. It signals to children that their suffering is invisible, and to families that they are disposable. It risks turning victims into future threats, not by nature, but by neglect. The Maldives must confront the uncomfortable truth: silence is not neutrality, it is complicity. The time to act is not when conditions are perfect but when humanity calls. And its calls are reverberating. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Maldives Syria Extremism Women and Children Gender Violence Civil Society detention Internally Displaced Persons Roj Camp Northeast Syria Vulnerable Populations children's rights open-air prison symbolic capital religious transformation prison abuse Salafi-Jihadism Counterterrorism Department extremist recruitment government betrayal geopolitics Anonymity anonymous Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Wielding terror and fear in the absence of credibility, extrajudicial detention is a defining strategy of political terror. In this comprehensive survey of the tactics of illegal detention employed by the American, Israeli, and Assad regimes, enforced disappearance emerges as the swan song of decaying empires on the brink of collapse. Wielding terror and fear in the absence of credibility, extrajudicial detention is a defining strategy of political terror. In this comprehensive survey of the tactics of illegal detention employed by the American, Israeli, and Assad regimes, enforced disappearance emerges as the swan song of decaying empires on the brink of collapse. Jacobo Alonso, Periplo - Safe Migration (2024). 18 laser-cut modules of polyester felt, 300cm each. Artist Syria AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 22 Jan 2025 nd · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION Damnatio Memoriae In his Prison Notebooks , Gramsci describes the interregnum of a dying civilization as it gives birth to a new state order. “Now,” he writes, “is the time of monsters.” In our time of monsters, enforced disappearance reemerges as an extrajudicial tool for “extraordinary” times. Such Orwellian simplicity belies the systematic practice of one of the worst crimes of the twenty-first century. Millions of people across the globe have disappeared in political terror schemes as part of a practice that has only increased over the last few decades, tied to the wars of the current era. Enforced disappearance is a crime distinct even from arbitrary detention or mass incarceration–rather than leveraging the known carceral architectures of the state, enforced disappearance relies on parallel hidden networks created to remove someone entirely from visibility. The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance formally defines the practice as: the “arrest, detention, abduction, or any other form of deprivation of liberty” by state or para-state agents followed by the state’s “refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.” There are no exceptions to this protection under international law. The practice of enforced disappearance, when widespread or systematic, constitutes its own independent crime against humanity. While kidnapping by the state is deemed extrajudicial—exceeding boundaries of the law and the ordinary—the state, in emergency, engages in the conspiracy to kidnap with impunity. Total wars waged by imperial powers abroad, dictatorial regimes within, and occupying powers against indigenous populations deploy enforced disappearance as a defining strategy of political terror. Three contemporary cases exemplify, even define, each horrific model: the U.S.’s global war on terror, the Assad regime in Syria, and the Israeli genocide in Gaza. In each case, the carceral architectures of the state or occupying power expanded grossly in wartime settings to conduct systematic disappearance campaigns against tens and hundreds of thousands of people. Such campaigns were inevitably, and by design, tied to a litany of other crimes including torture, sexual violence, arbitrary detention, collective punishment, and extrajudicial killing. Collectively, they represent among the worst cases of enforced disappearance in this century. An Archipelago of Disappearance: the U.S. Global War on Terror In 2001, the United States launched its ‘global war on terror,’ initiating a new mode of warfare for the many imperial wars and military campaigns fought thereafter, including the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the expansive military campaigns undertaken in the Middle East, North and East Africa, and Southeast Asia. As part of this global war, the U.S. developed a conglomerate of overseas carceral architectures to facilitate the capture and detention of individuals across territorial borders or even arenas of war. The physical infrastructure of these architectures were created in tandem with new legal arguments inventing new categories of persons—i.e., the “unlawful combatant”—to systematically deprive those taken of their fundamental rights and protections. In Iraq and Afghanistan, these structures took on more traditional forms of carceral architectures under foreign military occupation: military detention camps, internment facilities, and converted prisons run by U.S. and coalition forces. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, overwhelmingly civilians, were captured and held indefinitely without charge. One report puts the total number of Iraqis arrested in the first five years of the invasion alone at 200,000, of whom 96,000 spent time in U.S.-run prisons and camps. Their capture under the new “unlawful combatants” regime stripped them of age-old prisoner of war protections under the Geneva Conventions. Arbitrary detention, torture, abuse, and sexual violence were widespread and systematic in these prisons, cemented in infamy by Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram in Afghanistan. ‘ De facto’ disappearance, first termed in a 2004 ICRC report , was endemic to the mass detention campaigns undertaken by U.S. forces, who rarely informed the detained individual or their family where or how long they would be taken. Beyond the localized carceral architectures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States, as part of a broader war aim superseding delineated boundaries and war zones, created new extraterritorial carceral architectures to facilitate the forcible disappearance of hundreds of Muslim men and boys. Perhaps no site symbolizes this more than the notorious penal colony in Guantánamo Bay. Yet it was not the only one. Between 2001 and 2009, the CIA Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Program ran a transnational network of covert prisons, known as black sites, for the secret detention and brutal torture of men captured in the “war on terror.” Euphemisms served as a doublespeak to conceal a secret disappearance scheme of an unprecedented transnational scope. “Rendition” was the act of enforced disappearance, “detention,” secret and incommunicado, and “interrogation,” simply torture. The locations of the secret prisons remain classified. Information that has been declassified is enough to paint a macabre network of torture sites across the world. Some sites were run entirely by local “host” nations, some collaborated with local security forces, and others remained under exclusive American control on foreign territory. Men captured and transferred to CIA custody were “rendered” across black sites, in what a Guantánamo defense lawyer once described as an “international criminal enterprise” of human trafficking between foreign “torture pits.” According to the U.S. Senate report on torture, at least 119 men were known to have been held in the CIA torture program. Torture in the black sites, authorized by secret legal memos written by the U.S. Department of Justice, took on perverse and methodical forms including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, walling, sodomy, mock executions, and pure human experimentation. At least one detainee died in CIA custody; no exact number is known. An untold number of individuals died in U.S. custody elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then there is Guantánamo, the most infamous and enduring piece of the extraterritorial carceral architecture created in the U.S.’s global war on terror. A prison island—or, more accurately, an American penal colony on Cuban territory—the military detention camp encompassed the most diverse population of Muslim men and boys captured by U.S. or allied forces and disappeared across seas. Nearly eight hundred men from 48 countries were held in Guantánamo. When the prison first opened in 2002, only the nationalities of prisoners were disclosed. In 2004, the U.S. began revealing the names of the men and boys held, propelling efforts by international organizations, monitoring groups, and civil society to represent the men and contact their families. Testimony by survivors reveal the physical and psychological torture endemic to the first several years of the camp. Two decades of domestic and global backlash, litigation, and advocacy campaigns forced the release of most of the men. Twenty-seven prisoners still remain , including sixteen approved for transfer and three “forever prisoners.” Each carceral site or network in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, or undisclosed locations across the world did not operate in isolation. Rather, they formed parallel and at times intersecting networks under the U.S.’s global war on terror. Many Muslim men captured and held in the U.S. military detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, or tortured in CIA black sites, for example, were sent to Guantánamo. For many, the revolving door between carceral institutions across nations continued even after release. In this era, the U.S. pioneered powerful models of war and propaganda to conceal and acquit a disappearance and torture campaign amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity under international law. Their proclaimed success foretold models others sought to follow. "Apátrida / Stateless" (2024), performance, isothermal emergency flag, 210x180cm. Courtesy of Jacobo Alonso. Annihilation and Enforced Disappearance in Syria Post-2011 Enforced disappearance has deep roots in Syria, practiced for decades under the Assad regime of both father and son—Hafez and Bashar al-Assad. Political dissidents, activists, and their relatives were routinely disappeared in secret intelligence and military prisons across Syria. These numbers first climaxed in the late 1970s and early 1980s under the reign of Hafez al-Assad, when tens of thousands of Syrians were disappeared in a systematic campaign culminating in the Tadmur prison massacre of 1980 and the Hama massacre of 1982. By then, Syrian prisons had gained a reputation for depravity, torture, and extrajudicial killings in an Arab world dominated by carceral states. The regime, entrenched in permanent ‘emergency’ doctrines and past successes quelling rebellion, was primed to respond existentially to any threat to its rule. In March 2011, a popular revolution arose in Syria, as Syrians joined the wave of Arab revolutions unfolding in the region. The response of the son mimicked the father: a total campaign of arrests, indiscriminate killings, siege, and collective punishment. In post-2001 fashion, Bashar borrowed the discourse du jour of an existential ‘war on terror’ necessitating extreme violence to ensure internal state survival. The results of the ensuing war were catastrophic: at least 350,000 Syrians were killed , 14 million displaced , and 155,000 forcibly disappeared . In this war, enforced disappearance became a primary tactic of state political terror and collective punishment. An integrated military-intelligence regime targeted civilians for mass arrest and torture. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were kidnapped during protests, at military checkpoints, schools, hospitals, and from their homes, held incommunicado, and subject to horrific physical and psychological torture, including rape and sexual violence. The carceral architecture of the state expanded vastly to absorb the sheer volume of detainees. Military field courts issued interminable prison sentences and thousands of extrajudicial death sentences in secret trials lasting minutes. Sites like Tadmur military prison, closed in 2001, were reopened in 2011 to hold new populations of prisoners. The disappeared did not vanish in the fog of war. Smuggled documents, photos, and testimonies by survivors, defectors, and witnesses alike prove a meticulous record of the regime’s own systematic disappearance scheme. As early as 2014, the ‘Caesar’ photographs revealed over 28,000 pictures smuggled out by a military forensic photographer tasked with documenting the deaths of those killed in regime detention centers. The pictures evidence a perverse organizational scheme run by the state with bodies clearly marked by torture. State documentation and witness testimony elsewhere further uncovered the secret network of military hospitals, military-intelligence branches, ad-hoc detention sites, and prisons responsible for directing the arrest, torture, and killings of hundreds of thousands of civilians. In 2016, Amnesty International collaborated with Forensic Architecture to create the first 3D model of one such site: the infamous death chambers of Saydnaya Military Prison, where a then-estimated 13,000 prisoners were executed. Silence imposed on prisoners held in Saydnaya became a crude weapon of torture by the regime. Digital reconstruction of Saydnaya relied on architectural and acoustic modeling based on interviews with four survivors in a counter mapping effort that sought to break down both the physical and psychological architecture of silence imposed by disappearance. It was a powerful disruption to a structure that, until mere weeks ago, was impervious to time or human cost. The regime, backed by an impunity ‘won’ territorially in a war of annihilation, began issuing hundreds of death certificates for prisoners disappeared years earlier. Families who received the certificates were denied access to their bodies or any other means of verification. Enforced disappearance became its own phenomenon in Syria, spurring countless UN reports and proposed mechanisms that were all but paralyzed in achieving any resolution or accountability. In November 2023, the International Court of Justice issued a ruling against Syria, recognizing enforced disappearance as a violation of the Convention Against Torture, but fell short of ordering specific measures such as providing information of detainees’ whereabouts or allowing access to independent monitors. Elsewhere in Europe, former Syrian detainees and families of the disappeared pursued new avenues of accountability to bring individual perpetrators to account. In 2020, the first trial dealing with state torture in Syria took place in Germany against two former state officials who were convicted of crimes against humanity for their role in overseeing torture, sexual violence, forced imprisonment, and extrajudicial killings. As the fight for Syria’s disappeared stagnated, a Syrian rebel offensive launched in late November radically shifted the territorial status quo, culminating in the overthrow of the Assad regime ten days later. The liberation of each city was marked by the liberation of each prison within it, a metaphor physically upended by the breaking of each cell door. Once at Saydnaya, excavation teams worked for days to secure the release of the remaining detainees, some in levels below ground, captivating a nation scrambling to find their loved ones. Even now, the fate of over 100,000 detainees remains unknown . Enforced Disappearance As Genocide: Gaza After October 7 In Palestine, carcerality fundamentally underpins Israel’s settler-colonial project. Military occupation and an expansive apartheid regime form the larger prison within which the physical carceral architecture organizes the mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Since 1967, over 850,000 Palestinians have been arrested and imprisoned under the auspices of the Israeli military judicial system, the central mechanism of the occupation ruling over the West Bank and Gaza. Under this system, civilians are routinely arrested and tried according to an expanding set of Israeli military orders in military courts at a conviction rate of over 99%. Hundreds more are held indefinitely without charge or trial under administrative detention. It is a system bound up in innumerable individual human rights violations—arbitrary detention, fair trial violations, torture, forced deportation, the systematic prosecution of children—amid larger war crimes and crimes against humanity. One of them is the crime against humanity of apartheid. International human rights organizations and UN reports all describe dual legal regimes—military courts for Palestinians and civilian courts for Israeli settlers—that systematically privilege one racial group over another in a broader policy of domination and control under an apartheid regime. Other war crimes include the widespread prosecution of Palestinian civilians in military courts, the intentional deprivation of their right to a fair trial, the deportation of the occupied population to prisons and detention centers in the occupying power, and torture . Enforced disappearance comprises yet another feature of the Israeli carceral regime. Disappearance predates the creation of the military judicial system in 1967 and continued as an intermittent practice over the next several decades, often disguised by a patchwork of legal frameworks. In 2002, the Israeli Knesset passed the Unlawful Combatants Law , modeled after its U.S. post-9/11 predecessor , to retroactively legitimate the indefinite detention of Lebanese hostages. Three years later, the same law was applied to Palestinians from Gaza, enabling periods of secret and indefinite detention constituting de facto disappearance. More sinisterly, it laid the legal and structural groundwork for the total war on prisoners waged today. In retaliation to the breach of Gaza’s open-air prison on October 7, the Israeli regime issued a series of orders dramatically expanding its carceral architecture as it launched its genocidal war on Gaza. Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons were cut off from almost all outside contact as conditions drastically deteriorated, prisoner abuse escalated, and Israeli occupation forces ramped up arrests across the occupied territory. Emergency amendments to the 2002 Unlawful Combatants Law broadened the scope of secret detention, which Israeli authorities immediately leveraged against the Gazan population. New secret military detention camps were erected exclusively to detain Gazans: Sde Teiman in the south and Anatot near Jerusalem. Elsewhere at Ofer Military Prison, Gazan detainees were cordoned off to open-air tent camps and the secret wing of Section 23 , held incommunicado, and hidden even from the larger Palestinian prisoner population. Beyond the known existence of these three sites, Israeli occupation forces disappeared thousands of Gazan men, women, and children across makeshift military barracks, settlements, prisons, hospitals, and open fields. The new clandestine regime served as an appendage to Israel’s larger carceral architecture. Whistleblower reports and testimonies by former detainees point to an integrated network of horrific torture camps across Palestine’s occupied geography. Among them, Sde Teiman stands as an emblem of the torture and abuse of Palestinian detainees, acquiring the same diseased colonial reputation of Abu Ghraib. Palestinians held in Sde Teiman are kept blindfolded in barbed wire ‘pens,’ starved, severely beaten, and subject to interrogations and torture that include electrocution, sexual violence, rape, waterboarding, and medical experimentation. In an adjoining ‘field hospital,’ injured Palestinian detainees were tied to hospital beds and practiced on by medical staff. Elsewhere across Israeli prisons and detention camps, Palestinian prisoners were subject to the same practices of torture, starvation, and deliberate medical negligence. The crime of enforced disappearance is central to the larger crime of genocide, a conclusion outlined months ago by Palestinian human rights groups and echoed in Amnesty’s latest report . Disappearance, like genocide, is practiced methodically: the population of Gaza is physically tagged, catalogued, and, if not forcibly displaced or killed , disappeared to unknown sites. Numbers accounting for the full magnitude of these crimes are still unknown, ranging between the tens and hundreds of thousands. They are, at the time of this writing, enduring crimes of no known boundaries. In October 2024, shortly after Israel launched its full war on Lebanon, a new amendment to the Unlawful Combatants Law designated two new military camps for detention in the north, prompting concerns they may be used to hold Lebanese detainees. This is the circular expansion of a law that first sought to legitimate the enforced disappearance of Lebanese detainees twenty-two years ago and which commandeers the legal architecture of disappearance today. The fate of the disappeared and detained remains central to ceasefire negotiations and emerging forums of accountability. "UN-Safe Migration" (2024), Polyester felt and laser cut fabric installation. Courtesy of Jacobo Alonso. The disappeared, in their absence, loom large over the present. Impunity granted to one political terror scheme emboldens another, cementing permanent states of emergency and creating varied national, transnational, and extranational architectures of disappearance. They are examples of a twenty-first century reality with the potential to produce even more destructive results, leveraging evolving surveillance technologies and age-old carceral traditions. It is an inevitability readily taken for granted; an inevitability, too, that serves the fear intended by these schemes. And yet, the enormity of resources required to sustain the secret disappearance of tens of thousands of people ultimately fail under their own grandiosity. The secrecy and structures of such crimes are untenable, even as they undeniably produce incalculable human loss. Our current moment only proves their frailty. Across the globe, the edifices of once horrific sites are being quietly shuttered by the state or actively dismantled by popular forces in the face of enduring local and global resistance. As Guantánamo turns twenty-three this month, another eleven Yemeni detainees held without charge were transferred to Oman, leaving only fifteen men remaining. In Palestine, the fight for tabyeed el-sujoun —to ‘cleanse the prison walls’—is carried on across all fronts by resistance groups, civil society, and transnational coalitions, including prisoners’ coalitions in the U.S. The breaking of prison doors in Syria, inspiring renewed efforts in places like Egypt , now beckons the daunting task of what comes after. New modes of documentation, accountability, and rehabilitation seek to tackle the crime of disappearance, with a particular focus on the survivors and families of the disappeared. The future of these structures, whether carcerality may emerge in new forms, will always remain a threat to the hard-won achievements of the present. Nevertheless, a rupture of a sort has begun, and the seam must be unraveled to its end. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Syria Enforced Disappearances Disappearance Dissent Discourses of War Forced Disappearance Guantanamo Bay Gitmo Alienation Archive of Absence Archive Assad Regime Israeli Regime Sedneya Sednaya Prison Sde Teiman detention carcerality 9/11 post-9/11 world order prisoner's coalitions Hama War on Terror War Crimes CIA Abu Ghraib unlawful combatant Muslim Invisibilizing Muslims West Bank Gaza Palestine fair trial unfair trial Unlawful Combatants Law Anatot Nageb Ofer Military Prison Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

“No, the madness in our home, like the rest of this country, lies in our search for a strongman. In our home, no man is strong enough.” “No, the madness in our home, like the rest of this country, lies in our search for a strongman. In our home, no man is strong enough.” The Lucky Ones: A Memoir by Zara Chowdhary (Crown, July 2024). Cover design and illustration by Arsh Raziuddin. Artist Ahmedabad AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 19 Oct 2024 th · BOOKS & ARTS REPORTAGE · LOCATION How to Grow Flowers in a Bedroom By the end of March, there is no place to breathe in C-8. Papa has forbidden us from standing by the windows. He monitors how long we stand on the balcony, whom we look at, what we’re thinking. Inside, it feels like all air is finite. We’re trampling over one another for space to think, to be. Our silences have gone up our nostrils, come out our mouths, run out the door into the elevator, and fled. Our words now dance on the riverbed, mocking us from afar. We will never be free. Every room in this home is tainted by violence. Papa and Amma’s dark bedroom with its single small window, the kitchen with its deep sink and cloistered shelves, the laundry room, where I hide and write in a diary, the mori or dishwashing bathroom behind the kitchen, where only Gulshan is sent to clean our muck, Dadi’s room, with a view of the street but also Dadi’s fuming mouth. My parents’ room was where Misba and I hid each night during drinking time. We would hear loud, animated conversation outside—glasses chinking, something crude said, some laughter. Then the voices would always grow louder, angrier. Something would be thrown, something smashed. Then Papa would storm off to the bathroom. The door would be slammed. A moment of quiet. In my earliest memory of a night like this, when I was barely three, Amma came rushing into the bedroom, Phupu close behind her. “Rukhsi! Don’t just walk away . . .” Amma turned to close the door on her. “Zahida apa, please. Please.” Her voice wobbled. “Just please let me be.” She came around and sat at the edge of the bed. There, sitting a couple feet from my mother, I felt it for the first time: my mother’s burden shifting, growing, moving restlessly inside her, welling up in her wide, honey-colored eyes. But Amma squeezed her eyes shut and pushed it back in. I remember inching closer to Amma, placing tiny hands on her hunched shoulders, attempting an awkward hug. I remember Amma taking my tiny palms and shaking me off like a wet leaf stuck to her clothes. “Please Zara. Leave me alone.” I felt my own burden sprout, a tiny seed of helplessness. “Kidhar hai Rukhsi?” I remember my father slurring, demanding to be told where his wife was hiding. Please don’t tell him, Phupu, I prayed in this, the worst game of hide-and-seek ever. I remember Phupu’s deadpan voice telling him. I remember how he threw the door open, exploded into the room. “Bitch. Come back outside!” Then I remember Papa’s eyes accidentally meeting mine instead of hers, ready to fire, locked on a target. My eyes are wide and big like hers but dark like his. And yet for the first time I see my twinkle-eyed, smiling father—who tickled me till I collapsed giggling, who scratched my knee till I fell asleep—towering over me from the foot of the bed, glaring at me and seeing not his daughter but a limb that has grown from this woman. A part of her. He spits. “Do your drama. Brainwash the girl against me.” He rumbles, his mountain body barely holding back its rage. I sit there frozen between these two. The woman who won’t let me touch her, the man whom I dare not approach. All I want to whimper is I love you both . I remember Amma finally shaking out of her trance, then standing up and walking out of the room, hoping to draw the fire away, to spare me. I remember Papa turning to look at me one last time, hate in his eyes slowly melting into inebriated confusion. The fire and its first victim walked away. I remember Amma coming back later that night to call us to dinner. “Come on, girls,” she says in that shaky voice, not letting me look into her eyes anymore. When I hesitate to leave the safety of the bed and go out where the plates will tremor like me, she looks at me with complete emptiness. There is no love there, no joy, no life, only exhaustion. “Please, Zara,” she repeats. I quietly, guiltily get off the bed and follow her. I know then that there is no running, no saving myself. I can never leave. Not without my amma. “Arre, no two states of this country can stand each other. Everyone is fighting over food or language or rivers. We have four in this house!” we learn to say, trying to normalize or exoticize our home’s dysfunction for ourselves. It’s true. Dada is from Punjab in the North. Dadi is Gujarati. Amma’s mother is from the mango coast of western India. Her dead father is from the South. We blame the diversity for the disturbance. Too many stories in collision with one another, no shared tongue. But it’s also very not-true. Amma said yes to this marriage dreaming she’d learn to dance the garba, a dance she’d always marveled at from a thousand miles away. Phupu can cook herself any cuisine in the world, but she rushes to the table first when Amma is frying dosas. Dadi hates the mention of Dada’s family in Pakistan’s Punjab, but she pushes Misba and me to dance in front of the guests to every Punjabi bhangra song played at weddings we attend. “Tumhaare khoon mein hai yeh,” she reminds us. It is all in our blood. Amma and Baby Zara. Courtesy of the author. No, the madness in our home, like the rest of this country, lies in our search for a strongman. In our home, no man is strong enough. Dada is haunted by how he failed. Papa withers under the burden of his own mistakes. The women become dictators when they become divorced or widowed. There is no room in C-8 Jasmine for grace. So we huddle in Amma’s bedroom each night, telling each other stories, making up imaginary ones in which we live in forests by little streams, just Amma, Misba, and I. There is a tape deck in the room, a wedding present for Papa and Amma from his friends the Reddys. It’s his prized possession. Papa takes us every Friday to Law Garden, where in the evenings a man sells pirated and original audiotapes from the back of a converted Tempo Traveller: albums of every new and old Bollywood movie, as well as collections of ghazals, devotional Sufi and bhakti music. Papa never buys pirated. They will spoil his deck. If ever his purchases turn out to be fakes and the tape spools out and jams the player, he goes back and fights with the tape walla, calls him a dozen names. And then buys three more tapes. He buys Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan for himself. Some mornings he plays it after his shower and raises his hands and hums “Allah Hu, Allah Hu” as if temporarily possessed, energized, tentatively tethered to a faith he doesn’t understand. This is the only grace I see. I watch him, his soft beer belly rising and falling, the depression dropping away like the seams of his semitransparent cotton kurta suspended around his heaviness. Since the riots started, he hasn’t played it. But one Sunday, bored out of his mind, he opens the deck up and cleans the head with cotton swabs and Dada’s eau de cologne. When Misba and I shut the door of Amma’s bedroom that evening, we look at each other conspiratorially. We switch on the tape deck and allow ourselves the same grace. Grace is the only language Misba and I know to speak in. It has been our shared tongue as sisters since before we ever learned how to talk. We don’t yet know what it means to save each other, but we know something happens when we dance. We feel redeemed. We have done this each evening from the moment we started to walk, from the moment we recognized our world burned like clockwork each evening. We insert our favorite tapes one after another, hits from 2001: Lagaan, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, Dil Chahta Hai, Aks, Lajja, Nayak, Pyaar Tune Kya Kiya, Zubeidaa . We haven’t watched all the movies. Papa takes us to the theater only for the big ones. But song after song we go, moving and making the movie with our bodies. Through the moods and bhavas and rasas of each song, we make up steps and build facial expressions, we construct entire lives and love stories filled with heartbreak and mischief and sublime joy. Amma slips into the room in between dinner preparations to watch us. A few times, Dadi and Phupu peep inside too. Apa sits on the bed, arms folded, her grim mouth slackening into a smile. There is nothing to dance about right now. But in C-8 Jasmine, there seldom is. Dance is the only way Misba and I know to transcend this reality. When Amma comes in to watch, I watch her back, as she leans her tired body against the linen closet, her smile building from her thick lips to her honey eyes. Soon she’s clapping with our every shimmy and shake. She lets out a soft hoot. This is all she can do. Dance is teaching us what she can’t, mustn’t. That we have power. That as long as we have each other, our souls will be okay. She watches us bloom amid all this smoke, gracefully stretching into life, grateful we are hers, thankful we are alive. ∎ Excerpted from The Lucky Ones: A Memoir by Zara Chowdhary (Crown, July 2024). SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Ahmedabad Memoir Childhood India Pakistan Conflict Nationalism Feminism Non-fiction Excerpt Resilience Domestic violence 2002 Gujarat Riots Multiculturalism Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

As Pakistan's militarized disappearance of everyday Baloch civilians continues, the vitality of the community in the age of social media has come to be preserved through “dossiers of memory”—online archives housed in tweet threads and on Facebook groups. These archives are tools of resistance—declarative visual pleas to local and global audiences that affirm the presence of the disappeared Baloch and connect their struggles to worldwide movements against enforced disappearances. · THE VERTICAL Essay · Balochistan As Pakistan's militarized disappearance of everyday Baloch civilians continues, the vitality of the community in the age of social media has come to be preserved through “dossiers of memory”—online archives housed in tweet threads and on Facebook groups. These archives are tools of resistance—declarative visual pleas to local and global audiences that affirm the presence of the disappeared Baloch and connect their struggles to worldwide movements against enforced disappearances. Sameen Agha, My House is on Fire (2021). Marble & mixed media on canvas. Who is Next? “Now that I have cleaned the dust from my son’s photograph, where should I keep it to find some relief? Wherever I place it, I feel as though the photograph is looking at me and talking to me.” These are Nako (Uncle) Mayar’s words, shared in a Facebook post on 19 December 2023. Nako Mayar first caught public attention when his photographs and videos went viral during a sit-in protest in Turbat , held against the extrajudicial killing of Balach Mola Bakhsh by the Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) in November 2023. He was later seen participating in the “ Long March against Baloch genocide ” to Islamabad, organized by the Baloch Yakjehti Committee. The public were deeply moved by the sight of this elderly man holding a picture, crying, cursing, lamenting, and pleading—showing the photograph to everyone who visited the sit-in or sat near him to express solidarity. “Look how handsome my son is”, he would say. These visuals of Nako Mayar were shared widely on Facebook and Twitter, making Baloch people aware of his plight. Nako Mayar, holding a framed photograph of his disappeared son, Fateh, during a protest. Image courtesy of the author. Nako Mayar hails from Zamuran, a sub-Tehsil of Buleda in district Kech, nearly 70 kilometers south of Turbat city. He spent most of his life as a shepherd, relying on subsistence farming. After the 2006 assassination of Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti during a military operation in Kohlu Dera Bugti—which ignited the current and fifth wave of the Baloch nationalist movement—however, the political situation in the region deteriorated. As military operations intensified in the B-areas (rural areas policed by Levies and Frontier Corps) of Balochistan, Nako Mayar migrated to Tehsil Buleda, district Kech to escape the violence. Buleda, more populated and equipped with slightly better facilities than Zamuran, offered relative safety compared to the isolated, violence-stricken rural areas. Additionally, military operations often targeted remote villages, forcing residents to move toward more concentrated settlements, where they could be easily monitored and controlled. In Buleda, he continued to live a modest life, relying on his goats and sheep. His son, Fateh Mayar, was a diligent student who attended school in the mornings and taught English at a local language institute in the evenings. Fateh earned his pocket money from teaching. According to Nako Mayar, his son Fateh was forcefully disappeared from Turbat Bazaar on 14 June 2023, when he went for Eid shopping. This incident completely altered Nako Mayar’s life, transforming him from a free and independent shepherd into a political subject. In many of the videos shared on social media, Nako Mayar can be heard saying, “My son is innocent. He doesn’t even have a Computerized National Identity Card (CNIC). He’s still a child, less than 18 years old.” One of the most poignant lines he often repeats while looking at his son’s photograph is, “I am cursed for giving my beloved Fateh an education. If you come back, I will not let you study. If he had been a shepherd, maybe nobody would have cared about him. I am seventy years old, and he is my only son. My son used to go to school in the morning and to the language institute in the evening. He is not involved in any kind of anti-state activities. His records are clear—they can check the school and language institute attendance. If he were involved in any such activities, how could he have taken his relative to the Frontier Corps camp doctors when he was stung by a scorpion? This should not happen to anyone.” He continues, “If the tyrants do not give me justice, may God hold them accountable. Oh God, question these tyrants on my behalf.” The story of Nako Mayar and his son Fateh is not just about personal tragedy but is emblematic of a much larger human rights crisis faced by countless families in Balochistan. Fateh is just one of thousands of young Baloch, predominantly students, who have been forcibly disappeared by Pakistan’s military and paramilitary forces. In his search for justice, Nako Mayar is one of many family members who tirelessly protest outside press clubs, march along roads holding photographs of their missing loved ones and engage in social media campaigns led by political organizations such as the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP) and the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC). They demand answers and the safe return of their sons, husbands, and brothers. Central to their struggle are the photos they hold. These photos, once treasured as personal memories, have now become powerful symbols of protest, keeping the stories of the disappeared alive. More than just reminders of the past, these photos break the silence that surrounds enforced disappearances, turning personal grief into a powerful act of public resistance. In Nako Mayar’s case, the photos of his disappeared son, Fateh, have become much more than just images. They represent a father’s grief, his unbreakable resilience, and his refusal to let his son’s story be forgotten. These photos draw people in, making them feel the weight of Fateh’s disappearance and compelling them to engage with his story. The photographs are not just keepsakes. They are reminders of the love families still hold and the pain they endure. Every time Nako lifts Fateh’s image at a protest or posts it online, he is refusing to let his son’s story be silenced. He is fighting against the state’s efforts to erase Fateh’s memory. These photos demand answers, pushing families and communities to keep speaking up for those who no longer have a voice. They push the stories of their loved ones out of the darkness, out of prison cells, and into the public eye. The fight for visibility and justice has also found its way into the digital realm, where families and activists have created virtual archives, to ensure that the stories of the disappeared are neither forgotten nor ignored. Social media platforms have become crucial sites for preserving these memories and amplifying their resistance. The “Voice for Baloch Missing Persons” (VBMP) Facebook page is a digital archive created by families to record the stories of their missing loved ones. Since its formation in 2009, VBMP has documented thousands of cases of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Faced with a lack of attention from national and international media, families and activists have turned to social media to share their stories and gather support. Photograph from a sit-in camp near the Quetta Press Club. Image courtesy of the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP) Facebook page. Beside the Quetta Press Club, VBMP maintains a permanent camp where portraits of the missing are displayed prominently. These photographs, larger than typical ID photos, are arranged in rows. The camp, lined with these images, serves as a powerful reminder of the families’ pain and their relentless demand for justice. Each day, VBMP’s page posts updates, counting the days since its encampment began and marking the time that families have spent waiting for answers. Digital platforms have also become vital tools for connecting the local struggle in Balochistan to a global audience. By using hashtags like #ReleaseAllBalochMissingPersons on digital sites, families are not only reaching out for local support but also appealing to international human rights organizations and diaspora communities. These posts, shared repeatedly, create an online archive of pain and resistance, reinforcing the community’s presence in digital spaces even as they are marginalized in physical ones. Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC) emerged in 2020 after the killing of four-year-old Bramsh Baloch’s mother, allegedly by one of the local death squads believed to be operating under Pakistani military intelligence. This devastating event sparked new waves of protests, with BYC leading numerous demonstrations, including the Long March against Baloch Genocide in 2023 and the Baloch Raji Muchi in 2024 . These events, led by Baloch women, brought attention to the suffering of the community, calling for basic rights and an end to state violence. Every year, on October 4, the family of Shabir Baloch —one of the many forcibly disappeared activists—launches a campaign, demanding answers. For his wife, Zarina Baloch, and his sister, Seema Baloch, the fight is not just for visibility but for recognition, acknowledgment, and the hope of bringing Shabir back home. This year on October 4, Zarina Baloch and Seema Baloch, launched a protest campaign demanding the whereabouts of Shabir Baloch. Zarina, Shabir’s wife, is often seen at protests, both in person and online, holding a placard that reads, “Am I married or a widow?” Zarina Baloch holds a sign with the words, “ Am I married, or a widow? " Image courtesy of X. Shabir Baloch was born in the Labach district of Awaran. He began his political journey as a student activist and was later elected as the Information Secretary of the Baloch Students Organization, Azad chapter (BSO-Azad). The BSO was banned by the Pakistani state as a terrorist organization due to its radical separatist stance on the issue of Baloch liberation. Shabir was arrested by the Frontier Corps while visiting Gwarkop, a village seventy kilometres far from Turbat city in the Kech district, with his wife, Zarina, during a raid on 4 October 2016. Along with Shabir, twenty-four other Baloch were detained in the raid, but all were eventually released—except for Shabir. Since then, his whereabouts remain unknown. “It was less than two years into our marriage when Shabir was abducted,” Zarina says. I still hear our laughter echoing in our bedroom when we were together.” For the past eight years, Zarina and Shabir’s sister, Seema, have been searching for justice. On 12 October 2016, Zarina went to the police station to file a report, but the authorities refused to register her case. In November 2016, she filed a petition in court, hoping to find her husband. Zarina and Seema brought Shabir’s case to the attention of international organizations like Amnesty International and the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, but they received no response from the Pakistani government. The Pakistan Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances also took up Shabir’s case but failed to recover him. Instead, according to the Human Rights Council of Balochistan (HRCB), the commission intimidated and harassed Shabir’s family during the hearings. On October 4, 2024, HRCB tweeted , “On one occasion, a justice on the commission told Seema not to attend any more hearings. When she insisted, he remarked that if she was not a woman, she would have been kicked out of the office.” This is the struggle faced by every mother, sister, and wife of men, forcibly disappeared in Balochistan. These women protest and march tirelessly, often breaking down mid-speech while demanding answers, overwhelmed by panic attacks and grief. They find themselves navigating complex and indifferent government institutions. When they go to police stations to file their cases, they are refused. When they knock on courts’ doors, they are given endless dates for hearings without resolution. They work to have their loved ones’ names added to the lists of human rights commissions, but nothing changes. Instead, they are met with harassment, intimidating calls from authorities, and false assurances. Each day, the size of their case files grows thicker. With each passing year their hope and determination remain unwavering despite the system’s continued failure to deliver justice. One such file belongs to Saira Baloch—a plastic folder filled with photographs of her brothers, Asif and Rasheed. They were both arrested by Pakistani security forces at Zangi Nawad, a picnic spot in District Noshki, on 31 August 2018. Saira explains that while the security forces initially acknowledged the arrest, they later denied it. It has been six years since, and the family has received no information about the alleged crime, whereabouts, or legal basis for their detention. A folder with images of Asif and Rasheed. Image courtesy of X. Salman Hussain, an anthropologist, describes these files as “dossiers of memory.” It is a personal archive containing photographs, National Identity Cards, First Investigation Reports (FIRs), police complaints, court hearing dates, and handwritten notes from relatives. Personal notes often detail the dates and locations of abductions or provide outlines of speeches that families deliver at protests. The caption of one of Saira’s posts on X captures the essence of these memory dossiers, “Our happy life has been imprisoned first in pictures and then in files. Our wishes, dreams, and desires to live are locked inside this file. Will he (the disappeared) ever be able to come out of these torture cells and files?” T hese personal archives are much more than collections of old photos and documents, they are records of dreams, struggles, and resistance. When families share these photographs alongside their personal notes, they turn the images into powerful reminders of those who are missing, keeping their stories alive. With no physical remains to mourn, they use photographs to fill the space between life and death—where the missing is neither fully gone nor truly present. Sharing these photographs on platforms like Facebook or X is not just about raising awareness—it’s a way of saying, “We’re still here, and we will not be silenced.” Each post is a reminder that the state has failed to provide answers, yet these families will not stop demanding justice. For many relatives, searching for their missing loved ones has taken over their entire lives. Most of their days are spent protesting on the streets or sharing their stories online, refusing to let the world forget. By sharing these images, families also reclaim control over who is seen and remembered. Kashmiri and Palestinian scholars have called this a form of “counter-visuality,” where images serve as a tool to resist erasure and assert presence in spaces where they are denied. When a loved one disappears, families do not just lose a person, they lose part of their identity. They exist in a painful state of limbo, caught between being present and absent, struggling to find answers. Roles like wife, widow, parent, or child no longer fit. Instead, they become new political subjects, voices of resistance, marching in protest or campaigning on social media. Relatives who were once viewed as powerless victims have turned into powerful voices speaking out against state violence. This phenomenon extends beyond Baloch women, who have become symbols of resistance against enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Similar movements can be seen around the world. In Argentina, the Organization of Mothers of the Disappeared (Mothers of Plaza de Mayo) was formed in 1977, marking the first public protest against military rule. To this day, every Thursday, the Madres march around the Pirámide de Mayo in the center of Buenos Aires. In Guatemala , tens of thousands of people were disappeared during the 1960-1996 civil war between the military and leftist guerrilla forces, leading to enduring grief and activism by the families left behind. Likewise, in Jammu and Kashmir, the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) continues to fight for justice and accountability for those who have vanished under state-sponsored repression. In each of these cases, women have used public grief and emotional expressions—such as weeping and mourning—as powerful political tools, transforming fear into collective resistance against state violence. These movements against enforced disappearances have given rise to influential political figures such as Estela de Carlotto, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Parveena Ahangar and Mahrang Baloch. Every time a new story of disappearance is shared online, the community holds its breath, wondering, “Who is next?” This question echoes through every gathering and protest, a reminder that the pain of enforced disappearances is far from over. A young girl at a protest holds up a frame with the question “Who Is Next?” Image courtesy of X. Who’s Next by Qasum Faraz translated by Sajid Hussain (2013) Life is a poster pasted on the city’s walls. With the passage of time, It changes the names and photos emblazoned on its chest. Some days it’s Allah Nazar, Some days it’s Abdul Nabi. On every remorseless road of time and occasion, On every square, The wind distributes bits of my self- Like pamphlets. There is a strike tomorrow: All the shutters in the market will drop their gaze. Time and space will become one in the din of rallies. The day and the night, The month and the year, Will wear the same colour. Every letter on banners, placards, and foreheads, Will march along with a sea of its own. Who knows what will happen then? I, as a character of a global story, Stand at a distance and think: “For whom?” Someone, from behind, puts a hand on my shoulder, And whispers, “Life is a poster pasted on the city’s walls.”∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Balochistan Pakistan Civilian Activism Archive of Absence Resistance Resistance Movement Enforced Disappearances Disappearance Militarism Protest Extrajudicial Killings Counterterrorism Department Long March against Baloch Genocide Baloch Yakjehti Committee Zamuran Buleda Kech Shepard Subsistence Farming Assassination Kohlu Dera Bugti Baloch Nationalist Movement Rural Policing Violence Monitoring Turbat City Turbat Bazaar Childhood Computerized National Identity Card Education Levies and Frontier Corps Human Rights Human Rights Violations paramilitary Military Occupation Voice for Baloch Missing Persons Memory Grief Public Space Photography Justice Visibility Social Media Facebook X Quetta Press Club Baloch Raji Muchi 2024 State Sanctioned Violence Baloch Students Organization BSO-Azad Liberation Gwarkop Amnesty International United Nations Working Group Intimidation Security Dossiers of memory Anthropology Counter-visibility Erasure State Erasure Who is Next? Qasum Faraz Sajid Hussain Poetry Translation Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 5th Mar 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? Sabrina Tirvengadum, Sugar Cane (2023). Archival images, collage, digital painting, and generative AI. Artist Mauritius AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 3 Feb 2025 rd · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION Gardening at the End of the World Mauritius shot up from beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean in a volcanic eruption eight million years ago. As the lava cooled and became rock, rain fell into the cracks, forming streams and rivers that ran down to the sea. The water fed forests that crept up the island’s young mountains. Before long, an unbroken chain of dense evergreen forest extended across the land. For eight million years, these trees sheltered a dense flourishing of life. The largest among them towered to seventy feet, suspended above the younger trees and the undergrowth. Bright pigeons and parakeets studded the canopy, ferns, flowers, and fungi abounded in the understorey, and, where the forest thinned, a community of giant tortoises grazed on the long grass. By the late nineteenth century, Mauritius was a byword for ecological disappearance. It began three centuries earlier, when Dutch colonists—the island’s first, known human inhabitants—began clearing the lowland forest for lumber. The colonists massacred the giant tortoises for the small deposits of fat on their backs, and introduced goats, pigs, and dogs, which devastated the indigenous plant and animal life. Within a century of Dutch arrival, the island’s tortoises and large birds were all either rare or extinct. Wild cattle fled from the settled areas, and the forests were overrun by millions of rats. But the destruction wasn’t complete until the arrival of sugar. Under French and British rule (1715-1810 and 1810-1968 respectively), the island was transformed into an enormous sugar factory; by 1840, all other large-scale cultivation had been abandoned. This, in turn, exposed Mauritius to an economic logic of growth at all costs. When sugar prices plummeted in the nineteenth century, the island was pressured to export ever greater quantities of sugar to sustain the colonial economy. The consequences were etched across the island’s landscape: massive deforestation, spiralling species loss, and ever larger sugar mills belching thick smoke into the air. By 1880, 43% of the entire island had been converted into canefields, and 80% of native tree cover had been lost. The result of these changes can only be described as a climate catastrophe. In precolonial Mauritius, a rich variety of forest life protected the island ecology from cyclones and fluctuating rains. Palm forests kept the low coastlands cool and humid, while mountain woods slowed the flow of rainwater and absorbed moisture into the subsoil. Colonial deforestation permanently altered the island’s climate. As the air grew hotter and drier, springs and rivulets near the coast disappeared. The few remaining coastal evergreens died, unable to adapt to the changed climate. Large quantities of water, previously retained in the highland forests, flowed directly into the sea during the annual rains. This, in turn, left the island exposed to fluctuations in annual rainfall: swamps, rivers, and streams dried up after a shortfall in the monsoon, while flash floods struck with grim regularity. Malarial mosquitoes, unknown on the island before 1860 , found a natural home amongst its stagnant marshes and congested plantation canals. By the turn of the twentieth century, malaria was endemic to Mauritius. This is a story about what comes after disappearance. It follows a little — known environmental struggle waged between Mauritius’ sugar capitalists, colonial scientists, and the island’s African- and Indian-descended working population. Faced with an increasingly volatile natural environment in the nineteenth century, the Mauritian sugar industry argued that the only way to keep the island from total ruination was to continue producing sugar, in ever larger quantities, for greater profit. Colonial officials, armed with growing meteorological data and population statistics, were all too aware of the ecological disaster threatened by sugar production. Yet at the same time, they accepted the argument — advanced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby—that the island’s survival was impossible without a flourishing sugar industry. To address this predicament, the colonial government turned to scientists working at the island’s botanical gardens and weather stations. Fusing imperial power with environmental science, it embraced early forms of geoengineering and climate adaptation, in an effort to stabilise the Mauritian plantation economy and protect it from the island’s precarious climate. For both the government scientists and the sugar industry, Mauritius was a site of experimentation—the question was how life, and the profits that depended on it, could be made to endure following the disappearance of the island’s indigenous ecology. But beyond the interests of state and capital, Mauritian working people had their own ideas about how to organise their lives in relation to the island’s disturbed ecologies. As the descendants of Africans and Indians shipped to Mauritius under brutal systems of slavery and indentureship, they held onto their own knowledge about the land, while cultivating seeds smuggled across the Indian Ocean by their predecessors. With these tools, Afro- and Indo-Mauritians in the nineteenth century sought out a future beyond the sugar estates and colonial environmental control. At the heart of the struggle lay a simple question: was life—human and non-human—condemned to simply endure the devastation of the natural world, or was it possible to cultivate something more than survival? On the Walk by Sabrina Tirvengadum Like today’s global climate crisis, the burden of Mauritius’ volatile ecology fell unevenly among the island’s inhabitants. Worst affected by far was the labouring population of the sugar plantations. For over a century, men, women, and children kidnapped in Madagascar and East Africa were sold into slavery on the Mauritian plantations; at its height in 1817, the enslaved population was 79,494—more than 80% of the total population of the island. Then, when slavery was abolished in 1835 , the former slave owners turned to a new source of bound, racialised labour: indentured workers, recruited in rural areas of north and south India under contracts granting free passage to Mauritius in exchange for five years of labour on the sugar estates. Indentureship sat somewhere between slavery and free labour: while only bound for a fixed period, indentured labourers inherited the former slave barracks, took the place of the enslaved in the canefields, and suffered the same daily humiliations at the hands of the white overseers. The enslaved and the indentured were on the frontlines of the transformation of Mauritius’ landscape. The labourers hacked away swathes of ancient forest at the orders of the overseers. They hauled the black volcanic rocks that scattered the island into neat rows marking the canefield boundaries. And they cultivated the fields with their bare hands: weeding, planting, and shovelling during the rainy season, and in the dry season, enduring long, exhausting days cutting cane and transporting it back to the sugar mill. At night, the canecutters slept in overcrowded huts, in dwelling areas shared with the plantation livestock, alongside the rats, scorpions, and snakes who were attracted to the sweetness of the canefields. Malaria, yellow fever, and cholera proliferated near the densely packed, unventilated huts. When epidemics hit the island, the enslaved and the indentured were the first to die. The sugar industry, in collusion with the colonial authorities, did everything in its power to keep the island’s working population bound to the canefields. Armed patrols scoured the island for maroons (runaway slaves). The colonial government paid a reward for the severed hands of dead maroons, while French law stipulated that captured runaways were to have their ears cut off. Even after the end of slavery, indentureship perpetuated the island’s system of racial control. Under the indenture contract, workers were banned from leaving the plantation without written permission from the estate manager. Discriminatory pass laws forced Indo-Mauritians to carry identity cards showing their occupation and residence; those without evidence of employment were arrested and imprisoned at the vagrant depot, before being re-indentured on a sugar estate for a year. Local police conducted weekly ‘vagrant hunts’, sweeping across the countryside and apprehending every Indo-Mauritian they found. Throughout two centuries of slavery and indentureship, the ultimate goal of the planters remained the same: to keep the plantation workforce ‘attached to the soil’ (a phrase often repeated by colonial officials), at the frontline of the colony’s environmental collapse. On 14 June 1886, Dr John Horne, director of Mauritius’ renowned botanical gardens, wrote to the Colonial Office in London on an “urgent” matter of “great importance.” Twelve months earlier, Dr Horne had returned to the island to reports from forest rangers about an infestation of what they called “the cuscuta creeper.” Cuscuta reflexa— or dodder, its English vernacular name—is a parasitic creeper plant native to India. It propagates from seeds dropped on the ground, which produce a threadlike yellow stem that gropes for assistance from any nearby plant. Contact made, the stem twines itself around its host, sinking tiny suckers into its flesh and stealing its nutrients. In this manner, the creeper grows up to six inches a day, quickly smothering its host. The creeper had never been seen in Mauritius, but now it was spreading quickly through the island’s forests and scrubland. Younger trees and shrubs were killed, unable to sustain the parasite during the worst drought in a generation. Older trees were soon garlanded with a thousand tiny threads, each studded with small, bell-shaped white flowers with bright yellow filaments. In his letter, Dr Horne pleaded for information from India about the creeper, and how to destroy it. Horne’s desperation was a product of the surprisingly long history of climate science and environmental policy in Mauritius. As early as 1645 , Dutch colonists fretted about the rate of deforestation, and enacted laws to curb the pigs and dogs which were ravaging the island. Under French rule, the colonial administration was heavily influenced by a school of scientists known as ‘desiccationists’, who argued that drought was caused by deforestation. The result was a series of forest reserves and laws restricting deforestation in the interior—some of the world’s earliest conservation measures aimed explicitly at climate change. In the second half of the nineteenth century, after a series of devastating droughts, floods and epidemics, these environmental policies intensified. The government pursued the creation of new forests along the island’s denuded mountains and rivers, spending millions of rupees purchasing land for reforestation from abandoned sugar estates. These they handed to Dr Horne, who cultivated the land with saplings taken from his botanical gardens. This is the context for Dr Horne’s urgency regarding the “ cuscuta creeper.” Fearing the destruction of his saplings by the parasite, Dr Horne successfully lobbied the colonial government for a law ordering its total eradication. In starkly martial language, the botanist mobilised his forest rangers to carry out an eradication order, advocating “attacking it in force, at one time, at all the places where it is growing.” But the creeper was not acting alone. As Dr Horne wrote to the Colonial Office, men, women, and children from the Indo-Mauritian community were intentionally spreading the parasite. They carried portions of the plant wherever they went, Horne reported, throwing it on trees and shrubs and allowing it to propagate. A year after it was first detected by the forest rangers, the creeper grew conspicuously in the bushes surrounding Indian villages and plantation tenements alike. To those spreading it, the creeper was not cuscuta reflexa or dodder, but akashbel or kodiyagundal (its Bhojpuri and Tamil name respectively). In the healing traditions of the rural recruiting heartlands, the plant was recognised for its medicinal properties, its stem ground into a paste as a treatment for rheumatism, and its juice used as an antiseptic. In Mauritius, indentured workers also fed the creeper to the goats and cows which lived around their dwellings, who were, according to Horne, “very fond of it.” If, to the state, the creeper was a parasite threatening the colonial management of the landscape, to the Indian-born estate workers, it was a valuable companion in the struggle for survival. From the earliest days of slavery, plantation labourers turned to the land as a means of collective nourishment. On provision grounds—patches of marginal plantation land used by enslaved workers for food cultivation—the enslaved adapted familiar farming practices to the Mauritian soil in order to grow the basic foodstuff that kept them alive. Indentured labourers inherited the provision grounds, to which they introduced seeds and cuttings carried in their jahaji bundles (ships belongings), from flowers and fruiting trees to vines and root vegetables. These they cultivated with great care in the early hours of the morning, before setting off for the canefields with their cutlass and hoe. Already by 1845, colonists complained that indentured labourers were spending all of their time “cultivating fruits and flowers” at the expense of the sugar estates. This ecological knowledge formed the first foundation of a life independent of the plantations. In the eighteenth century, maroon communities emerged in the forests to the southeast of the island, where the dense tangle of undergrowth formed a natural refuge from the colonial state. After emancipation, the majority of formerly enslaved workers left the plantations, squatting on the slopes of the island’s mountains and cultivating fruit and vegetables for the market in Port Louis. They put their familiarity with the landscape to use, foraging in the diminishing forest and scrubland for tamarind, ginger, and Mauritian raspberries, gathered by women and children and sold in the bazaar. Fruit by Sabrina Tirvengadum This pattern continued with indentureship. Upon the expiry of their indenture contract, “old immigrants,” as they were known, could either sign a new contract to remain on the plantation, or leave. Of those who left, thousands used the savings they had eked out on the plantation to purchase land, either from the sugar estates or from older Afro-Mauritian gardeners. Tentatively at first, but then in ever-increasing numbers, formerly indentured workers moved beyond the sugar estates and settled in the margins of the countryside. By the 1870s, their market gardens covered the hillsides of the Mauritian interior. These gardens cultivated a precious degree of independence amidst the colony’s steep racial hierarchies. Post-emancipation, they offered respite from the horrors of enforced labour, and an altogether different manner of working. Local magistrates reporting on the formerly enslaved population complained that Afro-Mauritians failed to cultivate their land in a suitably acquisitive manner. “They work to procure the immediate necessities of life,” one criticised, “and do not show any desire to increase their property.” The magistrates accused the gardeners of failing to treat agricultural work as an end in itself, rather than merely the means to secure a comfortable existence. “These people of African origin,” another wrote, “live…in the enjoyment of undisturbed repose, which they seem to think…is due to them for the labour and miseries endured during the period of slavery.” But the gardens also formed a more direct retaliation to the ecological devastation of the sugar estates, through the plants themselves. It is difficult to know exactly what was grown on these nineteenth-century garden plots. Unlike the sugar mills, whose ruined stacks still scatter the Mauritian landscape, the small garden patches left hardly any trace, except for what lies buried beneath layers of sediment. The archives of the colonial state offer little more: market gardeners were rarely an object of concern for imperial administrators, and when they were, it was usually in exceptional circumstances irrelevant to their cultivation of the soil. Occasionally, though, we are offered a glimpse, not through testimony itself, but in the form of large compendiums of the island’s flora, compiled and published by colonial botanists in the late nineteenth century. I found one of these while researching in the archives of Kew Gardens in London. It was published in 1886, making it one of the earliest written accounts of the Mauritian gardens. In the compendium, long lists of towering trees, hardy shrubs, fruiting vines and colourful flowers are printed alongside tantalising off-hand comments noting their presence in the hillside gardens. Little more is written. The plants, however, offer their own testimony. Some of them—mangoes, areca palms, bitter gourd, turmeric, and coriander—will have been grown from seeds brought by the indentured from India. Many, however, were products of the plantation world. Pigeon pea— ambredade in Mauritian Creole—a legume used as a rotation crop in the canefields and adopted by Mauritian gardeners as a multi-purpose hedgerow, abounded on abandoned plantations, from which the gardeners likely took cuttings. Shorter term cash crops were planted alongside subsistence provisions, decorative flowers, and medicinal herbs; small patches of sugarcane next to trees that took half a generation to yield fruit. This was an agricultural model far better suited to Mauritius than the factory-like system of the sugar plantations, with its reliance on a single, volatile cash crop. Many of the indentured had been gardeners in their homeland; all would have been familiar with the monsoon rhythms of the Indian Ocean world. Like the intercropping system of northern India, the sheer diversity of the Mauritian market gardens enabled some degree of protection from crop failures and monsoon fluctuations, with overlapping harvests taking place throughout the year. But the gardens were also a divergence from the reforestation projects with which the colonial state responded to Mauritius’ environmental collapse. The government reforestation projects envisioned trees as instruments of geoengineering. By keeping temperatures down, increasing humidity and retaining rainwater, the new forests would stabilise the island’s climate, and keep aridity—the colonial scientists’ great fear—at bay. In this plan, trees were a technological fix that could stabilise and preserve plantation production and enable the colonial order it underpinned to endure ecological catastrophe. The scientists and imperial bureaucrats behind reforestation did not challenge the dominance of the plantations, nor the conditions for life they had produced in Mauritius; in fact, by obstructing rural foragers’ access to the forests, they hampered a vital means of existence outside the orbit of the estates. The gardens, on the other hand, formed a deliberate alternative to the sugar estates, in which cultivation exceeded the ambition of enduring a fragile present. The plants themselves, carefully recorded in the botanical compendium, were suspended across multiple temporalities. Some were animated by memories of familiar landscapes and habits, transposed across the Indian Ocean: banyan and peepal trees planted next to makeshift plantation temples; turmeric, neem, and mango cultivated in the gardens, and used in rituals marking births, deaths, and marriages. Others responded to present needs: medicinal herbs from the Ayurveda, Siddha, and Unani-tibb healing traditions were grown in the gardens, and used to give comfort to aching bodies; market crops provided much-needed cash for families; cannabis ( gandia ) was planted, and smoked among friends at dusk beside their dwellings. Others still corresponded to desires for a relatively distant future: trees that would not fruit for half a generation, whose shade would shelter the grandchildren of their cultivators. Taken together, these plants suggest the cultivation of not only endurance in a damaged land, but also a degree of collective spiritual and material comfort. The plants, and the garden patches on which they were grown, embodied the idea that this landscape could be something more than a mechanism for profit: that life could survive in the ruins and that land could sustain something like home. To the sugar estates, the sale of land to former plantation labourers was a useful opportunity to cede uncultivated fields in return for much-needed cash during a protracted slump in the sugar market. Plots were kept as small as possible, to ensure that cultivators were not entirely independent of occasional plantation labour. Meanwhile, the colonial authorities treated the early gardeners with outright hostility. During the brutal anti-Indian vagrant hunts of the 1860s and 1870s, secluded communities of gardeners became a sanctuary for vulnerable Indo-Mauritians, particularly plantation deserters and the unemployed. In retaliation, the colonial police incessantly targeted areas of small-scale cultivation, described in government reports as “the resorts of vagrants, thieves, and other bad characters.” Government scientists deployed race science to blame high mortality rates on Indian-born cultivators, proposing limits to immigration and forced repatriation as a measure against disease. Local magistrates monitored the size of garden plots; where they determined that the plots were too small to sustain a living, the cultivators were declared vagrants and sent to the vagrant depot, resulting in a year’s re-indenture. Even beyond the colony’s political conditions, gardening was a hard life. The garden patches were exposed to flooding and drought, unlike the irrigated, dammed plantation lands. During the worst droughts, gardeners abandoned their plots and returned to the sugar estates in their thousands. Often the plots were on malarial land unwanted by estate managers. There was no assistance from the state in the face of disaster. When, in 1892, a cyclone tore through the island, leaving 50,000 homeless and devastating the exposed garden plots, the only government assistance consisted of four days of rice rations and state employment at one rupee a day. Meanwhile, the government advanced generous disaster relief loans to the sugar estates, enabling damaged mills to be not only swiftly repaired, but also enlarged and improved. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century, Indo- and Afro-Mauritians poured their labour and resources into garden plots and the compromised, partial freedom they offered, turning their enforced intimacy with the nonhuman landscape into a means of survival and nourishment. It was, to them, worth it. The sugar plantations, colonial reforestation projects, and the garden plots: each offered a different response to the devastation of Mauritius’ indigenous ecology. The plantations followed a logic of production at all costs; as the economic mainstay of the colony, the sugar planters argued that they alone stood against the total ruin of the island. Their response to the growing ecological vulnerability was to seek new ways to overcome environmental limits and convert more of the natural world into a mechanism for profit: importing high-yielding cane cultivars, building bigger sugar factories, and experimenting with new chemical fertilisers. It was, quite literally, the end of time: the replacement of seasonality and organic time with the flat production cycle of a single cash crop. Dr John Horne’s “tree plantations,” as he called the reforestation scheme, were ultimately no different. Sugar was the impetus for reforestation. Influenced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby, which directly funded many of their activities, colonial scientists conceived of the island as a closed system—a series of zones of experimentation and production in which the forests were maintained to feed the canefields with moisture. The leading proponents of tree planting were adamant, in the words of the island’s foremost meteorologist Charles Meldrum, that “every inch of land that can be spared should be devoted to agriculture [meaning sugarcane], which is the mainstay of the colony.” They saw no life without the plantation, and no world beyond sugar. Set against this essential nihilism, the gardens represented a choice about how to organise life in the ruins of ecological disturbance. The plants connected with a past that exceeded the plantation; their cultivation suggested a future beyond survival in the dead-end present. By 1889, akashbel —the cuscuta creeper—had won. Forest rangers reported its presence everywhere from the coastal lowlands to the heights of the interior. Dr John Horne abandoned his efforts to stamp out the parasite. Two years later, he left the island and returned to Britain. Today, the creeper can still be found in Mauritius, in almost the exact same locations mentioned in Dr Horne’s letter to the Colonial Office almost 140 years ago. As another climate catastrophe looms over the island, the yellow threads that appear sporadically in its trees and shrubs are a reminder of an earlier generation—a generation who, after the horrors of slavery and indentureship, and in the midst of ecological disaster, saw not the end of this world, but the beginning of the next one. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Mauritius Climate Indentured Labour Climate Change Climate Catastrophe Nineteenth-Century Deforestation Sugar Cane Indian Ocean Volcanic Island Flora Fauna Ecology Colonization Indigenous Extinction Sugar Factory Export Colonial Economy Species Loss Sugar Mills Canefield Native Disappearance Capitalism Environmental Science Geoengineering Climate Adaptation Experiment Natural World Survival Labour Forced Disappearance Madagascar East Africa Racialised Labour Slavery Ancient Forest Volcanic Rock Dry Season Plantation Livestock Malaria Yellow Fever Cholera Endemic Militarism Violence Indo-Mauritian Indian Policing Workforce Attached to Soil Frontline Botanical Garden Cuscuta reflexa Climate Science Legislation History Community Medicinal Plants akashbel kodiyagundal Parasite Struggle Collective Food Cultivation Emancipation Afro-Mauritians Kew Gardens Archive Agriculture Reforestation anti-Indian vagrant hunts Sanctuary Freedom Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

“The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” · FICTION & POETRY Fiction · Japan “The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa. Cover design and illustration by Janet Hansen. Image Courtesy StudioM1. Into the Sea It isn’t just images that become memories. Different parts of my body stored up memories, which they silently retained. Those afterimages carried that way in the body would most likely never be erased. Skin cells regenerate periodically, becoming new, but the time that passed after the earthquake and sensations from that period seemed to linger on, as a transparent layer on my skin. And yet, when I tried to pass beyond my memories, all I could see was a two-dimensional whiteness. Connecting together all my physical memories only left me with a dense accumulation of fragments—I never managed to summon up a complete picture of that day. The attributes of the memories held by each part of my body may have been a part of me, but I couldn’t combine them into any self-identifying symbols, like those of the saints. Being in a place so far away from the sea and nuclear power plants had loosened my grip on my memories of that day, obscuring my connection to them. Eventually, this sea inside me was overlayed by images of numerous paintings, which yielded new impressions. My connotations with the sea came to include those folds of pale green out of which Botticelli’s Venus rose; Caspar David Friedrich’s desolate icy sea, with the blue-black shape of the wanderer gazing out mutely at it; the sea as rendered by the impressionists, with its musical depiction of the particles of light and color dancing there; Canaletto’s sea inextricably bound to his crisp renditions of Venice; and then the peaceful blue gaze of the sea meeting the sky in Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus. This final version merged with the sea as Nomiya had described it. The peaceful times before dawn, or after sunset. The dialogues in blue that one witnessed there. Even as it served as a giant mirror reflecting the sky through which the colors flowed and passed, the powerful force of its current eddied and whirled around beneath. Yet the impressions making up this stratum had been swallowed up by the sea that March, and had vanished. None of my own memories of water were violent. I was one of those who’d watched those video clips of the sea as it destroyed everything—those scenes of destruction shown repeatedly on TV and online. That weighty gray, white and black mass surging through the town, growing heavier with the things it acquired along the way, forming new masses, encroaching still further. Watching these videos, my eyes superimposed on Nomiya’s final moments, which they’d never actually seen. Those scenes of agony that my eyes took in, the spatial and temporal holes gaping wide open in a way that could never be depicted in a painting, covering over all my other connotations. What I saw in those photos and videos hadn’t integrated with the impressions of the sea that lived inside me. Now, there wasn’t so much as a trace remaining of the pool I’d visited as a child. The pine forest, too, had been irrevocably damaged by the sea’s violence. Since seeing the destruction, the places that I’d visited had been ripped apart into tiny fragments, which returned my gaze in inert silence. This was the silence of words that had been stewing for too long. The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories. As I looked at the city, the place I’d once lived would quietly flicker past, a pale shadow. There, memories of the sea’s violence assumed particular shapes: monuments attesting to the dangers of tsunamis, the remains of a school where many people had lost their lives. How should we carry with us the memories of those who had disappeared to the other side of time? Was it a case of endlessly tracing their contours in our memories, until their names were eventually rubbed away, forgotten? The sea, which contained so many like Nomiya who’d never returned, didn’t bear their names—it was always people’s memories that did so. Nine years later, they continued searching, quietly yet unceasingly, to bring home the dead who had vanished into the sea. Even knowing that the city of Göttingen contained dark, bitter elements to its memories, like the rings of a tree, I was still enticed by the impression it left on me—the twisting alleys and dead-ends that my feet traced, the lush greenery spilling forth, the movement of all kinds of shadow patterns woven by the sun. Wandering around someplace, without any particular focal point, letting my eyes roam across the scenery in front of me, I would find a portrait of the city, of that particular location rising up before me. When I saw a new face of this kind that I couldn’t comprehend except through my feet, my eyes would do their best to understand how it had shifted over time. The multiple faces buried within the strata comprising numerous eras and memories would merge, then peel apart. The city reflected those different faces in flashes, like the blinking of an eye—including the face from that time when it had been known by those three characters, 月沈原. Tracing the portraits from various times with my eyes, my feet kept on pushing forward, until I reached a white plastered building with a red wooden frame creating a geometric pattern. This was the Junkernschänke—squires’ tavern—which dated back to the fifteenth century. The building had changed expression through the decades depending on its owner: from private accommodation to a vacant house, from a hardware business to a wine dealership. Its traditional wooden structure had sustained considerable damage in the March 1945 air raid, but over time, repairs had restored it to its original form. The walls were decorated with pictures rendered in multicolored wood, a number of faces peering out from small circular portraits. The sets of eyes peering out from those portholes onto a distant time belonged to seven astrological gods: those for the planets from Mercury through to Saturn—excluding Earth—plus those of the Sun and the Moon. Coincidentally enough, the seven planets as they were classified at the time of the geocentric system were preserved here, right inside the old town. The swords, scepters, bows, and other objects that the gods bore so carefully were drawn according to traditional symbolism. Here, too, their attributes protected them from anonymity, bringing their names into relief.∎ Excerpted from The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton (New Directions, March 2025). SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Fiction Japan Japanese Literature Translation Debut Novel Mai Ishizawa Experimental Fiction Survivors Earthquakes Environmental Disaster Memory Trauma Disappearance Sensory Identity Seascape Seam Contemporary Literature Melancholy Tender Imagery Ecology Disaster Göttingen Gottingen's Scale Urban Solar System Iconography NDP New Directions Excerpt Time & Space Magical Realism Literary Poetry Akutagawa Prize Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 27th Apr 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note: