DESIGN DIRECTOR Mukul Chakravarthi Mukul Chakravarthi is a Senior Product Designer at Fidelity Labs, a Visiting Critic at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and former Adjunct Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is also a typographer, interaction designer, and architect based in San Francisco. DESIGN DIRECTOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

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“I really got into organizing through the Palestinian solidarity movement. I co-founded my school's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. The same people who used to walk by me in the student union when we were organizing for an academic boycott—those same people have reached out to me since to say they wish they had gotten involved, that they feel differently now. Really, the Black Lives Matter movement opened a lot of people's eyes to the interconnectedness of state violence.” INTERACTIVE Zohran Kwame Mamdani on Palestine in 2021 “I really got into organizing through the Palestinian solidarity movement. I co-founded my school's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. The same people who used to walk by me in the student union when we were organizing for an academic boycott—those same people have reached out to me since to say they wish they had gotten involved, that they feel differently now. Really, the Black Lives Matter movement opened a lot of people's eyes to the interconnectedness of state violence.” Zohran Kwame Mamdani There is a pervasive and commonly vocalized sense that the dire state of Gaza and the actions of Israel since October 2023 have created an unprecedented level of public support for Palestine. And perhaps the scale of public support—or, more accurately, its endurance—is indeed unprecedented. But in an interview from the SAAG archives held on 5th June 2021, NY State Assemblymember Zohran Kwame Mamdani shared his own feelings as a longtime SJP and DSA organizer for the Palestinian struggle, as well as in his political role, that with the uptick of violence in Gaza in 2021, he found immense positive signs of shift within society, the first instances of prominent politicians being on the backfoot with protesters and organizers, and other instances of what he had previously considered unthinkable. For Mamdani, much of the roots of this uptick in pro-Palestinian sentiment and the delinking of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism lie in part with the Black Lives Matter movement and the education of society writ large due to mass movements for racial and economic justice over the past decade, and longer. Mamdani and Naib Mian invoke the dichotomy that motivated the event for which they spoke— In Grief, In Solidarity . Mamdani’s sense of how power is and should be wielded, both inside and outside the “halls of power,” as it were, is held simultaneously with how deep the institutional roots between Israel and the US really go, for instance with the links between the NYPD and IDF’s brutal tactics, or most police departments in the US for that matter. This slice from our archive illuminates to a large degree that while change can feel faster than it is, histories of deeply grievous injustices and those of positive change are longer than we perceive them to be. Histories and ideas of collective action are invoked here, too: Mamdani’s idea of solidarity in action—whether deployed over a shipping container or outside a courthouse and wherever it may be—is deeply capacious. When Mamdani says that “we have not yet hit the ceiling of support for Palestinians,” he evokes a sentiment of today. Three years later, we still haven't. There is a pervasive and commonly vocalized sense that the dire state of Gaza and the actions of Israel since October 2023 have created an unprecedented level of public support for Palestine. And perhaps the scale of public support—or, more accurately, its endurance—is indeed unprecedented. But in an interview from the SAAG archives held on 5th June 2021, NY State Assemblymember Zohran Kwame Mamdani shared his own feelings as a longtime SJP and DSA organizer for the Palestinian struggle, as well as in his political role, that with the uptick of violence in Gaza in 2021, he found immense positive signs of shift within society, the first instances of prominent politicians being on the backfoot with protesters and organizers, and other instances of what he had previously considered unthinkable. For Mamdani, much of the roots of this uptick in pro-Palestinian sentiment and the delinking of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism lie in part with the Black Lives Matter movement and the education of society writ large due to mass movements for racial and economic justice over the past decade, and longer. Mamdani and Naib Mian invoke the dichotomy that motivated the event for which they spoke— In Grief, In Solidarity . Mamdani’s sense of how power is and should be wielded, both inside and outside the “halls of power,” as it were, is held simultaneously with how deep the institutional roots between Israel and the US really go, for instance with the links between the NYPD and IDF’s brutal tactics, or most police departments in the US for that matter. This slice from our archive illuminates to a large degree that while change can feel faster than it is, histories of deeply grievous injustices and those of positive change are longer than we perceive them to be. Histories and ideas of collective action are invoked here, too: Mamdani’s idea of solidarity in action—whether deployed over a shipping container or outside a courthouse and wherever it may be—is deeply capacious. When Mamdani says that “we have not yet hit the ceiling of support for Palestinians,” he evokes a sentiment of today. Three years later, we still haven't. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Follow our YouTube channel for updates from past or future events. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Live New York Palestine Intifada Gaza Dissent Occupation Israel Apartheid State Power Methods of Resistance Mass Protests Anti-Israel Protests Black Lives Matter Students for Justice in Palestine SJP DSA Democratic Socialists of America Inequality Racial Justice In Grief In Solidarity Power Dynamics IDF NYPD IDF and American Police Departments Police Brutality Political Prisoners Refugees Anti-Zionism Dehumanization Islamophobia Dismantling Oppressive Structures ZOHRAN KWAME MAMDANI is a Ugandan-born American Democratic Socialist politician. He is the assembly member for the 36th district of the New York State Assembly, in Queens. 5 Jun 2021 Live New York 5th Jun 2021 The Tortured Roof Vrinda Jagota 2nd May Occupation and Osmosis Ryan Biller 26th Oct Food Organizing at Columbia's Gaza Encampment Surina Venkat 24th Sep What Does Solidarity Mean? Azad Essa · Heba Gowayed · Tehila Sasson · Suchitra Vijayan 8th Apr FLUX · Kshama Sawant & Nikil Saval on US Left Electoralism & COVID-19 Nikil Saval · Kshama Sawant 5th Dec On That Note:

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

Journalist Fiza Pirani in conversation with Editor Kamil Ahsan. COMMUNITY How Immigration & Mental Health Intersect Fiza Pirani Journalist Fiza Pirani in conversation with Editor Kamil Ahsan. I’ve been very frustrated by the way that the media portrays suicide. Suicide contagion has been on the rise for teenagers in wealthy, suburban American neighborhoods. Financial prosperity does not protect them from mental illness. But suicide deaths still aren’t really reported on. RECOMMENDED: Foreign Bodies , a Carter Center-sponsored newsletter by Fiza Pirani, centering immigrants with a mission to de-stigmatize mental illness and encourage storytelling. One year after teen's suicide, Georgia father continues the fight , The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Oct 27th, 2018), by Fiza Pirani ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Investigative Journalism Mental Health Climate Change Erasure The Intersections of Mental Health Suicide Contagion Immigration Foreign Bodies Teenagers Personal History FIZA PIRANI is an independent journalist, writer and editor based in Atlanta, Georgia. She is currently a student in the University of Georgia’s Master of Fine Arts in Narrative Nonfiction program and the founder of the award-winning immigrant mental health newsletter Foreign Bodies . Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Teen Vogue, Colorlines, Electric Literature. Previously, she was managing editor of The AJC’s Pulse Magazine. Interview Investigative Journalism 16th Sep 2020 On That Note: On the Relationship between Form & Resistance 17th APR Nation-State Constraints on Identity & Intimacy 17th DEC Returning to the Sundarbans 28th OCT

· FICTION & POETRY Poetry · Dallas Alien of Extraordinary Ability "Go back to sleep Ms. Chowdhury, the American situation is strange" "Error" by Saniya Kamal, for SAAG. Mixed media, 2020. Editors' note: The following is an excerpt from a longer work-in-progress called “A lien of Extraordinary Ability. ” The artworks at the beginning and end of the poem are a result of a collaboration between the author and the artist. Alien of extraordinary ability is an alien classification by United States Citizenship and ______________ Services. The United States may grant a priority visa to an alien who is able to demonstrate “ extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics” or through some other extraordinary career achievements. The ________________ version of the classification (EB-1A), which grants permanent residency, additionally requires the alien to demonstrate "sustained national or international acclaim”, “achievements recognized by others in the field of expertise,” and "a level of expertise indicating that the individual is one of that small percentage who have risen to the very top of the field of endeavor.” When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. —Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali “Why do you want this visa?” a home. is it here? is it here? is it here? “Why in this country?” everyone likes sweet stuff sometimes. “What are your plans?” To build a spaceship out of the years named Solace. so it is to be born a particular particle to no particular address on no particular day of a less-than particular week. so it is to be star-seer, sin-shelter, flower named nayantara, a rearview. so it is that the name∞ You were given is not the same. nonetheless You are chosen. so it is to sense in an other an otherworldly sweetness. Have we met? You ask. No— for I am talking to myself. Before You, Idea. so it is to walk towards a frame hoping for image vs error . . . for don’t You want to see Your own particles pictured in the museum mirrors? No? Ok. then forget continuum. be disruption ∞ go back to sleep Ms. Chowdhury, the American situation is strange but we have not met yet. this is a museum. i am making a list∞ Personal ornaments Collared disks Scepters & early imagery Neolithic axes of the _______________ culture Blades Dagger-axes arrowheads & knives Serrated disks Ceremonial blades Serrated and ________________ axes Handles Animal heads and masks Dragons Fish Birds Naturalistic animals Insects Surface decoration Dish with coiled bird & dragon interlacery Plaque Shroud∞ ∞this is a list to keep thoughts of you at bay ∞so it is to imagine your death. to hold a conversation with your absence: so good, this gallery, You say— yes, it is quite the door to a thousand years ago! cries the Past. sshhh, begs the Future. let’s watch the wall open . . . see, we’ll have time for the fields! see, we’ll consult the sun re the moon! see, now we’ll “see” other families. our own. is this a museum or a border? where there is a border, does there need to be patrol? “no touching the heart! i mean art!” security cries. okay, i say, okay. and part the regions of my torso that is how i learn the guard is blind to my mockingbird inside. “now walk towards flowering cherry and autumn maples,” Mockingbird commands. “do it. alone” ∞idea-You disappears. I leave the museum or linger. i become or engage in: an etching window shopping allusions to the sea light palette ewer & basin I once was and will never again be: virgin & child the rape of ____________ by _____________ Are you also trying to understand what it is to be: a master “Alien (Reflection)” by Saniya Kamal for SAAG. Mixed media, 2020. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Poetry Dallas Bangladesh Diaspora Immigration Cultural Narratives of Immigration Borders Visa Alien of Extraordinary Ability Alienation Work Authorization Poetic Form Particularity Temporality Ornamentation North American Diaspora TARFIA FAIZULLAH is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (SIU, 2014). Tarfia’s writing appears widely in the U.S. and abroad in the Daily Star, Hindu Business Line, BuzzFeed, PBS News Hour, Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, Ms. Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, the New Republic, the Nation, Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Tarfia is currently based in Dallas. SANIYA KAMAL is a writer and artist, currently and MFA student in Fiction at Brown University. 13th Oct 2020 Tarfia Faizullah 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:

“How do you laugh at untrammeled power? Either you are completely terrorized by it, or you completely delegitimize its authority by laughing in its face and doing the most absurd things.” COMMUNITY Experimentalism in the Face of Fascism “How do you laugh at untrammeled power? Either you are completely terrorized by it, or you completely delegitimize its authority by laughing in its face and doing the most absurd things.” Meena Kandasamy RECOMMENDED: The Orders Were to Rape You: Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle , the newest book by Meena Kandasamy (Navayana, 2021). RECOMMENDED: The Orders Were to Rape You: Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle , the newest book by Meena Kandasamy (Navayana, 2021). SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Interview Chennai Sociolinguistics Avant-Garde Form Experimental Methods Dalit Literature Dalit Histories Indian Fascism Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Tamil Tigers Auto-Fiction Bhima Koregaon Marxist Theory André Breton Absurdity Explanation Affect Translation Tamil Eelam Personal History Failure Narrative Structure Meena Kandasamy is an anti-caste activist, poet, novelist, and translator. Her poetry collections, novels, and essay collections include Touch , Ms. Militancy , The Gypsy Goddess , When I Hit You , Exquisite Cadavers , The Orders Were to Rape You: Tamil Tigresses in the Eelam Struggle, and most recently, Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You . In 2022, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL), UK, and awarded the PEN Hermann Kesten Prize. She holds a PhD in sociolinguistics. 7 Sept 2020 Interview Chennai 7th Sep 2020 A State of Perpetual War: Fiction & the Sri Lankan Civil War Shehan Karunatilaka 10th Jan Kashmiri ProgRock and Experimentation as Privilege Zeeshaan Nabi 21st Dec Origins of Modernism & the Avant-Garde in India Amit Chaudhuri 4th Oct Humor & Kindness in Radical Art Hana Shafi 19th Sep Authenticity & Exoticism Jenny Bhatt 4th Sep On That Note:

COO of Fearless Collective, Tehani Ariyaratne, in conversation with Senior Editor Sabika Abbas Naqvi. COMMUNITY Public Art Projects as Feminist Reclamation AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR COO of Fearless Collective, Tehani Ariyaratne, in conversation with Senior Editor Sabika Abbas Naqvi. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Interview Feminist Art Practice Feminist Organizing Mural Public Space Art Practice Public Arts Fearless Collective Fearless Arts Residency Art Activism Fundraising Future Dream Spaces Queerness Queer Spaces Trans Politics Trans Community Wheat Pasting Sri Lanka Pakistan India Internationalist Solidarity Khwaja Siras Bubbli Malik Queer Muslim Project Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Interview Feminist Art Practice 29th Nov 2020 One of our murals in Rawalpindi, is an image of a [khwaja sira], Bubbli Malik, on a bicycle, and she says "I am a creation of Allah." The mural refers not to violence or trauma, but is a radical affirmation of the [khwaja sira] community. Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up:

· COMMUNITY Live · Brooklyn “Apertures” with the Vagabonds Trio A live performance for the launch of SAAG's Volume 2, also celebrating the release of Rajna Swaminathan's new record “Apertures” at the Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn. Swaminathan (mrudangam/vocals) performed as part of the Vagabonds trio with Ganavya (vocals) and Utsav Lal (piano). A live performance by experimental Rajna Swaminathan, Ganavya & Utsav Lal. On May 12th, 2023, SAAG hosted a launch event for Vol. 2 at the Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn, for which we were delighted to present the experimental and deeply moving musical compositions of the Vagabonds Trio: Rajna Swaminathan (mrudangam/voice), Ganavya (voice), and Utsav Lal (piano) who we had the pleasure of collaborating with a second time after his opening performance for In Grief, In Solidarity . They were joined partway by Miles Okazaki (guitar). To showcase musicians with such incredible musical range, a commitment to radicalism and social justice as expressed in the lyricism and melodies, and a deep rigor and discipline with their craft, was a true honor. We hope you enjoy the recording of the live event and the improvisational way it shifted from the respective discographies of each member of the trio, shifting seamlessly from several languages, including Tamil, English, Urdu, and more. Most of all, the performance celebrates the release of Rajna Swaminathan's new album Apertures (Ropeadope, Apr 28th), available to buy or stream now . SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Live Brooklyn Experimental Music Jazz mrudangam Rajna Swaminathan Apertures Ganavya Utsav Lal Launch Event Contemporary Music Ropeadope Miles Okazaki Event 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. 19th May 2023 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:

"There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution." "There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution." Artist Essay Miriyam Ilavenil 5 Feb 2026 th · REPORTAGE · LOCATION A Poetics of Banality: Karen Chase’s Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and Zundel State Karen Chase’s Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and ZundelState is a mediocre, counter-revolutionary poetic text on historicism, or rather, anti-historicism, veiled through the subjectivised genre of love. The book contains two stories: the first is Jamali Kamali , a homoerotic narrative poem about the 16th-century Sufi court poet and saint, Jamali, and his speculated lover, Kamali, now published for the first time in the USA. The second, titled ZundelState , is a novella in verse about Joe and Marianna, two lovers from a dystopian future where both history and dreaming have been outlawed. In both works, the inertia of American liberal poetics weakens against the rhizome of love, history, and imagination. Oscillating within orthodoxy, her unimaginative writing guts historicism from political reality, bleeding the soul out of these love stories. Jamali is resurrected from history, in selective memory, disfigured from his legacies of poetry, mysticism, autonomy, all for Chase to bury him within the hollowness of her subjectivity. The genre of homoeroticism bears the sexual dialectics of spirit and matter , neither of which is meaningfully expressed in Chase’s Jamali Kamali , in an aesthetic nor analytic sense. Jamali and Kamali’s bodies, interpreted in their most shallow, spineless, and severed forms, are the only aspect that concerns Chase’s poetics. The theology of Sufism, the politics of feudal Delhi and the theoretical limitations of “queerness” (the constraints of imperial socio-lingualistics against the cosmology of sexualities) are absent in her text, and in her subtext. The material world that both Jamali and Kamali exist in, and its umbilical cord with the present, is ruptured by Chase’s own one-dimensional narrative consciousness, intruding on this bloodline of history. Exiled from the dialectics of time, Chase insulates their memory into her imperial imagination. She desolates not only Jamali’s personhood, through his poetry and mysticism, from feudal Delhi, but along with it, his living memory, the reconstructions of it by “queer” Indians, from neocolonial Delhi. Her self-serving and stylistically superficial poetics messily drags Jamali and Kamali from the womb of history into her neocolonial text, as stillborns. There is no viable sexual desire between Chase’s Jamali and Kamali because they are described without bodies, nor minds, to think, to feel, to carnalise. Their erotics is castrated from the sexual materiality of Delhi. Their intimacy is made impotent by Chase’s voyeuristic gaze. Her poetic consciousness fails to actualise itself, outside of herself. Ironically, it is only towards the end of the poem, when Kamali mourns the death of Jamali, and the narrative subsumes Jamali’s materiality (what little of it), that her poem gains a form of life. In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s genre-rupturing Dictee , a more poetically critical expression of historicism is shared. Where Chase’s Jamali Kamali is an ahistorical homoerotic imagination of speculated history from feudal Delhi, Cha’s Dictee is a reconstruction of the dialectical sentience of Korea that has been (and continues to be) silenced, severed and made seditious by counter-revolutionaries, through the memories of multiple generations of subjugated Korean women. The conflict of Korean consciousness is poeticised not just through abstractions but through the anchored historicism. She does not incarcerate Korea in a single moment of history, like Chase does with Delhi, but expresses lyrically and liturgically, Korean consciousness through the chasm of time and space, through exiles and emancipations, through Japanese imperialism, American imperialism, and the South Korean puppet regime. Although Cha's poetry too, at moments, is stunted by subjectivity, it is still ultimately rooted in materiality, unlike Chase’s work which mystifies materiality through neocolonial abstractions. Cha’s Americaness, a product of imperialist forced migration, is implicated in her narrative. She complicates her place in her poetics, even when Korean history belongs to her. Her personal consciousness is never interruptive of her poeticism; rather, her presence bleeds into the collective bloodshed of Korea, as one ocean of violence and resistance. Chase’s Americaness, on the other hand, is made ambiguous in her first-person narrative, which speaks through the corpse of Jamali, violently embedding herself into this history. Liberal escapism is the thesis Chase constructs against the reactionary dictatorship of the ZundelState. Her fictional ZundelState feels far more material compared to the immateriality of Jamali Kamali . Her ZundelState is authoritarian; it has annihilated dreaming, history, and self-expression. While Chase’s narrative expresses the ZundelState as a form of fascist anti-historicism, her poetry is the embodiment of liberal anti-historicism. She too, like the ZundelState , is seemingly uninterested in the truth:where fascism denies thought, her liberalism is full of thoughts, regardless of the truth. The liberal consciousness placed against the fascist structure of the ZundelState does not contradict it but instead becomes complacent with it. The lovers in the narrative are Joe, who hates the ZundelState and scavenges for remnants of state-destroyed histories, and Marianna, an artist and an agent of the ZundelState who is conflicted by her complicity to the regime. In Joe’s scavenging, and through his and Mariana’s dreamings, fragments of history resurface. The narrative is particularly fixated on exploring the nuclear devastation of Nagasaki , Einstein's theory of relativity, and the history of World War II. Evading the violent imperial politics of the war, Chase’s apolitical poetics mutates Nagasaki into a detached spectacle, Einstein’s theory into an immaterial phantasm and the entire war into uncritical absurdism. Warfare is objectified as an empty eclectic ambience all for Chase’s imaginary liberal romance. A compelling love story should contend with the complexity of reality. There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution. Where Chase’s Jamali and Kamali are stillborn because she annihilates them from the womb of Delhi, Joe and Marianna’s love decomposes the very flesh of historicism into a mere rhetorical backdrop for their romance. ZundelState , even in its attempt at being a distant dystopia, is framed through American politics, Americanised characters and American liberalism. The narrative is ambivalent of its own Americanness, even referencing the American Dream, an ahistorical ideology, negated by any political criticism or even narrative consciousness of its savagery. There can be no reckoning with historicism in this text without contending with Americanism. Poetically perpetuating Americanism is counter-insurgency against historicism, poeticism, and creativity itself. Chase’s poetics, explained in the ‘A Note’ section of this book, is rooted in, as she states, what is unknown to her . She theorises that writing about what one does not know leads to infinite exploration as opposed to the confined space of writing about what one knows. Yet, her poetry negates her theory, for her ignorant imagination regresses literary evolution. All the “boundlessness” she poetises, through abstract dreams, subjective subconsciousness and bourgeois fictionalism, only ever regurgitates the monotony of American liberalism. Through her writing, her imperialist liberalism, against the goliath of historicism, exists without criticisms and without consciousness. While Chase uses the excuse of Joe’s ignorance (inflicted upon him by Chase’s ZundelState ) to explore known (Western) histories superficially, she is seemingly unequipped to contend with the unknown (Subcontinental) history in Jamali Kamali . Her writing reveals a neocolonial primitiveness that prevents her from weaponising creative and intellectual dialectics to confront the complex historical politics of the unknown. Her poetry emulates the figure of the European observer described by Glauber Rocha in his critical essay The Aesthetics of Hunger; where he articulates that Europeans are only ever artistically interested in the third world so far as it satisfies their nostalgia for primitivism. Chase’s poetry, as poetry, as literature, is made vapid, useless, and boring because of her own reluctance to know . Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's experimental film, The Hour of the Furnaces alarms us of how neocolonial cultural production decapitates history. Chase’s poeticism in these texts is part of this beheading. She is of this neocolonial class yet she evades responsibility for it. Her poetry postures as if neocolonial Delhi is not shackled by American imperialism, as if the horrors of Nagasaki have passed us, as if the heirloom of history isn't reaped from its oppressed descendants. Other than curiosity and ambiguous liberation, Chase’s Joe and her narrative have no other necessity for historicism. In contrast, Cha’s Dictee is resolute on scavenging history so as to not repeat it into oblivion, to not annihilate Korea in another imperialist war. Where Cha writes of history with an objective, Chase objectifies history itself. She is not interested in understanding the difference between fiction and history because she bears no political urgency to do so. Unsurprisingly, her class position inspires within her some political compulsion to obstruct historicism and propagate anti-historicism as poetics. Chase’s poetry blunts the weapon of history, negating the revolutionary function of art, rendering historicism useless in the war of politics, and fashioning both art and history as passive neocolonised ornaments. In times when fascism continues to rise and the imperial enslaved world teeters on the brink of annihilating wars, literature must not poetically apathise itself from political struggle. Books like Chase’s are a vital reminder that literature must not give precedence to self-involved imaginations over the collective struggle for material truth and emancipation. Literature, poeticism, and creative dialecticism are the nerves of humanity’s marrow. They must not allow the mind to be drowned by apolitical dreamings but instead catalyse the consciousness to revolt.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Miriyam Ilavenil is a journalist and a descendant of displaced Tamil Dalit indentured labourers who is interested in understanding the politics and histories of South and Southeast Asia. Column Essay 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:

"There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution." · Column · Essay "There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution." A Poetics of Banality: Karen Chase’s Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and Zundel State Karen Chase’s Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and ZundelState is a mediocre, counter-revolutionary poetic text on historicism, or rather, anti-historicism, veiled through the subjectivised genre of love. The book contains two stories: the first is Jamali Kamali , a homoerotic narrative poem about the 16th-century Sufi court poet and saint, Jamali, and his speculated lover, Kamali, now published for the first time in the USA. The second, titled ZundelState , is a novella in verse about Joe and Marianna, two lovers from a dystopian future where both history and dreaming have been outlawed. In both works, the inertia of American liberal poetics weakens against the rhizome of love, history, and imagination. Oscillating within orthodoxy, her unimaginative writing guts historicism from political reality, bleeding the soul out of these love stories. Jamali is resurrected from history, in selective memory, disfigured from his legacies of poetry, mysticism, autonomy, all for Chase to bury him within the hollowness of her subjectivity. The genre of homoeroticism bears the sexual dialectics of spirit and matter , neither of which is meaningfully expressed in Chase’s Jamali Kamali , in an aesthetic nor analytic sense. Jamali and Kamali’s bodies, interpreted in their most shallow, spineless, and severed forms, are the only aspect that concerns Chase’s poetics. The theology of Sufism, the politics of feudal Delhi and the theoretical limitations of “queerness” (the constraints of imperial socio-lingualistics against the cosmology of sexualities) are absent in her text, and in her subtext. The material world that both Jamali and Kamali exist in, and its umbilical cord with the present, is ruptured by Chase’s own one-dimensional narrative consciousness, intruding on this bloodline of history. Exiled from the dialectics of time, Chase insulates their memory into her imperial imagination. She desolates not only Jamali’s personhood, through his poetry and mysticism, from feudal Delhi, but along with it, his living memory, the reconstructions of it by “queer” Indians, from neocolonial Delhi. Her self-serving and stylistically superficial poetics messily drags Jamali and Kamali from the womb of history into her neocolonial text, as stillborns. There is no viable sexual desire between Chase’s Jamali and Kamali because they are described without bodies, nor minds, to think, to feel, to carnalise. Their erotics is castrated from the sexual materiality of Delhi. Their intimacy is made impotent by Chase’s voyeuristic gaze. Her poetic consciousness fails to actualise itself, outside of herself. Ironically, it is only towards the end of the poem, when Kamali mourns the death of Jamali, and the narrative subsumes Jamali’s materiality (what little of it), that her poem gains a form of life. In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s genre-rupturing Dictee , a more poetically critical expression of historicism is shared. Where Chase’s Jamali Kamali is an ahistorical homoerotic imagination of speculated history from feudal Delhi, Cha’s Dictee is a reconstruction of the dialectical sentience of Korea that has been (and continues to be) silenced, severed and made seditious by counter-revolutionaries, through the memories of multiple generations of subjugated Korean women. The conflict of Korean consciousness is poeticised not just through abstractions but through the anchored historicism. She does not incarcerate Korea in a single moment of history, like Chase does with Delhi, but expresses lyrically and liturgically, Korean consciousness through the chasm of time and space, through exiles and emancipations, through Japanese imperialism, American imperialism, and the South Korean puppet regime. Although Cha's poetry too, at moments, is stunted by subjectivity, it is still ultimately rooted in materiality, unlike Chase’s work which mystifies materiality through neocolonial abstractions. Cha’s Americaness, a product of imperialist forced migration, is implicated in her narrative. She complicates her place in her poetics, even when Korean history belongs to her. Her personal consciousness is never interruptive of her poeticism; rather, her presence bleeds into the collective bloodshed of Korea, as one ocean of violence and resistance. Chase’s Americaness, on the other hand, is made ambiguous in her first-person narrative, which speaks through the corpse of Jamali, violently embedding herself into this history. Liberal escapism is the thesis Chase constructs against the reactionary dictatorship of the ZundelState. Her fictional ZundelState feels far more material compared to the immateriality of Jamali Kamali . Her ZundelState is authoritarian; it has annihilated dreaming, history, and self-expression. While Chase’s narrative expresses the ZundelState as a form of fascist anti-historicism, her poetry is the embodiment of liberal anti-historicism. She too, like the ZundelState , is seemingly uninterested in the truth:where fascism denies thought, her liberalism is full of thoughts, regardless of the truth. The liberal consciousness placed against the fascist structure of the ZundelState does not contradict it but instead becomes complacent with it. The lovers in the narrative are Joe, who hates the ZundelState and scavenges for remnants of state-destroyed histories, and Marianna, an artist and an agent of the ZundelState who is conflicted by her complicity to the regime. In Joe’s scavenging, and through his and Mariana’s dreamings, fragments of history resurface. The narrative is particularly fixated on exploring the nuclear devastation of Nagasaki , Einstein's theory of relativity, and the history of World War II. Evading the violent imperial politics of the war, Chase’s apolitical poetics mutates Nagasaki into a detached spectacle, Einstein’s theory into an immaterial phantasm and the entire war into uncritical absurdism. Warfare is objectified as an empty eclectic ambience all for Chase’s imaginary liberal romance. A compelling love story should contend with the complexity of reality. There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution. Where Chase’s Jamali and Kamali are stillborn because she annihilates them from the womb of Delhi, Joe and Marianna’s love decomposes the very flesh of historicism into a mere rhetorical backdrop for their romance. ZundelState , even in its attempt at being a distant dystopia, is framed through American politics, Americanised characters and American liberalism. The narrative is ambivalent of its own Americanness, even referencing the American Dream, an ahistorical ideology, negated by any political criticism or even narrative consciousness of its savagery. There can be no reckoning with historicism in this text without contending with Americanism. Poetically perpetuating Americanism is counter-insurgency against historicism, poeticism, and creativity itself. Chase’s poetics, explained in the ‘A Note’ section of this book, is rooted in, as she states, what is unknown to her . She theorises that writing about what one does not know leads to infinite exploration as opposed to the confined space of writing about what one knows. Yet, her poetry negates her theory, for her ignorant imagination regresses literary evolution. All the “boundlessness” she poetises, through abstract dreams, subjective subconsciousness and bourgeois fictionalism, only ever regurgitates the monotony of American liberalism. Through her writing, her imperialist liberalism, against the goliath of historicism, exists without criticisms and without consciousness. While Chase uses the excuse of Joe’s ignorance (inflicted upon him by Chase’s ZundelState ) to explore known (Western) histories superficially, she is seemingly unequipped to contend with the unknown (Subcontinental) history in Jamali Kamali . Her writing reveals a neocolonial primitiveness that prevents her from weaponising creative and intellectual dialectics to confront the complex historical politics of the unknown. Her poetry emulates the figure of the European observer described by Glauber Rocha in his critical essay The Aesthetics of Hunger; where he articulates that Europeans are only ever artistically interested in the third world so far as it satisfies their nostalgia for primitivism. Chase’s poetry, as poetry, as literature, is made vapid, useless, and boring because of her own reluctance to know . Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's experimental film, The Hour of the Furnaces alarms us of how neocolonial cultural production decapitates history. Chase’s poeticism in these texts is part of this beheading. She is of this neocolonial class yet she evades responsibility for it. Her poetry postures as if neocolonial Delhi is not shackled by American imperialism, as if the horrors of Nagasaki have passed us, as if the heirloom of history isn't reaped from its oppressed descendants. Other than curiosity and ambiguous liberation, Chase’s Joe and her narrative have no other necessity for historicism. In contrast, Cha’s Dictee is resolute on scavenging history so as to not repeat it into oblivion, to not annihilate Korea in another imperialist war. Where Cha writes of history with an objective, Chase objectifies history itself. She is not interested in understanding the difference between fiction and history because she bears no political urgency to do so. Unsurprisingly, her class position inspires within her some political compulsion to obstruct historicism and propagate anti-historicism as poetics. Chase’s poetry blunts the weapon of history, negating the revolutionary function of art, rendering historicism useless in the war of politics, and fashioning both art and history as passive neocolonised ornaments. In times when fascism continues to rise and the imperial enslaved world teeters on the brink of annihilating wars, literature must not poetically apathise itself from political struggle. Books like Chase’s are a vital reminder that literature must not give precedence to self-involved imaginations over the collective struggle for material truth and emancipation. Literature, poeticism, and creative dialecticism are the nerves of humanity’s marrow. They must not allow the mind to be drowned by apolitical dreamings but instead catalyse the consciousness to revolt.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Column Essay Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 5th Feb 2026 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 severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” BOOKS & ARTS Into the Sea Mai Ishizawa · Polly Barton “The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” It isn’t just images that become memories. Different parts of my body stored up memories, which they silently retained. Those afterimages carried that way in the body would most likely never be erased. Skin cells regenerate periodically, becoming new, but the time that passed after the earthquake and sensations from that period seemed to linger on, as a transparent layer on my skin. And yet, when I tried to pass beyond my memories, all I could see was a two-dimensional whiteness. Connecting together all my physical memories only left me with a dense accumulation of fragments—I never managed to summon up a complete picture of that day. The attributes of the memories held by each part of my body may have been a part of me, but I couldn’t combine them into any self-identifying symbols, like those of the saints. Being in a place so far away from the sea and nuclear power plants had loosened my grip on my memories of that day, obscuring my connection to them. Eventually, this sea inside me was overlayed by images of numerous paintings, which yielded new impressions. My connotations with the sea came to include those folds of pale green out of which Botticelli’s Venus rose; Caspar David Friedrich’s desolate icy sea, with the blue-black shape of the wanderer gazing out mutely at it; the sea as rendered by the impressionists, with its musical depiction of the particles of light and color dancing there; Canaletto’s sea inextricably bound to his crisp renditions of Venice; and then the peaceful blue gaze of the sea meeting the sky in Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus. This final version merged with the sea as Nomiya had described it. The peaceful times before dawn, or after sunset. The dialogues in blue that one witnessed there. Even as it served as a giant mirror reflecting the sky through which the colors flowed and passed, the powerful force of its current eddied and whirled around beneath. Yet the impressions making up this stratum had been swallowed up by the sea that March, and had vanished. None of my own memories of water were violent. I was one of those who’d watched those video clips of the sea as it destroyed everything—those scenes of destruction shown repeatedly on TV and online. That weighty gray, white and black mass surging through the town, growing heavier with the things it acquired along the way, forming new masses, encroaching still further. Watching these videos, my eyes superimposed on Nomiya’s final moments, which they’d never actually seen. Those scenes of agony that my eyes took in, the spatial and temporal holes gaping wide open in a way that could never be depicted in a painting, covering over all my other connotations. What I saw in those photos and videos hadn’t integrated with the impressions of the sea that lived inside me. Now, there wasn’t so much as a trace remaining of the pool I’d visited as a child. The pine forest, too, had been irrevocably damaged by the sea’s violence. Since seeing the destruction, the places that I’d visited had been ripped apart into tiny fragments, which returned my gaze in inert silence. This was the silence of words that had been stewing for too long. The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories. As I looked at the city, the place I’d once lived would quietly flicker past, a pale shadow. There, memories of the sea’s violence assumed particular shapes: monuments attesting to the dangers of tsunamis, the remains of a school where many people had lost their lives. How should we carry with us the memories of those who had disappeared to the other side of time? Was it a case of endlessly tracing their contours in our memories, until their names were eventually rubbed away, forgotten? The sea, which contained so many like Nomiya who’d never returned, didn’t bear their names—it was always people’s memories that did so. Nine years later, they continued searching, quietly yet unceasingly, to bring home the dead who had vanished into the sea. Even knowing that the city of Göttingen contained dark, bitter elements to its memories, like the rings of a tree, I was still enticed by the impression it left on me—the twisting alleys and dead-ends that my feet traced, the lush greenery spilling forth, the movement of all kinds of shadow patterns woven by the sun. Wandering around someplace, without any particular focal point, letting my eyes roam across the scenery in front of me, I would find a portrait of the city, of that particular location rising up before me. When I saw a new face of this kind that I couldn’t comprehend except through my feet, my eyes would do their best to understand how it had shifted over time. The multiple faces buried within the strata comprising numerous eras and memories would merge, then peel apart. The city reflected those different faces in flashes, like the blinking of an eye—including the face from that time when it had been known by those three characters, 月沈原. Tracing the portraits from various times with my eyes, my feet kept on pushing forward, until I reached a white plastered building with a red wooden frame creating a geometric pattern. This was the Junkernschänke—squires’ tavern—which dated back to the fifteenth century. The building had changed expression through the decades depending on its owner: from private accommodation to a vacant house, from a hardware business to a wine dealership. Its traditional wooden structure had sustained considerable damage in the March 1945 air raid, but over time, repairs had restored it to its original form. The walls were decorated with pictures rendered in multicolored wood, a number of faces peering out from small circular portraits. The sets of eyes peering out from those portholes onto a distant time belonged to seven astrological gods: those for the planets from Mercury through to Saturn—excluding Earth—plus those of the Sun and the Moon. Coincidentally enough, the seven planets as they were classified at the time of the geocentric system were preserved here, right inside the old town. The swords, scepters, bows, and other objects that the gods bore so carefully were drawn according to traditional symbolism. Here, too, their attributes protected them from anonymity, bringing their names into relief.∎ Excerpted from The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton (New Directions, March 2025). ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (New Directions, March 2025). Cover design and illustration by Janet Hansen. Image Courtesy StudioM1. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Essay Japan Japanese Literature Translation Debut Novel Mai Ishizawa Polly Barton Survivors Earthquakes Memory Trauma Sensory Identity Seascapes Seam Contemporary Literature Melancholy Tender Imagery Fiction Ecology Environmental Disaster Gottingen's Scale Solar System Iconography Time & Space Magical Realism Literary Fiction Poetry Akutagawa Prize MAI ISHIZAWA a was born in 1980 in Sendai City, Japan, and currently lives in Germany. Her debut novel, The Place of Shells , won the Akutagawa Prize. POLLY BARTON is a writer and Japanese translator based in Bristol. Her translations include Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are , Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job , and Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden . In 2019, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for her debut book Fifty Sounds . Her second book, Porn: An Oral History , is forthcoming. 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