Acclaimed musician and composer Vijay Iyer on how the constraints of musical genre emerged from racial capitalism: the history of "jazz" itself narrated by delinking music from its Black radical and avant-garde traditions. COMMUNITY Musical Genre as a Creation of Racial Capitalism Vijay Iyer Acclaimed musician and composer Vijay Iyer on how the constraints of musical genre emerged from racial capitalism: the history of "jazz" itself narrated by delinking music from its Black radical and avant-garde traditions. We go through these cycles of the mainstream press declaring jazz dead, then rediscovering it. There's a savior! That narrative's really problematic. It excludes and erases countless Black musicians who have been at the vanguard for decades. RECOMMENDED: Uneasy (ECM, 2021): Vijay Iyer with Tyshawn Sorey and Linda May Han Oh. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Jazz Criticism Music Music Criticism Race & Genre Black Radical Traditions Amiri Baraka Roscoe Mitchell Racial Capitalism Avant-Garde Origins Village Vanguard Post-George Floyd Moment Historicity Black Speculative Musicalities Insurgence in Jazz Genre Fluidity Critical Improvisation Studies The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition Fred Moten Charles Mingus VIJAY IYER is a composer-pianist who has been described by The New York Times as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway.” He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, and the Alpert Award in the Arts, and was voted Downbeat Magazine ’s Jazz Artist of the Year four times in the last decade. He has released twenty-four albums of his music, most recently UnEasy (ECM Records, 2021), a trio session with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh; The Transitory Poems (ECM, 2019), a live duo recording with pianist Craig Taborn; Far From Over (ECM, 2017) with the award-winning Vijay Iyer Sextet; and A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM, 2016) a suite of duets with visionary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. He recently served as composer-in-residence at London’s Wigmore Hall, music director of the Ojai Music Festival, and artist-in-residence at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He teaches at Harvard University in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies. Interview Jazz 8th Nov 2020 On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

During the general election, prominent Indian political parties vied for villagers' affection in the Sundarbans, albeit turning a blind eye to the ongoing climate catastrophe. As demands for climate-conscious infrastructure and humanitarian relief go unappraised, people in the region are reckoning with the logical consequences of that apathy. THE VERTICAL Sinking the Body Politic During the general election, prominent Indian political parties vied for villagers' affection in the Sundarbans, albeit turning a blind eye to the ongoing climate catastrophe. As demands for climate-conscious infrastructure and humanitarian relief go unappraised, people in the region are reckoning with the logical consequences of that apathy. Dipanjan Sinha In Satjelia village, nearly a hundred kilometres from Kolkata, the largest city of eastern India, every family lives with memories of disaster. In the last week of May, they were again in panic with the announcement of Cyclone Remal hitting the eastern part of India. They spent sleepless nights at the makeshift relief centre fearing that their homes will again be lost, their crops will again be destroyed, and their land will turn unfit for agriculture for a long time with saline water flooding fields. “I still haven’t been able to recover fully from the losses I suffered from Cyclone Alia in 2009,” says Srimanti Sinha, who lives in a small hutment about a kilometre away from the river. Her home was swept away in the cyclone. Every time there is a storm, she is reminded of that time. “We keep praying that the water levels do not rise up enough to breach the embankment again.” This time, though, just before Cyclone Remal hit eastern India, candidates for the 2024 general elections paid the village a visit ahead of voting on 1st June. Every major party had fielded a candidate for the region with the main contestants being from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Trinamul Congress, and the I.N.D.I.A alliance. The candidates spoke about violence, religious issues, development, ending corruption, and building a strong nation. Somehow, they managed to skip over far more immediate concerns . In Satjelia, the demand is for stronger dams and embankments to protect the land from floods. The people also want support for farmers to reduce migration for work to faraway states like Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. “What [politicians] have spoken about is important for us too,” Sinha says. “But I wish they also spoke about what we need here the most.” Satjelia is situated in the middle of a ring of islands in the Sundarban delta: home to the largest mangrove forest in the world and over four million people. Like Sinha and others in Satjelia, people in several parts of the delta have suffered losses from cyclones and steadily rising water levels. In the past two decades, the sea level in the Sundarbans has risen by three centimeters a year, according to satellite imagery and media reports , which is among the fastest coastal erosion rates globally. In 2021, Cyclone Yaas destroyed over three lakh homes as seawater breached embankments in many parts of the state. Before that, tropical cyclones—whether Fani (May 2019), Bulbul (November 2019), or Amphan (May 2020)—battered this region. Each time, embankments were breached, and saline water entered agricultural land, causing immense loss of earnings and subsequent distress migration. Among these, Amphan was the most severe, killing over 100 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. After repeated losses to their land and belongings, most young people from islands like Sagar and Mousuni have migrated to the country’s southernmost states, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, over a thousand kilometers away, in search of new livelihoods. They now work as daily wage labourers and contract workers at construction sites, in factories, and on large fishing vessels. Those still living close to the water in Sundarban are desperate to move away, but they receive little to no assistance from the government. After big storms, there are announcements of relocation for victims. According to people in the villages, however, not much of that is seen happening. Bapi Bor, who lives in Bankimnagar, a village on the island near the Bay of Bengal, says homes are flooded even during high tides in parts of the delta, including Sagar Island. Sagar Island is a hub of climate refugees, being one of the largest islands in the delta. People have shifted here from small neighbouring islands like Lohachora and Ghoramara, which have been sinking in the past two decades. Now, as the water levels continue rising and Sagar Island keeps sinking, these refugees are again on the verge of losing their homes. The Sundarban delta, despite being one of the most ravaged areas by climate change globally, has been met with staggering apathy from the Indian political class. Meanwhile, a tussle between the central and state government in West Bengal has further exacerbated the poor quality of life in the Sundarbans. Many small dams throughout the islands were maintained by local construction labourers, whose work was compensated with money from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005. This national program for employment security ensured 100 days of work for people in rural India. “That money has stopped coming from the central government as they have accused the state government [of West Bengal] of corruption,” says Tanmay Mandal, a member of the village council in Rangabelia village near Satjelia. He explains that this is a serious problem for the islands since much work was done under that scheme, from maintaining earthen embankments to planting mangroves. On paper, the major political parties acknowledge the climate crisis—to varying degrees, as would be expected. BJP’s manifesto mentions it briefly, focusing more on “nature-friendly, climate-resilient, remunerative agriculture” and “coastal resilience against climate change.” The manifesto of the Indian National Congress has more detailed plans with a 13-point program under the heading “Environment, Climate Change and Disaster Management.” Meanwhile, the Trinamool Congress manifesto is more specific to Bengal and includes the crisis of the Sundarban delta. They mention specifically that “TMC will implement strategies to protect the rivers of Bengal, including all the vulnerable riverbanks of the state, from erosion and to safeguard communities from floods.” And yet, as the campaigns in West Bengal became more fervent, climate change remained a curio of the manifestos. In the speeches and rallies, it was lost amidst loud rhetoric about religion and rising prices. To be sure, this indifference is not limited to the delta. As the general elections rolled on from 19th April to 1st June, several parts of India were hit by a heat wave that claimed over 56 lives, of which 33 were polling officers. That tragedy, too, had little impact on the campaigns. According to Samir Kumar Das, a professor of political science at Calcutta University, the unfortunate reality of climate change is that it is only discussed when there is controversy. In other words: when the display of apathy becomes untenable, and crises become political liabilities. “The media is usually after the spectacular stories,” says Das. “But rising water levels or distress migration happens slowly. So while we see a lot of coverage after a storm, we have no idea how many people had to migrate eventually.” Across the board, political attention remains woefully inadequate as floods, heat waves, and droughts increase with the impact of climate change. In the face of such a fragmented and superficial political response, Das proposes a larger comprehensive approach, such as a central policy for distress migration. At the same time, Das notes that the climate crisis is being discussed more as it is increasingly affecting the cities in the form of a water crisis and unbearable heat waves. “The media cannot ignore it now,” he says. Das sees a shift in people's response to the crisis in the Sundarbans. “People are more vocal about what they need,” he observes. “Alms after a storm are not enough to satisfy them.” Instead, people are asking more difficult questions about the dams and infrastructure that are indicative of the broader scope of the problem. Some, of course, are intervening themselves. “It could be the beginning,” Das suggests, “of a new kind of pressure the political organisations can feel.” Then again, who can say how long it will take for apathy to become untenable? ∎ In Satjelia village, nearly a hundred kilometres from Kolkata, the largest city of eastern India, every family lives with memories of disaster. In the last week of May, they were again in panic with the announcement of Cyclone Remal hitting the eastern part of India. They spent sleepless nights at the makeshift relief centre fearing that their homes will again be lost, their crops will again be destroyed, and their land will turn unfit for agriculture for a long time with saline water flooding fields. “I still haven’t been able to recover fully from the losses I suffered from Cyclone Alia in 2009,” says Srimanti Sinha, who lives in a small hutment about a kilometre away from the river. Her home was swept away in the cyclone. Every time there is a storm, she is reminded of that time. “We keep praying that the water levels do not rise up enough to breach the embankment again.” This time, though, just before Cyclone Remal hit eastern India, candidates for the 2024 general elections paid the village a visit ahead of voting on 1st June. Every major party had fielded a candidate for the region with the main contestants being from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Trinamul Congress, and the I.N.D.I.A alliance. The candidates spoke about violence, religious issues, development, ending corruption, and building a strong nation. Somehow, they managed to skip over far more immediate concerns . In Satjelia, the demand is for stronger dams and embankments to protect the land from floods. The people also want support for farmers to reduce migration for work to faraway states like Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. “What [politicians] have spoken about is important for us too,” Sinha says. “But I wish they also spoke about what we need here the most.” Satjelia is situated in the middle of a ring of islands in the Sundarban delta: home to the largest mangrove forest in the world and over four million people. Like Sinha and others in Satjelia, people in several parts of the delta have suffered losses from cyclones and steadily rising water levels. In the past two decades, the sea level in the Sundarbans has risen by three centimeters a year, according to satellite imagery and media reports , which is among the fastest coastal erosion rates globally. In 2021, Cyclone Yaas destroyed over three lakh homes as seawater breached embankments in many parts of the state. Before that, tropical cyclones—whether Fani (May 2019), Bulbul (November 2019), or Amphan (May 2020)—battered this region. Each time, embankments were breached, and saline water entered agricultural land, causing immense loss of earnings and subsequent distress migration. Among these, Amphan was the most severe, killing over 100 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. After repeated losses to their land and belongings, most young people from islands like Sagar and Mousuni have migrated to the country’s southernmost states, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, over a thousand kilometers away, in search of new livelihoods. They now work as daily wage labourers and contract workers at construction sites, in factories, and on large fishing vessels. Those still living close to the water in Sundarban are desperate to move away, but they receive little to no assistance from the government. After big storms, there are announcements of relocation for victims. According to people in the villages, however, not much of that is seen happening. Bapi Bor, who lives in Bankimnagar, a village on the island near the Bay of Bengal, says homes are flooded even during high tides in parts of the delta, including Sagar Island. Sagar Island is a hub of climate refugees, being one of the largest islands in the delta. People have shifted here from small neighbouring islands like Lohachora and Ghoramara, which have been sinking in the past two decades. Now, as the water levels continue rising and Sagar Island keeps sinking, these refugees are again on the verge of losing their homes. The Sundarban delta, despite being one of the most ravaged areas by climate change globally, has been met with staggering apathy from the Indian political class. Meanwhile, a tussle between the central and state government in West Bengal has further exacerbated the poor quality of life in the Sundarbans. Many small dams throughout the islands were maintained by local construction labourers, whose work was compensated with money from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005. This national program for employment security ensured 100 days of work for people in rural India. “That money has stopped coming from the central government as they have accused the state government [of West Bengal] of corruption,” says Tanmay Mandal, a member of the village council in Rangabelia village near Satjelia. He explains that this is a serious problem for the islands since much work was done under that scheme, from maintaining earthen embankments to planting mangroves. On paper, the major political parties acknowledge the climate crisis—to varying degrees, as would be expected. BJP’s manifesto mentions it briefly, focusing more on “nature-friendly, climate-resilient, remunerative agriculture” and “coastal resilience against climate change.” The manifesto of the Indian National Congress has more detailed plans with a 13-point program under the heading “Environment, Climate Change and Disaster Management.” Meanwhile, the Trinamool Congress manifesto is more specific to Bengal and includes the crisis of the Sundarban delta. They mention specifically that “TMC will implement strategies to protect the rivers of Bengal, including all the vulnerable riverbanks of the state, from erosion and to safeguard communities from floods.” And yet, as the campaigns in West Bengal became more fervent, climate change remained a curio of the manifestos. In the speeches and rallies, it was lost amidst loud rhetoric about religion and rising prices. To be sure, this indifference is not limited to the delta. As the general elections rolled on from 19th April to 1st June, several parts of India were hit by a heat wave that claimed over 56 lives, of which 33 were polling officers. That tragedy, too, had little impact on the campaigns. According to Samir Kumar Das, a professor of political science at Calcutta University, the unfortunate reality of climate change is that it is only discussed when there is controversy. In other words: when the display of apathy becomes untenable, and crises become political liabilities. “The media is usually after the spectacular stories,” says Das. “But rising water levels or distress migration happens slowly. So while we see a lot of coverage after a storm, we have no idea how many people had to migrate eventually.” Across the board, political attention remains woefully inadequate as floods, heat waves, and droughts increase with the impact of climate change. In the face of such a fragmented and superficial political response, Das proposes a larger comprehensive approach, such as a central policy for distress migration. At the same time, Das notes that the climate crisis is being discussed more as it is increasingly affecting the cities in the form of a water crisis and unbearable heat waves. “The media cannot ignore it now,” he says. Das sees a shift in people's response to the crisis in the Sundarbans. “People are more vocal about what they need,” he observes. “Alms after a storm are not enough to satisfy them.” Instead, people are asking more difficult questions about the dams and infrastructure that are indicative of the broader scope of the problem. Some, of course, are intervening themselves. “It could be the beginning,” Das suggests, “of a new kind of pressure the political organisations can feel.” Then again, who can say how long it will take for apathy to become untenable? ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Backwaters, courtesy of Radhika Dinesh. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Dispatch Sundarbans Climate Change Satjelia Calcutta Cyclone Remal Cyclone Alia Elections 2024 Indian General Election West Bengal Refugee Crisis Refugees Climate Migrants Trinamul Congress I.N.D.I.A alliance Dams Embankments Rural Farmers Sundarban Delta Mangrove Forest Cyclone Yaas Tropical Cyclones Cyclone Amphan Agriculture Wage Labor Migration Kerala Tamil Nadu Contract Workers Bay of Bengal Bankimnagar Climate Refugees BJP Disaster Management Congress Riverbanks Erosion Manifesto Campaign Promises Electioneering Mitigation Sagar Island DIPANJAN SINHA is an independent writer who focuses on the intersection of culture and politics. His work has appeared in The Hindustan Times , The New Statesman , and Vice . 24 Aug 2024 Dispatch Sundarbans 24th Aug 2024 RADHIKA DINESH is a visual artist and animator from Kerala whose work draws deeply from the rich narratives of South Asia. She practises blending nostalgia with whimsy, bringing stories to life through a vibrant visual language. She is currently in her final year at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. The Stamp Uzair Rizvi 9th Apr The Ambivalent Voter Jeevan Ravindran 20th Sep Beatrice Wangui's Fight for Seed Sovereignty in Kenya Pierra Nyaruai 22nd Apr Dispatch from a Village Near Hamal Lake, Sindh, in August Ibrahim Buriro 12th Mar Returning to the Sundarbans Amitav Ghosh 28th Oct On That Note:

COO of Fearless Collective, Tehani Ariyaratne, in conversation with Senior Editor Sabika Abbas Naqvi. COMMUNITY Public Art Projects as Feminist Reclamation AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR COO of Fearless Collective, Tehani Ariyaratne, in conversation with Senior Editor Sabika Abbas Naqvi. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Interview Feminist Art Practice Feminist Organizing Mural Public Space Art Practice Public Arts Fearless Collective Fearless Arts Residency Art Activism Fundraising Future Dream Spaces Queerness Queer Spaces Trans Politics Trans Community Wheat Pasting Sri Lanka Pakistan India Internationalist Solidarity Khwaja Siras Bubbli Malik Queer Muslim Project 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. DISPATCH Interview Feminist Art Practice 29th Nov 2020 One of our murals in Rawalpindi, is an image of a [khwaja sira], Bubbli Malik, on a bicycle, and she says "I am a creation of Allah." The mural refers not to violence or trauma, but is a radical affirmation of the [khwaja sira] community. 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 Next Up:

Poet Chandramohan S in conversation with Advisory Editor Sarah Thankam Mathews COMMUNITY Between Form & Solidarity AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Poet Chandramohan S in conversation with Advisory Editor Sarah Thankam Mathews SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Interview Kerala Language Vernacular Literature Internationalist Solidarity Dalit-Black Solidarities OV Vijayan Dalit Literature Ajay Navaria Avant-Garde Form Poetic Form Deepak Unnikrishnan Resistance Poetry Love After Babel 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. DISPATCH Interview Kerala 31st Aug 2020 "One’s privilege cataracts one’s vision. Aspects of that privilege create a form of blindness, a cataracting of one’s advantage. My modus operandi is to illuminate as many blind spots as each of us have. It is not my fault that I may be born into a privilege, but it will become my fault if I do not make myself aware of it." RECOMMENDED: Love After Babel and other poems by Chandramohan S (Daraja Press, 2020) 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 Next Up:

The profile of Mahrang Baloch discusses how Mahrang's personal experience with her family members being disappeared prompted her to get involved in the activism against the state's Baloch disappearances. Mashal Baloch documented that profile extensively. Here, Mashal discussed the ethics of photojournalism, working with international correspondents, and how she has navigated being a self-taught photojournalist. INTERACTIVE Chats Ep. 6 · Imagery of the Baloch Movement The profile of Mahrang Baloch discusses how Mahrang's personal experience with her family members being disappeared prompted her to get involved in the activism against the state's Baloch disappearances. Mashal Baloch documented that profile extensively. Here, Mashal discussed the ethics of photojournalism, working with international correspondents, and how she has navigated being a self-taught photojournalist. VOL. 1 LIVE AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Live Balochistan 28th Feb 2021 Live Balochistan Karima Baloch Mahrang Baloch Self-Taught Reportage State Repression Pakistan Mapping Knowledge Humanitarian Crisis Photojournalism Baloch Missing Persons Baloch Student Long March Photographer Profile SAAG Chats Journalism Baloch Insurgency Geography Accountability Nation-State State Violence Human Rights Violations Extrajudicial Killings Enforced Disappearances 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. For SAAG Chats Ep. 6, Nur Nasreen Ibrahim discussed the nature of photojournalism with photojournalist Mashal Baloch, who also discussed her work for the profile of Mahrang Baloch , published by SAAG. As a self-trained photographer, Mashal's sense of precarity and a profound drive to learn with few resources available to her is palpably true both for photojournalists in Balochistan and in many embattled areas across South Asia. More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

Solidarity failed when it came to a dire Afghan refugee crisis, decades in the making. THE VERTICAL Everyone Failed Us Solidarity failed when it came to a dire Afghan refugee crisis, decades in the making. Arash Azizzada · Irene Benedicto “A group of women leaders are badly in danger and one of them is my mom. I really searching for a person who can help us. They attack our home at first…. I hope you can help us. Every one of us really get depressed, please help us to get out of here.” THE BARRAGE of messages I receive, like the one above from western Afghanistan on almost a daily basis has not stopped, even a year later. Desperate daily emails from Afghans seeking refuge and safety flood our inboxes. Some are social activists, human rights defenders, former interpreters, and women leaders at risk of retribution from the Taliban. Other marginalized groups such as Hazaras and Shias have already been victims of ethnic cleansing by the Taliban and remain targets of ISIS attacks. Women activists have been disappeared by the Taliban authorities. Afghans seeking evacuation hold onto hope in what seems to be a hopeless situation. No longer expecting the international community to come to their rescue, for governments and institutions to do what they’re supposed to do, they rely on community organizers like myself and others. For two decades, America bragged about what it was building in Afghanistan. Last summer, the “Afghanistan project” was exposed for the facade that it was: a hollow rentier-state that only held ever legitimacy with Western donors and not with the Afghan people. Despite obvious bubbles of progress where hope flourished amidst the violence, the impending threat of a drone strike or Taliban suicide blast was always around the corner. Some rural areas were battered and mired in misery due to violence and poverty; others flourished, led by Afghan women and marginalized communities. The only constant was never-ending conflict. It seems as if the U.S. built a house of cards in Afghanistan, created in its own image, a house that started falling when the chains of dependency were challenged. The alliance with human rights abusers, the elevation of notorious pedophiles, and funding of endemic corruption brought back to power an oppressive, authoritarian regime that is erasing women, marginalized ethnic groups, and the disabled from public and daily life. The U.S. ran prisons where innocent Afghans were tortured. Entire villages were wiped off the map, and this was excused away as collateral damage. The U.S. spent years telling Afghans to pursue their dreams, break barriers, and challenge cultural norms. Then, it turned its back on them and betrayed them. Perhaps those of us who dreamt of a better Afghanistan were at fault for having expectations of a country whose very existence was kickstarted by genocide, a country where American presidents attempt brazen coups and its own citizens storm its political headquarters. The grim reality that we bore witness to these past few months is one that anyone who has paid attention to Afghanistan could have seen coming. There is even a U.S. agency–the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)--which is dedicated to overseeing how reconstruction money was used in Afghanistan. In report after report, year after year, quarter after quarter, SIGAR wrote about the ghosts that the U.S. created–schools and hospitals that didn’t exist and a 300,000-man army that only functioned on paper. The Washington Post even devoted a series titled “The Afghanistan Papers, ” to showcase how policymakers and Pentagon officials had lied and deceived the American people about its success and accomplishments for 20 successive years. Nobody cared. The failure to value Afghan lives, however, lies not just with policymakers and elected officials. Certainly, the list of those responsible for the current situation in Afghanistan is long, ranging from Afghan elites to American elected officials from both parties going back four decades. Administration after administration has deprioritized Afghan lives and centered the needs of American hegemony. Congress held hearings on Afghanistan and yet rarely featured any Afghans. Policy discussions on Afghanistan in Washington D.C. at influential think tanks left out Afghans entirely. Afghans were left invisible in an occupation that lasted so long that it became not the “forever war” but rather the “forgotten war.” Afghanistan had disappeared from the psyche of the American people. Even when SIGAR released a report on rampant corruption that was wasting billions or when the Washington Post talked about lie after lie coming from the Pentagon, America just didn’t seem to care. The right-wing was too busy destroying democracy, the Democratic party was too busy fundraising from defense contractors, and the anti-war Left was too white to put Afghans and other impacted communities at the forefront. In our own Afghan American community, too many in our diaspora were profiting off the occupation. Their kids will go to prestigious American colleges, while Afghan girls will not be able to go to school at all and are robbed of a future. An international audience did finally pay attention to us last summer. American media, though, centered on the feelings of almost a million veterans who served in Afghanistan rather than asking Afghans how a withdrawal would impact them. The images of Afghans clinging onto the bottom of a military cargo plane had the world hooked. What does it say about our humanity that it took those tragic images for everyone to ask what we can do to help? For just a few days, people across the globe valued Afghan life. But moments like that are fleeting–Afghan history is littered with broken promises. Some of us have read enough history to know that the international community will not learn the lessons of its failure in Afghanistan and begin centering on the needs of the Afghan people. The Taliban spends every day perfecting its repression while the world has moved on, despite empty tweets and statements of solidarity. Today, as a year has passed since the chaotic withdrawal, wide-ranging sanctions on Afghanistan and theft of Afghan assets by the U.S. continue to inflict immense pain on innocent Afghan people, causing a humanitarian crisis that will likely lead to mass-scale death through malnutrition and starvation, a policy that disproportionately impacts Afghan girls and women. The United States’ attitude remains the same: focusing only on self-interest, even if it harms Afghans, except now it is done through economic warfare rather than through bombs built by defense contractor companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Afghans deserve justice and reparations for the harm America has caused in my home country. Despite that vision for the future, what America leaves behind are closed immigration pathways and a desire to pretend Afghans don’t exist in the first place. Perhaps if a few more Afghans clung onto a plane leaving the Kabul airport, someone would care. ∎ “A group of women leaders are badly in danger and one of them is my mom. I really searching for a person who can help us. They attack our home at first…. I hope you can help us. Every one of us really get depressed, please help us to get out of here.” THE BARRAGE of messages I receive, like the one above from western Afghanistan on almost a daily basis has not stopped, even a year later. Desperate daily emails from Afghans seeking refuge and safety flood our inboxes. Some are social activists, human rights defenders, former interpreters, and women leaders at risk of retribution from the Taliban. Other marginalized groups such as Hazaras and Shias have already been victims of ethnic cleansing by the Taliban and remain targets of ISIS attacks. Women activists have been disappeared by the Taliban authorities. Afghans seeking evacuation hold onto hope in what seems to be a hopeless situation. No longer expecting the international community to come to their rescue, for governments and institutions to do what they’re supposed to do, they rely on community organizers like myself and others. For two decades, America bragged about what it was building in Afghanistan. Last summer, the “Afghanistan project” was exposed for the facade that it was: a hollow rentier-state that only held ever legitimacy with Western donors and not with the Afghan people. Despite obvious bubbles of progress where hope flourished amidst the violence, the impending threat of a drone strike or Taliban suicide blast was always around the corner. Some rural areas were battered and mired in misery due to violence and poverty; others flourished, led by Afghan women and marginalized communities. The only constant was never-ending conflict. It seems as if the U.S. built a house of cards in Afghanistan, created in its own image, a house that started falling when the chains of dependency were challenged. The alliance with human rights abusers, the elevation of notorious pedophiles, and funding of endemic corruption brought back to power an oppressive, authoritarian regime that is erasing women, marginalized ethnic groups, and the disabled from public and daily life. The U.S. ran prisons where innocent Afghans were tortured. Entire villages were wiped off the map, and this was excused away as collateral damage. The U.S. spent years telling Afghans to pursue their dreams, break barriers, and challenge cultural norms. Then, it turned its back on them and betrayed them. Perhaps those of us who dreamt of a better Afghanistan were at fault for having expectations of a country whose very existence was kickstarted by genocide, a country where American presidents attempt brazen coups and its own citizens storm its political headquarters. The grim reality that we bore witness to these past few months is one that anyone who has paid attention to Afghanistan could have seen coming. There is even a U.S. agency–the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)--which is dedicated to overseeing how reconstruction money was used in Afghanistan. In report after report, year after year, quarter after quarter, SIGAR wrote about the ghosts that the U.S. created–schools and hospitals that didn’t exist and a 300,000-man army that only functioned on paper. The Washington Post even devoted a series titled “The Afghanistan Papers, ” to showcase how policymakers and Pentagon officials had lied and deceived the American people about its success and accomplishments for 20 successive years. Nobody cared. The failure to value Afghan lives, however, lies not just with policymakers and elected officials. Certainly, the list of those responsible for the current situation in Afghanistan is long, ranging from Afghan elites to American elected officials from both parties going back four decades. Administration after administration has deprioritized Afghan lives and centered the needs of American hegemony. Congress held hearings on Afghanistan and yet rarely featured any Afghans. Policy discussions on Afghanistan in Washington D.C. at influential think tanks left out Afghans entirely. Afghans were left invisible in an occupation that lasted so long that it became not the “forever war” but rather the “forgotten war.” Afghanistan had disappeared from the psyche of the American people. Even when SIGAR released a report on rampant corruption that was wasting billions or when the Washington Post talked about lie after lie coming from the Pentagon, America just didn’t seem to care. The right-wing was too busy destroying democracy, the Democratic party was too busy fundraising from defense contractors, and the anti-war Left was too white to put Afghans and other impacted communities at the forefront. In our own Afghan American community, too many in our diaspora were profiting off the occupation. Their kids will go to prestigious American colleges, while Afghan girls will not be able to go to school at all and are robbed of a future. An international audience did finally pay attention to us last summer. American media, though, centered on the feelings of almost a million veterans who served in Afghanistan rather than asking Afghans how a withdrawal would impact them. The images of Afghans clinging onto the bottom of a military cargo plane had the world hooked. What does it say about our humanity that it took those tragic images for everyone to ask what we can do to help? For just a few days, people across the globe valued Afghan life. But moments like that are fleeting–Afghan history is littered with broken promises. Some of us have read enough history to know that the international community will not learn the lessons of its failure in Afghanistan and begin centering on the needs of the Afghan people. The Taliban spends every day perfecting its repression while the world has moved on, despite empty tweets and statements of solidarity. Today, as a year has passed since the chaotic withdrawal, wide-ranging sanctions on Afghanistan and theft of Afghan assets by the U.S. continue to inflict immense pain on innocent Afghan people, causing a humanitarian crisis that will likely lead to mass-scale death through malnutrition and starvation, a policy that disproportionately impacts Afghan girls and women. The United States’ attitude remains the same: focusing only on self-interest, even if it harms Afghans, except now it is done through economic warfare rather than through bombs built by defense contractor companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Afghans deserve justice and reparations for the harm America has caused in my home country. Despite that vision for the future, what America leaves behind are closed immigration pathways and a desire to pretend Afghans don’t exist in the first place. Perhaps if a few more Afghans clung onto a plane leaving the Kabul airport, someone would care. ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Photograph courtesy of Arash Azizzada (November 2019). SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Op-Ed Afghanistan Refugee Crisis US Imperialism The Failure of the Diaspora ARASH AZIZZADA is a writer, photographer, and community organizer based in Los Angeles, CA. The children of Afghan refugees, Arash is deeply committed to social justice and building communities. He co-founded Afghan Diaspora for Equality and Progress (ADEP) in 2016, aimed at elevating and empowering changemakers within the Afghan community. He recently co-launched Afghans For A Better Tomorrow (AFBT), and has focused on evacuation and rapid response coordination efforts in the wake of America’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan. He has written for the New York Times , Newsweek , and been featured on NPR and Vice News . IRENE BENEDICTO is an investigative and data reporter with ten years of experience working as a journalist. She has covered breaking news and written in-depth long-form stories, local and international news from eight different countries on three continents, including the political hubs of Washington DC and Brussels, and three investigative data projects on migration, public health, and social inequities. 24 Feb 2023 Op-Ed Afghanistan 24th Feb 2023 The Captive Mind Sola Mahfouz 26th Jun Whiplash and Contradiction in Sri Lanka’s aragalaya Harshana Rambukwella 27th Feb Universalism & Solidarity in a Post-Roe Landscape Sharmin Hossain 23rd Feb Climate Crimes of US Imperalism in Afghanistan Shah Mahmoud Hanifi 16th Oct Chats Ep. 1 · On A Premonition; Recollected Jamil Jan Kochai 13th Nov On That Note:

This essay traces the afterlife of queer activist Xulhaz Mannan’s words: once hidden in a drawer, now scrawled on Dhaka’s walls amid mass uprising. Through the collapse of Hasina’s regime, the co-option of gender rights, and the violent silencing of queer life, it asks: can a new Bangladesh truly emerge if it continues to deny the existence of those it has consistently tried to erase? · THE VERTICAL Opinion · Dhaka This essay traces the afterlife of queer activist Xulhaz Mannan’s words: once hidden in a drawer, now scrawled on Dhaka’s walls amid mass uprising. Through the collapse of Hasina’s regime, the co-option of gender rights, and the violent silencing of queer life, it asks: can a new Bangladesh truly emerge if it continues to deny the existence of those it has consistently tried to erase? “Phobia Ends Here” (2023), acrylic in canvas, courtesy of Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin. A Grammar of Disappearance Authors' Note: We wrote this article in the hopeful aftermath of the July 2024 uprising last year. But since then, we have witnessed a troubling resurgence of attacks on the trans and queer community in Bangladesh, some even led by organizers in the uprising. “ W hy would the ones—those I cannot stop thinking about—forget me? Why cannot I live out my love freely? This is so unfair. ” In 1994, gay rights activist Xulhaz Mannan wrote the above in a letter, possibly addressed to his lover. Twenty years later, Mannan was murdered for publishing Roopbaan , Bangladesh's first LGBT+ magazine. Since then, his letters have remained stashed away in a closet in his residence. Last year, two queer archivists, including the authors of this op-ed, retrieved and digitized them. Excerpts from Mannan’s letters now appear on one of Dhaka’s freshly graffitied walls. On 28 July 2024, Bangladesh’s then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina imposed a curfew , issued a shoot-on-sight order, and cut off telecommunications in an attempt to suppress a student uprising. In response, coordinators of the student movement turned to guerrilla art. Armed with spray cans, they scrawled messages like "Hasina is a killer" on walls, streets, and riot vehicles before disappearing. People across the country joined in. The Hasina regime fell on 5 August 2024. Street art now covers the city. But Mannan’s graffiti stands apart—it is not a demand, nor a slogan, nor a call for justice. What does it mean to find a love letter rendered as political graffiti? In a country where homosexuality remains criminalized and queer lives are violently erased, this graffiti blends love and mass uprising. It now sits beside an image of the disappeared adibashi activist Kalpana Chakma . Together, they reveal the interwoven violences inflicted on queer people and dissenters under Hasina’s ultra-nationalist rule. “Phobia Ends Here ” (2023), acrylic on canvas, courtesy of Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin. Mannan was murdered in 2016, during Hasina’s tenure. The Home Minister at the time condemned the victims: “Our society does not allow any movement that promotes unnatural sex.” Hasina herself repeatedly denied the existence of queer people in Bangladesh. In a 2023 interview, when asked about the criminalization of homosexuality in the country’s constitution, she responded , “That is not a problem in our country.” The Hasina regime also attempted to co-opt the gender rights movement. A 2013 government gazette recognized hijra as a gender category, allowing inclusion in official documents and transgender women to run for reserved parliamentary seats . But instead of expanding public understanding, the policy collapsed hijra, intersex, and trans identities into a single vague category that enabled abuse. In 2015, hijras applying for government jobs were forcibly subjected to medical examinations . This flattening of gender identity eroded organizing efforts. In the years that followed, state-aligned gender activists and NGOs gained prominence. They argued that Hasina’s authoritarianism was necessary to protect gender rights from Islamist groups. But their fear-mongering proved hollow. Violence against gender and sexual minorities only intensified under Hasina, whose politics local organizers now describe as “hijra-washed.” “Phobia Ends Here ” (2023), acrylic on canvas, courtesy of Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin. One telling example came when progressive organisers included a subsection on trans rights in a school textbook. Islamist groups led by Asif Mahtab Utsho mobilised violently, forcing sexual and reproductive health NGOs to shut down. The Hasina regime offered no protection. The trans content was officially removed in June 2024. Queer people were targeted not only in public but also in digital spaces. The regime’s Cyber Security Act 2023 severely restricted internet freedom , forcing queer Bangladeshis into online silence. From dating to organizing, their digital presence was strangled. As the Hasina regime collapses and new proposals for justice emerge, we must remember that the freedom of queer Bangladeshis is linked with the liberation of all marginalized groups. Mannan’s murder, the co-optation of gender rights, and the crackdown on queer life were all part of a broader regime—one marked by extrajudicial killings , the repression of journalists , activists, artists, and human rights defenders under the guise of digital security, and the systematic violation of women and girls, particularly in indigenous areas , in the name of development. Hasina's ouster does not mark the end of authoritarianism. When the dust settles, we may once again see the rule of Bengali Muslim cis-men. In such a moment, Mannan’s graffiti offers a sharp reminder that Bangladesh is made up of many communities. If queerness continues to be criminalized, denied, and erased, the country will simply reproduce the same systems of violence. Queer people in Bangladesh have always fought for collective liberation—including in this very uprising. The question now is not whether they exist. It is whether the new Bangladesh is willing to coexist with them. ∎ “Phobia Ends Here ” (2023), acrylic on canvas, courtesy of Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Opinion Dhaka Xulhaz Mannan Roopbaan Bangladesh Queerness Queer Life Gender Violence Gender Rights Queer Activism Magazine Culture Sheikh Hasina Mass Protests Movement 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:

“If you truly believe someone is suppressing you, you can end up in jail for 15 years. So is there really a space for citizen journalism? I truly don't have an answer.” COMMUNITY Storytelling in Post-Aragalaya Sri Lanka AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “If you truly believe someone is suppressing you, you can end up in jail for 15 years. So is there really a space for citizen journalism? I truly don't have an answer.” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Panel Colombo Aragalaya Storytelling Citizen Journalism Social Media Fiction Media Landscape State & Media Corporate Corporate Media Sri Lanka Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day War Memorials Post-Aragalaya Moment Narratives Complicating the Unity of the Aragalaya Optimism on the Local Level Youth Media Youth Tech Remembrance Mourning State Repression Social Media Crackdown Sentencing Laws Ranil Wickremasinghe Gotagogama 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. DISPATCH Panel Colombo 27th Aug 2024 The SAAG launch event for Vol. 2, Issue 2 in Colombo, on 7th May 2024, began with a panel introduced by Chief Editor Sabika Abbas. The panel, moderated by Andrew Fidel Fernando, discussed whether storytelling is possible in post-aragalaya Sri Lanka. How do artists and writers of all persuasions deal with the disappeared? How do we face a state that refuses to even let remembrance occur, particularly regarding the events of 18th May 2009, or Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day? How did the events of 2022, the aragalaya in all its optimism, and the sharp break that followed affect the nature of reporting, fiction, social media, and the work of youth tech organizations? The panel included: Kanya D'Almeida, an award-winning writer and podcaster Benislos Thushan, a digital storytelling enthusiast and lawyer Darshatha Gamage, a youth empowerment and development specialist Raisa Wickrematunge, Deputy Editor at Himal Southasian We can't even remember our loved ones. Even regarding May 18th, we simply don't have any war memorials for people to go and mourn, and no national initiatives. Before, people at least went to social media. now it specifically says if you use social media, if you talk against the military, guess what? You'll be put into prison for five years—or more. If you truly believe someone is suppressing you, you can end up in jail for 15 years. So is there really a space for citizen journalism? I truly don't have an answer. 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 Next Up:

Kashmiri poet Huzaifa Pandit in conversation with Nazish Chunara. | · COMMUNITY Interview · Kashmiri Poetics The Craft of Writing in Occupied Kashmir Kashmiri poet Huzaifa Pandit in conversation with Nazish Chunara. Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. By abolishing Urdu, they are removing its historical significance... By pushing for the extinction of a language, you're pushing the extinction of a history and the sentiments associated with that history. Because in life the present is a function of the past. And so, by altering that past, they're hoping to alter the present altogether beyond the cognition. RECOMMENDED: Green is the Colour of Memory (Hawakal Publishers, 2018) by Huzaifa Pandit. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Interview Kashmiri Poetics Historicity Poetic Form Poetry Kashmiri Struggle Kashmir Faiz Ahmed Faiz Agha Shahid Ali Mahmoud Darwish PTSD Trauma Mass Protests Memory Language Diversity Urdu Resistance Poetry Metaphor Metaphoricity Raj Rao Varavara Rao Journaling Occupation Pune University Language Language Politics Hindutva Despair Defiance Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 24th Jan 2021 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:

Zara’s poem moves through the swagger, danger, and bruised glamour of urban Pakistan to show that being both woman and legend can make you a spectacle, a liability, and a survivor all at once. · BOOKS & ARTS Poetry · Lahore Zara’s poem moves through the swagger, danger, and bruised glamour of urban Pakistan to show that being both woman and legend can make you a spectacle, a liability, and a survivor all at once. Untitled (2025), digital illustration, courtesy of Mahnoor Azeem. To be Woman and Hip in Dunya I learned how to be hip from girls who sat at dhabas – It was 2018; I was nothing and no one, And shudh desi leftism was still a dream the kids had. I waded through the decay of urban Pakistan - The waterless boat basin - In my white platform boots. I was not the only girl who figured out life so. This is the manifesto of hip woman Who ate the apple, and risked jihad Baadalon se giri, bijli ki tarhan Bazaar-e-aam main — afwah uthi Ye kesi mystical saazish hai! Issey dewaar main chunwa diya jaye Jahanpana! Shehenshah: My only weapon is my poetry. When your soldiers visit the marketplace Encroachment notice and batons in hand I see them at the gate, While in the midst of my dance — I am not a dancer so I entertain children. Meanwhile, jesters, poets, and ustads Grace the King’s colony! For my own safety, I am not invited. Hip woman is: She’s got the law cowered Her gait relaxed, magnificent night suit chic Fists up, she raises a new independence slogan: Yeh jo dehshatgardi hai, Isske peeche wardi hai. How everything is metaphor! Last Friday, when I dressed up as girl I bruised myself to win a race Now, it hurts to be teased and caressed Waisay masoom banti hun magar pata hai mujhey — Hot boys are dangerous to me This is not the first time I have hurt myself so. To be woman and hip: Is to be okay not being woman at all, To be unafraid of androgyny Allow yourself all the ugly of humanity I am maila like my city. Meri shalwar key paainchon per Meri mitti ka daagh hai: The beggar’s pleading, My daddy’s corruption Let the truth slap the princess out of me For to not be woman and hip Is to be dream deferred, girl interrupted. Aik naya pollution metric propose karti hun: Khwabon ki kirchian kitnay gigaton carbon emit karti hain? When they make a liar out of a girl, I want you to kill me as tribute. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Poetry Lahore Karachi 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:

In Hong Kong’s shifting political landscape, diasporic South Asian communities have emerged as key voices within a growing movement to build transnational solidarity, especially in regards to Palestine. Through reshaping activist networks and confronting racial exclusion, South Asians are building new alliances, resisting colonialism, and deepening their commitment to Palestinian liberation. · THE VERTICAL Reportage · Hong Kong In Hong Kong’s shifting political landscape, diasporic South Asian communities have emerged as key voices within a growing movement to build transnational solidarity, especially in regards to Palestine. Through reshaping activist networks and confronting racial exclusion, South Asians are building new alliances, resisting colonialism, and deepening their commitment to Palestinian liberation. "Khai Hoa" (Bloom) by Hoai Phuong. Shifting Solidarities Building inclusive organizing networks is a fraught endeavor in Hong Kong. For the last five years , residents involved in demonstrations and community events have had to work around the government’s crackdown on civil liberties. For South Asians, the situation is more complex. In addition to dealing with the impacts of COVID-19 policies and the recent National Security Law ( NSL )—specifically implemented to intimidate dissenters—they also have to contend with the implicit racial biases of fellow organizers. It wasn’t until 2023, when people started protesting Israel’s genocide in Palestine, that organizing practices began shifting, with efforts to learn from South Asians’ years of work in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. While there is still plenty of room for progress, 2023 marked a promising moment of intersectional coalition building in Hong Kong’s political history. In 2019, the government proposed the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment), a bill regarding extradition that allowed criminal suspects to be sent for trial to a number of countries, including the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Macau. In the months that followed, more than a million people took to the streets to protest , citing concerns that the bill would expose people in Hong Kong to China’s judicial system. Protestors clashed with the police, and in the aftermath , faced immense repression; hundreds of activists were exiled, unions were dismantled, and residents left the territory in mass numbers. Amidst the turmoil, citizens found solace in one another, with the term “Hong Konger” becoming a unifying marker of identity for many dissenters. Despite this burgeoning camaraderie, ethno-nationalist tendencies persisted. The newfound sense of community excluded the city’s historic South Asian citizens —a group that came to the region as early as the 1800s, when the British colonized the city. Initially arriving as soldiers in the British army, South Asians eventually became central to setting up key administrative and educational institutions within the territory. However, today, Hong Kongers of South Asian descent still face institutionalized discrimination rooted in a colonial racial hierarchy, colorism, and language segregation. Adnan Muhammad is a Pakistani-Hong Konger who founded a Palestine solidarity group called United For Palestine (UFP) in 2017. Reflecting on his experience organising around Palestine in Hong Kong, he said, “We always felt like we were operating within silos [because] most of the people who came to our events were either Pakistani or Indian, or Muslim [from diverse backgrounds].” Adnan added that during the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests , South Asians and other minority communities could not partake because of the language barrier; most protest materials were in Cantonese. If they did participate, they became “easy targets” for the police due to their ethnicity, the institution's deeply rooted racist attitudes , and, notably, discriminatory “stop and search” practices. This is an observation that Alison Tan, a food designer and organizer, made , too. The Hong Kong-based designer stated, “People have a bit of a mind-your-own-business mentality in Hong Kong, especially in public, but during the demonstrations, you could see people actively looking out for each other,” adding, “Yet, when there were instances of police aggression towards South Asians, no one seemed to step up.” The organizing networks established in 2019 largely dissipated the following year when the pandemic hit. The government imposed 6pm curfews, movement tracking mobile apps, mask mandates, and restrictions on gatherings. In public, an air of self-censorship took root. Citizens felt that they couldn’t have open conversations about the ways these laws were negatively impacting them. The NSL, passed in 2020, made dissent along with community organizing even more difficult. It allowed the Hong Kong government to prosecute individuals with crimes of secession (trying to break away from China), subversion (threatening the government’s power), terrorism (acts of violence), and collusion with foreign organizations. Each of these crimes was vaguely defined—no one really seemed to know what would count as a transgression. By instituting this law, the government was effectively cracking down on civil liberties, including the freedom of speech. Despite the intensity of censorship, Hong Kong citizens did not lose their fervor for dissent. When Israel launched a genocidal attack on Palestine following the events of October 7th, organizing networks slowly began springing back into action. Citizens still didn’t have freedom of assembly, so events started out as small-scale, community-based, and non-confrontational gatherings. Nevertheless, organizers were resolute and made an effort to be intersectional. Following the cancellation of a Palestinian film screening at a community arts studio, solidarity efforts intensified. The events that were previously semi-public went completely underground. During this time, Alison remembers seeing South Asian and Middle Eastern communities taking the lead in filling a crucial gap in people’s knowledge about Palestine. “Most Chinese Hong Kongers do not care, and do not know [about Palestine]. We just don’t have an insight into the way faith, for example, plays a role in the struggle.” For Alison and Adnan, this knowledge gap exists because there has been little exchange and solidarity between movements for Hong Kong’s liberation and those located outside the region. In the past year, however, efforts by groups like United for Palestine have converged their goals with those of other organizing collectives. Under UFP leadership, people joined messaging groups made by South Asian Muslim youth that disseminated information about teach-ins and prayers being held in mosques that helped spread awareness about the history of the Palestinian cause. There were communal events, tucked away from the public eye, where people gathered to talk about grief, frustration, and their commitment to justice. Reflecting on these shifts, Adnan felt that even though their collective began operating in Hong Kong in 2017, “It was only after October 2023 that our efforts began reaching people beyond South Asian and Muslim communities, and people from other communities began to take an interest.” Vera, a Chinese Hong-Konger whose artist studio is located in a diverse neighborhood consisting of Indian, Pakistani, Nepalese, and Chinese residents, shared that his studio’s support for Palestine has brought him and his colleagues closer to their South Asian neighbors. “X, a Pakistani kaifong , who often plays chess with me, visited our space and saw Palestinian flags. Since then, he’s been cooking for us, saying Palestinians are like his brothers and sisters.” This again represents a rare instance of solidarity between communities who live alongside each other but don’t always have common ground to meaningfully interact with one another—a divide that's frequently reinforced by systemic factors, including language differences. At a community mutual aid event in March 2024 that raised 48,000 HKD in donations for Palestine, South Asian students put up a stall selling keffiyehs, mehndi, and other solidarity materials alongside other Hong Kongers who sold miso soup, zines, and second-hand clothing. The event also featured a halal vegan-friendly spread of foods and learning sessions about Islam’s role in the resistance and the Palestinian struggle against colonization. The fundraiser, centered around honoring and learning about Palestinian culture, ended with a moving performance of a song, “My mouth was made for speaking,” by a Hong Kong singer, drawing powerful links between the struggle for Palestine’s liberation and Hong Kong’s own struggle against imperialism. This is not to say that there has not been pushback. Events that have taken place more publicly have been shut down and censored under the pretext of ambiguous complaints. While official reasoning remains unknown, pro-Palestine organizers speculate that the government seeks to avoid friction with pro-Zionist lobbies and maintain a politically neutral—or rather, a conflict-free—environment within the city. Of course, choosing to remain indifferent to a genocide is akin to implicitly siding with the oppressor. In August 2024, after almost a year of community-based events for Palestine, some organizers were able to host a public exhibit showcasing Palestine solidarity posters at Hong Kong’s premier Art Book Fair, “BOOKED,” at Tai Kwun Contemporary. However, two days before the fair was due to begin, the exhibition was canceled without any clear explanation from the management. Pivotally, organizers remain resilient and tactful. Within two days of the exhibition at BOOKED being canceled, they secured an alternative venue and utilized solidarity networks to gather a large number of attendees. Jason, a photographer who has been running a leftist reading club in Hong Kong for the past year, believes this was only possible because efforts related to Palestine revitalized networks of organizing that had been previously quashed. “There was a lot of energy in the city that dissipated [after 2019], and now people have a reason to come together again.” Alison, who was also at the event, said, “Palestine has really brought people from all walks of life together in a really powerful way.” It is hard to say whether these efforts make a dent in the powerful apparatus of settler-colonial regimes that seek to occupy Palestine. But within their own context, these newly formed relationships are allowing communities in Hong Kong to chip away at divisions along racial and ethnic lines.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Reportage Hong Kong Civilian Solidarity Civilian Activism Activism Activist Advocacy Pakistan Free Speech Freedom Palestine Protest Mass Protests Civilian Unrest Liberation ideology Muslim Islam Organizing Ethno-nationalism Liberation Struggle Diaspora South Asia Muslim Organizing Public Space Geography Politics of Ethnic Identity Social Change Tai Kwun Contemporary National Security Law Hong Konger United For Palestine Protest Materials Cantonese Language Language Segregation China Police Action Freedom of Speech BOOKED Multi-ethnic Solidarity Networks 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. 22nd May 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:

Anne Carson and Ismat Chughtai's narrative devices exemplify unreliable and ethically dubious characters that go "to the edge of what can be loved." It is an epistemic approach that rightly repudiates the commonplace idea that the purpose of fiction is to make the Other relatable. BOOKS & ARTS Fictions of Unknowability Anne Carson and Ismat Chughtai's narrative devices exemplify unreliable and ethically dubious characters that go "to the edge of what can be loved." It is an epistemic approach that rightly repudiates the commonplace idea that the purpose of fiction is to make the Other relatable. VOL. 2 ISSUE 1 ESSAY Torsa Ghosal Artwork "Wonderland 2" by Priyanka D'Souza. Watercolour on paper (2015) ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Artwork "Wonderland 2" by Priyanka D'Souza. Watercolour on paper (2015) SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Essay Criticism 28th Feb 2023 Essay Criticism Ismat Chughtai Modernism Anne Carson Quilt Autobiography of Red Geryon Aleksandar Hemon Clarice Lispector Craft Epistemology Attia Hosain Street of the Moon Ethics Characterization Longform Knowledge Lihaaf Dostoyevsky Narrators Ethical Standards for Fictional Characters Zadie Smith Swing Time Jeannette Winterson Written on the Body Goodreads The Brothers Karamazov Short Stories Translation Short Story Fiction Irreverence Affect Alienation Rhetoric Sensuality Queerness Sadness Absurdity Composition Pedagogy Authenticity Verisimilitude TORSA GHOSAL is the author of a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind (Ohio State University Press), and an experimental novella, Open Couplets (Yoda Press, India). Her fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Catapult, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Bustle , and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English at California State University, Sacramento, and a host of the Narrative for Social Justice podcast. 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. IN HER verse novel Autobiography of Red , Anne Carson writes, “Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.” The sentence signals a turn in the protagonist Geryon’s coming-of-age storyline. Caught between adolescence and young adulthood, Geryon falls in love with the art of photography and a young man who “knows a lot/about art.” It causes his mother to complain, “I hardly know you anymore.” Geryon’s own vision develops against his lover’s ways of seeing, like images forming on transparent films exposed to light. But consider how Geryon’s access to his lover’s perceptions must be limited by his own perspective, his own frames of reference. Geryon, and us readers, would be mistaken to think that a picture and its framework can be clearly told apart. Autobiography of Red tracks how both love and art are so often bounded up with problems of perception. When Geryon’s mother asks him what he loves about the young man he is seeing, Geryon hesitates and finesses. He then becomes preoccupied with other thoughts like, “‘How does distance look?’ is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless / within to the edge / of what can be loved. It depends on light.” Geryon is reflecting on photography and philosophy when he should be talking about the man he loves. Or, he is thinking of the man he loves and scaffolding his thoughts with analogies and abstractions. After all, love, like photography, organizes the flux of experiences, gives our memories and perceptions a certain slant, and creates the semblance of intimacy out of distance. In Autobiography of Red , Carson adapts the myth about the slaying of the monster Geryon by Hercules into a contemporary coming-of-age tale and love story, told from the point of view of Geryon. From the winged monster’s perspective, the celebrated Greek hero is a figure worthy of love. What Geryon does not know is that this love will wreck his life. Throughout, Carson depicts the anxiety stemming from the desire to see other people and things as they are in themselves— ding an sich , as Kant would put it—and the impossibility to do so. “Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition” is not a truism. It conveys the longing for clarity—the kind of clarity one hopes to find in a definition. However, love and deftly crafted art confound rather than offer clarity. The best fictions I have read, the ones that have moved me to try my own hand at writing, accomplish a tricky task. In them, language gives uncertainty the glaze of clarity. Shimmering sentences entice me into assuming I have arrived at something—something like “meaning”—when the journey may have only just begun. Do writers need to worry at all about the ethical implications of choices in narrators, characters, and their quandaries of knowledge? The lack of clarity is an epistemological problem: it is a problem of knowing, or more precisely, a problem of unknowing. This problem forms the basis of fictions as varied as Anton Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog (trans. by Ivy Litvinov), Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf (trans. as The Quilt by Syeda Hameed), Clarice Lispector’s Amor (trans. Katrina Dodson), and the 2022 Caine Prize shortlisted story Collector of Memories by Joshua Chizoma. Literary historical arguments have been made for the dominance of the problem of knowing and unknowing—i.e. epistemological problems—in early twentieth-century fictions, including works of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Henry James. Proust, Woolf, Joyce, and James depend on the language of light and sight, perhaps inspired by photography, an emerging technology at the time, to construct their characters’ and narrators’ perceptual problems. In Joyce’s Araby , for instance, the narrator becomes infatuated with a girl he sees at dusk, “her figure defined by light.” The boy falls in love with a silhouette. Whom he cannot quite see becomes the very image of divinity. Anne Carson, WG Sebald, and Aleksandar Hemon, all writing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, are “new” modernists in this sense (well, “metamodernists” if you care for trendy academic terms). But if we step outside the constraints of literary historical arguments, founded on corpuses carved out of the chaos of everything written and published in a period of time—on figures cut out of the shapeless ground––then we see how the problem of knowing is the wellspring of fiction. Sometimes in a self-aware way, at other times inadvertently, writers make craft choices that animate the difficulty of knowing anyone or anything. Writers elaborate upon the problem, magnify or atomize it, even if they cannot solve it. There are two aspects related to this issue that I wish to address here: how and why unknowability can be built into stories, and the ethical implications of such design. The question of ethical orientation arises in response to a cliché that circulates in public discourses about the function of literature: literature cultivates empathy. We know the Other and learn to love this Other, or at least care for them while reading their stories. Fiction can make the Other relatable. So it goes. Reading is thus construed as a virtuous undertaking. To not violate such an ethical contract, what can the good writer do? The writer can make the world a little more knowable. That, however, is a restricted and restricting view of literature. In fact, I believe writers—particularly, writers of fiction—often move us and absorb us without making the worlds and the characters that inhabit these worlds fully knowable. The Nature of Blindspots in “Lihaf” The narrator of Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf is neither Begum Jan nor her masseuse Rabbo. It is not even Begum Jan’s husband, the Nawab who is busy philandering with young boys. The story is told by Begum Jan’s adopted niece who has a dreadfully inadequate understanding of and insufficient language for what she sees. The narrator was a small girl when she lived with Begum Jan. Years later, Begum Jan’s erotic relationship with Rabbo lingers as a “terrifying shadow” in her mind. When the narrator sees Begum Jan initially, the woman appears to be the “very picture of royalty.” What follows is a description of Begum Jan—her eyes, hair, skin—from some distance. Between light and shade, day and night, something happens. This “something” becomes a story worth telling precisely because the narrator, even as an adult, does not fully recognize what she saw, and has little understanding of Begum Jan’s experiences. Recounting the past, the narrator, an adult at this point, says (in Syeda Hameed’s translation): "Rabbo had no other household duties. Perched on the four-poster bed she was always massaging Begum Jan's head, feet or some other part of her anatomy. If someone other than Begum Jan received such a quantity of human touching, what would the consequences be? Speaking for myself, I can say that if someone touched me continuously like this, I would certainly rot." Reading this, in the aftermath of the profuse commentary Lihaaf has generated for depicting homosexuality, we smile knowingly. We know what the narrator does not. But, I think, Lihaaf endures as a story because we still do not decisively grasp all its internal movements. For example, the narrator remembers her own “adoring gaze” on Begum Jan that transformed the older woman’s face into that of “a young boy,” which is intriguing given the Nawab’s (Begum’s husband) dalliances with young boys in the same house. The narrator also offers to take Rabbo’s place—to comfort Begum Jan, “scratch her itch”—without seemingly understanding Rabbo’s role in Begum Jan’s life. Soon after, Begum Jan “lies down” with the narrator and transforms into a “terrifying entity.” Lihaaf sustains both under- and overreading into its elliptical narration. What exactly happens after Begum Jan offers to “count” the narrator’s ribs? Why can the narrator no longer look at Begum Jan without feeling a sense of terror as though the older woman would engulf her? Was it because she began to project her fear of same-sex relationships onto her harmless physical intimacy with Begum Jan and therefore started “feeling nauseated against her warm body”? Or was the narrator—a child at the time—molested by Begum Jan but did not have the language to process the experience? In Carson’s Autobiography of Red , when a young Geryon is molested by his elder brother, he too cannot name what has happened to him. The verses tell us Geryon “let his brother do what he liked” and himself tried to disengage from the bodily experience by taking refuge in imaginative thinking. Lihaaf ’s narrator may be similarly scaffolding her actual suffering by inventing the image of monstrous shadows cast on the walls of Begum Jan’s house. The consensus is that Chughtai used a naïve narrator to recount a tumultuous relationship witnessed in childhood to veil the story’s focus on homosexuality. The narrator is a tool that allowed Chughtai to tackle what was taboo at the time. But without the narrator and her blind spots, we do not have much more than a scandalous tale of a clandestine affair here. Characters whose perceptions are inhibited for any number of reasons are commonplace in fiction precisely because their points of view generate tension, humor, and conflict. And when these characters serve as narrators, as in Lihaaf , we get the (in)famous unreliable narrator. Some unreliable narrators lie, but others misrepresent and misinterpret experiences because they do not know any better. There are also instances of narrative unreliability wherein the narrator is not a fully dramatized character but seems close to one or more of the characters in the story, as is the case with Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog and Lispector’s Amor . I will discuss another such story shortly, but before we get there, let’s pause for a moment to reflect on the supposed unreliability of narrators in fiction. To claim a made-up story’s narrator is unreliable or to read a character’s perception as limited is to also suggest that there are greater truths, more reliable versions of the incidents out there—somewhere beyond this particular character’s and/or the narrator’s horizon of understanding. Against that greater truth, unreliability takes a certain definition, but how do we access this truth? Is the truth something readers carry with them to the fictional world? Is Lolita’s Humbert Humbert unreliable because common sense and our own ethical values say so? If the answer is an unequivocal yes, then we must accept that had our common sense and ethical values been any different, Humbert Humbert could be read as a reliable narrator. In other words, unreliability would not be a feature of the story but a matter of the reader’s perception. I can decide whether a narrator is reliable or not. Who can stop me? This is in line with the conventional idea that says our response to fiction (and art in general) is subjective. However, I don’t believe the reader has that much liberty entering the fictional world. What is more, I would go a step further to say that the best writers find crafty ways to limit the reader’s freedom, so the reader cannot escape the burden of uncertainty, casting aside the problem of unknowing by appealing to absolute relativism (“my truth is as good as yours”). Fiction offers an interpretive latitude or flexibility—an unsettling openness but not exactly autonomy. Unreliability, like unknowability, can be traced to craft decisions. Now we are back to where we started. What or where is the knowledge in a story against which we measure characters’ and/or narrators’ perceptual limitations? What is the basis for our judgment? I would suggest—drawing upon the narrative theorist James Phelan—that this broader horizon of knowledge is conveyed through the overall structure of the narrative. It is a function of certain textual patterns. To claim a made-up story’s narrator is unreliable or to read a character’s perception as limited is to also suggest that there are greater truths, more reliable versions of the incidents out there—somewhere beyond this particular character’s and/or the narrator’s horizon of understanding. Against that greater truth, unreliability takes a certain definition, but how do we access this truth? Is the truth something readers carry with them to the fictional world? Phelan distinguishes between various possible ethical positions elicited in fiction. Relations among tellers (author, narrators), characters, and audiences shapeshift over the course of a narrative’s unfolding. Characters behave a certain way, which leads to certain consequences. The narrator tells the story a certain way—stands somewhere in space, time, and ideologies, in relation to the events constituting the story. This, too, has an ethical dimension. And then the entire story, built out of specific narrative strategies, emanates an attitude toward the narrator as well as the characters. And of course, readers also bring their values to bear upon the story. Unreliability results from the misalignment of these various ethical axes. The misalignment is carefully constructed through a series of choices. Of course, craft choices can’t fully account for readers’ values, especially given that stories are read across cultures and historical periods, but many of the other variables contributing to unreliability are amenable to shaping. Take, for instance, Street of the Moon , a short story by Attia Hosain that was first published in The Atlantic in 1952 and later anthologized in her collection Phoenix Fled (1953). In Street of the Moon , the narrator seems to see the world through the eyes of Kalloo the cook and yet manages to distinguish the story’s attitude toward everything, especially women, from that of Kalloo’s. How does Hosain accomplish this? In the rest of this essay, I offer some answers. Ethical Conundrums in “Street of the Moon” Attia Hosain is a writer with a peculiar legacy. Every few decades her books are re-issued and then, apparently, go out of print. I suppose her refusal to identify with either India or Pakistan post-Partition made her an uneasy presence in the emergent national literary canons. But that is not all. Her stylistic inclinations diverge from those of her South Asian contemporaries like, say, Mulk Raj Anand. Introducing an edition of Hosain’s Phoenix Fled in 1988, Anita Desai notes, “Not for her the stripped and bare simplicity of modern prose—that would not be in keeping with the period—which might make it difficult for the modern reader not as at home as she with the older literary style, but it is in harmony with the material.” Hosain’s “material” is the pre-Independence feudal society of Lucknow. While I agree with Desai about Hosain’s style—it is different from “stripped” modern prose—I don’t think Hosain upholds an older literary style either. Did writers of an earlier era combine psychological and emotional realism (a hallmark of “modern prose” if there was one) with rich social drama in Hosain’s vein? I don’t think so. I assume what Desai means by “older” is that Hosain’s storytelling owes something to not only the English literature of her time but also longstanding Urdu literary and cultural traditions. Desai further states that Hosain’s short stories in Phoenix Fled are “truly interesting” for "[The] reconstruction of a feudal society and its depiction from the point of view of the idealized, benevolent aristocrat who feels a sense of duty and responsibility towards his dependents—women as well as servants. This character is something of a stock-in-trade with writers about the Indian scene of that period, but in Attia Hosain’s work he—or she—fades into the anonymous figure of the narrator, and the interest is focused upon the lively world of servants and their families…" Desai is suggesting there is a class difference between the narrators and the central characters of Hosain’s stories, which makes them interesting. If we read Street of the Moon with Desai’s comment in mind, then any misalignment in the ethical axes of the telling (the attitude of the anonymous third-person narrator) and the told (the central characters) would be chalked up to class differences. And it is not impossible to find fiction in which difference in ethics is simply a function of class-caste-gender distinctions, sometimes to rather patronizing effect. However, Street of the Moon is not such a story. And it is a problem if we conflate the self-effacing and non-characterized narrator speaking in the third-person with the strawman figure of “the idealized, benevolent aristocrat.” Hosain’s novel Sunlight on the Broken Column does have an aristocrat for a narrator (Laila, the rebellious daughter of a feudal family) but I find no clear reason as to why we must read Hosain’s short stories as though they were told by a similar figure, unless the story specifies so. I think the fact that we cannot fully pin down the narrator of Street of the Moon , that their values and beliefs keep shifting, makes the story a scathing and disturbing social portrait rather than a cautionary tale directed at men and women. Here's the beginning of Street of the Moon : "Kalloo the cook had worked for the family for more years than he could remember. He had started as the cook’s help, washing dishes, grinding the spices and running errands. When the old cook died of an overdose of opium Kalloo inherited both his job and his taste for opium. His inherent laziness fed by the enervating influence of the drug kept him working for his inadequate pay, because he lacked the energy and the courage to give notice and look for work elsewhere. Moreover, his emotions had grown roots through the years, and he was emotionally attached to the family. He had watched with affectionate interest the birth, childhood, youth and manhood of the sons of the house and felt he was an elder brother." Of his own age he was uncertain but felt young enough when opium-inspired. Eyes outlined with powdered soorma, tiny attar-soaked bit of cotton hidden in his ear his cotton embroidered cap set isn't angle, he went off and evening to the Street of the Moon. The morning after he would be slower of movement than usual, and when he weighed the flower, the lentils, the rice and fat for the day his hands would shake and Mughlani, who had charge of the stores, would shake her grey head and wheeze asthmatically: “You men, you are all animals even when your feet hang in their grave. What you need, Kalloo Mian is a wife to keep you at home.” “What I need is someone to help me in the kitchen it is hard work that makes my hands shake and my head grow heavy,” he would grumble. But the repeated suggestion took root in his mind and he brooded over the need to find himself a wife." Street of the Moon aids my thinking about perspectival blind spots as bases for fiction of unknowability (even when we do not have a naïve first-person narrator) because the events making up the story don’t seem to be particularly remarkable in themselves. E.M Forster maintained, “ Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.” But I feel like I know what happens next in Street of the Moon —it is the portrait of a society where possibilities are finite if you are of a marginal class and gender. So, while reading, what holds my attention is not so much the chain of events but the angle from which Hosain’s narrator approaches them. As we see from the excerpt, the opening shines the lights on Kalloo, and the lights are harsh. The first sentence establishes what Kalloo does not know for certain (how long he’s been working for the family) and thereby sets up a pattern. We quickly learn Kalloo is addicted to a perception-altering substance. The habit has allowed him to develop a self-image—he feels a sense of kinship with the family he serves, though we are also prompted to suspect that this might be a convenient justification for him to avoid looking for work elsewhere. At any rate, his sense of kinship is not reciprocated—the family offers him “inadequate pay.” If the narrator remarks upon Kalloo’s laziness as an upper-class employer would, the narrator also remains forthcoming about his unacceptable working conditions that Kalloo’s employers would refuse to acknowledge. A little later, Kalloo’s son from his first wife (who is dead) highlights this in dialogue: “What great fortune have you piled up? I know the Collector Sahib’s khansama who gets sixty rupees a month, and has a help, you get twenty rupees like a plain barvarchi .” The design of the opening is such that both Kalloo and the family he works for are held culpable for keeping intact a suspect order for several years. In the second paragraph, we learn more about Kalloo’s distorted self-image. He imagines himself young (when he is not) and takes care of his appearance when he visits brothels. Here is a man, who is then dependent, and perhaps dangerously so, on seeing himself in a certain light to make it through a life that is hard and unjust, a life meant to be spent “in the smoke and heat of the kitchen.” The first character to explicitly judge Kalloo, besides the narrator, is Mughlani. Her voice reaches us through dialogue. She scolds Kalloo for acting against the norms of social respectability. Mughlani, like the narrator, perhaps also sees Kalloo as lazy, but then Mughlani also imagines there could be a cure for Kalloo’s maladies. Why Mughlani imagines a wife would mend Kalloo can be chalked up to social beliefs—a man with a wife would behave more responsibly (really?!). However, when we learn that the old gray-haired Mughlani is out of breath from dealing with Kalloo (“wheeze asthmatically”), we can speculate that Kalloo’s having a wife could ease some of Mughlani’s troubles. Probably Kalloo’s slacking off doubles the woman’s responsibilities. Her advice to Kalloo is thus not simply a nod to codes of social propriety, but also a ploy that could potentially relieve her. It is not impossible to find fiction in which difference in ethics is simply a function of class-caste-gender distinctions, sometimes to rather patronizing effect. However, Street of the Moon , is not such a story. And it is a problem if we conflate the self-effacing and non-characterized narrator speaking in the third-person with the strawman figure of “the idealized, benevolent aristocrat.” The two characters—Mughlani and Kalloo—are pitted against each other, and the collocation makes both slightly more vivid. While reporting both their behaviors and Kalloo’s thoughts, the narrator does not fully align with either. There is a distance between the nondescript, non-localizable anonymous narrator and these other characters, especially Kalloo, who begins at the very edge of what can be love, and over the course of the story gets pushed further away. The distance between the narrator and the characters accounts for the tone (choice of the verb “inherited” for both Kalloo’s job and addiction, for example), the comments on Kalloo’s “inherent laziness”, and other unsavory behavior. This distance is manifested in how Kalloo intends to develop a flattering self-portrait—hardworking, loyal, agile servant of a family that treats him like an elder brother—and how the narrator exposes the dubious mechanics (opium) developing the picture. Hosain’s narratorial tactics are similar to Carson’s here, though the thrust is different. In Carson’s verse novel, Geryon has internalized a monstrous self-image—he thinks he is “stupid,” “ugly,” and exists at the edge of lovability—but the narrator places his behavior alongside those of other characters, including his brother and his lover, to expose how these people manipulate Geryon into developing an abhorrent self-image so they can exploit him. Just when Kalloo wishes he had a wife, a suitable candidate appears. The widow working as Mughlani’s help goes to her village and returns with her beautiful daughter Hasina. The narrator tells us no one thought of the widow as “a living woman” before she brought Hasina; the widow was “a humble ugly shadow” in everyone’s eyes. It is her daughter’s presence that brings her to life. Once again, two characters seem to give form to each other. Kalloo, the narrator nudges us to notice, registers the girl’s presence. He is unhappy that he must cook for another person, but he empathizes with the widow when she says, “I am growing old, and need someone to care for me.” Mughlani is keen to discipline the girl who apparently “Sit[s] all day admiring herself.” Kalloo agrees with Mughlani. His empathy for Hasina’s mother and appreciation for Mughlani’s scheme of disciplining the young girl is related to his dissatisfaction with his own son. What is common to Hasina and Kalloo’s son is that they are young, and people like Kalloo and Mughlani gather that they will disturb the existing social order. One noteworthy detail here is that while Kalloo’s son is quoted as mocking his father, Hasina has not said anything at all in the story so far. However, soon after the exchange with Mughlani, Kalloo decides “Hasina’s eyes mocked him.” Kalloo is projecting the image of his own son onto Hasina. The narrator has not described anything specific Hasina has said or done that can reasonably be understood as mockery. In fact, half the girl’s face is hidden: “She was hiding her mouth with her ‘dupatta’…” In this encounter between Kalloo and the girl, we do not know what the girl is thinking or doing. However, a third character present on the scene suggests that Kalloo is under the influence of opium. Under influence, Kalloo assumes he knows Hasina. The narrator, however, has left her unknowable. Kalloo, much like the narrator of Lihaaf , believes he understands what he does not—that is all we need to know to mistrust him. Soon, Kalloo begins to be haunted by Hasina’s eyes—the liveliness in them and the “angry hate” in them upset him. The narrator charts how from Kalloo’s point of view, Hasina’s eyes and nose ring dance. It is all too much to bear for a man used to numbing his senses with opium. The narrator’s distance from Kalloo widens as more and more voices enter the story through dialogue. The polyphonic surface unsettles Kalloo’s gaze on Hasina, even though none of them protest Kalloo’s beliefs about her. In fact, the others often mirror Kalloo’s viewpoints as far as Hasina is concerned. However, they question Kalloo’s perceptions on other counts. Mughlani, for instance, points out that the feudal family does not fire Kalloo because he is ready to work for too-little pay and not because he is “family” to them. Just as the characters contest Kalloo’s beliefs, they also contest each other’s claims. When Mughlani says, “In my days we didn’t leave the room for forty days [before a wedding],” Hasina’s mother says, “Not so many surely.” The structure of Hosain’s narrative whereby each character contests and undercuts others’ views on various subjects causes us—readers—to doubt their perception of Hasina. Ten pages into the thirty-two-page story, we do not know Hasina beyond what these other characters believe about her, but the narrator has not given us reasons to fully trust the other characters. Indeed, they do not trust each other. Mughlani takes the lead in arranging Kalloo’s wedding with Hasina. The wedding is entertainment for the bored aristocrats and an occasion for the other servants to celebrate and assert their authority. Kalloo’s great desire for Hasina on the eve of their wedding is suspect. What makes his desire suspect is not the present-day readers’ values alone: twenty-first-century readers may find Kalloo’s and Hasina’s vast asymmetries in age and power fraught, but that is almost beside the point. Kalloo’s desire is suspect because he is the same man who had instigated Hasina’s mother to beat her and projected his son’s insolence onto the girl. The first unfiltered glimpse we get of Hasina’s interiority establishes her naivety. With her, the problem of knowing and unknowing assumes the form of innocence. She is excited about wedding gifts, and she imagines she can do as she pleases after she is married because her mother tells her so. We know Kalloo relatively more than Hasina does, and, of course, we have some sense of how he perceives her. Sure enough, as soon as the ceremonial garbs are shed, Kalloo is once again haunted by “Hasina’s cruel mockery,” only made harsher by the fact she is now his wife. The sexual encounters between Kalloo and Hasina, though not described in a lot of detail, record his disregard for her wishes. Anecdotally I can add that my students, too, hold characters in fiction to oddly specific ethical standards. Some express resentment for the narrator of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body because the narrator is avoidant and noncommittal. Others don’t like Zadie Smith’s narrator in Swing Time because the narrator takes a lifetime to “see” how a dance performance she enjoyed as a child was performed in blackface and still admits to enjoying the dance. Her married life requires Hasina to find her own pain-numbing drugs: she takes pleasure in adorning herself, looking at her mirror image, admiring her new possessions. But even these are snatched from her, and it is not long before “her eyes lost their mischievous sparkle.” However, the sparkling eyes return, only for a short time, and everyone suspects this must be on account of her illicit relation with Kalloo’s son who is closer in age to her. Kalloo becomes vigilant and takes “very little opium” to make sure he does not lose his wife to his son. As it turns out, Kalloo’s suspicions are not misguided, and this is where the story’s ethical orientation becomes intriguing. If Kalloo was simply suspecting Hasina and nothing had happened between Hasina and Kalloo’s son, it would be one thing—we don’t trust Kalloo anyway—but that would make for a much simpler and weaker story. In Hosain’s story, Hasina has cheated on Kalloo. And when Kalloo sends his son away, Hasina continues to cheat—she begins to enjoy the attention of another servant. Hasina also loves touching luxurious items in the landlady’s room and steals some of them. She then elopes with the other servant who supposedly finds work for her, but given the story’s final scene it seems he sold her to a brothel. Hosain does not resolve the issue of conflicting perceptions. When we think we know a character, the character transforms ever so slightly under our gaze. This pattern replicates a similar pattern within the world of the story. And the pattern’s origin can be traced to the creative process. Fictions of unknowability succeed when the writer has risked going from a spaceless nook within to the very edge of what they know and love. Even though Kalloo’s suspicions about Hasina materialize, the story does not make him out to be a righteous figure, of course. Towards the end of the story, he sees her image (innocent, gay, mischievous) in his opium dreams. Then, apparently, he sees her “powdered face pallid in the harsh light” in the “Street of the Moon”—the red-light district. He runs away the moment he spots her because her reality threatens to obliterate the idealized portrait of her that he now cherishes. The cherished portrait conjures a subjectivity that he may have destroyed, but also, we remain uncertain about what Hasina was prior to being dragged into Kalloo’s world. Was she ever the idealized child Kalloo imagines her to be in the end? We do not know but we do know that Kalloo runs away from knowledge. That is the kind of person he is. There are a variety of things Kalloo does not remember and does not want to see. He cherishes oblivion. His perspective comes across as distorted not necessarily because we have a clearer view of the truth than him, but we have a clearer sense that his perceptions are excessively muddled. Is Hasina better off—happier—in the “Street of the Moon” than she was in the control of her obnoxious husband? Has her situation changed for better or worse? She was betrayed by a lover and ended up there. We don’t know much more than that. In the end, she is once more screened from our view—her interiority is inaccessible. We have been left with Kalloo, who carries on as he always has. Untrustworthy characters with dubious ethics like Kalloo, who neither reform nor face punishment, throw off balance the view of fiction (and literature more generally) as wholesome and instructive. Readers seem to worry a great deal about such unethical conduct on the part of authors. If Goodreads reviews are anything to go by, readers are disappointed when a story does not punish, kill, or “shut up” a character they cannot love. A reader asks, “Will someone tell me if any likable characters show up?” in a review of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov . Having taught literature and creative writing for some years now, anecdotally I can add that my students, too, hold characters in fiction to oddly specific ethical standards. Some express resentment for the narrator of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body because the narrator is avoidant and noncommittal. Others don’t like Zadie Smith’s narrator in Swing Time because the narrator takes a lifetime to “see” how a dance performance she enjoyed as a child was performed in blackface and still admits to enjoying the dance. Can writers never write about decent (“relatable”) people whose merits outweigh their flaws? My practiced move as a teacher is to ask students why they crave decency in fiction in this way. What sort of ethics prompts them/us to first see some “good” in people (well, characters) before caring for them? But for now, let me take the desire to find the “good” in Street of the Moon . Does Hosain’s story intend for the reader to empathize with Kalloo, to see some good in him? Or are we to feel for Hasina, though she does not remain decent (cheats, steals, elopes)? Who—which of these Others—have we learned to love in reading Street of the Moon ? These questions become subsumed in another question that has to do with craft decisions: with whom does the anonymous narrator’s allegiance lie in the story? In the strictest sense: neither Kalloo nor Hasina. What’s clear is that though the story closely tracks Kalloo’s point of view, the narrator does not fully align with him. And I think that is enough to make the story a complex fictional rendering of social life, rather than one that catalogs the evils of men like Kalloo or predicaments of women like Hasina. A story need not explicitly define its stance on subjects (women, misogyny, marriages). Instead, it may choose to shine the lights on everything it intends to negate: in this case, Kalloo’s gaze, his values. A narrative punishing Kalloo would be righteous but, in my opinion, quite pointless. Righteous narrators of fiction leave readers with a sense of comfort—we get to pretend we always knew right from wrong. But we really don’t. Not clearly anyhow. This is also why even in Carson’s Autobiography and Chughtai’s Lihaaf , characters who are ethically suspect do not face any radical consequences. Geryon’s untrustworthy lover does not grapple with chastising. Geryon’s failing—if it can be called a failing—seems to be his inability to extricate himself from those who abuse him. Towards the end of Autobiography , he accompanies his unrepentant lover to see an installation art piece resembling a volcano and concludes, “We are amazing beings.” In Chughtai’s story, the narrator who has recounted in some detail her peculiar childhood experiences comes to an incongruous conclusion: she will never tell anyone what she saw under Begum Jan’s quilt even if she was offered a large sum of money. These endings play with the readers’ concern for truth and their desire to see characters and events as they are in themselves while remaining unable to do so. Do writers need to worry at all about the ethical implications of choices in narrators, characters, and their quandaries of knowledge? From a writer’s point of view, I can see how ethics (often confused with socially defined morality) can be constraining. And should great art not fight constraints? But when writers talk of dispensing with ethics in their stories, they are usually talking of dispensing with moral (“good”) characters. The important thing to recognize is that ethics does not mean “good.” Ethics also does not mean a singular, well-defined position vis-à-vis a subject. To say stories have an ethical orientation is not to suggest that stories prescribe an easily digested pill to help enact social good. It is also not to say that stories’ ethical orientation would be the same as the orientation of any one or all of the characters. To say stories have an ethical orientation is to admit that craft decisions are never disinterested in ethics, though memorable stories, I think, have a hesitant ethics and this hesitancy is in their structure. In Street of the Moon , the pairing of characters, the contrasts Hosain works out in perceptions and points of view, the use of dialogue, and the slipperiness of the narratorial position on the unfolding events, contributes to the feeling of hesitancy. It is a story about the ways we obstruct knowledge and numb perceptions to bear what we must. ∎ More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5