SAAG is a leftist literary magazine & an argument that South Asians have claimed avant-garde traditions since longer than the word was coined. MISSION South Asian Avant-Garde (SAAG) began as an argument that South Asians have claimed avant-garde traditions since before the word was coined. They experimented wildly in form, function, and craft; some enormously impacted “European” avant-gardism. After all, “South Asia” has rarely been the locus of those histories. (See: “Picasso manqué syndrome” ) How do we carve out such a leftist magazine in the contemporary media landscape when traditional media is shuttering and where literary magazines, art exhibits, and academic journals often exist as silos? By compensating both our immensely hard-working staff and contributors. By publishing work that is thoughtful, rigorous, and self-reflective about the global left: work that connects the local and the global, work that is unafraid but not provocative simply for the sake of it, and work that is internationalist in scope. By traipsing across genres and modes of art. Perhaps most critically, we carve out our space by eschewing the boundaries and binaries implied by the term “South Asia,” emphasizing syncretic connections and mellifluous exchanges of knowledge that do not foreclose intellectual thought to borders. SAAG exists to create a genuinely activist-literary space. It does not seek to preach to the choir or provide a drifting sense of “representation.” Rather, SAAG hopes to thicken “South Asian” intellectual thought through furious expansion and lively clash. Subscribe below to get the chance to become a member of SAAG early and get early access to our online store (under construction), discounts to a dizzying variety of new merch, including subscription boxes for books, zines, board games, archival art prints, our first print issue, access to events in cities across the globe, our entire archive, and active collaboration with the editorial team. We have a lot of exciting new places to go, grassroots organizations to partner with, and stories to tell. We’d love for you to join us in interrogating and shaping South Asian Avant-Garde Vol. 2. South Asian Avant-Garde is published by 501(c)(3) nonprofit South Asian Avant-Garde, Incorporated. SUBSCRIBE Success! DESIGN The design system for Volume 2 of SAAG is wildly different to that of Volume 1, for many reasons. Read more on the process and conceptual thinking underlying the changes in the design system here . Primary sans typeface: Neue Haas Grotesk by Monotype. Serif body text: Caslon Ionic & Antique No. 6 by Commercial Type. Display face, Issue 1: TT Ricks by TypeType Foundry. Our colophon (representing the collective above) is inspired by Rabindranath Tagore's painting Head Study . COLLECTIVE We are an unwieldy, globe-spanning collective (see: masthead ) of forty-six South Asian writers, editors, academics, organizers, translators, playwrights, journalists, visual artists and designers. We share a deep political commitment to radical art that says something new about power and inequality. CHANGES As crises deepen both in and around South Asia, we extend our mission to encompass other parts of the world. Part of our mission is to forge new communities and build upon long-running traditions of solidarity across oceans, languages, and nations. The Vertical is a column that includes essential stories from around the world, featuring voices that offer a more profound introduction to critical issues impacting regions not limited to South Asia. Our reorganized categories allow various forms of work to be presented in any category. The Vertical will publish timely op-eds and dispatches in any format, whether prose, comic, or photo essay. Read Issue 1 here . THE VERTICAL South Asian Avant-Garde is a digital literary magazine for global South Asian solidarities & activist approaches to representation. ∙MISSION ∙COLLECTIVE ∙CHANGES ∙DESIGN ∙RECENT ∙EVENTS About PAST EVENTS WASHINGTON D.C. 26th October 2024 DC Zine Fest 2024 Tabling with Art Director Priyanka Kumar and Anchovy Press, with original zines by SAAG. WATCH ↗ LAHORE 21st September 2024 Community Newsroom: Lahore With Kitab Ghar Lahore WATCH ↗ BROOKLYN 21 September 2024 Brooklyn Art Book Fair 2024 Contemporary Printmaking as a Technology of Dissent, with Abeer Hoque, Priyanka Kumar, and Vrinda Jagota WATCH ↗ ISLAMABAD 3rd August 2024 Launch Event Vol. 2 Issue 2 The City State: From Master Plan to Margins WATCH ↗ LOS ANGELES 1st June 2024 An Evening with Asha Puthli at Nor Black Nor White LA. Moderated by Vrinda Jagota. Feat.: Fariha Roisin, Raveena Aurora & Mriga WATCH ↗ LOS ANGELES 28th May 2024 Community Readings on Solidarity Small World Books, Venice, CA WATCH ↗ COLOMBO 7th May 2024 Launch Event at Barefoot Gallery Narratives of Solidarity: Avant-Garde Storytelling in Sri Lanka WATCH ↗ NEW HAVEN 30th April 2024 In conversation with Amit Chaudhuri Discussing NYRB reissues A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag, & Freedom Song. WATCH ↗ BROOKLYN 30th March 2024 Launch Event Vol. 2 Issue 2 Solidarity: Across the Disaster-Verse · ShapeShifter Lab with panels, musical performances and more. WATCH ↗ NEW YORK 8th March 2024 Women, Resistance, Revolution. A SAAG & Kamli.NYC event · Panel with Gaiutra Bahadur, Gulalai Ismail & Suchitra Vijayan & musical performance by Apoorva Mudgal Ensemble. WATCH ↗ BROOKLYN 12th May 2023 Launch Event Vol. 2 Issue 1 Soapbox Gallery with album release of Apertures by Rajna Swaminathan, featuring Utsav Lal & Ganavya (Vagabonds Trio) WATCH ↗ NEW HAVEN 23rd April 2023 Film Screening JOYLAND (2023) dir. Saim Sadiq. Sponsored by the Asian-American Cultural Center, Yale Women's Center, and the Office of LGBTQ Resources. WATCH ↗ NEW YORK 22nd April 2023 In collaboration with SALAM for Rice & Resistance Tamil Labor on the Plantation WATCH ↗ LAHORE 31st December 2022 Launch Event at Kitab Ghar Literary Festival The Argument for an Internationalist Perspective of Disaster WATCH ↗ NEW YORK 22nd October 2022 In collaboration with SALAM for Rice & Resistance Climate Imperialism in Pakistan WATCH ↗ VIRTUAL 5th June 2021 In Grief, In Solidarity Panels, Films, Live Performances + more WATCH ↗ UPCOMING EVENTS MANHATTAN 9th November 2024 Grand Opening: Gul Gallery House of Gul & SAAG present Sat Chit Ananda: An Immersive Art Experience RSVP ↗ BURLINGTON 16th November 2024 Non-Fiction Comics Festival 2024 Come visit our table, with Priyanka Kumar and Anchovy Press, featuring original SAAG zines. Free to attend. ATTEND ↗ LONDON LUCKNOW Launch Events for Vol. 2 Issue 2 WATCH ↗

AUTHOR Suchitra Vijayan Suchitra Vijayan is the author of Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India, and co-author of How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners . Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, GQ, Boston Review, The Nation, and Foreign Policy . She is an award-winning photographer and founding member and Executive Director of The Polis Project . AUTHOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

In Mexico, over 116,000 people are registered as missing, many due to violence linked to the war on drugs. In the absence of timely support from the authorities, relatives of the missing are forced to create their own missing person posters, which serve as vital tools to mobilize local communities and gain leads, though they come with risks, such as extortion by criminals. With thousands of disappearances unresolved, unofficial, family-led searches for missing individuals continue, highlighting a broken system and the desperate need for more effective responses to the crisis. · THE VERTICAL Reportage · Mexico In Mexico, over 116,000 people are registered as missing, many due to violence linked to the war on drugs. In the absence of timely support from the authorities, relatives of the missing are forced to create their own missing person posters, which serve as vital tools to mobilize local communities and gain leads, though they come with risks, such as extortion by criminals. With thousands of disappearances unresolved, unofficial, family-led searches for missing individuals continue, highlighting a broken system and the desperate need for more effective responses to the crisis. Soumya Dhulekar, Untitled (2024). Digital collage. The Faces of Mexico's Disappeared On the afternoon of July 19, 2023, Abraham Flores and his wife, Beatriz Cárdenas, celebrated their daughter’s first birthday with a rainbow cake and a small family gathering at Flores’s parents’ house in northern Mexico. Around 10:30 pm, Flores dropped Cárdenas and their child off at their home. Flores, a 32-year-old ride-hailing driver, then went to pick up a passenger outside of the application. He assured his family he would be back soon. At 12:30 am, Cárdenas, 28 years old, warned her husband via WhatsApp about a shooting that had occurred a few blocks from their home in the municipality of Santa Catarina, Nuevo León. Flores didn’t respond. She messaged him an hour later and then fell asleep. Early in the morning, she tried to contact him once more and saw that his last connection was at 4:15 am. Since then, Cárdenas has been searching for him. “Hours passed. It was 5 p.m. and I couldn’t take it anymore. I went straight to my in-laws, and they said, ‘Maybe he went out with friends.’ But I knew it wasn’t normal,” Cárdenas asserted. “He could go out drinking or with friends, but he would always come back. I mean, he always came back. And now, he hasn’t.” Across Mexico, there are over 116,000 people officially registered as missing or disappeared, primarily since 2006 when the government launched the “war on drugs” and began militarizing the streets as part of its strategy. Families of the disappeared have united in search collectives , often risking their safety and facing numerous obstacles such as a lack of resources and information, physical threats, and a slow, negligent response from authorities. The missing person poster has emerged as a vital and accessible tool during the crucial early days of a disappearance, though it has its limitations. All images courtesy of the author (2024). Since the General Law on the Forced Disappearance of Persons was approved in 2017–following the intensive work and advocacy of families of the disappeared–the National Search Commission, the General Prosecutor’s Office, and their state counterparts have been responsible for investigating disappearances. However, the implementation of the law has been hampered by a lack of political will from authorities and insufficient human and material resources. The law mandates immediate searches, but authorities often refuse to file reports in the initial hours, despite the increased likelihood of finding a person alive during this critical period. Without a filed report, the official missing person poster, known as “ficha de búsqueda” (search form), cannot be issued. May-ek Querales, an anthropologist with the Social and Forensic Anthropology Research Group (GIASF) , explained that issuing a missing person poster also means that an investigation is officially opened. "Therefore it [authorities] will always have it on its agenda and will not stop looking for your loved one, in theory. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case,” Querales added. Despite official protocols, authorities told Cárdenas that they needed to wait at least 24 hours before filing a disappearance report. Many families are forced to create their own posters and distribute them through personal networks, such as WhatsApp chats, Facebook neighborhood groups, and word-of-mouth, in order to initiate the search for their missing loved ones. María de la Luz López Castruita, who has been searching for her daughter Irma Claribel since 2008 in the northern state of Coahuila, highlights the importance of the poster as an accessible search tool for families, but also as a communication tool to engage with society and ask for help. “It's a huge support for us because we think if more people spread it, the more likely it is that it will reach people who have seen our loved ones,” she said. Despite the limitations that the poster may encounter in its circulation, it can also become a valuable emotional object for families experiencing the pain and uncertainty of a disappearance for the first time. Faced with the overwhelming prospect of beginning the search for a loved one in a country with thousands upon thousands of missing people, the poster can be the first step that a family member takes to proactively search without depending on the authorities. “It also has a symbolic function so that people do not go crazy in the process of not having an answer from their loved one,” Querales said. In the initial hours after her husband’s disappearance, Cárdenas felt she couldn’t wait any longer. She created a missing person poster in Word, using a photo from their daughter’s birthday celebration. “It was literally the photo we had taken of him that night,” explained Cárdenas. “It was that photo, with red letters saying ‘MISSING,’ a description of what he looked like, what he was wearing…exactly as he appears in the photo is what he was wearing [at the time he disappeared].” The lack of immediate institutional support often makes families more vulnerable. Cárdenas used her personal phone number in that initial poster she created herself, a common practice among families hoping that a relative’s number will ensure more attention to any leads via incoming calls. Querales warned that this can put families at risk of extortion by organized crime , who are always looking for opportunities to profit. Cárdenas and her in-laws were extorted for about $600 dollars. “In their desperation, when someone tells them that they have information about their loved one, families are often overwhelmed and begin to share personal information that can include transferring money,” Querales said. “The non-institutional missing person poster has that risk because you do not have a phone, separate from your personal ties, that can provide you with protection.” Disappearances in Mexico are perpetrated by various actors with diverse motivations. Mónica Meltis, founder of Data Cívica , an organization using data to support victims of human rights violations, explained that Mexico had a history of enforced disappearances from the 1960s to the 1980s —a period known as the ‘Dirty War’ — primarily used to target political dissidents . While enforced disappearances perpetrated by state agents have not ceased, various actors, mainly linked to organized crime , now carry out disappearances, often with the complicity of, or permission from, state agents. “Forced disappearance continues to exist, although in reality it is now more complex because there is not only disappearance by the State, but now something called ‘disappearance by individuals’,” Meltis added. Starting the Search It was not until three days after Flores’s disappearance that the official missing person poster began to circulate. Despite how recently the photograph used in the poster was taken, the Nuevo León Search Commission made two mistakes in the details. They incorrectly stated that Flores was wearing a white hat (it was black) and black pants (they were blue jeans). To date, the commission has only corrected the color of the pants. Often, families do not have a recent or updated photo, and sometimes the shock of the events they are experiencing causes memory lapses. It becomes difficult to remember the physical features of their loved one, their particularities, or the details of the clothes they were wearing. This cannot only take a great emotional toll on them, but can also make the search much harder. López, who also leads “ Voz que Claman Justicia ,” one of hundreds of search collectives led by families of the disappeared, said she has seen this frustration in family members who are unable to remember. That’s why she often suggests being accompanied by someone close when filing the report. “We often make the mistake of giving incorrect information because of the pain that it brings. It is a lot of pain,” she said. In many of these cases, having a distinctive feature that truly differentiates the person can be a significant advantage when filing a report. López explains how tattoos, for example, can help to further individualize the person, or even make visual identification easier if a body is found. “When there are scars or tattoos, it’s easier. [Previously] I used to be critical when someone got a tattoo, but now I say how important it is to have one. That way, when bodies are found, they can identify them easily. Or, not only bodies, but homeless people too,” López said. “When I see my compañeras immediately looking for the tattoo, it leaves me feeling helpless because my [missing] daughter didn’t have any.” Families, mostly mothers, lead local search groups and offer guidance about the steps to follow after a disappearance as institutions often don’t provide necessary information, or fail to coordinate or collaborate with other authorities. “If someone disappears, the recommendation is to look for the collectives. They are the ones who will truly help you search, not the State,” said Meltis. Séverine Durin, an anthropologist and researcher at the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) , explained that families often find a lack of coordination among the institutions officially responsible for supporting them, which can be confusing and make the search process much more exhausting. If there is evidence that the person could have disappeared in a different state than the one in which they reside, it can be even more complicated. Frustrated by the inefficiency of the authorities and their slow response, Cárdenas decided to join a collective of families of the disappeared in Nuevo León a month after her husband went missing. “To see the inefficiency of the authorities, and then experience the advice, support, or guidance [the families] give you,” Cárdenas said. “It's such a different experience to be with them.” After a disappearance, most families go from government institution to government institution without finding any answers, impacting their job security or livelihood. Beyond sharing the pain of not knowing the whereabouts of a loved one, Durin explained that collectives of families offer mutual support, and are able to exert stronger pressure on authorities than a single person. “Definitely, they [collectives] will support you and you are going to be able to put pressure on the institutions to fulfill their duty of searching,” Durin added. "They can create search plans and agreements and obtain resources and security [for the searches].” Victims’ families primarily conduct two types of searches. One, where the search efforts are focused on finding their loved ones alive, involves roaming the streets, hospitals, prisons, and other such locations where someone under peril may find themselves. Although authorities must always act under the principle of presumption of life as mandated by the general law on disappearances, in practice authorities often suggest that the person might be dead, directing relatives to the Forensic Medical Service. This often revictimizes family members already contending with the trauma of losing a loved one in this manner. On the other hand, visits to the Forensic Medical Service have become increasingly important due to the country’s backlog of unidentified remains. "When the report is filed, the institutions immediately orient the search toward death,” explained Querales. “In other words, they talk about a field search, but in reality, it is already assumed that the person who disappeared has lost their life… the authorities themselves thus rule out the activation of immediate search protocols.” The other type of search involves hundreds of victims’ collectives combing through fields, hills, deserts, and vacant lots across the country to search for human remains, often in clandestine graves. According to local prosecutors, between 2006 and June 2023, 4,565 clandestine graves were identified, as reported by the Citizen Platform for Graves, a database created by Data Cívica and other organizations. At least 6,253 human bodies and 4,662 fragments were found during this period. Family members of the disappeared have learned about forensics to identify soil types, smells, and the proper care of human remains. They mobilize to obtain more detailed information for the missing person poster, and then circulate it to receive tips. They then start their own investigations, following the trail, and often putting their well-being at risk, to find any indication of clandestine burials. “They search in the mountains, or in other areas where they have information that there could be missing people,” explained Durin. “It’s difficult to understand for relatives of missing people, but it is important to find them, regardless of whether they are alive or not.” López, who focuses on both types of searches, emphasized the importance of sustaining searches under the presumption of life. While the official discourse often links disappearances to organized crime, the vast majority of cases suggest a complex web of factors, including militarization, corruption, impunity, and other forms of violence that disproportionately affect vulnerable populations. The search brigades that López carries out along with other families have found people who were reported as missing, incarcerated under a different name, or on the streets dealing with substance abuse. “We know that the searches of clandestine graves are there, and we cannot keep piling up so many remains and so many bodies. We know that there are many missing persons alive who want to be found, but nobody looks for them alive,” said López. “If we have seen that kind of search yields results, why not do it?” Information gap and Added Pressure on Families More than a year after her husband’s disappearance, Cárdenas still has no answers. At one point, authorities told her they had already identified two suspects but lacked enough evidence for an arrest. While balancing work and being a single parent to her now two-year-old daughter, Cárdenas also makes frequent efforts to review her case. Although the investigation is the duty of the prosecutors, families are often obliged to find the information on their own and deliver it to authorities in charge of the case. In most cases, if families do not provide the information, the authorities neglect the case. Being part of a collective helps, as there’s constant collective pressure to review the cases of all group members or pursue search actions. Additionally, authorities often warn families against making their case public, claiming it could jeopardize the investigation. However, in effect, this is likely to prevent any progress in the investigation. In fact, this tactic incites even more fear in families. Authorities also often suggest not publishing the search form or discussing the cases on social media or in the media. This is not in fact meant to aid the victim, but a method of subterfuge to downplay the growing numbers of disappearances. Although Cárdenas saw the poster she created immediately being shared on social media and in her group chats, she said that one of the challenges she encountered was social indifference. “The truth is, myself included, we don't really pay attention to other people's faces, you know? That's why I don't see much of a case for making a poster. In other words, people don’t take the time to observe the people around them,” Cárdenas said. While many families mobilize across Mexico and put up posters in public spaces, over 116,000 people remain missing. Querales explained that the collectives organize awareness brigades in different parts of the country, filling the streets or central plazas with missing person posters. However, the sheer number of posters can be overwhelming for people transiting through these public spaces. “Confronted with so many faces, how many people really stop to pay attention to those individualizing features?” Querales asked. “How are they to determine that perhaps that young boy in a street situation that they saw on the corner, or that person they crossed paths with on the metro, or someone who they ran into on any street, could be a face on a search poster?” Every day, new search posters are added to those already circulating in public and digital spaces as resistance against the state’s insistence on silence. The faces of Mexico’s disappeared are exposed over and over again in every place [that] families can access, defying government efforts to downplay the crisis. Families struggling in the wake of disappearances use the posters not only to mobilize the search, but also as daily reminders that their struggle will continue until all their loved ones are found. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Reportage Mexico Missing Person Disappearance Extortion Criminality Government Safety War on drugs Militarism Negligence General Law on the Forced Disappearances of Persons Forced Disappearance National Search Commission Political Will Search and Rescue Emergency Response Human Security Anthropology Social and Forensic Anthropology Research Group GIASF Missing Person Poster Social Media WhatsApp Facebook Community Collective Accessibility Vulnerable Populations Protection Data Civica Dirty War Political Dissidents Organized Crime Disappeared by individuals Nuevo Leon Search Commission Misinformation Missing Information Voz que Claman Justicia Memory Local search groups Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology CIESAS Institutional Forgetfulness Citizen Platform for Graves 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. 31st Jan 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:

Facing a crushing electoral loss and the suffocating grip of Pakistan’s military state, the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party remains committed to Chungi—reclaiming revolutionary traditions, rebuilding popular power, and planting the seeds of a socialist alternative in the country’s most forsaken neighborhoods. THE VERTICAL To Posterity Facing a crushing electoral loss and the suffocating grip of Pakistan’s military state, the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party remains committed to Chungi—reclaiming revolutionary traditions, rebuilding popular power, and planting the seeds of a socialist alternative in the country’s most forsaken neighborhoods. VOL. 2 PROFILE AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Noormah Jamal I will never leave you (2022) Acrylic on linen ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Noormah Jamal I will never leave you (2022) Acrylic on linen SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Profile Lahore 30th Apr 2025 Profile Lahore Haqooq-e-Khalq Party Elections Chungi Revolution Socialism Military Crackdown Community Discourse Discourses of War Storytelling News National Assembly Chiragh Ghar Campaign Ammar Ali Jan Pakistan Poverty Defence Housing Authority DHA districts Real Estate Militarism Armed Checkpoints Peri-urban settlements Village History Memory Dysentery Healthcare Inequality Aasim Sajjad Akhtar Working Class Capitalism Feudal Neo-Colonial Ethnic Division Popular Power Land Reform Subsidies Elitist Humanitarianism IMF International Monetary Fund Nationalism Repression Activism Cuba China Revolutionary Karl Marx Dehumanization Disempowerment Khalq Clinic Medical Internationalism Vocational Training Isolation Mobilization Chawla Factory Chenab River Kissan Conference Farming Farmers Agricultural Labor Solidarity Palestine Lebanon Zionism Economic Security Imran Khan Tehreek-e-Insaf Bertold Brecht 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. In moments of quiet, comrade Sikander sang. The melody—a touch above a whisper—meandered softly, as if probing for an answer to an unasked question. Our faces were lit only by the faint fire we had made in the ceramic bowl, using styrofoam boxes as kindling. The heavy rains of the previous week had cleared the smog, and the Big Dipper now crept up over the water tank on the bare concrete rooftop. The phone signal was down. The internet was choked off. The military had imposed a total blackout. So we lit a fire—and we talked. We talked about Gilgit-Baltistan’s bustling border with Xinjiang. We talked about Fidel Castro , who had sent a medical brigade to Pakistan and, on a call before dawn, instructed his lead doctor on the strain of basmati to be fed to the cadres. We talked about the feudal lords’ grip on the people. We talked, and we reflected. In moments of quiet, comrade Sikander sang his soft, piercing song. News of the election trickled in with each teary-eyed arrival from the polling stations. Sixty-five votes at the City District High School. Seventy-four at the Government Boys High School. Twelve at the Qazi Grammar School. Seven at the Modern Public High School. By the end of the day, the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (HKP) gathered only 2,174 votes. The two candidates were contesting for seats in the National Assembly and the Provincial Assembly from Chungi, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Lahore. Dejection swept through the Chiragh Ghar community center, transformed in recent weeks into a bustling campaign headquarters. The night before, hopes were high and predictions were jubilant. 10,000 votes. 15,000. 30,000. On the campaign trail, where passersby met Ammar Ali Jan , the lead candidate, with song and wreath after wreath of roses, a breakthrough seemed inexorable. Now, the dim hallways and winding staircases filled with whispers of disbelief and consolation. What did we do wrong? What if our critics were right? A few of us gathered on the roof. There, by the open flame, in thickening cigarette smoke, we talked late into the night about the military state and the dizzying structures of patronage that, time and again, condemn Pakistan’s people to the deathly embrace of the past. The Poverty of Chungi Few buildings in Lahore are taller than two or three stories, so the streets and neighborhoods stretch out in all directions across the flat landscape. In Lahore’s vast Defence Housing Authority (DHA) districts, the rows of homes—or, more accurately, walled compounds, often fronted by lush tropical gardens—feel endless. The DHA is the military-run real-estate developer that operates “defense” neighborhoods across the country. Pakistan’s aspiring professional class calls them home, as does the military and political top brass. Each DHA district is bookended by armed checkpoints. How many people who live in DHA cross the stark threshold into Chungi? In this peri-urban settlement that was once a village, paved streets make way for muddied and torn-up roads. The serene, airy alleys of DHA transition to a stifling cacophony of images, smells, and sounds. Cows, goats, and stray dogs mingle with the traffic, where cars and rickshaws buzz past each other from all sides at dizzying speeds. An open canal clogged with sewage and refuse from the food markets bubbles alongside one of the neighborhood’s main roads. The water is so filthy that some seventy percent of children in Chungi suffer from dysentery. These are the material imprints of a political system in which working people have had no meaningful shot at contending power for the better part of half a century. If the Pakistani left of the 1960s had put forward ambitious proposals for pulling the country towards greater equality, by the 1980s, “the socialist alternative which once seemed imminent had become a distant memory,” the politician and intellectual Aasim Sajjad Akhtar wrote . In its place, a series of increasingly entrenched regimes adopted, he wrote, “complex and sophisticated strategies of cooptation,” removing the workers and peasants from the equations of popular power and constructing a vast “patronage machine” to take their place. Then, the Soviet Union collapsed and the left entered a long era of retreat. The Pakistani state came to reflect a complex web of competing class interests—the capitalist, the feudal, the neo-colonial—that existed in permanent contradiction. Officeholders changed often. Little changed for the Pakistani people. At the top, a powerful military bureaucratic state apparatus—an inheritance of the colonial order—operated as kingmaker. This political structure seeped into every aspect of Pakistani society, threading its way through class and ethnic divides. At the scale of their lives, the people of Chungi, too, became beholden to the same contradictions that gripped the nation: above the sewage-filled canal that runs through the district, an opulent residence houses the local kingmaker. His loyalty buys the consent of the salesmen and the elders. The salesmen will secure the consent of their markets, and the elders of their neighbors. Allegedly, ten dollars buys a vote. Here, an electoral campaign resembles a suitcase of cash. What is the strategy for building popular power in Pakistan at this juncture? “None of the mainstream parties are interested in making the working class a subject of its politics,” Ammar Ali Jan told me after the election. “None of them are willing to speak of land reforms or ending subsidies for the elites. None of them are willing to confront the IMF. None of them are willing to give genuine and consistent solidarity to oppressed nationalities against state repression.” As a student, Ali Jan went to Chungi and found it to be a microcosm of the condition of millions of people around the country. Chungi revealed the futility of mere humanitarianism—a fixed road, new water filter, or food handouts—amid the tragedy that is produced and reproduced daily by the very architecture of the state. It revealed the inability of the existing order, so mired in its class interests, to bring dignity to the deprived. The situation of the people of Chungi pointed to a singular, piercing conclusion: the need to resurrect the revolutionary socialist alternative. Chungi Stirs At the start of 2023, Ammar Ali Jan and three activists of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement (HKM)—as it was then known—began their daily walk through the streets of Chungi . They talked with the butchers, stationery salesmen, and tailors at the bazaar. They talked with the textile weavers in the workshops and factories. They talked with the unionists whose struggles traced back decades—memories that they would soon seek to resurrect through public commemorations of forgotten martyrs. They talked with the mothers who cleaned the houses of Lahore’s middle and upper classes in a nearby DHA neighborhood. The HKM had organized in the community for some time before it embarked on the path of party-building. Pakistan’s complex structures of power were on their minds. How do you dislodge a system that dominates all the political offices, all centers of decision-making power, all structures within the judiciary? How do you politicize a dormant student body, and bring it into dialogue with the peasantry and the country’s disenfranchised women? How do you activate the workers in a neighborhood like Chungi? But they also thought about Pakistan’s old left, which had become fragmented and defeated, much of it confined to a series of old comrades’ clubs. How do you bring vitality back into a movement that has lost it? “The revolutions in Cuba and China—these were the most important things that we kept in our mind when we were writing our manifesto,” Dr. Alia Haider, an organizer with the HKP, told me. In Cuba, as in China, mass movements brought together coalitions of peasants, intellectuals, women, workers, and youth, establishing political bases that could overturn the feudal, colonial, and imperialist structures that gripped both nations. It was there, among the most oppressed, that revolutionary energies stirred. “We had read Marx, we had read Mao, we had read Fidel,” Dr. Haider said. “But when we arrived in Chungi, we saw that people who had never heard these names knew Marx. They lived Marx.” For the people of Chungi, the contradictions of class were blinding. They were visible in the sewage flowing through their streets; in the oil that the street food vendors could only afford to change monthly; in summary, uncompensated dismissals from the factories. But, like the broader left, they remained disorganized, disempowered, and dejected. “The Pakistani working class does not exist as an independent political subject,” Ammar told me. It exists in a “state of non-being, unable to assert its interests.” Its subordination has become entrenched. The politics of patronage that have seeped into every crevice and pore of Pakistan’s governing order have denied political agency to those most affected by it. It became clear that simply being voted into office by them would be insufficient. External representation on its own cannot awaken working class subjectivity—it cannot reassert its protagonism in the movement of history. What is needed, Ammar told me, is the reconstruction “of the subjective factor of the revolution—the party—with all the patience, consistency and courage that this requires.” The revolutionary party occupies a central space in the socialist tradition. Karl Marx showed that class analysis provides the fundamental starting point in understanding political parties, whose configuration reflects the stages of development and respective power of different classes. The ability of working people to represent themselves depends on the existence of a party created in their image, and carrying their subjectivity. Without such a vehicle, the working class is forced to align politically with the subjectivity of its oppressors. It becomes divided. Its political horizon becomes truncated. The revolutionary party is necessary to contain, develop, and advance the aspirations of the working masses. Years ago, the HKM first mobilized the community to sweep the streets and clean the canals, seeking to address the sanitation crisis. In 2022 , the movement organized weekly health camps around Chungi, an initiative led by Dr. Alia. With time, the imperative to institutionalize became clear. “As we began to organize the first of our free medical camps, we saw that the devastation facing the working classes was beyond our capacity to help them as a movement,” Dr. Alia told me. “So we had to not only develop the infrastructure to support these people, but also cultivate a politics of solidarity.” By August 2023, the HKP opened the Khalq Clinic , a permanent site providing free testing, consultations, and medicines to people in Chungi. The Cuban Ambassador attended the opening, recalling Cuba’s own missions of medical internationalism to Pakistan. By the end of the year, the Party had five vocational schools with courses on English, computer literacy, and financial management. Students from universities came to volunteer in droves. At first, Dr. Alia told me, they struggled to connect the problems of others with their own. But the people of Chungi transformed them and opened in them a much more expansive vision of political possibility. “Until we know what the water in the sea is like, we could not know how to navigate the waves,” Dr. Alia said. By the time the election arrived in February 2024, the HKP had mobilized seven hundred people to work on its campaign. Among them were two seventeen-year-old alumni of the vocational schools, who now managed a complex voter registration process at HKP’s campaign headquarters. They checked the voter lists against records from the polling stations. They identified and corrected missing data in the voter lists. For each entry on the lists, they prepared a folder with three sheets of paper, two pens, a ruler, and two pieces of candy to help voters navigate the labyrinthine process on the day of the election. They checked the folders against numbered spreadsheets for each of the polling stations. Within months after the election, further breakthroughs arrived. When, early in 2024 , workers from the Chawla factory learned of planned closures—and proposed dismissals with minimal compensation—they organized. Led by factory worker and HKP member Maulana Shahbaz, they won what Ammar described as the “largest golden handshake since the 1970s.” The workers’ severance package increased from roughly eighty US dollars to as much as three thousand. In October, HKP members traveled to the lush countryside of Jhang, a city on the east bank of the Chenab River, to bring together thousands of peasants for a Kissan Conference. The farmers sang, chanted, and vowed to take on the state that has long subjugated them. All along, the HKP worked to ground its local organizing in an internationalist vision, protesting regularly in solidarity with Palestine and Lebanon as they faced a merciless bombardment by Western-backed Zionist forces, and mobilizing in friendship with Cuba, itself suffocated by economic warfare. If building the revolution means preparing the masses for the task of governance, then the HKP’s small first steps hold immense significance. Carried toward their logical conclusion, their political strategy aims at activating a powerful dormant force that holds singular capacity to resolve the dilemmas of Pakistan’s oppressed—substituting the landlords, capitalists, and compradors for the masses in the equations of political power. In this context, the campaign in the February election had achieved its goals, even if it failed to secure electoral gains. Many described the vote as a referendum on Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf—a rejection of foreign meddling and the brazen denial of even the most basic democratic rights. As a local party, the HKP was not part of the national calculus. As is their wont, the other parties that had come to Chungi on the day of the election—never opening the tinted windows of their jeeps—soon left. They will return for the next election, whenever it may come: in two years, or three, or five. But the HKP has established a permanent presence in Chungi. Its organizational capacities were magnified by the electoral campaign. Now, it is aiming to move further afield: to open branches in other cities across the country, building clinics, building schools, cleaning the water, and everywhere reasserting the idea that working people are the subject of history and not the object of their oppressors. In the days after the February election, the HKP put out a statement. It began with a passage from the poem To Posterity by the German communist Bertold Brecht. The poem says everything there is to say about the permanent task that lies ahead: To the cities I came in a time of disorder That was ruled by hunger. I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar And then I joined in their rebellion. That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Eart h. ∎ More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

ARTIST Saara Nahar SAARA NAHAR is currently pursuing her UG in Visual Arts, Painting at MSU Baroda. She responds to the people and places/spaces in her surroundings, attempting to capture their essence. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

“When I say that language has failed us, I mean that there is no amount of information you can give a society that necessarily means it will be compelled to act.” COMMUNITY On the Relationship between Form & Resistance Iman Iftikhar · Sharmin Hossain · Kalpana Raina · Maira Khwaja · Suneil Sanzgiri “When I say that language has failed us, I mean that there is no amount of information you can give a society that necessarily means it will be compelled to act.” The second panel from our event on 30th March 2024, "Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse," at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn, New York, which marked the close of Volume 2 Issue 1 of SAAG. Here, Iman Iftikhar, Sharmin Hossain, Maira Khwaja, Kalpana Raina, and Suneil Sanzigir discuss how the varied forms of storytelling they use inform and are informed by their politics, resistance, and solidarity and how they feel it is most useful. This panel picks up from where Panel 1, "What do we mean when we talk about Solidarity?" ends. What follows is a discussion of form & storytelling with: Iman Iftikhar, a researcher, educator, co-founder and manager of Kitab Ghar, an Associate Editor at SAAG, and an editor at Folio Books. Maira Khwaja, a journalist, multimedia producer, and researcher at the Invisible Institute . She is also an Associate Producer of We Grown Now dir. Minhal Baig, April 2024, Stage 6 Films & Sony Pictures Classics. Kalpana Raina, a co-translator of For Now, It is Night: Stories by Hari Krishna Kaul (Archipelago Books, February 2024) Sharmin Hossain, an abolitionist organizer, artist, and the Organizing Director at 18 Million Rising that organizes Asian Americans. Suneil Sanzgiri, a filmmaker, researcher, artist, whose first solo exhibition, Here the Earth Grows Gold , opened at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023. Photographs courtesy of Josh Steinbauer. SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Panel 1: What do we mean when we talk about Solidarity? SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Quintet Performance ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Panel 2 of the event "Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse" held on 30th March 2024. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Panel Language Solidarity Films Film-Making Capital Investigative Journalism Criminal Justice Abolitionism Solidarity: Across the Disaster-Verse Prisons Police Personal History The Petty Self Kashmiri Struggle Translation India Anti-Colonialism Two Refusals Goa Hybrid Multimedia Sham-e-Ali Nayeem Portuguese Nationalism Afro-Asianism Bandung Conference Angola Mozambique Sita Valles Portuguese Communist Party Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola Angolan Liberation Youth/Police Project Act of Listening Stop and Frisk IMAN IFTIKHAR is a political theorist, historian, and amateur oil painter and illustrator. She is an editor for Folio Books and a returning fellow at Kitab Ghar Lahore. She is based in Oxford and Lahore. SHARMIN HOSSAIN is a Bangladeshi-American queer Muslim organizer and artist, from Queens, New York. She is the Organizing Director at 18 Million Rising , building national Asian American political power that contributes to movements for racial justice, abolition, anti-militarism, and democracy through political education, and deep base building. She was the Campaign Director of the Liberate Abortion Campaign, managing the coalition of more than 150 reproductive justice and rights organizations, groups, and abortion providers fighting for abortion access. KALPANA RAINA is a senior executive with extensive financial and management experience in the US and internationally. She serves on the boards of Information Services Group , and Words Without Borders. Her collaborative translation project of stories from the Kashmiri language, For Now, It Is Night, was published in Winter 2023 by Harper Collins in India and Spring 2024 by Archipelago Press in the United States. MAIRA KHWAJA is an educator and multimedia producer. She is the director of public strategy at the Invisible Institute . Her work centers on the Youth / Police Project , where she works with young people most affected by policing in the South Side to shape new discussions and efforts around public safety. She was a 2021 Leaders for a New Chicago award winner. She worked as an associate producer on We Grown Now (dir. Minhal Baig), a film about children in now-demolished high-rise public housing. Her work has been published in the South Side Weekly , The Funambulist , and The New York Times . SUNEIL SANZGIRI is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anticolonial struggles across the Global South. His first institutional solo exhibition Here the Earth Grows Gold opened at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023. His films have circulated at film festivals and institutions globally, including at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Criterion Collection, among others. Panel Language 17th 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. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

ARTIST Mohamed Ikram MOHAMED IKRAM is a music producer, engineer, and fine artist. He intuitively sketches and draws to reflect on his personal nature in Maldivian society and in a larger political context. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

These reflections do not aim to present a neat list of 2024’s "best" books or "essential reads." Instead, they are fragments of what stayed with us: works that lingered and called us back. BOOKS & ARTS SAAG’s 2024 In Reading The Editors These reflections do not aim to present a neat list of 2024’s "best" books or "essential reads." Instead, they are fragments of what stayed with us: works that lingered and called us back. Reading in 2024 often felt like fumbling for grounding amidst relentless upheaval. At times, it offered escape and solace. At others, it demanded grappling, interrogation, and a necessary confrontation. Whether through poetry, history, fiction, or essays, our reading this year insisted on engagement: on seeing, feeling, and remembering to live, even when it felt unbearable. These reflections do not aim to present a neat list of 2024’s "best" books or "essential reads." Instead, they are fragments of what stayed with us: works that lingered and called us back. Our favorites include a novel set in Baltimore tracing the lives of the Palestinian diaspora, texts that provide much needed clarity on revolutionary politics, a quiet yet searing study of sound and space, some comfort reads, and much more. These books held mirrors to the year and world we lived through, compelling us to look even closer when we could not look away. Here, in the voices of those who read and felt with these works, we share not only our most loved reads of the year but the struggles they opened up for us, allowing us to see anew. #1 I have an enduring love for novels that are political yet rise above preachiness or self-absorption to deliver an actual narrative. This year, I needed something visceral to help process the anger I carried: at the personally testing situations I faced over the past year, at myself, at politics everywhere, and at the state of the world we inhabit. My mind feels oversaturated by the relentless stream of online clickbaity content, which so often tells you how to feel rather than inviting you to actually think. My two favourite novels from my year in reading are Chain-Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel . Fiction, though it might seem an escape from reality on the surface, teaches imagination and heart like nothing else. Reading about people in combat—be it dystopian televised death matches among the incarcerated or teenage girl boxers—transported me this year to worlds where I could quietly take stock of do-or-die battles: from the expansive and deadly to the taut and fleeting. — Zoya Rehman, Associate Editor #2 Although I had a thinner reading year in general, I waited quite excitedly for the release of Poor Artists , a hybrid work of fiction and non-fiction by art writing duo The White Pube (Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente). It follows a young brown artist in the UK named Quest Talukdar and includes anonymous material from real art world figures. The book is so refreshing, lucid, and plainly radical. As a young person working in the arts in the UK right now, it simultaneously felt crazy and comforting to imagine other ways of being creative under capitalism, with mutual care at the forefront. In short: I am so glad this book exists in published form. — Vamika Sinha, Senior Editor #3 How many ways are there to write histories of a language, or more specifically, histories of a script? In Scripts of Power: Writing, Language Practices, and Cultural History in Western India , Prachi Deshpande outlines at least two methods, weaving a fascinating history of Modi writing, a cursive Marathi script that has, since the early 20th century, fallen into disuse. There’s a cherished dogma among some South Asians who see the subcontinental patchwork of regional linguistic blocs as somehow more organic an entity than the bloc of nation-states that we have today. The book makes one wonder how true that is. My second pick, Thomas S. Mullaney’s book on the Chinese computer , is a direct descendent of his earlier work on the Chinese typewriter (which carries one my favorite acknowledgments of any academic monographs; it begins: “What is your problem?”). This one asks how different generations of engineers, enthusiasts, eccentrics, and entrepreneurs tried to solve the fundamental problem of computing in Chinese: how does one input a language with no alphabet into a digital computer? Lastly, I chose Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals by Ronnie Grinberg , partly because it is about a bunch of people who read, wrote for, and edited longform, literary-political magazines based out of New York (much like SAAG), and were interested in engaging with the world through argument. And partly because I have a weakness for anything having to do with the midcentury, Partisan Review-Commentary-Encounter crowd. Grinberg’s book, thankfully, is a refreshing departure from the exhausted genre that is the lament for the decline of (often New York-based) public intellectuals. — Shubhanga Pandey, Senior Editor #4 This year, every book I read felt like a knock-out including: Animal by Dorothea Lasky , Yellowface by R.F. Kuang , Letters to a Writer of Color edited by Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro , Fling Diction by Frances Canon , Riambel by Priya Hein , Dumb Luck and Other Poems by Christine Kitano , Letter to the Father by Franz Kafka , Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace , Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen , A Fish Growing Lungs by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn , and The Psychology of Supremacy by Dwight Turner , among many others. Each book I read challenged and changed my approach to creative writing craft, human psychology, how we process social trauma, and what we can learn from community, as well as demanding systemic change. One poetry collection that showed me how form could explode on the page, and how polyvocality and the acknowledgement of our ancestors could be conveyed, was JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies . The collection plays with the idea of “Master of Ceremonies” as someone who both entertains and has authority over the stage. With his stutter, Ellis has difficulty pronouncing “master” (which then becomes “aster” in his work). Throughout the collection, Ellis interrogates the notion of master, both as the figurehead who controls the lives of others, often under authoritarian or tyrannical rule, and as a symbol of accomplishment and the mastery of craft. — Rita Banerjee, Fiction Editor #5 2024 has been a difficult reading year for me because of the state of the world. I often relied on comfort reads, including contemporary romances and "romantasies," but even within these genres, I encountered books that were surprising, thoughtful, and heartbreaking. A series I became hooked on was Wolfsong by TJ Klune (Green Creek, #1), which was both difficult and troubling to read (many trigger warnings), yet its writing wore its heart on its sleeve—it was raw, unabashed, and unrestrained. That's why I appreciate love stories—they give the reader permission to feel all the uncomfortable, awkward, dramatic, and unrestrained emotions. Ali Hazelwood was my favorite go-to read in contemporary romances. Another kind of comfort came from revisiting decades-old books. I read older Kazuo Ishiguro books and re-read Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet , drawn by their effortless, soothing prose, even when the novels explored difficult situations. Two books stood out to me this year. First, Minor Detail by Adania Shibli . The novel begins in 1949, through the perspective of an Israeli soldier. As the story unfolds, small, seemingly "minor" details catch his eye, details that take on deeper meaning as the novel shifts to the perspective of a Palestinian woman in the present day. The sense of dread builds slowly but relentlessly. It is a difficult read; many trigger warnings for rape, violence, and sexual assault. I also loved The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley . This year, while leaning into lighthearted romances for a mental health break, this novel struck the perfect balance—lighthearted in moments, but deeply moving and beautifully written. The story follows a bureaucrat hired to work in a study and keep an eye on an "expat" that the government has brought from history: Graham Gore, who originally died on a doomed Arctic expedition in the 1800s. The novel broke my heart, transformed me, made me laugh, and gasp. I could not put it down. — Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, Senior Editor #6 2024 wasn’t a year for pleasure reading; it was a year for intentional reading. Scrambling to decide what to read, compounded by the weight of world events, brought into focus all the things I knew I didn’t know. This year, I actively sought out new sources of information, embracing a practical and necessary discomfort. That commitment began with the search for knowledge about a region my research focuses on: Central Asia. I happened upon one of the best reads of the year, The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road by Xin Wen . This 300-page deep dive into the history and culture of the Silk Road examines ancient trade and cultural exchanges during a distinctive age of exploration. Wen argues that diplomacy–unlike how we see or use it today–was central to fostering dialogue, trade, and mutual respect, all while navigating conflict without resorting to war. If you love history, travel, economics, or international relations, this one's for you. The idea of traversing conflict without resorting to war was also the focus of a graduate course I completed just two days ago. Another favorite read of the year, spurred by our course discussions, was Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work by Laura Robson . I kept returning to this book all throughout term; every time I opened it, there was a new thread to follow. In this 250-page work, Robson examines how capital is often prioritised over human dignity, showing how economic forces undermine individual security and lead to physical, emotional, and psychological dislocation. And what kind of reading year would it be without a novel? In The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai , I was confronted with despair, power, and the fragility of society. This atmospheric novel taught me how to confront the eerie wonders of the world while living under the looming shadow of societal collapse. — Nazish Chunara, Associate Editor #7 I loved Border and Rule by Harsha Walia . With microscopic clarity, and a postcolonial lens, Walia’s book is an indictment of the smoke-and-mirrors narratives used by states to obfuscate the horrible realities of displacement, forced migration, and statelessness. These realities, Walia argues, are hardwired into today’s capitalist and insidiously racist border control systems of Western capitals. The book further demonstrates how these practices, benefiting a few while exploiting those on the move, are being deployed by Middle Powers in the so-called Global South—such as the UAE, India, and Brazil—against the backdrop of rising populism and the widening gulf between rich and poor. — Mushfiq Mohamed, Senior Editor #8 As South Asians, we are all acutely familiar with the India-Pakistan hegemony on the intellectual discourse in the region (language, caste, class, ethnicity, and gender, of course, further complicate who from within these regions gets to speak, if at all). Particularly, as a Pakistani woman, rarely have I had an opportunity to concertedly engage with literature by Bengali, Nepalese, Tamil, or Malayali (to name a few) writers from beyond the Hindu/Urdu speaking world. In 2024, I sought to change this and read translated writing from across the South Asian diaspora. In particular, I would like to recommend Hospital by Sanya Rushdi –a short yet powerful novel exploring the psychosis experienced by a young Bangladeshi woman in a psychiatric facility in Melbourne. I also loved Ten Days of The Strike by Sandipan Chattopadhyay , with the titular essay serving as a powerful reminder of the politics of shitting. In general, a Bengali translation by Arunava Sinha , I realised, will never disappoint a reader. Honorary mentions among my SA reading list include: Password and Other Stories by Appadurai Muttulingam , and the award-winning Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshanathan . — Iman Iftikhar, Associate Editor #9 More than any other year, 2024 left me feeling like I don't know anything about my world. More often than not, I didn't have the vocabulary and, more disturbingly, the emotional-spiritual bandwidth to articulate or sit with what was/is happening in the world and how it can/could/should impact how I move through life. I learnt a lot from reading Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv, Human Acts by Han Kang , Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, and the poetry and writing Shripad Sinnakaar shared on social media. These writers gave me words, feelings and narrative clarity to sustain my engagement with the world and not shut it out in the face of incomprehension. — Esthappen S., Drama Editor #10 I’ve been reflecting a lot on sound and space this year. Live Audio Essays by Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a collection of transcribed and edited texts from the performances and films he has written and compiled. Moving through excerpt-like recounts, it situates sound through text, blending anecdote with punctuated investigations. It’s a fascinating push to think more deeply about how sound is interpreted and engaged with in different contexts, from the power of sumud to police tip offs, to studying the biological effects of noise pollution. Over the summer, I visited Autograph in London to see Ernest Cole: A Lens in Exile , curated by Mark Sealy . This remarkable exhibition presented images from Cole’s time in New York and his travels around the USA during his exile from South Africa in the 1960s. I also appreciated the catalogue-style book accompanying the exhibition, The True America: Photographs by Ernest Cole , as well as Raoul Peck’s documentary, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found . While working in Paris, I attended Offprint . I had sternly instructed myself to just look and not buy more books(!), but then a small, palm-sized monotone blue book caught my eye. Hold the Sound: Notes on Auditories , edited by Justine Stella Knuchel and Jan Steinbach, is a compilation of texts by artists and researchers attempting to encapsulate descriptions of sound. The book gathers words by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, John Cage, Mosab Abu Toha, Sun Ra, and many others. On my way out I squealed embarrassingly—like an auntie remarking on how much I’ve grown—when I saw Luvuyo Nyawose’s eBhish’ . — Clare Patrick, Art Editor #11 This year, I read in the hour or so I had while our one-year-old slept and I could still keep my eyes open. Reading was both urgent, pressurized by the devastating plight of Palestinians, and a moment to breathe: a space for contemplation, and to feel. I read history, horror, and grief, grief, grief. Rarely is political analysis as exhilarating as in my first favourite read of 2024: The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad , edited by Carollee Bengelsoorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani . From revolutionary movements to “pathologies of power,” to Palestine, the cold war, and Pakistan-India, Ahmad’s insights are crystal clear, provocative, moral, and startlingly prescient. I want to emphasize the clarity of his writing, perhaps owed to his pedagogy as a teacher. I meant to read selections but ended up reading it straight through. My second pick is The Singularity by Balsam Karam (translated by Saskia Vogel) . In an unnamed coastal city, a refugee woman searches for her daughter until, in despair, she leaps to her death, an act witnessed by another woman who narrates this aching, fragmentary testimony of grief–for children, for home. Lastly, [...] by Fady Joudah : what we read this year, we read through a genocide. Fady’s scathing poems left no brutality or complicity unnamed, while speaking with tender sorrow to the dead and wounded. If nothing else, listen to Fady read Dedication here . — Ahsan Butt, Fiction Editor #12 I would like to offer Behind You Is the Sea , a novel by Susan Muaddi Darraj. Released in January 2024, just months after the events of October 7, Darraj’s novel follows three Palestinian American families in Baltimore. Its tender, nuanced characterizations of women and men, young and old, navigating their place in a city burdened by legacies of racial, economic, and legal apartheid, offer an honest exploration of immigrant life in America. Although written before the current conflict in Gaza and Occupied Palestine, it reminds us of the generational trauma and resilience that all Palestinians in the diaspora carry with them. — Aditya Desai, Advisory Editor #13 This year, I loved Sahar Romani’s poetry chapbook, The Opening , a beautiful, tender collage of poems on family, love, and coming into yourself, and into the world. For fiction, I recommend two very different books. When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain is a speculative fiction novella by Hugo Award winning author Nghi Vo. It’s wildly inventive, lyrically written, menacing, beautiful, and queer. Also on the novella tip, Berlin-based Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s novel, Minor Detail , stunned me. Written in clear, marching prose, its focus on minor details, set against the backdrop of occupation, sexual violence, death, and exile, is a portrait and a protest. In nonfiction, I loved: 1) Inciting Joy , a book of essays by Ross Gay, each one luminous with generosity, perceptiveness, and yes, joy. 2) Come Together by sex researcher Emily Nagoski, about sex in long-term relationships, though my biggest takeaway came from two chapters on the gender mirage (women as givers, men as winners) and how this construct within our patriarchal society undermines and destroys heterosexual relationships. 3) Poverty by America is sociologist Matthew Desmond’s heartbreaking follow-up to his even sadder book, Eviction . I grew up middle class, and it was infuriating and eye-opening–I’d recommend it to anyone, especially if you didn’t grow up poor. 4) Sex with a Brain Injury by Annie Liontas was another revelation, giving me enormous empathy for those with acute brain injuries (more common than you know!) and all their attendant furies. 5) Last but certainly not least, I listened to All About Love by African American legend bell hooks, twice, back to back, as the American election season came to a terrifying close. In 2025, I want to internalize hooks’ commitment to love as an ethic—in the family, in friendships, in the workplace, and in politics. — Abeer Hoque, Senior Editor With love, gratitude, and in solidarity, The Editors at SAAG. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Digital Illustration by Iman Iftikhar. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ From the Editors 2024 in Reading Fiction Chain-Gang All Stars Poor Artists Write Like a Man Yellowface Scripts of Power Aster of Ceremonies Wolfsong The Melancholy of Resistance Border & Rule Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Ten Days of The Strike Rita Bullwinkel Ernest Cole Lawrence Abu Hamdan The Singularity Fady Joudah Behind You Is the Sea When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain Sex with a Brain Injury Arts Presently Poetry Literature & Liberation The White Pube Hybrid Multimodal Prachi Deshpande Ronnie Grinberg Dorothea Lasky R.F. Kuang Taymour Soomro Deepa Anappara Frances Canon Priya Hein Christine Kitano Franz Kafka Carvell Wallace Kenzie Allen Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn Dwight Turner JJJJJerome Ellis Craft Ali Hazelwood Adania Shibli Kaliane Bradley Xin Wen Laura Robson László Krasznahorkai Harsha Walia Sanya Rushdi Bengali Literature Tamil Literature Nepalese Literature Malayali Literature Sandipan Chattopadhyay Appadurai Muttulingam V.V. Ganeshanathan Shripad Sinnakaar Han Kang Mark Sealy Luvuyo Nyawose Susan Muaddi Darraj Sahar Romani Chapbook Ross Gay Matthew Desmond Emily Nagoski Annie Liontas bell hooks From the Editors 2024 in Reading 25th Dec 2024 IMAN IFTIKHAR is a political theorist, historian, and amateur oil painter and illustrator. She is an editor for Folio Books and a returning fellow at Kitab Ghar Lahore. She is based in Oxford and Lahore. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

With internet services partially restored and the curfew relaxed, the government in Bangladesh is spinning bizarre narratives about student protesters. Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League have variously labeled the protesters as both innocent and as Pakistani collaborators in the 1971 Liberation War. They have also alleged that students were misled by terrorists. Meanwhile, extrajudicial arrests of students continue. THE VERTICAL Update from Dhaka III With internet services partially restored and the curfew relaxed, the government in Bangladesh is spinning bizarre narratives about student protesters. Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League have variously labeled the protesters as both innocent and as Pakistani collaborators in the 1971 Liberation War. They have also alleged that students were misled by terrorists. Meanwhile, extrajudicial arrests of students continue. VOL. 2 OPINION AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Quota (2024), digital artwork, Nazmus Sadat. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Quota (2024), digital artwork, Nazmus Sadat. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Opinion Dhaka 23rd Jul 2024 Opinion Dhaka Quota Movement Fascism Student Protests Bangladesh Awami League Sheikh Hasina Police Action Police Brutality Economic Crisis 1971 Liberation of Bangladesh BTV Zonayed Saki Internet Crackdowns Internet Blackouts BSF Abu Sayeed Begum Rokeya University Abrar Fahad BUET Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology Mass Protests Mass Killings Torture Enforced Disappearances Extrajudicial Killings Chhatra League Bangladesh Courts Judiciary Clientelism Bengali Nationalism Dissent Student Movements National Curfew State Repression Surveillance Regimes Repression in Universities Argentina's Military Dictatorship Dhaka Medical College Hospital Doosra Fake News Razaakars July Revolution Student-People's Uprising 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. EDITOR'S NOTE: SAAG received this piece along with other media organizations on 23rd July, with another update the following day. Part of it was published by The Wire. We chose to publish the piece lightly edited, in keeping with the author’s wishes. Due to the urgency of its message, it has not been fact-checked in accordance with regular editorial processes. The views expressed in this piece are the author’s and do not necessarily represent SAAG’s editorial stance. —Iman Iftikhar 22nd July There is a particular type of bowling in cricket called “the Google” or “the Doosra.” It is a rare spin ball that is meant to trick the batsman—one only a few bowlers have mastered. Good batsmen and women, however, can tell from the way the bowler’s arm or wrist acts which way the ball will spin and play accordingly. Except in the case of the deceptive Doosra. Many a famous scalp has been taken by the well-executed Doosra. In Bangladeshi politics, it is actually the infamous spin doctors themselves who seem to be falling prey to the Doosra, the outcome not going quite the way they intended. Bangladeshi citizens are faced with a dilemma. The coming 48 hours may be a “general holiday,” as declared by the government. The quota students, on the other hand, have declared a “complete shutdown.” The Army chief, Waker-Uz-Zaman, announced on TV that the army had brought things under control and the country is heading back to “normal.” At the same time, however, there are soldiers in the streets enforcing an ongoing curfew with orders to shoot to kill. A curfew isn’t what one associates with a general holiday, though sadly, killing unarmed citizens could be considered normal in Gaza or Kashmir. In Bangladesh, with no Internet, no cash, no banking services, and with people using pay-as-you-go accounts for gas and electricity on the verge of having their connections closed down due to non-payment, one wonders whether this really will become the new normal. The “shutdown” moniker makes some sense. Most shops are closed, and while there are people on the streets, especially in the hours when the curfew is called off, the city is tense (the curfew was relaxed today from 10 am to 5 pm. Offices and banks are to be open from 11 am to 3 pm). The only people venturing out any distance away from home, whether or not they have a curfew pass, are those on essential duty: hospital staff, journalists, and fire-fighters. People can be seen in the back streets, where there appears to be no military or police presence, but there are also reports of people being hunted down and killed in alleyways, a source of intense fear. The policing is site-specific. The Maghreb azaan floats across Rabindra Sharani, the outdoor recreation centre in the well-to-do residential area of Dhanmondi. There are no security forces here. Young women and men walk by the lakeside after dusk. Puppies frolic by the amphitheatre as kids play football and parents walk toddlers on the stage. I am also told that life is “normal” in the upmarket tri-state areas of Gulshan, Baridhara, and Banani. Diplomats and decision-makers live there, and it wouldn’t bode well to have an overt military presence in such areas. These are the normal zones. Mohammadpur, less than a kilometre away from Rabindra Sarani, is a curfew zone. Topu, the Head of the Photography Department of Pathshala, the South Asian Media Institute which I founded, rings me at around 7:30 pm to tell me that a graduate student Ashraful Haque Rocky has been picked up by the police. Luckily, he has a press card as he used to work for a prominent newspaper. They’ve taken his camera away, but so far, he’s not been roughed up. We’re trying to get someone from the newspaper to call the police to make sure he is not physically harmed or disappeared. We anxiously await more information from the police station. After lobbying through multiple sources, a message comes in just before midnight that Rocky has been released. He has his camera. For the moment, we know nothing more. News trickles in through our network that anyone taking injured students to the hospital, even if they are helpful bystanders, is getting arrested by plainclothes police. Injured students are arrested as soon as they are well enough to be released. They don’t always get beaten up or put in jail; sometimes, they are just extorted. A friend’s brother was released upon paying a ransom of one lakh taka, just short of $1,000, worth a lot of money in Bangladesh. Newspapers also report Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus bucking the government narrative with a statement to the international community on Monday, “Bangladesh has been engulfed in a crisis that only seems to get worse each passing day. High school students have been amongst the victims.” 23rd July Local news channels reported last night that there had been “no untoward incident,” though a friend provided eyewitness reports of two students and two passersby being killed by the police in the Notun Bazar area of Dhaka. A young rag picker was shot dead in a different part of the city. She also talks of the smart tanks stationed outside her house in Gulshan. Foreign Minister Hasan Mahmud summoned the diplomatic community to brief them on the current situation with a presentation. It didn’t go quite as planned. Unusual for diplomats, the UN Resident Coordinator asked the FM about the alleged use of UN-marked armored personnel carriers and helicopters to suppress protesters. The outgoing US Ambassador Peter Haas, who had been instrumental in the US government’s sanctions against the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) for its human rights abuses, was the one to respond to the FM: “I am surprised you did not show the footage of police firing at unarmed protesters.” There are dissenting voices among civil society personnel despite the fear and repression. 33 eminent citizens have asked the government to apologize unconditionally to citizens for the deaths of protesters since 16th July. The Communist Party of Bangladesh has demanded fresh general elections, while Rashtra Sanskar Andolan (Movement for State Reform) has demanded the government’s resignation. 25 women’s rights activists and teachers termed the Supreme Court’s verdict on the quota system “a trap to confuse the ongoing just protests against the fascist government.” 24th July My partner, Rahnuma, and I are both aware that martyrs don’t do good reporting. Working with limited resources, along with our wider team of dedicated activists, we’ve been looking out for each other. I’ve been out on the streets, on most occasions Rahnuma being my bodyguard. Even in this warlike environment, some show solidarity and want updates. A few even ask for selfies while heavy-set Awami League types scowl from a distance. Curfew and trigger-happy security forces have made it difficult to visit friends in the hospital, find safe homes, and get supplies. Finding ways to beat the Internet ban and get messages such as this one out has been far from easy. We’ve managed so far. It is for you readers to take the next steps to freedom. The broadband connection was restored last night, but selectively. We now have email and WhatsApp access at home, but no YouTube or Facebook, nor social media. My niece, two roads down, has none. Meanwhile, the spin doctors are working overtime. The students, who were called “razaakars” (war of liberation collaborators) a week ago, then became “komolmoti shishu” (sweet innocent kids) a few days later, and are now “obujh chhatro” (naive students) whom the “dushkritikari o jongi” (miscreants and terrorists) have exploited. The PM met with the business community on Monday afternoon. They were concerned about the effect this “problem” has had on the nation’s economy. Part of the discussion was aired on TV. The PM absolved the quota protesters of any ill deeds and reminded us that they were not the reason the army had been brought in. Strange then that one of the protestors' demands is that all charges against them be dropped. There is silence about the ongoing arrests of students. The spin doctors are working overtime to fit the quota protests, which spilled over into a nationwide uprising, into the government’s hold-all explanation, “the BNP-Jamaat-Shibir are responsible.” They will not be spared. They are the ones trying to hold back the country and turn back the development process. The entire cabinet nods. Some of the party faithful come to the podium to hail the PM for her leadership and for thwarting the opposition’s evil plans so successfully. They assure her that the nation will continue in its glorious journey under her able leadership. They would like her to be Prime Minister “for life.” The images of Sheikh Hasina and her father, Bangabandhu (friend of Bengal) Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, plastered on every wall across the country, the billboards and banners that litter the countryside, the Bangabandhu corner, required by law to be present in every library and prominently placed at the airport and all-important buildings, collectively create a North Korea-like adulation of the great leader. As in North Korea, the Bangladeshi leader has total control. The Argentinian army’s loss in the Malvinas (Falklands) Islands, while a loss for the nation, resulted in an unexpected gain. It broke the aura of the army’s invincibility, which allowed the resistance to build and eventually overthrow the military regime. It was one of the few instances where military rulers have been brought to trial. This aura of invincibility is important for the leadership to maintain. That is why the photo of the soldier on the receiving end of a flying kick by a student way back in 2007 was quickly hushed up and has disappeared from official archives. It is probably also the reason why the recent attack on the home minister’s house, though instigated by the helicopter fire on protestors down below in the first place, never made it to print and electronic media. Even the acknowledgment of such temerity, even if provoked, is dangerous. The business community needs the Internet to be up and running immediately. The downtime is costing them, and they are getting agitated. The great leader informed them that she had explained everything to the naive students, and they had understood. The students were no longer the problem. What was to be tackled were the terrorists and the miscreants, which she would take care of. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you. The business community knew where the red lines were and was careful not to cross them. They bowed and retreated. The media in Bangladesh long stopped behaving as the fourth estate and has morphed into a PR network for their corporations and for the government. With extremely rare exceptions (the daily New Age being one), independent media has perished. Embedded journalism is the norm. The few free-thinking journalists who still survive in this space worry about the moles surrounding them. Media owners confide that their headlines are dictated by military intelligence. Their own culpability, they conveniently ignore. Even the headlines, some say, are dictated by security agencies. Even so, there are brave journalists who do what journalists must. Rigorous research. Detailed fact-checking. Connecting the dots. Good reporters find holes in the spin doctor’s statements, who are caught in their own web of lies. Different ministers making contradictory statements create traps for each other. Why the police opened fire and killed “komolmoti shishus” is not an easy question to answer. If the attackers were BNP and their allies, why they were chanting pro-Sheikh Hasina slogans is also unexplained. If there was nothing to hide, why, after the claim that the internet shutdown was due to a technological issue was debunked by the industry experts, was the Internet still down? The government accuses international agencies who are reporting on the situation, of providing fake news. Why, then, is Dhaka Medical College Hospital refusing to provide figures for the dead and injured? In recent years, tyrants across the globe have often deployed the “fake news” accusation to deny human rights violations that are abundantly clear to the public and the rest of the world. They’ve also used the full spectrum of repressive state machinery, including media, to deny culpability and hide their own guilt. They have also banded together to share resources and copy from each other’s playbook. Sheikh Hasina, a long-standing member of the tyranny club, has been playing the game for some time. But arrogance has its drawbacks. It would be wrong to underestimate the public, and the Doosra can only take one so far. Especially when the spin doctors seem to be getting wrong-footed by their own ball. ∎ More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

These reflections do not aim to present a neat list of 2024’s "best" books or "essential reads." Instead, they are fragments of what stayed with us: works that lingered and called us back. BOOKS & ARTS SAAG’s 2024 In Reading These reflections do not aim to present a neat list of 2024’s "best" books or "essential reads." Instead, they are fragments of what stayed with us: works that lingered and called us back. VOL. 2 FROM THE EDITORS AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Digital Illustration by Iman Iftikhar. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Digital Illustration by Iman Iftikhar. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ From the Editors 2024 in Reading 25th Dec 2024 From the Editors 2024 in Reading Fiction Chain-Gang All Stars Poor Artists Write Like a Man Yellowface Scripts of Power Aster of Ceremonies Wolfsong The Melancholy of Resistance Border & Rule Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Ten Days of The Strike Rita Bullwinkel Ernest Cole Lawrence Abu Hamdan The Singularity Fady Joudah Behind You Is the Sea When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain Sex with a Brain Injury Arts Presently Poetry Literature & Liberation The White Pube Hybrid Multimodal Prachi Deshpande Ronnie Grinberg Dorothea Lasky R.F. Kuang Taymour Soomro Deepa Anappara Frances Canon Priya Hein Christine Kitano Franz Kafka Carvell Wallace Kenzie Allen Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn Dwight Turner JJJJJerome Ellis Craft Ali Hazelwood Adania Shibli Kaliane Bradley Xin Wen Laura Robson László Krasznahorkai Harsha Walia Sanya Rushdi Bengali Literature Tamil Literature Nepalese Literature Malayali Literature Sandipan Chattopadhyay Appadurai Muttulingam V.V. Ganeshanathan Shripad Sinnakaar Han Kang Mark Sealy Luvuyo Nyawose Susan Muaddi Darraj Sahar Romani Chapbook Ross Gay Matthew Desmond Emily Nagoski Annie Liontas bell hooks 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. Reading in 2024 often felt like fumbling for grounding amidst relentless upheaval. At times, it offered escape and solace. At others, it demanded grappling, interrogation, and a necessary confrontation. Whether through poetry, history, fiction, or essays, our reading this year insisted on engagement: on seeing, feeling, and remembering to live, even when it felt unbearable. These reflections do not aim to present a neat list of 2024’s "best" books or "essential reads." Instead, they are fragments of what stayed with us: works that lingered and called us back. Our favorites include a novel set in Baltimore tracing the lives of the Palestinian diaspora, texts that provide much needed clarity on revolutionary politics, a quiet yet searing study of sound and space, some comfort reads, and much more. These books held mirrors to the year and world we lived through, compelling us to look even closer when we could not look away. Here, in the voices of those who read and felt with these works, we share not only our most loved reads of the year but the struggles they opened up for us, allowing us to see anew. #1 I have an enduring love for novels that are political yet rise above preachiness or self-absorption to deliver an actual narrative. This year, I needed something visceral to help process the anger I carried: at the personally testing situations I faced over the past year, at myself, at politics everywhere, and at the state of the world we inhabit. My mind feels oversaturated by the relentless stream of online clickbaity content, which so often tells you how to feel rather than inviting you to actually think. My two favourite novels from my year in reading are Chain-Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel . Fiction, though it might seem an escape from reality on the surface, teaches imagination and heart like nothing else. Reading about people in combat—be it dystopian televised death matches among the incarcerated or teenage girl boxers—transported me this year to worlds where I could quietly take stock of do-or-die battles: from the expansive and deadly to the taut and fleeting. — Zoya Rehman, Associate Editor #2 Although I had a thinner reading year in general, I waited quite excitedly for the release of Poor Artists , a hybrid work of fiction and non-fiction by art writing duo The White Pube (Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente). It follows a young brown artist in the UK named Quest Talukdar and includes anonymous material from real art world figures. The book is so refreshing, lucid, and plainly radical. As a young person working in the arts in the UK right now, it simultaneously felt crazy and comforting to imagine other ways of being creative under capitalism, with mutual care at the forefront. In short: I am so glad this book exists in published form. — Vamika Sinha, Senior Editor #3 How many ways are there to write histories of a language, or more specifically, histories of a script? In Scripts of Power: Writing, Language Practices, and Cultural History in Western India , Prachi Deshpande outlines at least two methods, weaving a fascinating history of Modi writing, a cursive Marathi script that has, since the early 20th century, fallen into disuse. There’s a cherished dogma among some South Asians who see the subcontinental patchwork of regional linguistic blocs as somehow more organic an entity than the bloc of nation-states that we have today. The book makes one wonder how true that is. My second pick, Thomas S. Mullaney’s book on the Chinese computer , is a direct descendent of his earlier work on the Chinese typewriter (which carries one my favorite acknowledgments of any academic monographs; it begins: “What is your problem?”). This one asks how different generations of engineers, enthusiasts, eccentrics, and entrepreneurs tried to solve the fundamental problem of computing in Chinese: how does one input a language with no alphabet into a digital computer? Lastly, I chose Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals by Ronnie Grinberg , partly because it is about a bunch of people who read, wrote for, and edited longform, literary-political magazines based out of New York (much like SAAG), and were interested in engaging with the world through argument. And partly because I have a weakness for anything having to do with the midcentury, Partisan Review-Commentary-Encounter crowd. Grinberg’s book, thankfully, is a refreshing departure from the exhausted genre that is the lament for the decline of (often New York-based) public intellectuals. — Shubhanga Pandey, Senior Editor #4 This year, every book I read felt like a knock-out including: Animal by Dorothea Lasky , Yellowface by R.F. Kuang , Letters to a Writer of Color edited by Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro , Fling Diction by Frances Canon , Riambel by Priya Hein , Dumb Luck and Other Poems by Christine Kitano , Letter to the Father by Franz Kafka , Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace , Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen , A Fish Growing Lungs by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn , and The Psychology of Supremacy by Dwight Turner , among many others. Each book I read challenged and changed my approach to creative writing craft, human psychology, how we process social trauma, and what we can learn from community, as well as demanding systemic change. One poetry collection that showed me how form could explode on the page, and how polyvocality and the acknowledgement of our ancestors could be conveyed, was JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies . The collection plays with the idea of “Master of Ceremonies” as someone who both entertains and has authority over the stage. With his stutter, Ellis has difficulty pronouncing “master” (which then becomes “aster” in his work). Throughout the collection, Ellis interrogates the notion of master, both as the figurehead who controls the lives of others, often under authoritarian or tyrannical rule, and as a symbol of accomplishment and the mastery of craft. — Rita Banerjee, Fiction Editor #5 2024 has been a difficult reading year for me because of the state of the world. I often relied on comfort reads, including contemporary romances and "romantasies," but even within these genres, I encountered books that were surprising, thoughtful, and heartbreaking. A series I became hooked on was Wolfsong by TJ Klune (Green Creek, #1), which was both difficult and troubling to read (many trigger warnings), yet its writing wore its heart on its sleeve—it was raw, unabashed, and unrestrained. That's why I appreciate love stories—they give the reader permission to feel all the uncomfortable, awkward, dramatic, and unrestrained emotions. Ali Hazelwood was my favorite go-to read in contemporary romances. Another kind of comfort came from revisiting decades-old books. I read older Kazuo Ishiguro books and re-read Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet , drawn by their effortless, soothing prose, even when the novels explored difficult situations. Two books stood out to me this year. First, Minor Detail by Adania Shibli . The novel begins in 1949, through the perspective of an Israeli soldier. As the story unfolds, small, seemingly "minor" details catch his eye, details that take on deeper meaning as the novel shifts to the perspective of a Palestinian woman in the present day. The sense of dread builds slowly but relentlessly. It is a difficult read; many trigger warnings for rape, violence, and sexual assault. I also loved The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley . This year, while leaning into lighthearted romances for a mental health break, this novel struck the perfect balance—lighthearted in moments, but deeply moving and beautifully written. The story follows a bureaucrat hired to work in a study and keep an eye on an "expat" that the government has brought from history: Graham Gore, who originally died on a doomed Arctic expedition in the 1800s. The novel broke my heart, transformed me, made me laugh, and gasp. I could not put it down. — Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, Senior Editor #6 2024 wasn’t a year for pleasure reading; it was a year for intentional reading. Scrambling to decide what to read, compounded by the weight of world events, brought into focus all the things I knew I didn’t know. This year, I actively sought out new sources of information, embracing a practical and necessary discomfort. That commitment began with the search for knowledge about a region my research focuses on: Central Asia. I happened upon one of the best reads of the year, The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road by Xin Wen . This 300-page deep dive into the history and culture of the Silk Road examines ancient trade and cultural exchanges during a distinctive age of exploration. Wen argues that diplomacy–unlike how we see or use it today–was central to fostering dialogue, trade, and mutual respect, all while navigating conflict without resorting to war. If you love history, travel, economics, or international relations, this one's for you. The idea of traversing conflict without resorting to war was also the focus of a graduate course I completed just two days ago. Another favorite read of the year, spurred by our course discussions, was Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work by Laura Robson . I kept returning to this book all throughout term; every time I opened it, there was a new thread to follow. In this 250-page work, Robson examines how capital is often prioritised over human dignity, showing how economic forces undermine individual security and lead to physical, emotional, and psychological dislocation. And what kind of reading year would it be without a novel? In The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai , I was confronted with despair, power, and the fragility of society. This atmospheric novel taught me how to confront the eerie wonders of the world while living under the looming shadow of societal collapse. — Nazish Chunara, Associate Editor #7 I loved Border and Rule by Harsha Walia . With microscopic clarity, and a postcolonial lens, Walia’s book is an indictment of the smoke-and-mirrors narratives used by states to obfuscate the horrible realities of displacement, forced migration, and statelessness. These realities, Walia argues, are hardwired into today’s capitalist and insidiously racist border control systems of Western capitals. The book further demonstrates how these practices, benefiting a few while exploiting those on the move, are being deployed by Middle Powers in the so-called Global South—such as the UAE, India, and Brazil—against the backdrop of rising populism and the widening gulf between rich and poor. — Mushfiq Mohamed, Senior Editor #8 As South Asians, we are all acutely familiar with the India-Pakistan hegemony on the intellectual discourse in the region (language, caste, class, ethnicity, and gender, of course, further complicate who from within these regions gets to speak, if at all). Particularly, as a Pakistani woman, rarely have I had an opportunity to concertedly engage with literature by Bengali, Nepalese, Tamil, or Malayali (to name a few) writers from beyond the Hindu/Urdu speaking world. In 2024, I sought to change this and read translated writing from across the South Asian diaspora. In particular, I would like to recommend Hospital by Sanya Rushdi –a short yet powerful novel exploring the psychosis experienced by a young Bangladeshi woman in a psychiatric facility in Melbourne. I also loved Ten Days of The Strike by Sandipan Chattopadhyay , with the titular essay serving as a powerful reminder of the politics of shitting. In general, a Bengali translation by Arunava Sinha , I realised, will never disappoint a reader. Honorary mentions among my SA reading list include: Password and Other Stories by Appadurai Muttulingam , and the award-winning Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshanathan . — Iman Iftikhar, Associate Editor #9 More than any other year, 2024 left me feeling like I don't know anything about my world. More often than not, I didn't have the vocabulary and, more disturbingly, the emotional-spiritual bandwidth to articulate or sit with what was/is happening in the world and how it can/could/should impact how I move through life. I learnt a lot from reading Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv, Human Acts by Han Kang , Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, and the poetry and writing Shripad Sinnakaar shared on social media. These writers gave me words, feelings and narrative clarity to sustain my engagement with the world and not shut it out in the face of incomprehension. — Esthappen S., Drama Editor #10 I’ve been reflecting a lot on sound and space this year. Live Audio Essays by Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a collection of transcribed and edited texts from the performances and films he has written and compiled. Moving through excerpt-like recounts, it situates sound through text, blending anecdote with punctuated investigations. It’s a fascinating push to think more deeply about how sound is interpreted and engaged with in different contexts, from the power of sumud to police tip offs, to studying the biological effects of noise pollution. Over the summer, I visited Autograph in London to see Ernest Cole: A Lens in Exile , curated by Mark Sealy . This remarkable exhibition presented images from Cole’s time in New York and his travels around the USA during his exile from South Africa in the 1960s. I also appreciated the catalogue-style book accompanying the exhibition, The True America: Photographs by Ernest Cole , as well as Raoul Peck’s documentary, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found . While working in Paris, I attended Offprint . I had sternly instructed myself to just look and not buy more books(!), but then a small, palm-sized monotone blue book caught my eye. Hold the Sound: Notes on Auditories , edited by Justine Stella Knuchel and Jan Steinbach, is a compilation of texts by artists and researchers attempting to encapsulate descriptions of sound. The book gathers words by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, John Cage, Mosab Abu Toha, Sun Ra, and many others. On my way out I squealed embarrassingly—like an auntie remarking on how much I’ve grown—when I saw Luvuyo Nyawose’s eBhish’ . — Clare Patrick, Art Editor #11 This year, I read in the hour or so I had while our one-year-old slept and I could still keep my eyes open. Reading was both urgent, pressurized by the devastating plight of Palestinians, and a moment to breathe: a space for contemplation, and to feel. I read history, horror, and grief, grief, grief. Rarely is political analysis as exhilarating as in my first favourite read of 2024: The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad , edited by Carollee Bengelsoorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani . From revolutionary movements to “pathologies of power,” to Palestine, the cold war, and Pakistan-India, Ahmad’s insights are crystal clear, provocative, moral, and startlingly prescient. I want to emphasize the clarity of his writing, perhaps owed to his pedagogy as a teacher. I meant to read selections but ended up reading it straight through. My second pick is The Singularity by Balsam Karam (translated by Saskia Vogel) . In an unnamed coastal city, a refugee woman searches for her daughter until, in despair, she leaps to her death, an act witnessed by another woman who narrates this aching, fragmentary testimony of grief–for children, for home. Lastly, [...] by Fady Joudah : what we read this year, we read through a genocide. Fady’s scathing poems left no brutality or complicity unnamed, while speaking with tender sorrow to the dead and wounded. If nothing else, listen to Fady read Dedication here . — Ahsan Butt, Fiction Editor #12 I would like to offer Behind You Is the Sea , a novel by Susan Muaddi Darraj. Released in January 2024, just months after the events of October 7, Darraj’s novel follows three Palestinian American families in Baltimore. Its tender, nuanced characterizations of women and men, young and old, navigating their place in a city burdened by legacies of racial, economic, and legal apartheid, offer an honest exploration of immigrant life in America. Although written before the current conflict in Gaza and Occupied Palestine, it reminds us of the generational trauma and resilience that all Palestinians in the diaspora carry with them. — Aditya Desai, Advisory Editor #13 This year, I loved Sahar Romani’s poetry chapbook, The Opening , a beautiful, tender collage of poems on family, love, and coming into yourself, and into the world. For fiction, I recommend two very different books. When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain is a speculative fiction novella by Hugo Award winning author Nghi Vo. It’s wildly inventive, lyrically written, menacing, beautiful, and queer. Also on the novella tip, Berlin-based Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s novel, Minor Detail , stunned me. Written in clear, marching prose, its focus on minor details, set against the backdrop of occupation, sexual violence, death, and exile, is a portrait and a protest. In nonfiction, I loved: 1) Inciting Joy , a book of essays by Ross Gay, each one luminous with generosity, perceptiveness, and yes, joy. 2) Come Together by sex researcher Emily Nagoski, about sex in long-term relationships, though my biggest takeaway came from two chapters on the gender mirage (women as givers, men as winners) and how this construct within our patriarchal society undermines and destroys heterosexual relationships. 3) Poverty by America is sociologist Matthew Desmond’s heartbreaking follow-up to his even sadder book, Eviction . I grew up middle class, and it was infuriating and eye-opening–I’d recommend it to anyone, especially if you didn’t grow up poor. 4) Sex with a Brain Injury by Annie Liontas was another revelation, giving me enormous empathy for those with acute brain injuries (more common than you know!) and all their attendant furies. 5) Last but certainly not least, I listened to All About Love by African American legend bell hooks, twice, back to back, as the American election season came to a terrifying close. In 2025, I want to internalize hooks’ commitment to love as an ethic—in the family, in friendships, in the workplace, and in politics. — Abeer Hoque, Senior Editor With love, gratitude, and in solidarity, The Editors at SAAG. More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

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

The Revolution won’t materialise / out of your mere thoughts. FICTION & POETRY Skulls K Za Win The Revolution won’t materialise / out of your mere thoughts. This is the final poem, dated 23.02.2021, by K Za Win (1982–2021), who was shot dead by Myanmar security forces at a protest in Monywa on 3 March 2021. Revolution will be in bloom only when air, water and earth— all the nutrients are in agreement. Before the Revolution opened out, a bullet blew someone’s brains out, out on the street. Did that skull have a message for you? Faced with the devil is this or that statement relevant? In the dharma of dha you can’t just wave the sword. Step forward and cut them down! The Revolution won’t materialise out of your mere thoughts. Like blood, one must rise. Don’t ever waver again! The fuse of the Revolution is either you or myself! First published in Adi Magazine , Summer 2021, t his poem 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. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 "Skulls" by Hafsa Ashfaq. Mixed-media, digital illustration & acrylic on paper (2023). SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Poetry Myanmar Military Coup Dissident Writers Revolution Spring Revolution Pogroms Picking Prison Incarceration Military Crackdown Politics of Art Adi Magazine Monywa Posthumous Burma Histories of Revolutionary Politics K ZA WIN (1982-2021) was a land rights activist and a Burmese language teacher in addition to a poet. In 2015, he marched with students along the 350 mile route from Mandalay to Yangon for education reforms until the rally was shut down near Yangon and he along with most of the student leaders were arrested and jailed. He spent a year and one month in prison, after which he published his best-known work, a collection of long-form poems, My Reply to Ramon . In the 2020 election, he said he didn’t vote for the National League for Democracy, whose policies he was very critical of, but when the NLD won by a landslide and an election fraud was alleged as an excuse for the 2021 military coup, he was on the frontlines of the anti-coup protests. He was shot dead by Myanmar security forces at a protest in Monywa on 3 March 2021. Poetry Myanmar 4th Apr 2023 On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct