· BOOKS & ARTS Essay · The Editors Into the Disaster-Verse “Recently, I spotted an issue of Harper’s harboring a cover story about the apocalypse. It is subtitled 'The Sense of an Ending,' which I reckon is less of an editorial choice than the wave of a white flag to imagination.” The Ruin. Acrylic and gouache. By the author (2021). I am sorry for every mistake I have made in my life. I’m sorry I wasn’t wiser sooner. I’m sorry I ever spoke of myself as lonely. Mary Oliver Just once in my life—oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life? Amy Hempel Rapture. July 2017. Some months back, at work, I daydreamed about disappearing. I felt invisible regardless, and the world did not seem quite right for me. It seemed not quite right because it rarely isn’t for anyone at all. A plot hatched. A plot to be raptured. It was something of a lark, but not really. At the time, the final season of The Leftovers was airing, and I found Evie Murphy’s hoax to be aspirational. It was easy to imagine. My friend Chris would ordinarily be the most likely to notice my absence, but we’d fought months earlier and had since been avoiding each other. My roommate would probably assume—if he wondered—that I was sleeping at some boy’s place. “I think I’m coming down with something,” I said out loud in lab the next day. Everybody in the lab told me to go home, as expected. Once home, I booked an Airbnb for two weeks. I’d considered Milwaukee, which I’d passed by once, but landed elsewhere. It was a house overlooking the lake. It was cheap. It was beautiful. I’d have it all to myself. It was meant for four or more. I packed lightly. I bought a new toothbrush and razor, split my medications into separate bottles, and put unread books on my nightstand. I did the dishes, threw out the trash, folded my clothes, and got to the train station early. All on my own! It was the first time I’d been punctual in months. See, for the past two years or so, I’ve tried to kill myself several times. Some were not at all intended as cries for attention, but it was fine. I made peace with them being seen as such. Thrice, I stockpiled an increasing number of benzos, along with increasing amounts of alcohol, and went to sleep. Each time, I woke up in the afternoon, befuddled. The third time, I could no longer make sense of my body’s ability to metabolize a month’s worth of prescription pills. And that was that. Others were indeed intended for attention, and I reliably got caught. I became good at pretending I meant it, at the tearful apology administered while thinking unspeakable things. But what I never said—because no one wanted to hear it—was that though my friends and family did a great deal for me, they also greatly exaggerated their importance. And, honestly, how could sixty 2 milligram pills of clonazepam be so unsatisfactory? Then when I was gone, they never found out. I wanted to keep up the disappearance, like a character in a spy novel you let yellow in your bathroom. I’d fake my identity! Become the ghost of some much-lauded novel! I knew, of course, that any such story would end with deportation, but still. It was a nice daydream. Things were different on the train back home, two weeks later. Everyone who wanted me alive had gotten lucky, they wouldn’t know just how much. I knew that most ways of narrating the story would elicit some proclamation that I was “burned out!” and I needed to get away. Which was fine. But it wasn’t true. A strange new axis of time snuck in. Any time before, I would’ve gotten caught. Once, years ago, my sister had called the police when my flight didn’t land on time. Now, I was perfectly capable of life in whatever narrow sense it meant. The day after I got home, Chris walked over to my desk in lab, frowningly. “Where have you been?” he asked. “Just seeing someone,” I said. “Probably not anymore. Why? What’s up?” “So you weren’t sick?” “No. Well, I was, but nothing major. I needed a break.” I don’t think he bought it, but he didn’t push it. I’d missed him, he’d missed me. The following Sunday we watched the new episode of The Leftovers , as we had the two years before. Laurie Garvey went scuba-diving, possibly to commit suicide. It was marvelous. I spent two weeks at that lakefront house, armed with Diet Cokes, pre-made deli sandwiches, cookies, and a carton of cigarettes. I watched old seasons of The Leftovers . Then Lost . Then The OC . I kept my phone on silent. I didn’t hear from anyone. My greatest act of attention-seeking got none at all. I slept till mid-afternoon each day. After a week, I thought I had bedsores. Then I got restless. I fumed, as I still do, about society’s extreme moral judgment of suicide, which I consider—if I’m honest—just as much a human right as any other. We cannot, we must not, ask anyone to live if they do not wish to. We mustn’t ask for them to relinquish that right, no matter how terrible it may be for the living. It was odd, I thought later, how the future returned. Privately, reflexively fuming about moral beliefs much bigger than me was an old sensation, but more than that it was a new one. An idea whose absence I had not noticed rustled back to me. A knot tied loose. Passively, I began to make decisions. A sprinkling of the still “so much to see, so much to do, so much to read.” For a little bit there, I remember thinking very hard about time and the world in the way I imagine Bill Bryson must, like an unfinished picture book freshly encountered. It was chronological. That’s one way of narrating it, which makes it sound very triumphalist, if it weren’t for how funny it was. Forced solitude cures suicidal ideation—hurrah! But then there was something else too. I learned about a very strange people. During my little Eat, Disappear, Bon Iver retreat, I read only one book I’d pulled from the bottom of my to-read pile that I assume I bought because I used to have a morbid fascination with libertarian culture: Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture . A suicidal person and a peakist walk into a bar. Someday, there’ll be an audience for a very niche joke. Between 2005 and 2011, the particular subculture of “peakism” emerged in American society. Peakists believe that global oil production, in particular, had either already peaked or was about to. So is everything: food supply, energy, topsoil. Things are about to get dire. The global economy is on the brink of collapse, as is capitalism itself. As a group, peakists are left-leaning and white; they hold graduate degrees; they’re pessimistic about the possibility of political change. Peakists are survivalists, but ordinary. They stockpile resources, grow their own food, ride bicycles, compost, and try unsuccessfully to convince their friends and family to buy into this impending doom and gloom. They make fringe websites, write books, and become YouTube stars: like “Oily Cassandra,” who preached peakist dictums while performing a striptease. They do not often meet : they become hermits. The more pessimistic amongst them foresee apocalyptic scenarios, like in The Day After Tomorrow, The Happening, and Mad Max . Warfare over scarce resources. Famine. Epidemics. Billions dead. The slightly less pessimistic see a post-peak world with more self-sufficient communities. Yet, they live, despite having all the makings of a suicide cult. These are people who had seemingly answered Camus’ famous dictum that “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” On the heels of the Great Recession, the burst of the housing bubble, Occupy Wall Street, peakists are, by their own definitions, convinced not of the resilience of capitalism but its imminent collapse. Perhaps the strangest thing is that very few of them (28 percent) have ever been involved in formal or political activities related to energy or environmentalism (most who made up this figure had only attended a meeting or so). They see the apocalypse coming not by way of radical Christian millenarianism or eschatology but as an extrapolation of what we all know. To foresee the end of American imperialism or global capitalism: if only. And, of course, of course: it’s a shame to have so little hope—which must be what their friends tell them, making them want to gouge their eyes out. But at the same time: how much evidence do we really have, at that guttural, searching level, that peakists are irrational? I can’t imagine believably pathologizing such beliefs or compartmentalizing them into “religious fervor.” If a peakist dies by suicide tomorrow, won’t we do what we always do—ascribe it to mental illness instead of seeing it as a reasonable conclusion of their own ideology? I can’t say why, but peakists have been crowding my head, fuming in it, ever since. I found the forums, the books, and Oily Cassandra. I want to hold onto that. They’re in this “category” I can’t quite name, a resolution that I know has many more forms. I want to find enough things to fill this category, to figure out what it really is. I won’t be trying to kill myself again anytime soon. I’ve been reassuring my friends and family that I’m no longer suicidal for a while now. I reassure them that I’m no longer suicidal because I sense that the things that feel suicidal seem to be expanding. They don’t yet know I actually mean it now. Which is fine. Chronology still matters little to me. Even the possibility of all this newness peakists see coming feels woeful. But there is something about this time, in forward motion, that feels unanswered. Into this computer screen bubbles the thought, I know these people, don’t I? Team Sweet Meteor of Death. May 2023. If this is dying, death sure is noisy. It’s all gotten a bit much, see. All this anticipation of extinction. Almost as if we’ve all signed some collective suicide pact, waiting in the wings to be euthanized. Almost none of us have any ability to change things, which has ossified into an excuse for some very loud resignation. Almost as if Stoicism has finally prevailed as the most wise tradition in moral philosophy. Montaigne once praised the tranquil nature of peasants who had been ravaged for war, plague, and destruction, and remained stoic above it all. Perfect little saints, those peasants. The ones who paid no mind to the horrors they endured. They accepted it all willingly, and quietly. But we’re not those peasants. We’re certainly not quiet. We seem perhaps a little too willing. I’m talking, of course, about the apocalypse and that all who anticipate it do so with such wildness. Despairing with such hedonism, we herald autumn upon a single fallen leaf. Every moment in time brings cultural affirmation of an infinite number of responses to climate change ranging from the gleefully optimistic to the pessimistic, and now we are at its most abyssal ebb. Everywhere, there is a feverish variation of that Larkin verse: Most things may never happen: this one will. And that faint hint of the absurd , an inner voice insists, for the sake of completeness. More than a faint hint. Recently I spotted an issue of Harper’s in an airport harboring a cover story about the apocalypse. Subtitled “The Sense of an Ending,” which I reckon is less of an editorial choice than the wave of a white flag to imagination, the story is mostly a long list of apocalyptic trends. One could conclude that it is about reaffirming Giovanni Arrighi’s idea of late capitalism’s impending “systems collapse,” but mostly, it’s a lengthy primer of, and thus more about, Christiandom’s long history of thinking about the end times. I couldn’t say. It’s horribly imprecise. In the most recent editorial of the Real Review : “If every summer is the worst on record, then all summers are one summer, an identical experience; disaster as inevitability.” Alas, alack: we are going to die. Mark Bould’s The Anthropocene Unconscious deconstructs apocalyptic tropes in culture: the match cut montages in films and television shows, the attempts towards making the apocalypse ridiculous, the consumer demand for hours upon hours of television shows about the world after the Big Thing happens. At some point in the early days of The Pandemic, I realized just how homogenous my to-read pile of books, recently or imminently published, really was. Disaster. Catastrophe. Death. Precarity. Crisis. Extinction. Apocalypse. We could quibble all day about each of their different meanings, but boy, do they blur together nowadays. I started keeping a list of all this apocalyptic stuff when the pandemic began (like Riley on Buffy the Vampire Slayer , I feel an urge for the plural—unhappy with the real one and doomed by all possible choices, I proffer a gluttony of apocalypses). The list kept me from feeling too useless, but soon it became so long I started using tally marks. Before I stopped counting entirely, I had a tally of seven pieces in the New Yorker , with the annotation “somehow mostly about Trump?!” I do not recall any of them, but the note sounds plausible. I did, however, write a generous paragraph on Amanda Hess’ piece “Apocalypse When? Global Warming’s Endless Scroll” in the Times. Then other lists of lists. Philip Lehmann wrote about climate engineering: he began by listing recently-published books Generation Dread , The World as We Knew It , and Global Burning . As I read, I got caught up in a series of semantic dilemmas. Has the meaning of “late capitalism” changed, I wondered. Late capitalism today seems to mean the phenomenon of a system going extinct because humanity is too. It’s not just a pyramid scheme anymore. It’s not just about the gig economy. It’s just late, as if to a party. There was also Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All , a technocratic tract that put me off reading for weeks. Climate Change Apocalypse: A Young Engineer’s Travels into the Science and Politics Behind Global Warming , of which I received two advance copies. There was The Apocalypse and the End of History , which I did not read and did not seem to me to be about climate change at all, but the title reminded me of Rancière's idea of “endism,” a phrase used to describe the post-Soviet trend for historians and philosophers to declare something major had ended : whole eras of history or culture. There was a truly startling number of opinion pieces on climate depression, a mental health issue to which I’ve become quite indifferent because it seems to depend on “bad news”, of which we’ve never had a shortage. I begrudgingly watched The Last of Us . Bella Ramsey’s thirteen-year-old Ellie quipped: “People are making apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow.” I chuckled, then thought: if only. Used to be that whenever I read the testimony of survivors of tragedy, I retracted in anguish: accounts from bushfires in Australia, post-nuclear Japan, witness accounts from genocide in 1971 in Bangladesh, or the numerous accounts in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions reports from South Africa, El Salvador, and many other countries after years of unspeakable horror. People who have befallen no such tragedies talk like that now; they use millennial therapy-speak. Why bother calling it “climate anxiety”? Let’s call it what it is: climate nihilism. Usually, when a friend needs to vent and starts with the disclaimer that it’s “not that bad/first world problems,” I reassure them that nobody will be ranking their problems. But in this case, scale really is the nub of the issue. Whose climate nihilism are we hearing from nowadays? Who comprises all these storied authorial voices? The survivor of a flood that’s claimed countless lives writes an obligatory column or two. Quasi-simultaneously, American East Coasters, in presumably their first heat wave, tie themselves up in knots, and that’s all one hears or reads about until it’s over. Climate nihilism is very de rigueur . Like buccal fat removal and crop tops in the men’s section. With the apocalypse all around us, it's hard not to keep thinking of Rancière. Endism was not about climate change, but that tendency he saw—to proclaim an end to History or Politics or Ideology—is easily extended to Humanity. On endism, Kristin Ross wrote in 2009 that “philosophical activity undertaken under the sign of urgency is a new version of an old phenomenon: the heroicizing of the philosopher’s voice, the philosopher as prophet who can see ‘the end’ that others cannot see.” Endism is a viral meme now. There are TikTok stars who may as well all be named Francis Fukuyama. But, I insist, if we’re going to die, let’s at least take a moment to find the right words. The placement of the stress matters. We are going to die. We are going to die . We are going to die. (We are going to die. Too far?) Or we could defer to a YouTube commenter who wrote, on the partially unrelated subject of social media: “I’ve been on Team Sweet Meteor of Death for at least six years.” It’s a bit derivative, but it sounds fun! Apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow, indeed. Climate Psychiatric Alliance. July 2023. In the New Yorker , Jia Tolentino writes about “climate anxiety” and how psychology and psychiatry conduct “climate therapy.” Her sources are in unison that “climate anxiety” is a legitimate pathology peculiar to our time. “Climate anxiety,” writes Tolentino, “differs from many forms of anxiety a person might discuss in therapy—anxiety about crowds, or public speaking, or insufficiently washing one’s hands—because the goal is not to resolve the intrusive feeling and put it away.” It’s an awfully pedestrian way to think of anxiety: there are any number of things that are unresolvable, but sure, I suppose, we can sigh and pretend this “new” pathology, too, is believable. Halfway through the piece, Tolentino pivots, pondering her own luxury to pontificate about climate change. It's a welcome pivot, to be sure, but it seems designed to be surprising . A young Filipino woman, Isabella, skewers the Western tendency to be “thinking about the Earth, and journaling about it.” Isabella survived Typhoon Ulysses; she experienced more immediate emotions of panic and grief, with little time to process them. Later, a Native American fisherman impacted by the Exxon Valdez oil spill confesses to living and organizing through a sense of vengeance. None of this is surprising, of course, but it allows Tolentino to end ambivalently. For whatever reason, the story’s surprise element is conveyed most through Tim, a Floridian millennial with whom the piece begins, a man whose journey is meant to seem epiphanic. Tim majored in mechanical engineering. He later traveled to Indonesia, where he felt “dazed by grief” upon the news that orangutans were going extinct. He traipsed around the Sumatran jungle, returning unable to stop thinking about polluted water and carbon footprints, and with a viral case of climate anxiety. He went through a breakup during the pandemic and spiraled into a deep malaise. He then improved through therapy through the Climate Psychiatry Alliance. When we return to Tim at the end of the story, we discover that he had undiagnosed A.D.H.D. “He’d come to suspect,” Tolentino writes conspiratorially, “that he’d sometimes used climate anxiety as a container for his own, more intimate problems.” Well, duh. That’s obvious for the same reason this essay may feel obvious: humans are self-indulgent. That is fucking banal. Not so for Tolentino. Save the global pandemic, Tim suffered no natural disaster. He did, like many of us, suffer more prosaic disasters. Breakups. Intense isolation. An undiagnosed condition. In the meantime, psychiatry constructed a whole new pathology to ascribe to his fixating mind. Tolentino unfurls it like some freshly discovered ancient scribe. I may be a formerly suicidal person, but I’d like to think I’ve never thought of myself as uniquely grappling with anything at all. This is what everyone deals with. Isn’t climate anxiety, or even active crisis, always simultaneously in the domain of the intimate and the global? The notion of “climate anxiety” can support a plausible story of a fixating mind. But it cannot support a plausible story of disaster-induced anxiety: a brand-new thing! The neat story can ascribe anxiety to climate change, even pathologize it. An unrelated diagnosis can undo it entirely. Pathologies are often fragile and fictitious. And that’s fine to admit! My own woe led me, rather inexplicably, to study the very thing breeding peakists and nihilists—climate change—and I insist it’s fine to admit to all the conflation. The Climate Psychiatric Alliance cannot possibly be “holistic”; there will always be something greater one will attempt to perceive. And that’s fine! It would not be cruel to deny its categorization, which, I suspect, might be what the Climate Psychiatric Alliance might argue. Yes, I find the pathologizing of “climate anxiety” simplistic and ahistorical. That doesn’t mean that I dismiss the psychic toll of impending disaster. Relationships or careers crumbling as orangutans go extinct? Depressed because you lost your job at the same time as islands far from you are sinking? Therapy’s great for that. Disaster is always personal, always omnipresent. It’s a given. Not the apocalypse— disaster . The kind that reaches into our lives. The kind that is never unique because it lives in skies, seas, selves, and cheap similes. It patiently grows until we can see it. Like any life lived, it aches. Elsewhere, it blazes across scales. In every part of our being and everything else too. Disaster, like life, is all-encompassing; let it be so. Carbon footprints cannot assess pain, for pain is comorbid with far too much. So is disaster. Twin Bed. October 2017. I’ve just realized that I’ve lost another of my closest friends, a friend from college. I’ve sent her so many texts I feel like I’m in a Taylor Swift song. She loves Taylor Swift. I hope she listens to more of her music and gets back to me. “You will lose people!” Zoya is telling me very gravely. Zoya is one of my childhood best friends. She does not tolerate self-sabotage. “And you need to grow up about it,” she continues, because, of course, she does. “I know you’re really bad at letting people go, but you need to get better because this shit happens. People lose friends.” My friend hasn’t gotten back to me. She never will. I’m really not quite sure why the end of a friendship is so much more emotionally gutting than most everything else in life. It’s confounding. Once, my mother didn’t speak to me for six months, and I spent them with no knowledge of how long it would last. I have lost romantic partners. Friends, though—those are some real disasters. They have so little cultural weight. You can’t use them as excuses. The last time I met my friend, I was staying at her apartment in New York. As usual, we shared the bed. One night, halfway to sleep, she told me about the moment she was certain we’d be in each other’s lives forever. A year or two earlier, we’d had a very big fight on Christmas in Chicago. Drunk, we went to a CVS together because we needed to pee. Outside the bathroom, we happened upon a corkboard where the store’s staff had pinned wish lists for a Secret Santa party. That’s so sad, I said. That’s so fucking condescending, she said. It was a glorious fight. I argued that it was really sad because the things they asked for were really cheap and for family members: "$7 airplane model for my son,” “$4 bar of chocolate for my mom.” Wasn’t it enough that they had to work till 2 AM over the holidays? She argued that regardless of my insistence on some sort of solidarity, I was looking down on them. We yelled at each other for twenty minutes, fumed all the way back to my place, and didn’t speak for two days. Neither of us apologized, and then one day, I needed her help, as the only fellow biologist, for an important presentation, and without noting what had happened, we were friends again. Such things happened with many of my friends. But she and I rarely fought because when we did, it was terrible. We once cleared a roomful of drunken partiers dancing to EDM music. Our fights required resolution, or else. The night she recounted our sole unresolved fight, she told me that that was when she realized that no matter how angry she got with me, I was too much like family to her. When I remember that fight and its desperate need for resolution, I return to something about respect. I still think I had a point in that fight, but she did, too, because she has a strong moral compass. Even if I was sometimes at odds with it, I respected it. It was close enough to mine that I could understand it. We didn’t need to say anything that time, I noted in bed. We trusted in each other’s goodness enough to know it was just about the yelling. I don’t understand how we got from then to now. Sleeping next to each other in a twin bed like only significant others and best friends can, we went to sleep cozy and loved. That’s gone now. No fight took place, but I must have done something morally unconscionable because I cannot imagine her having any other reason. I don’t know why it hurts so much, but I have a strange feeling it has something to do with how common it is. Other situations garner far more sympathy. The loss of a friendship is devastating—and banal. People talk about how time heals all wounds, but I am not a paper cut, I am not a severed salamander capable of regeneration, I am not a time-traveler with something other than now. Now, I am indicted for reasons I do not know, and I believe I never will. But Zoya’s right. I’m too old to pretend these things do not happen. I’m walking home as she tells me. There are times even the most romantic amongst us must master moderation. The air was misty when we started talking. It seemed so wispy and idyllic. But now it’s snowing quite heavily, and I must be more pragmatic. My jacket has a hole in the back, and there’s snow wedged near the bottom of my spine. There are more urgent concerns. There is no such guarantee against such losses. A moral compass is no match for the bigness of this world, its ability to keep us separated for the rest of our lives, and its agility with turning fickle decisions to certainties. How much of disaster resides here? In a lost friendship. In days and nights. In the anhedonia of the mind. Do people sit back and wait for the end of days because they’re afraid of losing things or because they already have? Always-Time. November 2019. I’m co-presenting in a session at an Environmental Humanities seminar on “Futurity.” At my suggestion, we've started with a clip of the cold open from the first episode of The Leftovers ’ final season. The clip shows 19th-century Millerites in white robes, standing on the roofs of their houses. They’ve been told a date for the apocalypse. On that day, a husband, wife, and their child climb up onto their roof and wait for it all to end. The day passes, and another date appears; one date after another, they wait, but the apocalypse never comes. The number of believers dwindles; only the wife continues to have faith, and still it does not come until finally, the crushing ignominy makes her a village pariah. The clip ends, and I want to say that now, all of a sudden, a scene I have cried over seems stupid. I’m struggling, really struggling, to figure out what to say next, to move past the Millerites, to find something to say about our future, let alone our “futurities.” Why did I suggest this clip? I’d felt it was relevant to faith, the apocalypse, disaster, change, something—but now I have no idea what I was thinking. Suddenly, I feel it’s a bit irresponsible to equate climate change with apocalypse when, instead, it’s just the same old disasters, except many more and faster. That contraction of time may make it feel like the same thing, but it most certainly is not. And what the fuck is “futurity” supposed to be? I start talking about death instead. About new historical literature on death in the Anthropocene. The collapse of the self in the face of climate change. This happens reflexively, desperately, because as luck would have it, I’m well-versed in the philosophy of death, and remixing snippets of my greatest hits fills up the necessary space. After, there’s a good minute or two of silence, and soon, we’re taking a break for food, piling hummus and tahini and pita onto disposable plates. I’m spending most of my days through gritted teeth. I’m quite exhausted. Look at us, Ivy-Leaguers reading esoteric expositions that are all different ways of saying how our children and grand-children will face the consequences of climate change if we let the Earth warm 3 degrees or more. Our children? If?! How can I emphasize this enough: I have zero idea what exactly I’m supposed to feel when anyone with half a mind knows that we careened off the face of a cliff a long time ago, but is finding ways to avoid admitting that they’re always looking down. Am I missing something here? Am I the only person stupid enough to feel this way? Greta Thunberg is sailing across the Atlantic. The Argentinian artist Nino Cobre—sponsored by an environmental nonprofit that seems to have nothing better to do with its money—paints a mural of her on the side of a building on Mason Street in San Francisco. A friend active in the Sunrise Movement tells me she’s exhausted, and her words are all collapsed together with the frustration of her novel-in-progress and the stress of medical bills. I walk out of a class and watch students marching across campus protesting Yale’s lack of action on divestment from the fossil fuel industry. Bernie Sanders details his Green New Deal, and it is the most ambitious set of policy proposals by any candidate. Along comes Jonathan Franzen. “You can keep on hoping,” he writes darkly, “that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.” Franzen writes that a kind of denial of climate change catastrophe is present in progressive politics and climate activism. He disparages the “climate activists [who] argue that if we publicly admit that the problem can’t be solved, it will discourage people from taking any ameliorative action at all. This seems to me not only a patronizing calculation but an ineffectual one, given how little progress we have to show for it to date.” This is the last straw. Here we have a writer who has put down in plain terms the defeatism I feel so often, and I dislike him for it. Luckily, everyone else seems to as well. Why? The easiest part of the answer is that Franzen belittles the Green New Deal with elitist disdain, thumbing his nose at people with bold plans of action. But beyond that, I struggle. Maybe we’re angry because, although there is more than a kernel of truth embedded within the argument, our cynicism and his are keeping us from the work. Sure, I can admit a lot of the work of idealism just isn’t needed. But nobody needs to hear that all we have left to do is to sit back and wait for the apocalypse either. In truth, what we’re all really annoyed by, I think, is the conflation of the affective response of defeatism with righteousness. I may be entitled to feel defeated, but that does not mean it is the right thing to be. Obviously, I’ve felt all along that there’s utility in not admitting what I really believe; why else would it be so much harder than admitting it? But let’s face facts. In a matter of a year or two, climate pessimism will be everywhere very soon, and though we’re fighting for mass action, we’ve really had no good antidote to climate pessimism while we wait. I feel like many of us like to think of climate catastrophe as wholly unique, a real apocalypse. Which it is, but it also isn’t. All the disasters in history have made it so that what we will get is not totally unique. Climate pessimism is what we get when we start to pretend as if nobody’s studied disasters at all. As if people haven’t witnessed them and lived to tell the tale. As if people from the Alaskan Arctic to earthquake-prone island-nations have not been preparing for decades. As if war hasn’t paralyzed peoples for generations, and armies and bombs haven’t obliterated them; as if drought didn’t spark the tinder box of civil war in Syria, and hurricanes haven’t already ravaged New Orleans and Puerto Rico and earthquakes haven’t already devastated Indonesia and Haiti and Kashmir—and oh look, Puerto Rico again too. Climate change isn’t one seismic wave that knocks us all out, and we all know this, but we talk like it is. It will be like it is : a patchwork of storms, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, tsunamis, droughts, wars, genocides, civil wars; now here, then there, just much faster, then simultaneously, and many more at an unprecedented scale. Is that better or worse than the apocalypse? What I tell myself is: if humankind had never faced disasters before, then perhaps I could sit around being righteously defeated. It’s a very strange time to be a historian of disaster, which I’m beginning to think of as synonymous with the environmental historian. Yet somehow, alas, I am ardent that this is what I meant to do. I chose this, very actively, this second doctorate, which I realize everyone finds outrageous. And my choice is more confounding because what is it that I am doing ? Looking? Yes, looking. Looking at disaster is paralyzing. Hasn’t that always been the case? Would that be a good reason to stop doing it? Of course not. But the short answer is too short, and the long answer is too long. Sitting here, typing in Bass Library in the extremely peculiar town that is New Haven, inside an empire hell-bent on its own destruction, I want to say it outright: around the time an appropriate arrangement emerges, we will all be dead. But anyway. Simultaneity. November 2022. On a summer afternoon in Colombo, at one of the protests urging the ousting of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, I found out that Roe v. Wade had been definitively struck down. I avoided social media, for I was in another place just as afraid. The aragalaya in Sri Lanka had been ongoing for much of the year. With economic collapse came power cuts, inflation went rampant, making all essential goods unaffordable for most. At the same time, I was in the archives, poking my head out every so often for an oral history interview. I was speaking to one diver and reef biologist. At some point he discussed a particular site that has long been a tourist hotspot. His voice cracked, and he began to speak at a lower volume. That site in particular made him sad. I paused to ask him how it felt to be there. “Nothing’s there,” he said. “All white.” We parted ways. I mulled for a long time why it was that the death of coral reefs is often a synecdoche for climate change catastrophe, and not the far better one: sadness. Rajapaksa crept out of the country in the middle of the night. Ranil Wickremasinghe, an equally troublesome man, became President, cracking down on the aragalaya with an abrupt zeal. Something broke between the day before and the days immediately after Rajapaksa’s departure. Those days, people talked how it all now felt a bit pointless, if I asked. They had no fuel in their tuk-tuks, no electricity at home, food was being rationed, shops were shuttering. Then the floods in Pakistan began. Before anyone quite knew the scale of it, I had been on the phone with our co-worker in Karachi who apologized for not having gotten back to me; she’d had no internet or electricity for a week. I told her there was no need to apologize. A question sat momentarily in my mind before it slipped away. That was in July. It is now November in New Haven, and the simultaneity of crises continues to reverberate, as I assume it must for everyone. Recently, SAAG began fundraising for the Women Democratic Front in Pakistan. I read Ibrahim Buriro’s dispatch from his village of Sabu Khan Buriro in Sindh. I was ashamed, because the catastrophe he described sounded quieter than the din in my head, but it felt worse. I didn’t know how to picture it: what losing that many people looks like. There was none. Only centuries-old paintings of the deluge painted by those who predicted the end times. I read the late K Za Win’s poem , written in protest of the military coup in Myanmar, and tried to picture it. I could only see the first row of protesters at a march. Should we resist the urge to project our imagination onto such disasters, as long as we do not not fail to attend to them? The question that had popped into my head before I knew about the floods was: “How bad will it be?” It’s like wishing for the gift of prophecy, even though it would likely cripple us. I wish I could go back to other moments of writing my essay where I was less incredulous of the scale of disaster. Where I can sense myself searching to know what it feels like, to truly relate. I’d like to know if being a witness to the simultaneity of all this is at all useful. I want to know when I’m old enough to stop pretending such things do not happen. I want us to prepare better, together. I want it so badly. Today marks first snow. It’s snowing quite heavily, and I know I must be pragmatic. We may distract ourselves. We may take a moment, and only that. We may distance ourselves, and not only that. A Bunch of Plinys. May 2020. Why on earth did I turn to a second doctorate—to history? I get asked this almost every day. What all those faces say is: this is a crazy person. I answer truthfully. I knew this is what I wanted my life to be, to mean. It is what I want to do. But why? I’ve taken stabs at a number of answers over the past few weeks in this document. They became more and more obscure. Like a tawdry poet, I first went to the Romantics and the sublime. That ambivalence in the face of destruction: horrific, godly, cosmic, perhaps beautiful. But I don’t need any more fucking ambivalence, I am fat with it. I went to the Stoics. To Seneca and Epictetus; to Montaigne, who is not a canonical Stoic, but for me cannot be seen as anything but. But as comforted as I often feel by Stoics, they are revelatory to me almost entirely because of their rhetoric. They are patronizing. I went to Heidegger, with his grand notions of Dasein. Dasein is a human who can only be if they have the foresight to see death coming. Dasein orients towards death as it barrels towards them, with the knowledge of their past. Your futurity —to butcher Heideggerian ideas of “being”—is a state of being in which the future of you is not an unknown. It is not even in the future, really. It is already coming towards you. That was somewhat useful, but it also felt like an elevated version of the Marvel multiverse. I didn’t know what to do with him: emotionally, that is, not epistemologically. “Why does the history of disaster matter to me?” I ask, to explain “in my own words.” Well, perhaps because I feel that familiarizing destruction is key to understanding it. It’s an inexplicable moral sense. There’s a category of things I want to put my finger on, and it pivots on humans, on us; on me, and back on us. It matters because I am not special. Walter Benjamin is famous for his idea of the angel of history. The idea of the angel is simple: The angel looks back and sees catastrophe. A storm hits. The angel cannot help but be swept along into the future while his back is turned. The storm is progress. Benjamin’s oft-cited notion, shorn from context, often loses some of that ambivalent, essayistic quality that makes him so brilliant. The angel of history was a way for Benjamin to recognize what the human is; “to understand a humanity that proves itself by destruction.” Benjamin projected his ideas onto a Paul Klee painting in a rhetorical struggle, approaching history like a critic, or even a novelist (earlier in Theses , Benjamin used the more colorful metaphor of a chess-playing puppet to connote "historical materialism." The narrative arc of the angel is clean and thus, perhaps, more memorable). But he was insistent on a "secret agreement" between the past and the present. When people look upon destruction, what can seem feckless, even inhumane, can be the opposite. One needs to look back to move forward. I, too, found succor not in dictums but stories and images . They rang more new and true. For one thing, there’s something odd about the very sources of disaster history. I quickly began to suspect that humans have not historically been good at leaving first-hand traces of the horrors they’ve survived. Most of it happens via proxy. It seems sensible to think that some kind of “instinct,” visceral memory, or closeness would create our corpus of disaster stories, but strangely, none of it seems to push people towards storytelling. Not for that purpose, anyway. First-person accounts from survivors are often obtained, less so offered; often against their will and rarely in a setting of their choosing. Here's one story. The great naturalist Pliny the Elder was a man of his time: he ascribed devastation to providence. He saw Mount Vesuvius explode in 79 CE, and ventured into it. It was the first thoroughly-documented volcanic eruption, a watershed moment for volcanology. He died there. Years later, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, who was with Pliny the Elder earlier on the day of the eruption, related what he knew to the historian Tacitus. On the day of the eruption, the younger Pliny’s mother drew her father’s attention to a strange cloud. Pliny the Elder saw it and asked his nephew if he wanted to join him, but the younger Pliny refused (apparently, he needed to study). Pliny the Elder ventured by boat. “In likeness and form,” Pliny the Younger wrote in his letter, “[the eruption] more closely resembled a pine-tree than anything else… and then spread out into a number of branches.” "Pliny the Younger and his Mother at Misenum, 79 A.D." Angelica Kauffman (1785) Pliny the Elder, his nephew claimed, journeyed towards the volcano on a small ship. Before he arrived, a woman begged him to save her, and the old man instantly hopped into the role of rescuer. Having saved many other people as well, the older Pliny moved “towards the place whence others were fleeing, and steering a direct course… utterly devoid of fear.” Let’s pause here to note the implausible. Pliny the Elder was notably fat. Most likely, he dictated his observations to an amanuensis from the deck of his ship. Having witnessed presumably enough, Pliny the Elder dined, slept, and died soon thereafter. Pliny the Younger closed the letter with a self-pitying proclamation that his own experience, in Misenum, was of no import. It was an invitation, sort of an “Oh, don’t ask, it was terrible!” And Tacitus asked. So Pliny wrote another letter relating the post-eruption scene in Misenum, where the skies blackened, the streets overrun with “people crowding in masses upon us” to escape the city. Everybody feared death. Pliny’s mother begged of him to leave her to die, for she was old and she did not want to slow him down. He insisted he would not leave her. At nighttime, they returned to Misenum where everything was layered with ashes, in ruin. Pliny the Younger’s second letter is more emotional and evocative than his first. There is a sense that the details making up the knowledge of the eruption—the ash, smoke, the pine tree cloud, the wreckage, the ships, the woman who called for help, the amanuensis who noted what the naturalist saw—are veiling an emotional experience Pliny still shies away from. But he ends this second letter by warning Tacitus menacingly: “You will not read these details, which are not up to the dignity of history , as though you were about to incorporate them in your writings.” We don’t know if Pliny was writing from an impulse of ancient egotism or genuine self-deprecation. But I find an unsettling believability to his warning to Tacitus: even clear-headed observers who survive catastrophe and look back at it feel incapable of the act of doing history. There seems to be a too-authentic closeness that digs a trench, on one side of which a survivor will always be paralyzed, and the job will have to go to someone else. It is like, or perhaps is, post-traumatic stress disorder. Volcanoes took a long time to be figured out; time we do not have. Pliny’s letters about Mount Vesuvius brought volcanology into vogue for a time. And then it's almost as if there was an enormous gap in volcanology from the ancients till seemingly the sixteenth century. Vesuvius erupted again in 1631, and Etna in 1669. Suddenly everyone from Hooke to Newton, Cuvier to Goethe had some opinion. Controversies in volcanology bedeviled philosophers, natural historians, and geologists alike. Well into the nineteenth century, scientists debated ideas of volcanology that could be traced at least as far back as Lucretius. Of course, it's not as if volcanoes went on recess. I can't quite explain the gap, except by way of my own ignorance, but it seems to me that volcanoes, as a concept, are defined by modern science. Thus, perhaps for too many, Pliny the Younger's experience, and the ideas of many others, truly were not up to the "dignity of history." One scholar blames the many lost years squarely on the resurgence of Christian premillennialism, i.e., end-of-days thinking. But premillennialism also coincided with postmillennialism . What with Christian missionaries invading new lands for people to convert, there was also growing optimism for a great era for Christian prosperity; a Golden Age Millennium of greatness before the end was nigh. In this circuitous way, I ended up where I never wanted to be: Christian eschatology, where apocalypse writing always begins. I understand why. The stories are indelible. The Christian view of volcanoes for much of the early modern period does not seem too dissimilar to that of the ancients: both associated volcanoes with punishment and the fires of Hell. Just as Virgil proclaimed that the giant Enceladus was buried under the eruption of Etna by the goddess Athena for defying the gods, Christianity throughout the Middle Ages and beyond proclaimed the upswell of lava as the manifestation of the wrath of God and a damning indictment of the societies inflicted by them. Earthquakes and other disasters, even war, generated similar responses for much of recorded human history: they were all indicative of the wrath of one god or many. The ancient Greeks often blamed earthquakes on the god Poseidon. Japanese folklore blames a great catfish named Namazu. The Book of Revelation chronicles the “seven bowls” of God’s wrath, the bowls poured by angels, each one causing a catastrophic event foreseen in a vision. After the bowls of bodily sores, mass extinction in the oceans, the rivers turning to blood, a literal firebombing by the Sun, and more—finally, there is a giant, world-ending earthquake. “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since mankind has been on earth,” the Book of Revelation says, in one of its more modest moments. A rather anticlimactic denouement. Disasters have a way of creating vacancies for moral exhortations—though not necessarily theological ones. All that godsplaining needs somewhere to go. That is familiar to me. I was raised Muslim, and now whenever climate change comes up in the company of elders, all I hear about is qiyamat , or Judgment Day. It’s a busy day. Now that’s new. Growing up, people said all sorts of things were indications of qiyamat . A scandalous billboard. A particularly brazen female news anchor. On one baffling occasion, it was the way my friend’s cat meowed. Peevish uncles often used qiyamat as a nationalist, anti-India sentiment. But it’s so big now. Those uncles now know that the flood and the cat’s meow do not sit in the same category. Like scholars, they invoke human blunders. Qiyamat is a prophecy foretold centuries ago. It’s history; it’s up to the dignity of history. We may be up to the dignity of history. It depends on what we do with ourselves. I wish to dignify people through history; that is my only answer to explain my crazy decision to turn to it. That does not mean I am special. None of us are. The Ruin and the Volcano. November 2020. For Benjamin, “he who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.” W.H. Sebald did that literally. I said earlier that environmental history may well be the history of disaster. But Benjamin and Sebald take this one step further. When the question is strictly material , one could rephrase it: is the history of the disaster the same thing as the history of the ruin? Sebald was born and grew up on the outskirts of the Bavarian Alps in 1944. His father, a prisoner of war until 1947, was part of the Nazi armed forces. Images of destruction and the ruins of postwar Germany were the first things he recalled when he felt like he was returning “home.” In a famous essay, Sebald the child and the adult, reveals himself to be totally confounded by just how little there was to see of all this destruction in the lives of people: It is true that the strategic-bombing surveys published by the Allies … show that the Royal Air Force alone dropped almost a million tons of bombs on enemy territory; it is true that of the hundred and thirty-one towns and cities attacked, some only once and some repeatedly, many were almost entirely flattened, that about six hundred thousand German civilians fell victim to the air raids and three and a half million homes were destroyed … but we do not grasp what it all actually meant … It seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness. So many people all just carried on as if nothing had ever happened. That so much of it occurred after Hitler was long gone, after war elsewhere had ended, did not matter. For Churchill, Solly Zuckerman, and Arthur Harris, the strategy of total destruction was to achieve “wholesale an annihilation of the enemy, with his dwellings, his history, and his natural environment, as can possibly be achieved.” Rendered by Sebald, it is devastating, perhaps even sublime, the extent to which the destroyed environment was just as much a part of the architecture of human habitation as a city or a dwelling. “How ought such a natural history of destruction to begin?” he asked. There is no answer, not in Sebald’s novels, not in his essays. There are simply things going on unfolding: things decaying, ruins existing. He walked along the millions of bricks left behind from the air-dropped ordnances and the fire-storms and the collapse of apartment buildings, surveying the postwar city landscape excavating brick-by-brick, and found no answer as to what need there was for such destruction except for the whims of a few men. What we should fear the most is not the hurricane but when people are failed. In his “nature-history” of Paris, Benjamin merges uncontrollable disaster with a proletarian mob—it’s a possibility of great potential. The potential wobbles, though, in his words. In some places, in many places, revolution may manifest as mindless destruction—what if it’s so boundless, there is not enough potential left? There are many who covet the safety provided to many of us; they’re not wrong. The very geography of disaster, we all know, is unjust. And to me, the white-hot anger of a people wronged is more terrifying than a volcano. It is conceivable that a situation arises where it won’t matter who is seen as culpable; it is conceivable that powerful actors make it so. If we remain paralyzed for too long, repeating mantras of anxiety or the denial of its existence, it will not be a hurricane that tears us limb from limb. My friend Meg recently wrote to me about this essay. “I think sometimes you use your brain as a way to step away from the most uncomfortable parts of yourself because you are more comfortable with the realities of global disaster than you are with the personal ones,” she wrote. She’s right, but that also describes most academics. They say to write the book you want to read. Unfortunately, I can’t, for this one cannot be written alone. Now-Time. August 2023. Now somehow, now somehow, the people in the worlds I inhabit most closely—that of academia, environmental humanities, global history, energy history—don’t actually look at apocalypticism, endism, whatever you may call it, straight in the face. Even though the works that define these fields, and those continually published, are painstaking in deepening the scale of the problems climate change poses, the problem of all this pessimism is not spoken aloud, and if it is, the responses are so very trite. There are exceptions—I admire the work of Bedour Alagraa and Anna Tsing, among others—but the hush is deafening. Over the years that I have brought up climate pessimism to various scholars, I have only ever received one answer, delivered in dismissive, patronizing fashion. It is always the same answer everyone has heard many times: about the necessity of hope, rarely justified in any real or specific terms insofar as having reason to hope, but simply an expression of it. As if we haven’t heard that old canard before. As if people are incapable of holding things simultaneously. As if ambivalence or serious engagement is a step too far for academia. Any other answers are mere quibbles disguised as serious responses: “It won’t be an apocalypse,” “We need to organize.” In the very vocation set out to define the problem, to demonstrate how we got here, the people populating it have no answer to how many are responding affectively to climate change, or to the many alarming cover stories and books and articles producing their doom-scroll, or even what all those alarmist signs are a symptom of. Here, in hallowed halls, climate pessimism is verboten. The most generous version of it I’ve heard is by AOC in a recent Instagram Live. After spending half an hour outlining how climate change impacts every aspect of human life, she was in a bit of a hurry. “I am a big believer in ‘climate optimism’, she said. “You ever notice that it's easier to imagine everything going to hell than it is things actually working out and getting better? People are reactive, and the challenges that the climate crisis presents to us are going to require a reorganization of the parts of our society. And people don't like being proactive… I just really believe that climate doomerism and cynicism in general leads you down a very dark path.” There’s the chastisement on moral grounds, and then there are things that, frankly, sound peakist. The chastisement is typical. The biggest part of it is the idea that cynical people are necessarily doing nothing. Then there are the things at odds with the core ideas AOC has long espoused. It’s not the fault of the vast majority of people. Individualistic action will not be enough. Power, capital, and political systems are resilient. The imminent collapse roars back. “[Systems] are simply going to collapse, and we can make a proactive decision about that,” AOC argues. “Certain things collapsing doesn't mean doom. It means we need to make space for a better way. … We should not have to move heaven and earth to save these things that are collapsing under their own weight because they never made sense.” What does this mean? What silent majority is moving heaven and earth to save systems, and what exactly is collapsing again? What proactive decisions were the vast majority of people on this planet supposed to but failed to make? Is the argument that there is some sort of absence of global protest, or do we, as usual, just mean America? There is no shortage of calls for revolution; there is so much uncertainty as to its imminence despite centuries of vociferous argument. But let's run with AOC's premise anyway. If all that is true, perhaps we should also not lose many things that are precious: lives, primarily. How can anyone be sure that “systems collapse” and “death” won’t happen simultaneously? They might! A Marxist education allowed me to understand that acceptance of lives lost is at the heart of the idea of revolution. Is climate optimism too shy to admit into its arena that horrible, uncertain trade-off? For me, climate optimism is denialism that there is logic to pessimism; a relegation of pessimism to the emotional, supposedly illogical. It requires recourse to very dubious things: that imagining utopia is difficult, that our imaginations can incite action, that our actions are sufficient, that doomers are uninformed, that systems are tottering. Climate optimists often directly contradict what they elsewhere preach—that the scale of the problem is pervasive—with a strange Pollyannaish turn to hope as a cure-all. At best, it is an unfinished thought. Like mine. The overwhelming majority of peakists express views that are far-left. And of course, it should be said that some of what peakists believe doesn’t justify their survivalist thinking. They’re largely anti-capitalists who believe capitalism is short-lived, and that oil production will peak soon, or it already has. To me, either of those seems like a reason to hope—I just don’t quite believe them. Different people take the same evidence to mean radically different things. The human brain is not internally consistent in its own logic, and in this peakists are not unlike climate optimists. Peakists also believe the state has not done anywhere near enough for racial minorities. They express the belief that the US is an oligarchy, they disdain both political parties, and electoral politics in general. They sound like almost everyone I’ve met in the US who identifies with the left. Doomers, as a group, may well be overrepresented on the left. They are many of the people we are looking to recruit. Some have been pathologized with “climate anxiety.” Climate optimism would have us shame it out of them. Validation of what another might be feeling cannot exist here. To which I must ask: are we trying to lose? Then, that canard—that being pessimistic is unethical and dangerous . It’s a slippery slope argument. Like most slippery slopes, it’s facetious and determinist. It’s a finger wag—one might say “~vibes~”—as a statement of belief based on illusory evidence. Lynne Segal in the Boston Review argues that “such pessimism can dangerously align us with a form of reactionary conservatism, merely gawping at the dire state of things, apparently helpless before impending disaster.” Segal mentions the dystopia of The Hunger Games as a fantasy that obliterates utopian visions. For Segal, what combats pessimism is collective action and solidarity which produce care and joy. It is a lovely thought, but again: we have and continue to do all of this, and there is no magic threshold Segal or any theorist can come up with. Which makes it all just hoary preaching to the choir. There is no reason to believe pessimism should necessarily make one a reactionary conservative. Emotions are not partisan objects. I’ve been a pessimist, and I persist with my work. I believe it very important. As I see it, most people who dedicate time to understanding and combating climate change feel a great deal of pessimism actually: it’s perfectly natural to feel several things all at once. And while solidarity is joyful, organizing is exhausting . Ask anyone organizing a union: most of the time, it feels like we’re on a giant hamster wheel. I see no reason why my most doomer self would spurn collective action in perpetuity. It feels strange, yes: why bother fighting when you feel so defeated? But that’s precisely it. So many things are not unique about this time. Humans fight unwinnable battles all the time; chastising pessimists with variations on the same cliché is not, in fact, a solution. And neither Logic nor Rhetoric have ever been the wisest antidotes for depression , though they’ve been deployed for much of recorded human history. And also: excuse you, The Hunger Games is excellent . There is no evidence that its audience slipped into reactionary conservatism upon its end. Why would it? It ends by dismantling the dystopia. My point in all this, my reason for vacillating so violently seems plain to me now. I want admission. Our own private disasters collide with global ones, and we feel terrible. If we want to organize, surely part of the “care” of solidarity is to recognize the thing climate activists and scholars seem loath to admit: we’re not feeling good about it. And that’s fine. Sure, it will make the slogans harder to write, but it’s better than deluding ourselves that our comrades truly believe that we can pull off fossil fuel divestment and break pipelines by the end of the year, and if we do so, we’re saved . But most of us don’t believe that’ll happen, any of it. Sign us up anyway. In 2017, Ashley Dawson argued that global capitalism now is not so much about uneven development but about uneven disaster, even if Western media scarcely covers disasters in developing countries. Spectacular, record-breaking heat waves struck the Pacific Northwest, on the heels of of all those elsewhere in the Americas. Then the catastrophic wildfires devastated Hawai’i, with thousands dead, injured, or missing. I suspect those were the things we all heard about. Meanwhile, Typhoon Khanun hit the Korean Peninsula, where there have only been five typhoon-level storms since 1945, and Russia, destroying farmland, killing and injuring hundreds. Typhoon Doksuri killed approximately sixty people in Fujian province, China. The El Niño phenomenon causing drought in much of East Asia has villagers in Indonesia digging up river beds. 8,000 evacuees are stranded as the wildfires in the Canary Islands continue to rage. Wildfires rage in Greece. These are just some natural disasters. I’d wager every country is plagued by problems we parcel as political or economic that are exacerbated by climate change or energy in some way. I intend this match-cut exposition to situate us, at the very end, not so much in time but in banality. None of us know how to simultaneously obtain the stories, persons, and sentences of disaster, let alone the planet. Disaster resides. In the now-time, as in the everywhere-time, always-time, and to-be-time. It seeps. It sets up house. The doomer is Cassandra. Some may suspect she is telling the truth. They all treat her as if she is insane. In John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Gena Rowlands’ Mabel, supposedly a manic psychotic, is stranded in an aggressive family who do the opposite of what they say. They all keep insisting they must have a good time, but they never even try. All they do is caterwaul. Mabel knows how to have a good time. She reacts, she loves, she dances, she sings. She seems to know precisely what’s going on. She demands someone tell her the truth, but they never do. Six months pass in a mental hospital, where she is treated with electroshock therapy. When she returns, her husband asks her at the dinner table what the hospital was like, her eyes dart around. “Everybody’s here,” she says tentatively, like someone learning to speak. “Seems like a party.” Later, when she mentions the hospital routine, she is chastised. The cruelty of this fait accompli is immeasurable. The sane peck and pick away at you until you howl in pain. “Aha!” they’ll say in unison. Mabel asks tearfully of her father at the crowded table: “Dad, please stand up for me.” He stands up. She says no, not that, sit down. “Please stand up for me.” He stands again. “I don’t understand this game,” he says. “Good times from now on,” Mabel’s husband yells. “Things are gonna get better and better and better, and then they’ll get better than that and then they’ll get better.” I do not endorse this ridiculous notion that this is how we should treat pessimists. I do not endorse it because oftentimes, I agree. Oftentimes, I don’t. So what? What are we so afraid of that we can’t admit how afraid we are? What’s the worst that can happen? That with their last breath, the doomer turns to smirk and say: “Told you so”? At the Sentence. December 2022. It is the day before 2023. I don’t know what I was yesterday, but I am a pessimist today. Not so long ago, believing in climate change at all was the strangest kind of inversion: we, the believers, were equivalent to the Millerite pariah; the deniers the apocalypse-skeptics, all the people who rolled their eyes at religious zealots. Now it feels that axis has spun, bewilderingly pitting optimists and pessimists at opposite ends. Of course, we all have our reasons. We think they are good. But is there an axis at all if anyone can be of two minds? Recently, I pulled up my list on the impending apocalypse, and instead of alarm, I felt inadequate to actually work on climate change for a few reasons. The first is embarrassing. In the beginning of the 2020, I fell into a deep writing slump, and aside from the words on these pages—which I considered diary entries—I have written nothing since. That is until two days ago when my friend Sarah read this draft and forced me to complete it as an editorial. What’s worse, I’ve lured you into reading about disaster, but I still don’t know what it means. What is it? As far as I can tell, the disaster we chronicle does feel more like ruin. Like Sebald, that’s the only way I can really picture it, and the picture is after the fact. Not writing had an interesting effect on my brain. For the first time in my life, the closest I can come to original thought is in visual art. Six months ago, I bought some fancy artist papers and a canvas, acrylic paints, India ink, and I started to paint something I’d sketched out. I’d learned to embroider over the pandemic so every time I just didn’t know to make something, I’d correct it by using thread. Not to give anything form, just to fill space. I tell myself they’re supposed to be columns and I let the stitching falter, to make myself feel better. I’m making an old ruin. So, in other words, I learned how to embroider, paint, color, and flounder solely to attempt at making a point. Isn’t that something? "Untitled" Acrylic, india ink, thread. By the author (2022) Two things bubble out: aesthetics and death. In recent years, I’ve become a particular fan of Derrida, which is surprising, because for quite some time, he was more impenetrable to me than even Heidegger or Foucault were. Then just the other day, I read Brian Dillon on the subject of Derrida. Dillon writes: I see now why Theory was so attractive to a young man, a boy really, who had lost both parents within five years. These writings seemed to confirm not only that disaster was real, and general, and happened even at the smallest levels of language, but also that catastrophe could be turned. Art was nothing but an acknowledgment of this moment when you realized the cracks had been there all along… I fell in love with such moments of collapse. “Aestheticizing,” we’d learn to say of such love; I hate the word to this day. As if there was anything available, anything left, except aesthetics, except an effort to frame the wreckage in the aftermath, at the last. The way Dillon links Derrida’s personal history to disaster and language makes my heart skip a beat, as does the defense of the aesthetic. It would be wise to use every thinker or theorist in this crisis this way. Trying harder than we have before to humanize one another, a prosaic thing to say, but what tactic could be sounder? What is it about the aesthetic that can feel like it might just save us, save everything, even if not in the literal sense? In an earlier draft of this essay, I’d written: “Nobody, not even Greta Thunberg, needs a mural of Greta Thunberg.” I really believed that at the time, very deeply, like I believed all things. But whenever I’m sure, I begin to suspect myself more. The whole premise of my woes on disaster are linked to the aesthetic, particularly the avant-garde. I, too, hate the word “aestheticizing.” The aesthetic is the one realm instinct has yet to fail me. I cannot explain why I love something aesthetically: I do or I don’t. That’s how it is with language. The thing I’d missed about disaster for a long time was how banal it is. I’d failed to keep up with where it was—which was everywhere. When I stopped writing, for example, it was as if there was a crashing. A compaction of words occurred, and words began to slip away from me, as if a whole era’s trace in the geological record had just collapsed in on itself. That is a ludicrous analogy, but I wanted to make it, and so I did. Because I am not required to be equivalently important to the geological record. I did not sign a legal document or swear an oath, “I will never use language that may imply that two things are equal in importance even if I do not mean it.” I made the analogy because language and aesthetics are battlegrounds. They shift. We try to keep up. We fail. We try to specify them. We fail. And we will always fail because they make up the “we.” We fight this losing battle so hard. We even pretend we’re winning. We play with things that seem very real all the time. Right now, we’ve fixed time on terms that are wholly mine. The world outside is moving faster than us. It doesn’t care. That may lull you into thinking that what is happening does not matter, but we do this all the time. We fix borders, even though we know they do not exist, which is why what our brains somehow seem incapable at holding many things at once. We foreclose the simultaneity of disaster. For no good reason, and against our principles, even the best of us hold onto borders for dear life. Floods devastated villages, towns, cities, and peoples across Pakistan—and actually, Afghanistan, and this omission does actually matter. Border disputes and lynchings occurred so close to us that some of those killed may even have popped up on your Tinder at some point. In Sri Lanka, economic and political collapse may have seemed joyful in what it brought forth—the mass protests—but in truth, the disaster crippled the whole island-nation’s well-being, health, ability to work, to heal, to move. In the Maldives, an archipelago not far away from Sri Lanka, a brutal Islamist government has cracked down on the most benign of citizens, all whilst a drug epidemic and gendered violence continue unacknowledged. There are some luxuries some places have: its writers do not need to write anonymously, for instance, as I do not. It’s only occasionally even crossed my mind. But we know just how many places this is not true for. We all accept how little agency we have over the climate crisis individually. But we do have agency: over time, over our minds, over our language, over our aesthetics—all places disaster will reach into and hollow you out unless you grab ahold of it. My own agency is in these words; if there’s something other than ideas or a shoulder to cry on to offer, I haven’t found it yet. Has all this been about politics? That’s the wrong question. In The Origins of Dislike , Amit Chaudhuri writes: “That word, “about”, is a key term in Anglophone literary discourse, and is meant to enforce a dichotomy between creativity and thought, writing and event.” The “about”, he says, “may be dispensed with in a way that allows poetics and politics to flow into each other.” I want to return to the category: that question I asked myself many years ago. What is it that I have been writing for all these years? It reads like a diary. Slowly, it became an essay. Thankfully, I saved the original drafts because as I read back, I sensed continuity. It is being published as an editorial. It’s all a category problem I bring up because my insistence that this be seen as an essay, not a declamation, is characterized by doubt, by my inability to give you direct answers as a form of mimesis for the mind. The problem with doubt is the insolubility it creates with myself. On the one hand: I am not pertinent here. I am not at the center of the point I am making. None of this has anything to do with me. But maybe: I am pertinent here. I am at the center, and although I do not like it, I chose it. It is self-centered. It is all about me. And everyone’s pertinent here: the individual and the collective need not be at odds. Queen Bed. June 2023. I spent a few nights at my friend Nur’s place in Brooklyn just before I left for Colombo earlier this month. It was good for me. No, it was necessary. The night before I left, I awoke abruptly at 3am. I’d had a dream about my lost friend, the one I hadn’t heard from in years. I didn’t even know where she lived anymore, though I assumed she still lived in New York. On a lark, I searched on Instagram and came across a montage from a few months earlier. She’d gotten married. I watched it over and over. I sat up, elated, pausing the video to look at her face. She was happy. She was mid-laugh in every photo. I could hear it, that laugh that was like if Phoebe Buffay was a cartoon witch. I recognized other faces from college. They were adjusting her hem, holding her hands, or stiltedly smiling. I was so happy; she deserves nothing less than such joy. I didn’t even notice that I was crying. My simultaneous reactions were extreme. It felt so strange to catch myself in the process of feeling them. I felt guilty the next day when I asked Nur the next day as she got off a work call if I could talk to her. I told her how the two sentiments were completely separate: my genuine happiness for her and my self-pity. I remember them differently, even. I’d pored over every frame because I was desperate to know if she was happy, and she was. I’d cried for a long time, before I called Zoya. Whether I schedule my confiding or not, I feel guilty. Neither Zoya nor Nur had any advice for me; they just listened. Until this time, I thought I’d gotten quite good at letting my friend go. I thought of her now and then. When I read the melodramatic letters of Pliny the Younger, I remembered thinking how funny she would have found them. I remember this one time years ago when she, too, had gone somewhere alone: Paris. I don’t know if she “disappeared,” only that, as she told me later, secretively, that she’d had a grand time. I didn’t pry. Speaking to Zoya and Nur was an admission of defeat. Turns out, I’m still not good enough at letting people go. But it also turns out that nobody expected me to be. Maybe what Zoya had wanted to do was permit me to think I could. Maybe she changed her mind. Either way, she did not say, “told you so.” It was kind. Kinder still to admit that it doesn’t work. Then I knew something else. The problem was considered fixed. For some, it’s easier when a problem can be marked “complete.” I cannot control other people, only myself. A knot tied loose is two or more threads dangling in the wind. Different friends see different hues in us. Those hues don’t disappear just because they aren’t perceived. They’re still there, but it doesn’t feel like it, which is the problem. I hope to reunite with them my whole life. I’ll hold candles for them, like Kevin Garvey in The Leftovers . “People hold candles, Nora,” he tells an old lover, presumed dead for decades. It’s unfathomable to me that people live with regrets they know they will carry. Kindnesses were done. Then they were over. Things were accepted, and with yet more friends, I receded into the black. Which is nowhere at all, or so it feels. This time I’ll tie a different knot. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay The Editors Disaster History Environmental History The Leftovers Matthew Schneider-Mayerson Peak Oil Apocalyptic Environmentalism Libertarian Culture Peakists Affect Stoicism Montaigne Late Capitalism Giovanni Arrighi Endism Mark Bould Anthropocene Literature Rancière Kristin Ross Environmental Disaster Jia Tolentino Climate Psychiatric Alliance Climate Anxiety Avant-Garde Form Apocalypse Disaster & Faith Banality Martin Heidegger Jacques Derrida Philosophy Nino Cobre Green New Deal Chicago New Haven Lahore Karachi Gotabhaya Rajapaksa Aragalaya Ranil Wickremasinghe Floods in Pakistan Romanticism Seneca Dasein Walter Benjamin W.H. Sebald Pliny the Elder Pliny the Younger Vesuvius Volcanology Christian Eschatology The Book of Revelation Earthquakes Qiyamat Ruins Nature-History Geography of Disaster Bedour Alagraa Anna Tsing Environmental Humanities Energy History Popular Culture Nihilism Climate Pessimism Climate Optimism Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Doomers Oil Production Lynne Segal Ethics The Hunger Games Fossil Fuel Divestment Ashley Dawson The Local and Global Intimacy & Disaster Friendship John Cassavetes A Woman Under the Influence Gena Rowlands Visual Art Brian Dillon Disaster & Language Greta Thunberg Simultaneity Agency Amit Chaudhuri Anglophone Literary Discourse Mary Oliver Amy Hempel Doubt Essay Form Climate Change 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. 12th Mar 2024 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:

ARTIST Shyama Golden SHYAMA GOLDEN is a Sri Lankan-American artist whose oil and acrylic paintings use figuration to explore the complex and layered ways identiy is experienced, performed, and reinforced. Her work has been featured on covers for the New York Times , LA Times , and Netflix Queue , as well as various book covers such as Shruti Swamy’s Archer , Fatimah Asghar’s If They Come for Us , and Akweke Emezi’s PET and BITTER . Her work has been exhibited at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery and Trotter & Sholer, among others. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

· THE VERTICAL Reportage · Argentina Buenos Aires, Shuttered Trade unions are the most potent stopgap against Javier Milei, an outlandish avatar of Argentina's Faustian bargain with the far-right. But Argentina is poised on the razor’s edge: outside of brutal crackdowns or Milei losing his voting base, there are few foreseeable outcomes for the working class in impoverished Argentina. The second general strike this year happened this past Thursday on May 9th, bringing Buenos Aires to a standstill (photograph courtesy of Confederación General del Trabajo ). On January 24, in a city with many of its stores and banks closed, there was a suffocating heat. In the blocks surrounding the National Congress, Buenos Aires witnessed the first general strike in the country in seven years. Workers in columns with their flags came from all over to reject the measures of the government that took office a little over a month ago. This scene was soon replicated in the main cities throughout the country. In front of the steps of the Congress, Pablo Moyano, Truckers union leader and co-chairman of the trade union federation known as the General Confederation of Labor ( Confederación General del Trabajo or CGT), spoke to a square full of workers who were raising their voices against the proposed austerity policies by the government. "We ask the deputies to have dignity and principles,” Moyano said. “We ask them not to betray the workers, the doctrine of Peronism, which is to defend the workers, the poor, and the pensioners." Moyano condemned the decreed privatization of state corporations such as Aerolíneas Argentinas (National Flag Carrier), Télam (News Agency), Banco Nación (National Bank), and Radio Nacional (Public Radio). He accused them of leaving “millions of workers on the streets and handing them over to their friends [the private corporations].” CGT organized its first strike just 45 days into Javier Milei's regime under the slogan "The homeland is not for sale". The strike protested the state reforms and the deregulation of the economy, including sweeping labor changes, the end of severance pay, the extension of employment trial periods from three to eight months, and the privatization of state-owned companies. The sweeping reforms included a massive presidential executive order and a 523-article bill , the Omnibus Bill, that has been hotly debated in Congress for months but passed in April. Milei’s ruling coalition, La Libertad Avanza , wrangled a majority opinion on the bill by eliminating many of its original articles, including the privatization of the national bank, with the support of right-wing and center-right parties. But in a country in a deep economic crisis , with the highest annual inflation rate in the world (almost 300%), with 40% of the population now under the poverty line, and a near-collapse of industrial production, the toll the austerity measures have taken on Argentines is immense, and Milei’s policies are still far too punishing, especially those concerning the privatization of public agencies. The Omnibus Bill is on track for a contentious fight in the Senate next week . Over the past few months, unions from all over Latin America and Europe marched in support of the strike such as the Unitary Central of Workers of Chile and the Brazilian Unified Workers' Central . The Worldwide Unions' Federation , which groups unions in 133 countries, called its affiliates to show solidarity with Argentina's workers. This past Thursday, on May 9th, the CGT, the Argentine Workers' Central Union (CTA), and the Autonomous CTA carried out the second general strike against Milei’s austerity policies since January, after the passage of the Omnibus Bill in the lower house. Hundreds of flights were canceled. Bus, rail, subway systems were all halted. Banks and schools were shuttered. Industrial production was at a standstill. The streets outside of the demonstration on 9th May 2024. (Official CGT statement). Buenos Aires, a city with a metropolitan population of 15.6 million people, was as empty as it would be on a holiday. The CGT represents trucker unions, health personnel, aeronautics, and construction. They were joined in the strike by informal workers, pensioners, and the state´s workers unions–the main sectors affected by these austerity measures. In January, Rodolfo Aguiar, Secretary General of the State Workers Association of Argentina (ATE), entering the Plaza de los Dos Congresos along Avenida de Mayo, spoke to SAAG and argued that the government's main victims are those who are publicly employed. “We, the state workers, bother those who want to appropriate the State to put it at the service of global corporations.” Milei's anti-state and austerity policies have caused changes in the national administration. As of April, over 15,000 state workers had been fired. In order to discourage participation in the demonstration, on January 18th the presidential spokesman, Manuel Adorni, announced the deduction of pay for any state workers who participate in the strike (the same threat was repeated on May 9th). The move backfired. The political opposition party also participated in the demonstration. Axel Kicillof, the governor of the province of Buenos Aires, the most important in the country, attended the march. Kicillof is representative of the left wing of Peronism—a camp often considered as best positioned to be the political heir of Kirchnerism. Albeit with a different call than that of the CGT, the leftist Party of Social Workers (PTS), which has four deputies in Congress, also participated in the mobilization. “There was a strike in many places, but the most important thing was the mobilization. The government wants to downplay it, but the participation in the streets was very high,” said Myriam Bregman, congresswoman and former presidential candidate of the leftist coalition Workers’ Left Front , in a statement outside Congress. According to the CGT, one and a half million people joined the strike throughout the country in January, while 600,000 were part of the epicenter of the march in the city of Buenos Aires. The government says that only 40,000 people were mobilized. It remains to be seen what numbers will be used to describe the most recent strike. The Criminalization of Protest With the election of Javier Milei, the far-right has come into power in Argentina for the first time since the recovery of democracy in 1983. Milei is bombastic, a self-described “anarcho-libertarian.” In a broad sense, he evokes a contemporary authoritarian ruler in the vein of Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro. In Argentina, this means that Milei espouses a classically liberal view of the free market, as well as a sharp rollback of welfare reforms. He also cuts an incendiary figure in more outlandish ways. He has argued for the privatization of everything from human organs to babies . Milei has also confessed that he talks to his dog Conan, who died 7 years ago, through an “interspecies medium.” Apparently Milei has been known to ask Conan, whom he has four living clones of, for political advice. But most consequential for Argentina is Milei’s strong affinity with the last military dictatorship: an ugly history rearing its head in a country that has been reeling from the damage for decades. Under the dictatorship, 30,000 people were tortured and/or disappeared . Approximately 500 children were ripped from their parents. The military dictatorship (1976-1983) carried out a policy of illegal repression, indiscriminate violence, persecutions, systematized torture, forced disappearance of people, clandestine detention centers, manipulation of information, and other forms of State terrorism. In addition, it contracted the largest foreign debt up to that time in Argentine history. Eventually, industrial production collapsed, leading to mass deindustrialization of the country during the following years. Having come to strength in the waning years of the last Peronist government, Milei’s political party was supported mainly by young men, many of whom voted for the first time in the last elections in October last year. During the toughest years of the pandemic, Milei characterized the center-left government as a "criminal infection." Milei represents, of course, much of what has always been anathema to Peronism. Under the broad political ideology of justicialismo , Peronism has a long history of leadership in Argentina. It has staunchly opposed the military dictatorships, and broadly supported Juan Perón's agenda of social justice, economic nationalism, state-led market intervention through subsidies, and international non-alignment. Trade unions in Argentina have long been considered the “spinal column” of Peronism. Milei came to the government accompanied by Victoria Villarruel, the vice president and an activist from the last military dictatorship. Villarruel denies the number of disappeared people and supports the controversial “theory of two demons,” equating left-wing killings with state terrorism, a theory of far-right which denies the genocide under the military dictatorship. Milei and Villaruel are the first president and vice president in Argentine democracy who have tried to relativize social condemnation against the crimes of the last military dictatorship (1976-1983) and state terrorism—breaking with the democratic consensus on the dictatorship’s crimes against humanity. Indeed, Milei's verbiage is similar to that of the military. For Milei, there was “a war” in the 1970s, in which “excesses” were committed. Of course, in reality it was an illegal systematic plan of extermination. More specifically, under Milei, “internal security” has become the state’s chief prerogative, involving policies denounced by human rights organizations and left-wing activists in Argentina. The president appointed Patricia Bullrich, a politician with a long and strange history in Argentina (originally part of the left, but ended up in the extreme right) to Minister of Security. Bullrich, in turn, came up with an anti-protest protocol that aims to criminalize protests and crackdown on demonstrations in the street. Bullrich’s protocol details the operation of the security forces in the event of disturbance of public order. The measures include sanctions on groups making such demonstrations. The sanctions include detention or a payment of fines, as well as the withdrawal of benefits for those who are beneficiaries of social security. Despite the implementation of the protocol, the mobilization on the street was massive and successful. That the unions can and have brought the capital to a standstill is a fundamental challenge to Milei: few options are imaginable, save brutal crackdowns, or an erosion of Milei's support. In recent months, leftist groups demonstrating against the Omnibus bill in front of Congress have been brutally repressed. Police have fired rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons to disperse protests, which have by now become everyday occurrences. Protests have challenged Milei's government ever since he took office. Ten days after he was inaugurated, he was confronted with a spontaneous cacerolazo (a form of protest by hitting pots) against the devaluation and the increase in prices. After the first cacerolazo, the president gave an interview on radio , where he made a statement that "there may be people who suffer from Stockholm syndrome." "They are embracing the model that impoverishes them, but that is not the case for the majority of Argentina," he said. Of course, there is also a very large portion of Argentines who support the far-right government, in the hopes that it can be successful in Argentina, especially in the macroeconomy in order to stop inflation. Critics of this “pragmatist” viewpoint point continually to IMF stipulations and the devastating impacts that austerity policies have had many times in the past. But in truth, Milei’s voting base is part and parcel of a larger political drift in Argentina. The Rightward Drift How is it that a country like Argentina, one with a long tradition of social and labor rights, has elected a president who seeks to abolish so much of what its citizens have come to know? In the simplest analysis, much blame lies with the previous administration, in the hands of the largest Peronist party, the Partido Justicialista or PJ. Under President Alberto Fernandez and Vice President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the administration failed to stem inflation and thus recover the purchasing power of wages–a crisis that modest wage increases were insufficient to mitigate. The frustration caused by the economic crisis led citizens towards the neoliberal parties, plunging the left into demoralization and uncertainty. The years under the presidency first Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) and subsequently his wife, Cristina Kirchner (2007-2015), have long been known as the years of the “progressive wave” in Latin America, a historical period that is often characterized by leftist leaders in the region including Lula da Silva in Brazil, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and Evo Morales in Bolivia. The progressive wave is often associated with a strong expansion of rights and an improvement in employment and social coverage. During the years of Kirchnerism, Argentina became a pioneer of socially progressive policies in Latin America. It became the first country in the region and the tenth in the world to allow same-sex marriage in 2010 . Two years later, it passed the Gender Identity Law, allowing transgendered people to register their documents with the name and sex of their choice. In 2013, Cristina Kirchner enacted a new law that punishes child labor and another that seeks to regularize the situation of more than a million domestic employees, the majority of whom work informally. Kirchnerism, at the time, also presided over low unemployment rates. When Néstor Kirchner took office in 2003, the country was overcoming one of its worst economic crises in history, and more than 17% of Argentines were unemployed. Kirchnerism managed to reduce that figure to less than 7%, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses about 6 million jobs were created during the K era. The economic growth was promoted, especially, by the gains of productive capital in the heat of the significant rise in real wages, the increase in external competitiveness derived from the establishment of a high exchange rate, the phenomenal increase in the prices of agricultural commodities, and through the labor value of skilled workers who were unemployed during the long recession at the turn of the century. Thus, redistributive policies were an essential component of strategies for reducing inequality in both economic and social realms. Kirchnerism remained the main wing within Peronism, under the leadership of Cristina Kirchner and managed to return to the government in 2019; the expectation was that it would be able to overcome the economic crisis left by the government of Mauricio Macri (2015-2019), one with hefty external debt with the IMF and a weak economy. Despite the economic crisis, the Peronist government of Alberto Fernandez continued with public works and maintained subsidies for energy and transportation. It also maintained the various social programs that have been promoted to support the most vulnerable sectors. The exit from the pandemic and the prolonged confinement, added to the scandal of the leak of a photo showing the first lady and a group of people, including the president, celebrating her birthday at the presidential residence, during confinement. This leak concentrated the fury of a middle class that had seen its level of income increasingly deteriorate and strengthened “anti-caste” sentiment (“caste,” in Milei’s personal parlance, refers to career politicians, equivalent to the “deep state”). Milei on the Razor’s Edge Notably, even before the recent passage of the Omnibus bill in the lower house, Argentina´s lower house approved the bill in a 144-109 vote on February 3rd. La libertad Avanza has only 38 deputies in the lower house. In February, the main opposition party, Unión por la Patria , a Peronist alliance composed mainly of Kirchnerists, voted against the bill, with their deputies sitting in the session with banners saying “May it NOT become the law!” The leftist Frente de Izquierda y de los Trabajadores, Unidad (FIT-U), also rejected the bill. Following the general vote on February 6th, the omnibus bill was sent back to the commissions over lack of support. The main disagreements were privatizations and federal taxes. The government did not achieve the support of governors whom Milei accused of being traitors and threatened to defund. But between then and April, it was been speculated that Milei is beginning to wise up: giving up some campaign promises to ram through his reforms. At least with the lower house thus far, he has succeeded. Ahead of the Senate battle, Milei remains at a crossroads: whether to continue betting on his anti-caste discourse, accusing the opposition that was willing to support him of being traitors and criminals, or sit down to negotiate and make concessions and understand that the Argentine political system is sustained based on negotiations between the national government and the provinces. But even if the Omnibus Bill now succeeds in the Senate, even in its milder form, it is unlikely to satisfy the unions. Back in February, the bill may have been destroyed in the “palace” but it was first put in check on the street. Indeed, it seems Milei will keep facing down the unions, which are now arguably the most potent force challenging him, not the opposition parties. “A new strike or mobilization is not ruled out,” Moyano had said on March 8th. “But it is latent. It will always be latent. If your worker's rights are attacked, if you lose your job, if your salaries are lowered... I am not going to stand by and no union or leader is going to allow them to fire their workers.” When the CGT did carry out the second general strike , it did so with high compliance, alongside labor across the country including unions representing public transport. But not before thousands of layoffs, subsidy eliminations, wage slashes and pension cuts crippled the working class of Argentina. According to the CGT, the general strike on Thursday was "forceful" and it demanded that the Government “take note.” For the CTA , the strike was the result of "a government that only benefits the rich at the expense of the people, gives away natural resources, and seeks to eliminate workers' rights.” But the real question is: have the events of this year shifted the needle for Milei’s voting base? ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Reportage Argentina Trade Unions General Confederation of Labor Javier Milei Javier Milei Peronism Omnibus Bill La Libertad Avanza Austerity Economic Crisis Inflation Unemployment Poverty Unitary Central of Workers of Chile Brazilian Unified Workers' Central Worldwide Unions' Federation Kirchnerism Party of Social Workers Bolsonaro Military Dictatorship Free Market Welfare Cuts Privatization Justicialismo Juan Peron Cristina Kirchner Partido Justicialista Nestor Kirchner Progressive Wave in Latin America Pink Wave Labor Movement Labor Labor Rights Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 12th May 2024 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:

Novelist Shehan Karunatilaka in conversation with Fiction Editor Kartika Budhwar. COMMUNITY A State of Perpetual War: Fiction & the Sri Lankan Civil War AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Novelist Shehan Karunatilaka in conversation with Fiction Editor Kartika Budhwar. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Interview Sri Lanka Sri Lankan Civil War Satire Chinaman Tamil Tigers Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Enforced Disappearances Cricket Extrajudicial Killings Kumar Sangakkara Shakthika Sathkumara Sri Lankan Literary Tradition Chats with the Dead Booker Prize Buddhism Ghost Stories Theater South Asian Theater Carl Muller Anarchist Writing Writing about Recent History Discourses of War Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna Marxist-Leninist Uprising JVP Worrying Humor Gallows Humor Absurdity Queerness Gananath Obeyesekere 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 Sri Lanka 10th Jan 2021 The stereotypes of the commercial sphere, the smiley, happy go lucky, Sri Lankans—there is something to that stereotype. It's not a grim place, even though a lot of grim things take place here. A tragedy will happen, the jokes will start almost immediately. Maybe it's gallows humor or a coping mechanism. Whatever it is, that seems to always be there. RECOMMENDED: This interview took place prior to the publication of Shehan Karunatilaka's Booker-Prize winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Penguin), which he discusses in the interview as a work-in-progress. 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:

PHOTOJOURNALIST NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati lives in Kathmandu, Nepal and works at the intersections of visual storytelling, research, pedagogy, and collective action. In 2007, she co-founded photo.circle , an independent artist-led platform that facilitates learning, exhibition making, publishing, and a variety of other trans-disciplinary collaborative projects for Nepali visual practitioners. In 2011, she co-founded Nepal Picture Library , a digital archiving initiative that works towards diversifying Nepali socio-cultural and political history. She is also the co-founder and festival director of Photo Kathmandu , an international festival that takes place in Kathmandu every two years. She has served as festival director for South Asia’s premier non-fiction film festival Film Southasia , been part of the selection committee for the first cycle of World Press Photo ’s 6x6 Global Talent Program in Asia, and been a mentor for the 2020 World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass. She was recently awarded the 2020 Jane Lombard Fellowship by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, New York. She studied documentary photography at the SALT Institute of Documentary Studies, Maine, and International Relations and Studio Art at Mt. Holyoke College, Massachusetts. PHOTOJOURNALIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

The story of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar can be told through the footwear—the strewn, tossed, bloodied, abandoned—that is tied up with both the iconography and reality of brutal state violence. Piles of flip-flops amidst the debris, military boots stomping the ground: both are “central characters” of the Revolution. FEATURES Whose Footfall is Loudest? AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR The story of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar can be told through the footwear—the strewn, tossed, bloodied, abandoned—that is tied up with both the iconography and reality of brutal state violence. Piles of flip-flops amidst the debris, military boots stomping the ground: both are “central characters” of the Revolution. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Essay Myanmar Military Coup Spring Revolution Saffron Revolution Hla Than Aung San Suu Kyi National League for Democracy Amay Sound Low-Income Workers Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring Student Movements Student Protests Incarceration Military Crackdown Military Dictatorship Military Operations Revolution Histories of Revolutionary Politics 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 Essay Myanmar 24th Feb 2023 Never in my life did I think that flip-flops could be fascinating. Only after a memorable incident entailing a particular pair of flip-flops did I begin to pay attention to them. An incident, yes! The one that will stay with me my whole life. It made me realise that certain footwear could carry more meaning than just “footwear”. It happened after Amay passed away. Before she drew her last breath, Amay had been struggling with lung cancer for nearly three months. At the time, we were living in a small town. Hoping that we could still save her, we sent her to a hospital in the city. We buried her there when she died. Without Amay, our journey back to our small town was desolate. My heart felt empty, as if there was nothing left for me to hold on to. Everything around me went pitch dark, as if I had been pulled into a black hole. When it was decided that all of Amay’s belongings would be given away to needy families, I acquiesced. I didn’t want to cling to her stuff—after all, I had lost Amay as a person already. Even then, something that belonged to Amay was discovered unexpectedly. A pair of flip-flops. Under Amay’s bed, lying still and quiet in the darkest corner as if they were hiding, were a pair of her flip-flops. They must have been separated from Amay when she was taken to hospital. When I looked at them carefully, I saw that the soles were worn out and the heels were ragged. Amay was a frugal woman who always budgeted carefully and spent wisely. Apart from a new pair of flip-flops for some occasions, she wore these worn rubber flip-flops on a daily basis—when she did household chores and went grocery shopping—for many years. If the straps were broken, she would replace them with new ones herself. If only one strap of her flip-flop was broken, she would keep one new strap for later use. After several years of daily use, Amay’s toeprints were imprinted on the flip-flops. Tears started rolling down as I looked at them. These flip-flops showed me beyond a doubt how Amay went through hard times in her life, and how she endured pain and suffering. That pair of flip-flops I inherited from Amay would stay with me for many, many more years. Since then, I’ve been drawn to stories, memories and lives that could be revealed by well-worn flip-flops. We might change clothes every day, but a member of a low-income household, who could barely afford an extra pair of flip-flops, had to rely on the only pair they had. Flip-flops were a poor person’s comrades-in-arms on a thorny road. Flip-flops gave them strength. They were as close to them as their own skin. “My flip-flops are my fortress!” poet Hla Than declared. After the military coup in February 2021, I collected more intriguing stories of flip-flops and their owners. A small, underdeveloped country suffering from economic asthma under COVID-19 was hit by a rogue political wave. This spring, the future of the nation became as blurry as the spring mist itself. If someone looked far into the future, they would only see a parched land. The military claimed that the 2020 election fraud made the coup inevitable. Prior to the election, “The Sound of Heels,” an election campaign song by the National League for Democracy (NLD), was very popular. It became the NLD’s triumphant anthem following the party’s landslide victory in the election, but it vanished into thin air after the military seized power. The song was dedicated to the State Counsellor, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the NLD, to whom her supporters referred as “Amay”. The song was about how her efforts gave Myanmar, an ostracised society under long years of military rule, a chance to step onto the world stage. On 1 February, the clack-clack of heels were silenced by the bang-bang of military boots. Before long, the whole country was completely under the boots. The voices of mourning mothers, the tongue-clicking of dismayed youth, the moaning of farmers out of their stubbled fields and workers out of their factories got louder and louder each day. “Join the CDM now!” As soon as the rallying cry put people on alert, all those different voices merged together—ineffectual whines turned into battle cries reverberating across the sky. If someone had ever questioned whether footwear could be frightening, the answer would have been “yes” if they were military boots. In the first week of the Spring Revolution, civil servants joined the CDM en masse. The main action of the CDM was that no employee should go to work. In some political cartoons, military generals in jackboots trampled doctors, school teachers and workers. “Stop going to office, struggle out of the dictatorship!” was the slogan of the strikers. They warned each other that if people continued to work for the military state, many precious lives, beautiful things and human values would be smashed under the boots. That’s how footwear became a central character in the Myanmar Spring Revolution. There was more to come. Within a week of the coup, thousands of young people took to the streets. In response, the military hired a group of jingoists and staged counter-protests. Some anti-coup protesters started shouting that they were out on the street on their own volition, and that they had not been paid by anyone. To drive home the point that they were from well-to-do families and that they could not possibly be bought, they came to the protests in expensive outfits and shoes. This, however, only highlighted the dire situation of most of their fellow protestors, who couldn’t afford fancy outfits. There were messages on social media condemning some affluent protesters for talking down to people from underprivileged backgrounds, including those hired by the military. In opposing tyranny, people simultaneously learned to smash any form of discrimination based on wealth or class. Day by day, the revolution gathered strength. It soon turned into a nationwide protest of people from all walks of life—rural and urban. Their footfall echoed in the streets. Now street surfaces seemed totally covered by an array of flip-flops and shoes that it would be difficult for anyone to gain a foothold there. Spring was in full bloom. On roads where fallen ones would be laid to rest, columns after columns of rallies continued to march over and over again. One of the non-violent protests was known as “Lace your shoes up!” In the early days of the Spring, security personnel seemed uncertain about whether they should use force against protesters. They tried to push the crowds off the roads, saying the people were obstructing traffic. The youth reacted by making their protests mobile. They moved around in small groups and continued to protest. They crossed the road when the light was green. They stopped when the light turned red. They shouted rally cries. As soon as they had the chance, they sat on the road, lacing up their shoes at a leisurely pace. Policemen watching them were speechless. In the following days, there were “harvesting onion” and “collecting rice grains” movements. Loose onions and grains of rice were deliberately poured out in the middle of a road so everyone could help pick them up and put them back in the bags to annoy the police. Spring flowers of a variety of colours were seen everywhere. New and creative forms of revolutionary activities shone here and there. Some people found fault with these kinds of protests. Young people were not serious, they said. Others pointed out the generation gap. Older people did not understand the state-of-the-art techniques of young people. In reality in the early days of the spring, people of all ages managed to build mutual trust and solidarity. They were full of energy, enjoying the calm before a storm. The fresh, green spring would soon turn into a fully-blown parched summer. The intense heat made wall tiles rise up and crack. A heatwave also pervaded throughout the democratic movement. The forces, standing up hand-in-hand against the junta, were hit with a bloody gust. A volley of gunfire across the sky set a flock of roosting birds on a chaotic flight. A group of soldiers and police chased down the protesters who were retreating into a neighbourhood, and beat them to death like blood-starved beasts. Even the black asphalt road began to weep, blood streaming down all over her face. After blood was spilled, the style of people’s revolutionary art also changed. Each time a group of people were chased by guns and batons, dozens of ownerless flip-flops would be left abandoned on the street. Some flip-flops were upside down, others in the gutter, and many of them unpaired. And yet most of them looked well-worn. When the security forces were gone, people picked them up and organised them in pairs for their owners to come and collect them. The abandoned flip-flops didn’t look great but they could be invaluable to their owners. In this way, I learned, rather accidentally, that flip-flops had always been important witnesses to our revolutions. In the 1988 uprising, flip-flops were scattered everywhere on the road. In the 2007 Saffron Revolution, there were many flipflops drenched in blood. Following the 2015 student protests, hundreds of flip-flops were on the road again. There was even a shoe charity campaign in 2021. It emerged after some people began to question on social media what kind of shoes would be most suitable for protests if they were to escape from violent attacks. A number of shoe donors came forward. In some places, many pairs of “used, feel free to take” shoes in various sizes were on offer. Some people who owned extra pairs of shoes shared them with their comrades. They exchanged metta in sharing shoes. They looked after each other. They became more united, realising that people were cut from the same cloth. On top of physical violence, people also suffered from psychological warfare by the regime. The longer a revolution dragged on, the more volatile revolutionary morale could become. And yet, crackdowns notwithstanding, most protesters decided to continue with their struggle. Some bid farewells to their parents and friends. “In the event that I am killed I donate my organs to anyone in need,” some people wrote in their wills. “Don’t push this person any further, / at land’s end / my flipflops are my fortress,” read the last lines of a poem by Hla Than. People prepared for a last-ditch fight. Oaths—that they would not back down no matter what—were sworn. They glued pictures of the coup leader on the roads and marched on them. The senior general’s face was smeared with hundreds of footprints. The murder of protesters became more commonplace. The number of martyrs multiplied every day. People shed new tears before old tears dried on their cheeks. They were placed under curfew. Internet access was restricted. Arrests and detentions under various charges became more frequent. People felt less and less secure. There were no more grounds for them to take a stand, so it seemed. They became afraid of nightfall. What they feared more probably was the nightfall over their future. One day I saw a photo of a pair of slippers on social media. “These belonged to a mother. They were left during a protest.” They were white and size 37. The straps were white, but not pure white. The left and right slippers must have been thrown into disarray when the wearer was attacked. There was a line of blood on the pavement that stained one of them. I learned that the owner was a 50-year-old schoolteacher. She was shot to death at that spot by the military terrorists. A bullet that hit her hand took her life as she had a heart condition. “She wasn’t feeling very well when she went to the protest,” said her daughter in an interview. The alleged “2020 election fraud” brought dishonour to members of the education department who had overseen the polling stations. That’s why she believed that it was her duty to protest the coup on the front line. Before she left home, she had comforted her daughter that the security forces would go easy and not use violence against school teachers. Sadly, the gun barrel does not discriminate—it was loyal only to the finger that pulled the trigger. One bullet after another shattered our dreams. Karl Marx’s slogan “Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” echoed loudly among the masses. The daughter wept violently over the slippers left by her fallen mother. This reminded me of how I cried whenever I saw my amay’s flip-flops. What of her? Would she become interested in footwear too? In revolutions, footwear is often prematurely parted from its wearers. The group in military boots stood firm, determined to put an end to the civilian resistance. The people had no weapons, nor sturdy shields. Their flip-flops wore thin. Even then, the hot, bloody roads couldn’t be worse than hell. No one seemed to mind the intense heat under their soles. With or without footwear, their way out of hell would be an arduous journey. ∎ Endnotes : Hla Than’s poem was translated by Ko Ko Thett. This essay appeared in Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring: Witness Poems and Essays from Burma/Myanmar 1988-2021 , edited by Ko Ko Thett and Brian Haman, and published by Gaudy Boy in North America, Balestier Press in the UK, and Ethos Books in Singapore. 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:

“Loneliest star, shining so brightly / For no one to see. / Loneliest star, tell me your secret / You shouldn't keep it.” COMMUNITY Quintet “Loneliest star, shining so brightly / For no one to see. / Loneliest star, tell me your secret / You shouldn't keep it.” Priya Darshini · Max ZT · Shahzad Ismaily · Moto Fukushima · Chris Sholar The closing set from our event on 30th March 2024, "Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse," at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn, New York, capped off two stimulating panels and marked the close of Volume 2 Issue 1 of SAAG. The performance by the quintet of Priya Darshini (vocals), Shahzad Ismaily (piano, drums/percussion, synth, guitar), Moto Fukushima (bass, shamisen) & Max ZT (hammered dulcimer), and Chris Sholar (electronics, ableton) ushered in new emotional registers, and another period of interpretive possibilities for SAAG, as reflected upon by Darshini. Their set showcases many of the songs from Darshini's debut album, as well as songs about hope and solidarity, and a showstopping rendition of a composition of Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers." Event Photography courtesy of Josh Steinbauer. SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Panel 1: What Does "Solidarity" Mean? SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Panel 2: On the Relationship between Form & Resistance The closing set from our event on 30th March 2024, "Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse," at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn, New York, capped off two stimulating panels and marked the close of Volume 2 Issue 1 of SAAG. The performance by the quintet of Priya Darshini (vocals), Shahzad Ismaily (piano, drums/percussion, synth, guitar), Moto Fukushima (bass, shamisen) & Max ZT (hammered dulcimer), and Chris Sholar (electronics, ableton) ushered in new emotional registers, and another period of interpretive possibilities for SAAG, as reflected upon by Darshini. Their set showcases many of the songs from Darshini's debut album, as well as songs about hope and solidarity, and a showstopping rendition of a composition of Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers." Event Photography courtesy of Josh Steinbauer. SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Panel 1: What Does "Solidarity" Mean? SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Panel 2: On the Relationship between Form & Resistance SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Live Brooklyn Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse Jazz Music Classical Music Experimental Music Vocals Hammered Dulcimer Drums Guitar Electronics Composition Contemporary Music Shamisen Alternative Jazz Love in Exile On Becoming House of Waters GRAMMY Periphery Emily Dickinson Atahualpa Yupanqui Protest Song PRIYA DARSHINI is a vocalist with a fresh, imaginative and fascinating sound influenced by Carnatic and South Asian classical music, and deeply syncretic global traditions including Americana, folk, and jazz improvisation. Her debut album Periphery (Chesky Records, 2020) was nominated at the 63rd Annual GRAMMY Awards for Best New Age Album. Based in Brooklyn, Darshini also serves on the Board of Directors of the International Wildlife Coexistence Network , and is a trustee of the Mumbai-based non-profit Jana Rakshita which aids underprivileged pediatric cancer patients, Adivasi children's education, amongst other initiatives. MAX ZT is a Chicago native now based in Brooklyn who had his first encounter with the hammered dulcimer at the age of two. He has been lauded as the “Jimi Hendrix of dulcimer” by NPR , and performed with musicians like Ravi Shakar, Tinariwen, and Jimmy Cliff, among others. Max ZT and Moto Fukushima together form the Brooklyn-based power duo, House of Waters. The band has released two albums, with its debut album, Rising , reaching #2 on the iTunes World Music chart, and the second album hitting #4 on the iTunes Jazz chart. Its sophomore album, On Becoming (GroundUP Music, 2023), was recently nominated at the 66th GRAMMY Awards for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. SHAHZAD ISMAILY is a largely self-taught composer and musician, having mastered a wide array of instruments. Ismaily has recorded or performed with an incredibly diverse assemblage of musicians and has also composed regularly for dance and theater. He was a two-time nominee at the recent 66th GRAMMY Awards, for both Best Alternative Jazz Album for Love in Exile (Verve Records, 2023) with Vijay Iyer & Arooj Aftab, and Best Global Music Performance for the track "Shadow Forces" from Love in Exile . Most recently, Ismaily is part of the new quartet Beings which will release its debut album There is a Garden (No Quarter) in July 2024. MOTO FUKUSHIMA is a Japanese artist currently based in NYC. He is a six-string bass player, composer, and shamisen player. Along with Max ZT, Fukushima forms the duo House of Waters. The band has released two albums, with its debut album, Rising (GroundUP Music, 2019), reaching #2 on the iTunes World Music chart, and the second album hitting #4 on the iTunes Jazz chart. House of Waters' sophomore album, On Becoming (GroundUP Music, 2023), was recently nominated at the 66th GRAMMY Awards for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. CHRIS SHOLAR is a world-renowned music producer and composer and one of the most in-demand guitarists in the world of R&B and Hip Hop music. He has worked with Stevie Wonder, Beyonce, A Tribe Called Quest, Frank Ocean, and Snoop Dogg, amongst many others, and as performed at numerous concerts, and arenas, including Carnegie Hall, the Glastonbury Festival, and the NFL Super Bowl Gala. He is a two-time GRAMMY Award winner from his collaborations with Jay-Z and Esperanza Spalding. 25 Apr 2024 Live Brooklyn 25th Apr 2024 JOSH STEINBAUER is an award-winning filmmaker, musical composer, and visual artist. His work has been shown in Heaven, Third Ward, No Moon, Gen Art, H. Lewis galleries, Harvard Art Museum and American Folk Art Museum , and published in Nowhere Magazine, Terrain, The Offing, Moving Poems, Scroll.in, BrooklynOnDemand , and the Times of India, amongst others. Some of his portrait drawings are currently exhibited at the Long Island City Artists' (LIC-A) newest show Drawing Beyond the Surface , curated by Jorge Posada. “Apertures” with the Vagabonds Trio Rajna Swaminathan · Utsav Lal · Ganavya 19th May Between Notes: An Improvisational Set Utsav Lal 5th Jun Natasha Noorani's Retro Aesthetic Natasha Noorani 5th Jun The Aahvaan Project · Performance Vedi Sinha 5th Jun FLUX · Natasha Noorani Unplugged: "Choro" Natasha Noorani 5th Dec On That Note:

A dispatch from a church festival on a largely uninhabited island that has long been the site of a contentious border dispute between India and Sri Lanka. THE VERTICAL The Uneasy Dreamscape of Katchatheevu A dispatch from a church festival on a largely uninhabited island that has long been the site of a contentious border dispute between India and Sri Lanka. Jeevan Ravindran You can almost taste the excitement on the boat as it nears Katchatheevu, people craning their necks out of windows, and perching on the steps to catch their first glimpse of it. For most passengers, it seems to be their first time visiting the island—abandoned, uninhabited, and closed to civilians for all but two days each year for its annual church festival. Standing on some bags to gain height, I catch flashes of the island—a statue of the Virgin Mary encased in glass peeping out from some foliage; with trees for miles, and waves lapping the shore. The four-hour boat journey from mainland Sri Lanka to Katchatheevu is surreal. I’d never heard of Katchatheevu until November last year. From a sparsely-populated Wikipedia page, I’d learned the island was only open for visitors during its March church festival, so I resolved to go. Katchatheevu lies in the Palk Strait between southern India and northern Sri Lanka, a contentious and liminal space that has historically been contested between the two countries. Under British rule, the island belonged to India, and after Independence it became a disputed territory. In 1976, it was ceded to Sri Lanka by then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in a series of maritime boundary agreements. However, this decision has always been hotly contested by Tamil Nadu politicians ever since, who have long called for the reacquisition of Katchatheevu, ostensibly on the behest of Indian fisherfolk. In 1991, the Tamil Nadu Assembly adopted a resolution for its retrieval. In 2008, then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu argued to the Supreme Court that the agreements on Katchatheevu were unconstitutional. As recently as last year, the 1974-76 maritime boundary agreements over Katchatheevu have remained hotly contested. Katchatheevu was closely surveilled during the Sri Lankan Civil War, which ended in 2009, suspected to be a base for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a militant group fighting for an independent state in the country’s north, from which they smuggled weapons. Since the end of the war, the island has been controlled by the Sri Lankan navy, with Indian fishermen allowed to dry their nets on its land. But conflicts between Sri Lankan and Indian fishermen continue to rage around the space, with Indians accused of crossing the maritime boundary to poach in Sri Lankan waters. Many poor Sri Lankan fisherfolk returned to these waters after the Civil War, by which time they found a landscape dominated by Indian trawlers they could not compete with. View of the island from the boat. Courtesy of the author These unresolved disputes of land and livelihoods make the seemingly peaceable annual church festival even more intriguing, since regulations on movement to and from the island are abandoned for the festival. Pilgrims from both sides of the strait collide in a rare meeting point of communities who speak the same Tamil language but have historically met mostly under difficult conditions; the line between southern India and northern Sri Lanka became porous during the civil war as people fled Sri Lanka in droves as refugees. In centuries prior, hundreds of thousands of Indian Tamils were brought over to Sri Lanka as indentured laborers by British colonizers. Indian Tamils were denied citizenship by Sri Lanka upon independence; many were deported back to India, with others in a state of limbo for decades. Communities in both countries have thus experienced statelessness and rejection on the other’s land, making Katchatheevu a contested space, all the more significant as a fleetingly-inhabited melting pot of experiences and cultures. It becomes a rare waypoint through which the porosity of borders and violent history of the region can be seen through its visiting Tamil communities. Yet it remains a little-known and incredibly underreported place, with the specifics of its historic legacy rarely discussed in a wider context. Traveling with two friends on the boat, I try to glean as much as I can about Katchatheevu’s history. My friend and I befriend a fellow passenger. She tells us a story about how St. Anthony’s Church, the only building on the island, was built. A fisherman who almost died at sea promised God he would build a church if he was saved. After the fisherman survived, he stayed true to his word, and built the church using materials from Delft island, about two hours closer to Sri Lanka’s mainland. As we disembark onto a temporary and very shaky gangway assembled by the Sri Lankan Navy, which administers the island year-round, we spot a crowd already assembled on the shore—Indian pilgrims. For the church festival, all disputes and regulations are suspended, and pilgrims from both countries land on the island in a rare meeting point of communities otherwise totally separated by the Palk Strait. We are shepherded into four different queues for navy checks—Sri Lankan women, Sri Lankan men, Indian women, and Indian men. The Indian and Sri Lankan sides look each other up and down with bemused curiosity. On the other side of the checkpoints, Katchatheevu is wild and bare, untamed vegetation crowding the sides of a wide and sandy path. The early afternoon sun beats down heavily on us, and juice vendors have wisely set up shop to serve cold drinks to thirsty pilgrims. Families separated by gender wait for their relatives to come through the queue, and I spot an interesting exchange between two pilgrims from India and Sri Lanka that highlights how monumental the festival is as a reminder of the liminal space Katchatheevu occupies. “Where are you from, son?” asks the aunty from Bangalore, clad in a light brown sari, speaking in a dialect quite far removed from Jaffna Tamil. “Jaffna,” replies the young man sitting next to her in a collared shirt and trousers. “Where’s that? Sri Lanka?” the aunty asks. “You don’t know where Jaffna is?” he replies, looking shocked and slightly offended. “Yes, it’s in Sri Lanka. It’s world famous!” After our friend arrives, we trek towards the church to set up camp. Along the way, we spot pilgrims industriously clearing patches of vegetation to find a spot to bed down, and others who have come organized with lunch carriers and huge containers of water, because there is no drinking water available on the island. We select a spot just in front of the church, next to a trio from Colombo, and lay out the bed sheet I’ve brought from home. A few minutes later, a voice over the loudspeaker announces that the prayers will soon begin. St. Anthony, patron saint of the fisherfolk of Sri Lanka's north and India's south. Photography courtesy of the author. The nuns begin to chant repeatedly: “ Punitha Mariye, Iraivanin Thaaye, paavikalaa irukkira engalukkaaka, ippozhuthum naangal irappin velaiyilum vendikollumaame. [Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death].” The church itself is a rich cream color, with a statue of St. Anthony, patron saint of the fisherfolk of Sri Lanka’s north and India’s south, nestled in an arch just below its roof. Another statue, larger and more imposing, is positioned on a podium in front of the church. Dressed in brown robes with fair white skin and brown hair, St. Anthony holds a small child and looks out into the sea of pilgrims as they kneel on the ground and pray, many of the women covering their hair with lace veils and turning rosaries in their fingers. Indian pilgrims work their way through the crowd, distributing sesame sweets. One of the temporary stalls set up by vendors from both countries. Photograph courtesy of the author. I decide to wander through the temporary stalls set up by vendors on an otherwise abandoned patch of vegetation. Enthusiastic sellers assume I’m from India and quote me prices in Indian rupees. One salesman asks me to take his photo, and predicts that I’ll soon be headed abroad. He inspects my palm, and informs me that my first child will be a boy. I spot the tent of Silva, a pilgrim from Bangalore.His tent has both Indian and Sri Lankan flags pinned on the front. He tells me he’s been coming to Katchatheevu for the last nine years. “They’re always in brotherhood, no?” says Silva. “Nobody can divide it. They’re always binding, very lovely people,” adding that Katchatheevu inspired him to visit mainland Sri Lanka. I chat with a fisherman from Rameswaram who’s visiting for the first time with a party of four other people. He tells me Katchatheevu is well-known in his hometown, but not many people make the journey over. Soon, religious songs blaring over the loudspeaker begin to drown out our conversation, and the Walk of the Cross begins. Young boys clad in red and white robes stand at the head of the procession. A wooden cross carried on the shoulders of Reverend Fathers behind them towers overhead. Photograph courtesy of the author. As they walk, songs accompany their steps, and a huge crowd walks around the church’s perimeter as the sun sets, taking us to the beach where groups of men are bathing in the clear blue water, standing and laughing amongst themselves. Every time the cross stops, people fall to the ground behind the cross and begin to pray, and a sermon is delivered from the church’s pulpit by Indian and Sri Lankan clergy, in variously inflected accents that inform us where they might be from. Some sermons are pointedly political. They talk of the Sri Lankan Tamils forcibly disappeared during the civil war. Of mothers still looking for their children. Some mention the ongoing economic crisis Sri Lankans continue to face. Others appeal directly to the pilgrims, telling them to be more loving and accepting of others and the pain they might be facing. It’s during the Walk of the Cross that I spot the original St. Anthony’s Church, the one built by the saved fisherman. It is a sharp contrast to the new church, with a decaying facade with plaster peeling off it, but stark in its simplicity. Pilgrims stream in and out to pray to old statues of St. Anthony placed on a ledge, overlooked by a chipped wall hanging of Jesus on the cross. Others camp in front of it, chatting and watching the Walk. “We’re devotees of St. Anthony,” one man from Thoothukudi, India tells me, perched on a blanket with his friends. “We have a very famous church for him there on the seaside, and we go and stay there every Tuesday… We’d heard about Katchatheevu before but we never had the opportunity to come, so this year when we got the chance we decided we had to come.” They’ve decided to buy soap at the stalls as souvenirs for their family, and joke about how much more expensive tea is in Sri Lanka due to the economic crisis. But the conversation takes a serious turn when they ask me about conflicts between Sri Lankan and Indian fishermen, and they say Indian fishermen are really struggling and have been shot down when trying to fish near Katchatheevu, despite it previously belonging to India. “If it were ours, there would be no shooting,” one of them says. They say that India has “extended a hand in brothership” towards Sri Lanka, but it has been met with “disgraceful behavior” by the latter. However, they’re adamant that India shouldn’t try to reclaim Katchatheevu, saying it’s been “given and that’s it.” Once the Walk of the Cross is over, the mass takes place at the front of the church. I perch next to my friends on the blanket as the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary are chanted repeatedly in Tamil. I realize it’s the first time I’ve been to a mass in Tamil, and listen intently to the words, which seem to acquire a deeper meaning in my mother tongue. I find myself deeply, uncontrollably moved, tears streaming down my cheeks as the words wash over me. “Isn’t this so nice?” I say, turning to my friend after the mass finishes. It feels like she’s radiating a deep, calm, glow. Her hands are clasped in prayer. “Yes,” she replies, hugging me. “Thank you for bringing me.” Afterwards, there’s a procession of St. Anthony, with a statue carried through the crowd and around the island, flashing with green and red lights. The church is decked out in beautiful lights that lend it a Christmas feel, and there’s a festive feeling in the air as people go to light candles at a small cave-like shrine next to the church, cupping them carefully to avoid the wind extinguishing them. Throughout the day, there are also intermittent announcements of pilgrims’ prayers to St. Anthony—people asking for foreign visas to be approved, for marriages to be arranged, and for illnesses to be cured. The specifics of people’s names and locations are all divulged, and my friends and I wonder at people’s deepest wishes being revealed so publicly. We then use our meal tokens to claim food provided by the navy—a meal of rice and fish curry. Being a vegan, I’m obliged to go back to the stalls to buy myself a meal of rice and vegetables, unable to eat the food provided. After dinner, I get to chatting with a fisherman from Rameshwaram, who also talks about the lack of fish on the Indian side of the ocean, forcing them to travel into Sri Lankan waters. We exchange numbers and decide to keep in touch. We’ve been chatting on and off all day to the trio from Colombo who have camped next to us, and we end up talking to them until late in the night, exchanging life anecdotes and cackling with laughter while pilgrims snore around us. They tease me about my new friend, saying that I’m about to embark on a cross-border romance. When we finally decide to call it a night, the buzz of life still hasn’t stopped, with people walking around and talking in hushed tones, and the church lights still glowing furiously. “Pilgrims, please wake up and get ready. The mass will begin at 6 am,” a voice over the loudspeaker announces at 4:30 am the next morning. But people are slow to take notice, the mass of sleeping bodies not rousing itself awake until shortly before sunrise. Just before 6 am, the mass begins, and it feels noticeably more formal than the festivities of the previous day, with Indian officials present. Hymn sheets are handed round, and the atmosphere is solemn as people periodically stand to sing from their campsites. The morning mass at 6 am. Photograph courtesy of the author. Just before 9 am, the mass comes to a sudden end, and we’re told to claim our breakfast parcels, this time rice with dhal and soya meat curry. I only eat a little, conscious of the boat journey later, and then the announcements begin, telling us which boats are ready to leave from the island and urging pilgrims to make their way to the shore. The fisherman from Rameshwaram comes to say goodbye to me, prompting more teasing from my friends. People crowd the old and new churches for one last prayer, and I join them before we trudge back the way we came the previous day. At the harbor, the Sri Lankan side pushes and shoves to depart, and we manage to get onto the third boat after almost an hour of waiting. The boat journey this time is relatively more eventful than the first. About ten minutes in, there’s a sudden jolt and a loud bang, with a force beneath our feet that feels like the boat has just hit something. Over the next few minutes, the bangs and jolts intensify, and people begin to scream and cry. The floorboards of the boat have come up on its left side, and the seats jump up and down. I find my hands reaching out for my friends around me, both old and new, and we sit huddled in a circle, praying quietly under our breath while an elderly lady cries and calls out to St. Anthony for help a few rows behind us. I lose count of how many times I throw up on the way back—at one point we run out of bags, so I have to stand on tiptoe to vomit out of the window, sea water hitting my face as my stomach convulses. People call the boatmen to show them what’s wrong with the boat and beg them to go slower, but nothing seems to change. My friends try to contact the navy and we even get to the stage of waving my red kurti out of the window as a danger sign, but to no avail. It seems to be by sheer miracle that we make it back to Kurikkaduwan. On the bus back to Jaffna town, I chat to the fellow Katchatheevu pilgrim next to me, Baskar, his grandson perched on his lap holding a toy gun. He went to Katchatheevu the previous two years as well, when the COVID-19 pandemic meant only 50 pilgrims were allowed to attend. He tells me he made a promise to St. Anthony to visit Katchatheevu with his whole family if his daughter was cured of a serious illness that twelve doctors said she wouldn’t survive. “That’s her,” he says, pointing to the girl sitting in front of us in a green salwar kameez, holding her phone to her ear and listening to Tamil film soundtracks. “I told St. Anthony I would bring her to Katchatheevu alive. I had that belief.” Baskar, who works as a fisherman, said the economic crisis has made it difficult for him to attend the festival because of the higher boat costs, but he somehow had to make it work because of his promise to Anthony. “We believe that whatever sea we go to, he’ll save us,” Baskar says. “Because of my belief in St. Anthony, I’ve been rescued two or three times. Once I even fell into the sea unconscious after hitting my head. But because of God’s grace, I was saved.” Two years ago, Baskar says he met an Indian pilgrim who was so upset that the COVID-19 restrictions meant nobody else could come. This year, he met the pilgrim again with his family, and was so happy that everybody could come. “I told him, don’t worry, next time you can come with all your siblings and children,” Baskar says. “And this time I was so happy… Lots of people came and they were so happy… We speak happily with them. Last night, there were around 40 or 50 Indians and they were all talking and laughing with me so happily—they wouldn’t let me sleep,” he says, laughing. ∎ You can almost taste the excitement on the boat as it nears Katchatheevu, people craning their necks out of windows, and perching on the steps to catch their first glimpse of it. For most passengers, it seems to be their first time visiting the island—abandoned, uninhabited, and closed to civilians for all but two days each year for its annual church festival. Standing on some bags to gain height, I catch flashes of the island—a statue of the Virgin Mary encased in glass peeping out from some foliage; with trees for miles, and waves lapping the shore. The four-hour boat journey from mainland Sri Lanka to Katchatheevu is surreal. I’d never heard of Katchatheevu until November last year. From a sparsely-populated Wikipedia page, I’d learned the island was only open for visitors during its March church festival, so I resolved to go. Katchatheevu lies in the Palk Strait between southern India and northern Sri Lanka, a contentious and liminal space that has historically been contested between the two countries. Under British rule, the island belonged to India, and after Independence it became a disputed territory. In 1976, it was ceded to Sri Lanka by then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in a series of maritime boundary agreements. However, this decision has always been hotly contested by Tamil Nadu politicians ever since, who have long called for the reacquisition of Katchatheevu, ostensibly on the behest of Indian fisherfolk. In 1991, the Tamil Nadu Assembly adopted a resolution for its retrieval. In 2008, then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu argued to the Supreme Court that the agreements on Katchatheevu were unconstitutional. As recently as last year, the 1974-76 maritime boundary agreements over Katchatheevu have remained hotly contested. Katchatheevu was closely surveilled during the Sri Lankan Civil War, which ended in 2009, suspected to be a base for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a militant group fighting for an independent state in the country’s north, from which they smuggled weapons. Since the end of the war, the island has been controlled by the Sri Lankan navy, with Indian fishermen allowed to dry their nets on its land. But conflicts between Sri Lankan and Indian fishermen continue to rage around the space, with Indians accused of crossing the maritime boundary to poach in Sri Lankan waters. Many poor Sri Lankan fisherfolk returned to these waters after the Civil War, by which time they found a landscape dominated by Indian trawlers they could not compete with. View of the island from the boat. Courtesy of the author These unresolved disputes of land and livelihoods make the seemingly peaceable annual church festival even more intriguing, since regulations on movement to and from the island are abandoned for the festival. Pilgrims from both sides of the strait collide in a rare meeting point of communities who speak the same Tamil language but have historically met mostly under difficult conditions; the line between southern India and northern Sri Lanka became porous during the civil war as people fled Sri Lanka in droves as refugees. In centuries prior, hundreds of thousands of Indian Tamils were brought over to Sri Lanka as indentured laborers by British colonizers. Indian Tamils were denied citizenship by Sri Lanka upon independence; many were deported back to India, with others in a state of limbo for decades. Communities in both countries have thus experienced statelessness and rejection on the other’s land, making Katchatheevu a contested space, all the more significant as a fleetingly-inhabited melting pot of experiences and cultures. It becomes a rare waypoint through which the porosity of borders and violent history of the region can be seen through its visiting Tamil communities. Yet it remains a little-known and incredibly underreported place, with the specifics of its historic legacy rarely discussed in a wider context. Traveling with two friends on the boat, I try to glean as much as I can about Katchatheevu’s history. My friend and I befriend a fellow passenger. She tells us a story about how St. Anthony’s Church, the only building on the island, was built. A fisherman who almost died at sea promised God he would build a church if he was saved. After the fisherman survived, he stayed true to his word, and built the church using materials from Delft island, about two hours closer to Sri Lanka’s mainland. As we disembark onto a temporary and very shaky gangway assembled by the Sri Lankan Navy, which administers the island year-round, we spot a crowd already assembled on the shore—Indian pilgrims. For the church festival, all disputes and regulations are suspended, and pilgrims from both countries land on the island in a rare meeting point of communities otherwise totally separated by the Palk Strait. We are shepherded into four different queues for navy checks—Sri Lankan women, Sri Lankan men, Indian women, and Indian men. The Indian and Sri Lankan sides look each other up and down with bemused curiosity. On the other side of the checkpoints, Katchatheevu is wild and bare, untamed vegetation crowding the sides of a wide and sandy path. The early afternoon sun beats down heavily on us, and juice vendors have wisely set up shop to serve cold drinks to thirsty pilgrims. Families separated by gender wait for their relatives to come through the queue, and I spot an interesting exchange between two pilgrims from India and Sri Lanka that highlights how monumental the festival is as a reminder of the liminal space Katchatheevu occupies. “Where are you from, son?” asks the aunty from Bangalore, clad in a light brown sari, speaking in a dialect quite far removed from Jaffna Tamil. “Jaffna,” replies the young man sitting next to her in a collared shirt and trousers. “Where’s that? Sri Lanka?” the aunty asks. “You don’t know where Jaffna is?” he replies, looking shocked and slightly offended. “Yes, it’s in Sri Lanka. It’s world famous!” After our friend arrives, we trek towards the church to set up camp. Along the way, we spot pilgrims industriously clearing patches of vegetation to find a spot to bed down, and others who have come organized with lunch carriers and huge containers of water, because there is no drinking water available on the island. We select a spot just in front of the church, next to a trio from Colombo, and lay out the bed sheet I’ve brought from home. A few minutes later, a voice over the loudspeaker announces that the prayers will soon begin. St. Anthony, patron saint of the fisherfolk of Sri Lanka's north and India's south. Photography courtesy of the author. The nuns begin to chant repeatedly: “ Punitha Mariye, Iraivanin Thaaye, paavikalaa irukkira engalukkaaka, ippozhuthum naangal irappin velaiyilum vendikollumaame. [Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death].” The church itself is a rich cream color, with a statue of St. Anthony, patron saint of the fisherfolk of Sri Lanka’s north and India’s south, nestled in an arch just below its roof. Another statue, larger and more imposing, is positioned on a podium in front of the church. Dressed in brown robes with fair white skin and brown hair, St. Anthony holds a small child and looks out into the sea of pilgrims as they kneel on the ground and pray, many of the women covering their hair with lace veils and turning rosaries in their fingers. Indian pilgrims work their way through the crowd, distributing sesame sweets. One of the temporary stalls set up by vendors from both countries. Photograph courtesy of the author. I decide to wander through the temporary stalls set up by vendors on an otherwise abandoned patch of vegetation. Enthusiastic sellers assume I’m from India and quote me prices in Indian rupees. One salesman asks me to take his photo, and predicts that I’ll soon be headed abroad. He inspects my palm, and informs me that my first child will be a boy. I spot the tent of Silva, a pilgrim from Bangalore.His tent has both Indian and Sri Lankan flags pinned on the front. He tells me he’s been coming to Katchatheevu for the last nine years. “They’re always in brotherhood, no?” says Silva. “Nobody can divide it. They’re always binding, very lovely people,” adding that Katchatheevu inspired him to visit mainland Sri Lanka. I chat with a fisherman from Rameswaram who’s visiting for the first time with a party of four other people. He tells me Katchatheevu is well-known in his hometown, but not many people make the journey over. Soon, religious songs blaring over the loudspeaker begin to drown out our conversation, and the Walk of the Cross begins. Young boys clad in red and white robes stand at the head of the procession. A wooden cross carried on the shoulders of Reverend Fathers behind them towers overhead. Photograph courtesy of the author. As they walk, songs accompany their steps, and a huge crowd walks around the church’s perimeter as the sun sets, taking us to the beach where groups of men are bathing in the clear blue water, standing and laughing amongst themselves. Every time the cross stops, people fall to the ground behind the cross and begin to pray, and a sermon is delivered from the church’s pulpit by Indian and Sri Lankan clergy, in variously inflected accents that inform us where they might be from. Some sermons are pointedly political. They talk of the Sri Lankan Tamils forcibly disappeared during the civil war. Of mothers still looking for their children. Some mention the ongoing economic crisis Sri Lankans continue to face. Others appeal directly to the pilgrims, telling them to be more loving and accepting of others and the pain they might be facing. It’s during the Walk of the Cross that I spot the original St. Anthony’s Church, the one built by the saved fisherman. It is a sharp contrast to the new church, with a decaying facade with plaster peeling off it, but stark in its simplicity. Pilgrims stream in and out to pray to old statues of St. Anthony placed on a ledge, overlooked by a chipped wall hanging of Jesus on the cross. Others camp in front of it, chatting and watching the Walk. “We’re devotees of St. Anthony,” one man from Thoothukudi, India tells me, perched on a blanket with his friends. “We have a very famous church for him there on the seaside, and we go and stay there every Tuesday… We’d heard about Katchatheevu before but we never had the opportunity to come, so this year when we got the chance we decided we had to come.” They’ve decided to buy soap at the stalls as souvenirs for their family, and joke about how much more expensive tea is in Sri Lanka due to the economic crisis. But the conversation takes a serious turn when they ask me about conflicts between Sri Lankan and Indian fishermen, and they say Indian fishermen are really struggling and have been shot down when trying to fish near Katchatheevu, despite it previously belonging to India. “If it were ours, there would be no shooting,” one of them says. They say that India has “extended a hand in brothership” towards Sri Lanka, but it has been met with “disgraceful behavior” by the latter. However, they’re adamant that India shouldn’t try to reclaim Katchatheevu, saying it’s been “given and that’s it.” Once the Walk of the Cross is over, the mass takes place at the front of the church. I perch next to my friends on the blanket as the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary are chanted repeatedly in Tamil. I realize it’s the first time I’ve been to a mass in Tamil, and listen intently to the words, which seem to acquire a deeper meaning in my mother tongue. I find myself deeply, uncontrollably moved, tears streaming down my cheeks as the words wash over me. “Isn’t this so nice?” I say, turning to my friend after the mass finishes. It feels like she’s radiating a deep, calm, glow. Her hands are clasped in prayer. “Yes,” she replies, hugging me. “Thank you for bringing me.” Afterwards, there’s a procession of St. Anthony, with a statue carried through the crowd and around the island, flashing with green and red lights. The church is decked out in beautiful lights that lend it a Christmas feel, and there’s a festive feeling in the air as people go to light candles at a small cave-like shrine next to the church, cupping them carefully to avoid the wind extinguishing them. Throughout the day, there are also intermittent announcements of pilgrims’ prayers to St. Anthony—people asking for foreign visas to be approved, for marriages to be arranged, and for illnesses to be cured. The specifics of people’s names and locations are all divulged, and my friends and I wonder at people’s deepest wishes being revealed so publicly. We then use our meal tokens to claim food provided by the navy—a meal of rice and fish curry. Being a vegan, I’m obliged to go back to the stalls to buy myself a meal of rice and vegetables, unable to eat the food provided. After dinner, I get to chatting with a fisherman from Rameshwaram, who also talks about the lack of fish on the Indian side of the ocean, forcing them to travel into Sri Lankan waters. We exchange numbers and decide to keep in touch. We’ve been chatting on and off all day to the trio from Colombo who have camped next to us, and we end up talking to them until late in the night, exchanging life anecdotes and cackling with laughter while pilgrims snore around us. They tease me about my new friend, saying that I’m about to embark on a cross-border romance. When we finally decide to call it a night, the buzz of life still hasn’t stopped, with people walking around and talking in hushed tones, and the church lights still glowing furiously. “Pilgrims, please wake up and get ready. The mass will begin at 6 am,” a voice over the loudspeaker announces at 4:30 am the next morning. But people are slow to take notice, the mass of sleeping bodies not rousing itself awake until shortly before sunrise. Just before 6 am, the mass begins, and it feels noticeably more formal than the festivities of the previous day, with Indian officials present. Hymn sheets are handed round, and the atmosphere is solemn as people periodically stand to sing from their campsites. The morning mass at 6 am. Photograph courtesy of the author. Just before 9 am, the mass comes to a sudden end, and we’re told to claim our breakfast parcels, this time rice with dhal and soya meat curry. I only eat a little, conscious of the boat journey later, and then the announcements begin, telling us which boats are ready to leave from the island and urging pilgrims to make their way to the shore. The fisherman from Rameshwaram comes to say goodbye to me, prompting more teasing from my friends. People crowd the old and new churches for one last prayer, and I join them before we trudge back the way we came the previous day. At the harbor, the Sri Lankan side pushes and shoves to depart, and we manage to get onto the third boat after almost an hour of waiting. The boat journey this time is relatively more eventful than the first. About ten minutes in, there’s a sudden jolt and a loud bang, with a force beneath our feet that feels like the boat has just hit something. Over the next few minutes, the bangs and jolts intensify, and people begin to scream and cry. The floorboards of the boat have come up on its left side, and the seats jump up and down. I find my hands reaching out for my friends around me, both old and new, and we sit huddled in a circle, praying quietly under our breath while an elderly lady cries and calls out to St. Anthony for help a few rows behind us. I lose count of how many times I throw up on the way back—at one point we run out of bags, so I have to stand on tiptoe to vomit out of the window, sea water hitting my face as my stomach convulses. People call the boatmen to show them what’s wrong with the boat and beg them to go slower, but nothing seems to change. My friends try to contact the navy and we even get to the stage of waving my red kurti out of the window as a danger sign, but to no avail. It seems to be by sheer miracle that we make it back to Kurikkaduwan. On the bus back to Jaffna town, I chat to the fellow Katchatheevu pilgrim next to me, Baskar, his grandson perched on his lap holding a toy gun. He went to Katchatheevu the previous two years as well, when the COVID-19 pandemic meant only 50 pilgrims were allowed to attend. He tells me he made a promise to St. Anthony to visit Katchatheevu with his whole family if his daughter was cured of a serious illness that twelve doctors said she wouldn’t survive. “That’s her,” he says, pointing to the girl sitting in front of us in a green salwar kameez, holding her phone to her ear and listening to Tamil film soundtracks. “I told St. Anthony I would bring her to Katchatheevu alive. I had that belief.” Baskar, who works as a fisherman, said the economic crisis has made it difficult for him to attend the festival because of the higher boat costs, but he somehow had to make it work because of his promise to Anthony. “We believe that whatever sea we go to, he’ll save us,” Baskar says. “Because of my belief in St. Anthony, I’ve been rescued two or three times. Once I even fell into the sea unconscious after hitting my head. But because of God’s grace, I was saved.” Two years ago, Baskar says he met an Indian pilgrim who was so upset that the COVID-19 restrictions meant nobody else could come. This year, he met the pilgrim again with his family, and was so happy that everybody could come. “I told him, don’t worry, next time you can come with all your siblings and children,” Baskar says. “And this time I was so happy… Lots of people came and they were so happy… We speak happily with them. Last night, there were around 40 or 50 Indians and they were all talking and laughing with me so happily—they wouldn’t let me sleep,” he says, laughing. ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making A statue of St. Anthony, patron saint of the fisherfolk of Sri Lanka’s north and India’s south, is nestled in an arch just below the roof of the church. Courtesy of the author. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Dispatch Katchatheevu Sri Lanka Island Palk Bay Jaffna Tamil Tamil Diasporas Indian & Sri Lankan Tamil Communities Church Festival Rameswaram Border Dispute Fisherfolk Fishing Crisis Disputed Territory Pilgrimage Low-Income Workers Trawling Transnational Solidarities Internationalist Solidarity Sri Lankan Civil War Indentured Labor Labor Fishing Labor Subsistence Labor JEEVAN RAVINDRAN is a multimedia journalist based in Jaffna and London, with bylines in VICE , Reuters , CNN, and more. She reports on human rights and politics. 16 Jun 2023 Dispatch Katchatheevu 16th Jun 2023 The Citizen's Vote Jeevan Ravindran 16th Jul The Ambivalent Voter Jeevan Ravindran 20th Sep Scenes From Gotagogama Sakina Aliakbar · Ruvin De Silva 23rd Feb A State of Perpetual War: Fiction & the Sri Lankan Civil War Shehan Karunatilaka 10th Jan Chats Ep. 5 · Tamil translation & Perumal Murugan's “Poonachi” N Kalyan Raman 7th Dec On That Note:

WRITER Amna Chaudhry AMNA CHAUDHRY is a writer and activist based in Lahore. She also teaches creative writing and writes the newsletterThis Is The Mod Squad, which covers feminism and ethics in the fashion industry. WRITER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

· THE VERTICAL Op-Ed · Afghanistan Climate Crimes of US Imperalism in Afghanistan The occupation of Afghanistan demonstrated that climate catastrophe is a crucial feature of imperialism, not a bug. Aerial satellite map of the city of Kunduz, where a Kunduz Trauma Center operated by Médecins Sans Frontières hospital was bombed by a US Air Force gunship in October 2015. The former site of the MSF Trauma Center colored in yellow can today be seen in satellite images as a vacant plot filled with debris. Courtesy of Kamil Ahsan using ArcGIS. EVERY EMPIRE is unique but most empires share many discernible structural features and operational modes. Normative patterns of imperial conduct include transgressing geographic, cultural, political, legal, and other kinds of boundaries while generating new circulations of people, ideas, technologies, and practices. Historically, empires leverage inequalities and, in so doing, tend to commit crimes. In the modern era, Afghanistan has been arguably the primary victim of imperial war crimes. Since 2001, these crimes have been perpetrated by a large number of colluding and competing international actors and a wide assortment of local collaborators and proxies. It is historically rare for an empire to be held accountable for criminal conduct, and it is a bitter irony that empires present themselves as peace-loving and law-giving while imperial history can be read as repeating litanies of unprosecuted criminal conduct. Through information management predicated on censorship, propaganda, and manipulation of individual states and multinational institutions that may or may not constitute legal conduct, empires work hard to immunize themselves against their own criminality. The International Criminal Court indictment of the US and other actors for crimes against humanity in March 2020 was diluted in September 2021 after the Taliban returned to power to now make it practically impossible for the US to be investigated and held to account by the ICC. The ICC was the last and only internationally recognized authority willing to publicly pursue US imperial war crimes against humanity in Afghanistan. US imperial authority was horrifically predicated on perpetual jet bombing, wanton drone assassination, incessant helicopter night raids, routine abductions and extrajudicial killings, and systematic renditions to black sites in the country. All this occurred across a globally dispersed imperial regime of torture predicated on illegal human trafficking and conscious legal obfuscation, through chains of contractors and subcontractors working covertly across national boundaries. Rapidly emerging GIS-based technologies through which US imperial violence against the people of Afghanistan occurred—involving drones most notably—inherently challenged and transgressed established laws regarding war, military occupation, and universal human rights. U.S. Central Command movement across Kabul of a white Toyota Corolla on Aug. 29th, 2021. Mapping, central to U.S. defense companies and military, tracks an individual car. Today, former defense officials at companies like Janes and Quiet Professionals deploy the same data to ostensibly track and protect refugees. (CENTCOM/via Military Times) Here I highlight the environmental impact of the US-led international so-called “War on Terror” in Afghanistan and call for accountability and remedial action from the US and its allies for criminal negligence of the uniquely precious and life-sustaining natural resource base of the country. The US engagement of Afghanistan’s natural resources began during the Cold War in the context of the Helmand Valley Development Project involving large dams and related canals, roads, airports, and new bureaucracies and administrators organized to provide a perennial supply of water to new agricultural lands where nomads were to settle and produce cash crop exports such as cotton in the south of the country. The HVDP not only failed due to a lack of basic initial soil and groundwater surveys, but the over-salinated soil became usable for little else besides poppies that transformed Afghanistan into the world’s largest exporter of hashish, opium, and heroin in the 1980s. During this decade while the CIA was covertly funding and arming the Mujahideen, the US Drug Enforcement Agency facilitated the processing and global marketing of Afghanistan’s bountiful opiate harvests. One result of the extensive CIA financial and military provisioning of the Afghan mujahideen was the extensive landmining of mountain passes and valley pasturelands between market settings and strategic locations in eastern Afghanistan especially. The ICC was the last and only internationally recognized authority willing to publicly pursue US imperial war crimes against humanity in Afghanistan. Beginning in October 2001, a twenty-year monsoon rain of US bombs fell on Afghanistan. Older well-tested munitions such as daisy cutter bombs designed to destroy forests in Viet Nam were used to decimate gardens, orchards, and farms in Afghanistan, while innovative new bunker buster bombs devastated underground water channels, overland canals and dams, and mountainous habitats. This vengeful imperial desire to obliterate single individuals from Tora Bora in December 2001 to the “Mother of All Bombs” in April 2017, to the ‘final official’ drone bombing of an innocent family in August 2021, and the hundreds of thousands of US bombs throughout this imperial occupation, have done irreparable harm by depositing depleted uranium into the soil and groundwater to such an extent that Afghanistan now joins Fallujah, Iraq, the Marshall Islands, New Mexico, Hiroshima and Nagasaki as locations where US munitions have left radiation poisoning and high concentrations of eternally disturbing birth defects among humans and animals in their wake. Deadly chemicals have long blighted the waters and wider ecosystems surrounding many hundreds of military bases in the US. Similarly, the habitats surrounding what were hundreds of military bases in Afghanistan have been forever tainted by deadly toxins, but this environmental assault is amplified seemingly irremediably by the noxious burn pits used by these bases to incinerate everything from paper to human waste to military equipment including full vehicles. These bases were found throughout Afghanistan, from mountain hamlets in the north to the ever-expanding Shindand base in the southwest near the Iranian border to Bagram in the lushly watered northern third of the Kabul valley. During the American imperium, Bagram was a city of its own, defined by a perpetually flaming and smoldering football field-sized burn pit. The toxicity emanating from these burn pits circulated near and far from the bases, resulting in inescapable disease and infertility across the biological spectrum of organisms from insects to fish, crops, plants, trees, animals, birds, and humans. Afghanistan now joins Fallujah, Iraq, the Marshall Islands, New Mexico, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki as locations where US munitions have left radiation poisoning and high concentrations of eternally disturbing birth defects among humans and animals in their wake. The US military operates primarily on fossil fuels and, as a result, carries one of the largest carbon footprints in the world. Nowhere is the air pollution resulting from military aircraft and diesel-fueled wheeled vehicles more evident than in Kabul, which regressed during the US imperial presence in the country from near-pristine air quality in 2001 to having among the world’s worst air pollution during the US occupation. The hyper-urbanization of Kabul from a city of roughly half a million inhabitants in 2001 to more than five million today has occurred without a sanitation system, while unregulated private wells have depleted the city’s water supply and are also being undermined by climate change-induced deglaciation of the Hindu Kush. From lack of water to radiated water, from toxic air to poisoned soil, the fully unrestrained US imperial military conduct in Afghanistan has resulted in an environmental catastrophe that requires accountability and restitution from all international powers that have contributed to what is now genocidal famine and environmental ruin, much of which did not occur within the boundaries of international law and ethical conduct. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Op-Ed Afghanistan Environmental Disaster Radiation US Imperialism War Crimes Climate Change Geography Urbanization International Law Internationalist Perspective Drug Enforcement Agency DEA Daisy Cutters Munitions Normative Frameworks Structural Frameworks Policy Torture GIS-based technologies Helmand Valley Development Project HDVP Surveillance Regimes Militarism Military Operations Taliban Media United States Memory Nationalism Human Rights Violations Human Rights Hindu Kush Bagram Heroin Hashish Opium Marshall Islands New Mexico Japan Hiroshima & Nagasaki Drone Warfare Predatory Drone Infertility Disease Generational Damage Kunduz 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. 16th Oct 2022 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:

“As life moves to time elsewhere, in the cities of the world I’ve set out to leave behind me, things move to water, its flow. I do not fail to notice that both time and water flow—perhaps it is this that abets and causes motion?” FEATURES Dukkha AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “As life moves to time elsewhere, in the cities of the world I’ve set out to leave behind me, things move to water, its flow. I do not fail to notice that both time and water flow—perhaps it is this that abets and causes motion?” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Essay Bengal Personal History Holding Water Epistemology Trauma Temporality Water Sadness Depictions of Grief Grief Essay Form Experimental Methods Banality William Blake Teesta Disaster & Language Intimacy & Disaster River Guilt Privacy Siliguri Loneliness Stream of Consciousness Watercolor Rath Yatra Memory P. C. Sorcar Darjeeling Himalayas 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 Essay Bengal 4th Jul 2021 “For a tear is an intellectual thing.” William Blake THEY are beating water. They are beating water with a hammer. I wake up with this sound in my ears. I yawn to be sure that I’m awake. I don’t know whether people yawn in their sleep. I don’t know many other things—whether the body wakes up before the mind, or whether it is possible to beat water with a hammer. But they’re beating water with a hammer. The ears must be the most alert part of our bodies? I’ve heard water speaking in different dialects before. From the sound of it being poured, I can make out how far water in a glass is from the brim; I hear buckets in neighbouring flats overflow; I hear leaking taps, disobedient drops falling to the floor from the mouth of a tap, unhurt; I hear sweat collect into drops; I hear saliva move inside mouths; I hear water breathe and sleep. But this is a different water. They are beating water . I walk out of my rented room. Outside, there’s the light, reluctant to announce itself as if it were a guest. The wind is just the opposite, seeking attention. Both invisible, invincible. What is visible is water—the river Teesta, swollen like an overworked muscle, twitching, like a nerve. But where’s the hammer? I look, but with my ears. There is the regular rhythm of water falling on water to the earth, where everything must collect. When I get out of bed—and from the dream where I was caged all night—the world is in motion. In towns and cities, that motion is triggered by time. Here, where I’ve come to escape time’s fundamentalism, it is not time that is causing motion, for water is the last of the revolutionaries, having managed to live indifferent to time. As life moves to time elsewhere, in the cities of the world I’ve set out to leave behind me, things move to water, its flow. I do not fail to notice that both time and water flow —perhaps it is this that abets and causes motion? There are no mirrors in this house, and so I do not see any humans. I do not know the antonym of ‘human’, but whatever it is, it is for this that I have come here. For me, the opposite of humans is water. It is perhaps because I feel related to water, related as in being a relative. Every time I’ve tried to say this to someone, they’ve dismissed or interpreted this as a ‘poetic’ reflection. I’ve seen doctors who’ve dismissed it as a phase—like teenagers who fancy themselves as their favourite crushes on their T-shirts— and others who’ve told me that there was nothing to worry about feeling like that, for humans are indeed composed mainly of water, more than three-fifths of us. But no one really understands. The drizzle has stopped though I can see its ruins—on leaves, floors, tarpaulin. That water can fall anywhere without breaking its bones is a slap to the superiority of vertebrates. I wonder whether water, if it were animal, would be mammal or aves. Are these raindrops eggs then, or corpses? I am water not because I long to flow. I am water because no metal, no air, no music, nothing can hold my sadness like water. Water fills a teardrop like air fills a yawn. The elements rush in when they sense emptiness. My fingers are on my face again. If water could leave fossils, I imagine that this is how they’d look—these marks coursing down my face. They disappear, but not the sadness. Perhaps it is my fossil. It might have all begun with dehydration. My days in the hospital were marked by the aloneness of being inside the womb of a dark room, but without the water of the womb that enables life. Bottles of saline water hung like benevolent angels beside me, keeping watch over my life. I could see them even in the darkness—the fluorescence of water inside a plastic bottle. I heard them coax life into me, drop by drop, as if I was being created anew. I lay on my back, my spine dividing the bed like a book, thinking of strangers—writers whose words still hadn’t left me, co-passengers whose words had stuck as spit does on walls. That is the thing about sadness—its extremism, its intrusiveness, that leaves space for nothing. Sadness changes us unrecognisably even as we appear the same to the world. Humans, after all, are not like the sky—one cannot tell the climate of feelings from its body and colour. Dark clouds do not appear like boils on human bodies to indicate sadness. It was hard to believe that it was crying that had left me dehydrated. Any piece of wood becomes sweet-smelling when left in the proximity of sandalwood: this is a saying in Bangla. Left beside water for days, hearing it trickle drop by drop into my body, I became an embodiment of that. The thought of organ transplants never left me, as if this water would replace my sadness, my body’s largest organ. I could not think of it as anything but water—it came out of me as tears, snot, and sweat, the last in moments of panic and anxiety, when I felt this fear would corrode everything. I felt it inside me as one does water, in its various states, moving inside me like water, me trying to push it out as if it were gaseous, but it was like ice, solid and heavy, territorial, refusing to move, immobilising me, every thought and action. I longed for a hammer that’d allow me to break it into pieces just like the ice-candy man scraped ice. I hoped for this new water from the drip to take its place, as rain cleans the air, to fill me with life as I imagined life should be: without pain. I thought of the agents of my sadness—those I’d loved, whose understanding had now disappeared. As if I’d suddenly turned into a foreign language. I imagined their sadness as well, even as I knew that it was different from mine. I saw theirs from the outside, and recognised it from their words and gestures. From the self-centredness that suffering brings, I understood only the obvious: if sadness were a species, I belonged to its phylum. Life with watercolour, I see now, was also a life with water. What I loved most about watercolour was what I loved most about water—its unexpectedness of flow and behaviour. Even after all these years, I couldn’t be completely sure how a dab of the brush would behave on the canvas. It could spread beyond my imagined prediction, or it could remain still, like the skin of a drying pond. That was how sadness settled inside me even though I still can’t tell whether the sadness was inside or outside. Watercolour changed my perception of language. Surface tension—the physical property of water that explained its behaviour on the canvas—I now saw only as ‘tension’. Paint I came to read and hear as ‘pain’. Like people, sounds and things and expressions had begun disappearing from my life. Cohabitation meant living with, living beside. My long history of living beside water, as it helped me understand the world on canvas, and then the interminable days of lying beside the relentless drip, reminded me of possible older lives—memories stored inside the gene, like a safe deposit that would remain unused until needed. My immediate ancestors had made a life in the alluvial plains of Bengal—my mother’s paternal family on the Gangetic delta, my father’s by the Padma. In this, they were related to the first humans who built settlements by the river. I hoped that that ancient sense of water, its blood and its carefree individualism, had trickled into me in some way. They had known water simply as water; as neighbour, not as something imagined , like ice or gas. This intimacy with water had marked their relationships—not just fluidity and flow, but a natural transparency and constancy. But the river was only a memory inside me—a human memory, of calls of fear by my great grand-people, of delight in its offerings, of the sound of splashing, of rolling abundance, and also of drowning. Why has the river stopped flowing after entering me? How have I become its station? There is nothing we own as deeply as pain. That is perhaps why we’re reluctant to let it go. I’m often unable to distinguish myself from my sadness. It is not like looking in a mirror, where I know I am related to the person looking back at me, who moves when I do, who walks away when I do. That sadness can have a body and breasts and fingers and a stomach that moves in all four directions is still new to me, even after all these years. For it is hard to imagine sadness. An infant might be able to imagine many things, perhaps even its hair blowing in the wind, but it can’t imagine sadness. Why am I sad? Trying to answer this question is like looking for a black stone from amidst a large pile of black stones—the answer is there, but not identifiable to me. If I knew which stone it was, I’d throw it far away, beyond the reach of the strength of my arms and the power of my eyes. I think of possible reasons for my sadness—I pile them together like those black stones. When they topple over inside my head, I arrange them differently, like books on shelves, but nothing helps. I only feel it inside me. Sometimes, I rub my chest as if sadness were a lump that would dissolve and melt inside me. But I can’t touch it. I feel that I’ve let sadness turn to god, the way god is invisible but everywhere. Like Hindu gods, sadness is also form-changing. The pestle pounding between my breasts transforms into a leech in my throat, and soon into water in my eyes. I touch the water and stare at it sometimes. For even though it might look like the same water, the sadness is always different. Like water, like god, like a caterpillar, it is always changing form. I struggle to remember why I was sad yesterday or why I cried all night last week. When I am exhausted by its ingratitude at my having given it a home to stay, I want to throw it out. Instead, I hide it from the world as if it were a secret love. I try to remember when I first made its acquaintance but I fail. It seems I’ve known it for as long as I have known my mother. Or life. Because I don’t tell anyone about it, I cannot seek their assistance. Once or twice, a friend who sensed the wildlife of my tears over the phone, says, ‘Maybe you should see a doctor? I have a friend who benefitted from…’ I struggle the most at that moment—her words are like a laxative inside my gut, they push my sadness out violently. My face is in my hands then—I have to hide my tears from the world. I have no idea why hiding my face seemed necessary at that moment. I am embarrassed. I feel guilty. I always feel guilty for being sad. Happiness missionaries are everywhere—on my bookshelves, in my phone, in notes I have copied and written to myself. Life seems to be only about joy, about participating in ananda, in pleasure, in happiness—everything we do ought to be directed towards that sole aim. Sadness is life’s outcast, and those like me are therefore life’s outcasts too. Why tears are more private than laughter, I don’t know. I will not be able to recognise my tears, in spite of having known them for so many years, ever since I was born. They are not like blood and its groups. If they were, we might have been able to know about the group that constituted the saddest people. When a friend asks what sadness feels like, whether it’s permanent, (‘Like paralysis?’), I try to think of an appropriate metaphor and fail—‘It’s like a niggling cough inside you. You feel it there, inside your chest, waiting to come out all the time’. Nothing helps. Nothing helps. For everything might have a language—some kind of language—but sadness doesn’t. It is pre-linguistic, and hasn’t evolved since then. That is another thing that I think about often. That sadness might be my only connect with my oldest ancestors. My body, with deposits of pollutants, might not be related to theirs, their reasons for joy must have been different from mine, but I think it is our sadness that makes us true relatives. I refuse to see a doctor. A friend says: ‘You must change a shoe that pinches’. It is not the fact of my sadness being compared to a shoe that irritates me. It is their assumption that sadness can be replaced. Everyone seems to have a vague idea about what that replacement might be, but they can’t be quite sure—a spare tyre replaces a similar tyre; will another kind of sadness replace this sadness? Sadness paralyses. It is because the water freezes. How does it move then? I pose this as an anonymous question to a suicide prevention website and someone writes back immediately. I imagine the responder to be a woman, and soon after, a machine. ‘Try origami—take paper and try to fold it into a shape that resembles your sadness. Write to us after you’ve done that. Being able to do that is half your work done.’ I recoil from the aggressive tone, this ridding of sadness now so integral to me, as close as a biological child. The annoyance passes, but the thought loiters in my consciousness. I bring old newspaper and turn to my fingers—they’ve fed and cleaned me all my life, won’t they bring me some calm if they can? Stars and birds, flowers and balloons—everything can be created from folding paper, so at that point it appears that this is how god created the world, merely by folding. I’ve only ever made boats before—folding squares into triangles and pulling them inside out gently until the likeness of a boat emerged. It was a surprise every single time—the genius of folds, of lines and planes, sticking without water’s glue. And yet, no matter how much my boat-making improved with practice, the tiny boat never managed to sail without capsizing. The thinness of paper, even with its softness, fails to find appropriate support in a partner like water, it being without a spine itself. Is sadness the paper I’ll have to fold into a boat, or the water on which the boat must sail? My heart feels like a boatman trying to boat on a dried river. I cry in the shower. Water washing water, as if water were excreta—the way I heard my grandmother say bishey bishkhoy, poison kills poison. Water runs over me, touching me in places where even light struggles to enter. I close the tap from time to time but cannot leave. Water is a magnet—I know I should leave for dryness, for warmth, but I stand there waiting for more water. I am aware of my aloneness, I feel like a seed. It was possible that all seeds are as lonely as the mango stone. Loneliness had turned them hard and unwelcoming of every kind of touch, whether of blade or tongue or teeth. The opposite of this was the papaya—seeds that were soft and silky and naughty, this joy coming to them from living in a commune inside: a hundred blackish seeds. That is why hair too is never lonely—it struggles for space, but is never in want of company. The heart, on the other hand, is completely alone. One heart, one penis, one vagina. But two breasts. Was there a moral in this? Was water as lonely as me? I wouldn’t ever know, so dependent was I on this body and its inability to migrate to anything besides itself. I hated my thoughts and wanted to be rid of them. In fact, I wanted to be rid of myself. I questioned all my thoughts and actions as if they were someone else’s, even an enemy’s. I did not realise that I was lonely—I did not understand that my loneliness had pitted me against myself. It was a surprise, what I had become—like a wet and fierce wind that carves rocks, so that what we see is actually the remainder after the tussle between stone and wind, I was now a leftover of my sadness. Sadness slows down everything—it survives on echoes, for everything returns over and over again. It stammers inside, trying hard to get out. It becomes like a port of the heart, and mind that they always return to. Compared to other emotions, its pace is slow—but slow only horizontally, for it moves southwards like water does through soil. Other emotions, like the roots of trees, feed on sadness urgently. They change immediately, for sadness is a powerful catalyst: it changes its surroundings without itself changing. I try to understand sadness through physics—taking away a piece of brick will result in exactly the same volume of air taking its place. The disappearance of a person leaves sadness that is far greater than the physical volume of the person. How does that happen? Science fails, I fail. To carry the size and weight of sadness that is bigger and heavier than one’s body; it was sadness that Sisyphus was trying to push up the mountain. I have this image: I’m standing at the top of a hill, about to jump off, but I can’t. I think it is sadness that glues me to the spot for sadness is an addiction. I’ve become a parasite to this sadness. I must remain alive to keep my sadness alive. I don’t know why they call it stream-of-consciousness. Lately, every time water from my paintbrush has leaked onto the canvas, that phrase has come up. Information doesn’t interest me—they are like nails that break for being too long, the fact of this phrase coming from William James’s revolutionary book. Did he actually mean stream of sadness when he said consciousness? Was he sad when he coined the phrase? But at times it doesn’t feel like a stream but a waterfall—water hurting water, sadness hitting sadness. I’m teaching my nephew to draw water. Next to him is a box of watercolours. We are rubbing water—with a brush, of course—on a blue tablet to produce blue water: adding water to produce water, a version of sexual reproduction as it were, humans producing humans, plants producing plants, like producing like. (That is the nature of reproduction: to produce versions of oneself. Only the sun is different. We, in all our varied forms, are its offspring, but we don’t resemble it.) The little boy takes the brush and pulls it from one end of the page to the other until its bluish stains mark the page. He promptly calls them water’s pimples. He’s angry when I laugh at his diagnosis. Scolded, I ask for a cure—water, he says, and pours the entire bowl on the page, and, of course, the drawing book. The flooded page is put under a patch of sunlight. There it dries unequally, crinkling, losing its flatness. We imagine land as we do water—flatness pleases us, it makes us feel powerful. Sharp undulations, prickliness, bristliness—they trouble us. This comes to us from our body which wants smooth surfaces; even a tiny grain of sand can keep us awake. The eye, like our back, seeks plain surfaces. There is aaram in looking at a straight line instead of jagged lines. But water is neither straight nor jagged. It is a moving line. The closest approximation of water’s movement on land is that of ants moving in a line, untouched by the push and rush of time. For many things move water—feet and machines, pumps and pipes, but time has no power over water’s movement. Time cannot move water, like it cannot move sadness. Another day we try again. This time land is sandwiched between two blocks of blue—water and sky. One of these he can see—and so it is not hard for him to be faithful: he looks outside the window, the blue sky is squatting there as always. He needs no tutoring, no demands are made on the imagination. Blue must be coloured blue. But water, silent in the bowl next to him, is colourless. Why must he colour it blue? It is a lie, he thinks. I try to paraphrase the Raman effect for him, but it’s like chanting a mantra to prove the existence of god. Water can be any colour, he says, and then demonstrates—dipping the brush into the colours one by one, letting it leak and dissolve into the bowl. Water collects all the colours. There’s nothing more accommodative than water. It is more elastic than even the human heart. ‘Making a bucket is a lot of work. Anything that holds water demands a lot of work.’ It is Rath Yatra, and I’m at a small fair that accompanies it every year. The fairs of my childhood are gone—clay, iron and tin toys have now been replaced by plastic. Almost everything squeaks, or runs on battery. I’ve come here to buy clay utensils—miniatures, toys for children. Utensils, fruits and vegetables, even houses with sloping roofs—most of these things don’t exist anymore, not even in villages. They are a part of folk memory, on their way to turning into nostalgia, a space as inert as a museum. This man sits in a corner. He is a remainder, and reminder, from an older time, when men trusted their hands, and when they blamed their poverty on destiny and not the government. In front of him are three kinds of things: kulo, boti, balti, the first for winnowing, separating grain from husk, the second a kind of flat bladed knife, used by sitting on the floor; the third is a toy tin bucket. For the bucket he asks for twenty rupees. Scared that I might bargain, he adds: "Anything that holds water demands a lot of work." It is folk knowledge that it always rains on the day of Rath Yatra. But there is not a cloud in the sky. That humidity which makes rain possible has landed on earth,. Around me is a blind crowd, blind because, like me, they do not know where we’re all going. We’re being pushed, and are pushing each other without will. We are sweating, we have become clouds. People are eager to touch the rope that pulls Jagannath and his siblings. It is endearing, this sacredness of a rope, how belief transforms the common into a thing of wonder. It is what love does too. I notice that the priest who’s sitting in the "ground storey" of the Rath is carrying a black umbrella. But the rains don’t come. It is as if we’ve become skies—water is flowing out of us relentlessly. The man’s words don’t leave me—how difficult it is to create anything that holds water. I kept thinking of god as the old man spoke, and how hard it must have been for him to design our eyes that hold tears. "Because you can’t carry water in everything after all." I’ve watched time lapses of water solidifying into ice. It is still a thing of wonder for me, for I was born into a household that did not have a fridge until I was seven. It was a magic machine. The magician P.C. Sorcar visited Siliguri almost every winter. We watched him cut human bodies into pieces and put them back together, the people, who were dead only a while ago now walked back to their seats in the auditorium. I thought of the fridge as akin to the magician—it could change unwieldy, liquid water into solid square cubes. But, like Sorcar, the fridge kept its technique hidden from me—it would freeze water only with its door closed. These time-lapse videos affect my body. I find that I swallow my saliva more often. I see water freezing into ice and I imagine this is how pain coagulates into sadness inside me. I remember looking at the icy peaks of the Himalayas from the balcony of my rented apartment overlooking Darjeeling’s Happy Valley Tea Estate. When I couldn’t see them clearly, I realised it wasn’t just my clinical myopia but the water in my eyes, which surprised me with its inexhaustibility. At first I dip just my head in the old iron bucket. It is cold—the water feels like metal, cold, solid, and resistant to any entry. When I force my head in, it tries to expel my head out of the bucket. I try again—I push my head in and then pull it out when the resistance seems too strong to bear. My head doesn’t learn to swim. One thing I take from this with some relief, even joy, is how water drowns out and distorts almost all surrounding sound. For a moment, perhaps because of the unexpectedness of the impact, it drowns out the sounds inside my head as well. I immediately begin thinking of this as a cure—this dunking my head in water every time sadness paralyses me. I remember my mother pouring water on my head and forehead to bring down my fever. I will trust in water too. Later, as the day wears warmer clothes, I walk to the river and sit on a rock. My feet enter the water. The river doesn’t push back like the water in the bucket. Head and feet—these are our extreme points, where tiredness accumulates the fastest. But how different the aches, and how different their cures. The water, even though it is colder than my body, as it mostly is when we meet in natural conditions, doesn’t seem as foreign to my feet as it did to my head. I do not know why. All my life I have allowed the water poured over my head to run to my feet. I read that the Indus Valley civilisation came to an end because of water shortage. Civilisations can end because of water. Can sadness end for the same reason? I am sleepy. Sleep feels like a pencil whose nib breaks every day. The history of hurt remains unrecorded. ∎ 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: