While Pakistan doubles down on deporting Afghan Refugees, filmmaker Rani Wahidi covers the story of an Afghan musician, Javid Karezi, and his family, to bring to light the difficulties Afghan refugees face after migration. BOOKS & ARTS The Limits of Documentation Anmol Irfan While Pakistan doubles down on deporting Afghan Refugees, filmmaker Rani Wahidi covers the story of an Afghan musician, Javid Karezi, and his family, to bring to light the difficulties Afghan refugees face after migration. It’s late 2022 and singer Javid Karezi is sitting on stage with his harmonium surrounded by his new band. They’re at a wedding ceremony in Quetta, Pakistan. Karezi is mid-song when a middle-aged man interrupts him. Up until now, Karezi’s singing has only caused guests to leave. The man—apparently the host—asks Karezi to sing a song in Pashto. Karezi is taken aback by this request—he is being asked to sing in a language he is not fluent in. He tries to put it off, but eventually decides to ask his fellow bandmate, Waseem, to sing the requested song instead, and sits off to the side. This is a scene from documentary filmmaker Rani Wahidi ’s film, The Failed Migration , where she follows the Karezi family’s journey of deportation from Pakistan to Afghanistan. As a celebrated singer, the son of renowned Afghan singer Faiz Ahmed Karezi, and a sixth generation musician, Karezi is used to being in the spotlight. But when the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, life took more turns than he could have ever imagined. In August 2021, after their successful takeover of Kabul , the Taliban banned music —leaving Karezi and his fellow musicians devoid of their livelihoods. By April 2022, Karezi, his wife, and 5 children, packed up their lives and moved to Pakistan by way of the Chaman border crossing—and they weren’t the only ones. They joined the growing community of roughly 4 million Afghan refugees . A majority of them have lived in Pakistan since the late 1970s and about 1.7 million are undocumented. If not for films like Wahidi’s The Failed Migration , the struggles experienced by generations of Afghan families in Pakistan would be largely ignored, likely due to xenophobia, political disputes, and the government’s neglect of these very issues. “Musicians have a gift and the Taliban took that from them. Anyone can open a shop, but not everyone has such a skillset, so to take that from someone is very bad,” Wahidi says, adding that while foreign media often covers such issues, “ we live our stories, we can revisit them anytime. They are close to us, we can explain them better, keeping our own contexts and lived experiences in mind, and we have a lot of time to tell our story.” Karezi had little contact with other Afghan musicians during his time in Pakistan, as he tried to focus on making a living for himself. He's proud of what he does, and is teaching his son to play the tabla as well. Wahidi’s skillset is also her talent but it’s been unable to substantively help Karezi in the struggle of being an Afghan refugee in Pakistan. As a singer of Dari and Farsi—languages not commonly spoken or understood in Quetta—he was only ever hired for a few functions. He found informal work that provided little economic, health, and food security. Even when he did book wedding ceremonies or events, the money wasn’t enough, especially after being divided amongst the larger band that he performed with. Coming home from a gig one night, as Wahidi’s film shows, Karezi asks his daughter what the doctor said about his wife’s condition since she’s been sick for a while, only to find out that she needs to be put on an oxygen supply and requires more medicine—which he can already barely afford. Like most Afghan refugees, Karezi lives on the sidelines, taking part only in the informal employment sector—but not all experiences are the same. As a development worker, Elaine Alam has worked extensively with Afghan refugee communities and divides them roughly into two categories. “On one hand, [there] are the Afghan refugees you see at Peshawar University or Quaid-e-Azam University. They’re coming from a certain background in order to pursue education, which does not negate their challenges but does give them a certain privilege because they have an understanding of how to acquire things,” she told me. “Then you have people coming from a tribal background. These refugees come from a larger population, and have no leadership, no security, and no safety. Their only point of contact is the Commissionerate for Afghan refugees, which focuses on government plans and allowances through UNHCR.” The second category are the ones most at risk for deportation and detainment, and usually live in katchi abadi (slum areas). They have no access to healthcare or education, leaving them in a cycle of odd jobs with a fear of getting caught by authorities. Elaine puts Karezi somewhere in the middle of the two since he possesses a skillset he can use. However, his informal living situation along with a disruptive climate impedes his progress, placing him much closer to the second category. Karezi may be the spotlight of Wahidi’s film, but his story speaks to a much larger journey experienced by Afghan refugees in Pakistan. After a couple of months with his family cooped up inside a small and bare apartment, Karezi decides to take his children to a park in an effort to distract them from their struggles. With no schools willing to admit them, the five children grapple with settling in, and are distraught at having lost access to education. “His two older daughters were affected the most. One is in grade 10 and the other is in grade 7, and both were denied admission to school because they were considered over age,” Wahidi says, highlighting this as one of the top most struggles Karezi faced after migration. But experiences of young Afghans across the country—even second and third generation immigrants born in Pakistan—show that this is just an excuse hiding a much larger problem. Miles away in Karachi, 19 year-old Shabana Ghulam Sakhi worries about the future of her education after not being admitted into any university in the country. Because she doesn’t have any form of Pakistani identification, Ghulam, and other refugees like her, can only attend the Afghani school—–which has very few qualified teachers. This is where she completed her intermediate exams. “My English is very weak because we study English separately as one subject, and even for that we don’t have good teachers, so we really struggle after that,” she informed me in an interview. “I feel helpless. I did a 6 month digital marketing course that the UNHCR arranged for us at our school but still haven’t received the certificate, so I can’t do anything,” she says. Between limited access to education in Pakistan and the Taliban halting girls' education in Afghanistan , Karezi was stuck. He came to Pakistan hoping to prioritize his children’s education but ended up having to go back. His daughter Sabia, who Wahidi has also centered in the film, often talks about how she misses school. Left with no choice but to journey back to Afghanistan, Karezi returned in 2023. Fully aware of the restrictions on women’s education, Sabia worries about when she’ll get the opportunity to go to school again. Several circumstances forced Karezi to leave, but others have experienced something different—deportation—following newly established policies. The second phase of Pakistan’s new policy started after Eid , when police were instructed to identify locations where undocumented Afghan refugees were living. Officials have confirmed the intention to depor t Proof of Residence or POR card holders despite negotiations with various stakeholders still underway. Shabana Ghulam Sakhi has spent much of the last year trying to get her brother out of jail after he was detained by the police—despite having a valid POR card. “They hid his card, and claimed he was illegal and detained him. It was only when we found a copy at home that they suddenly reproduced it and let him go,” she says. Throughout the conversation, she voiced her worries about the future, unable to identify a way to support herself and her family. Those who remain in Pakistan live in constant fear; they find themselves terminated from jobs, detained by police, all while struggling to get their POR cards reissued. These cards form the basis of their identity, since Afghans are not issued Computerized National Identity Cards or CNICs . Not having a CNIC was also one of the reasons Karezi was unable to find formal employment and get his daughters admitted into a school in Pakistan. The policies around deportation treat Afghans as second class citizens and have shaped Pakistani citizens’ mindsets for a long time. Many Pakistanis continue to believe that the Afghan deportations are a good thing . This is partly why Wahidi found it so difficult to make her film. “For me, the biggest challenge was that in Pakistan, making a documentary on Afghans is difficult, because we don't want them accepted as a society,” she said in an interview. “There’s been no documentary on Afghans in mainstream Pakistani media since the Taliban came to power,” she added. Still, Wahidi made huge efforts to depict the reality of the Afghan refugee crisis, but there is a long way to go in resolving the issue. “It’s important that NGOs and civil society actors continue to do whatever they can in their own capacity and power, so that they can support young Afghan refugees and children. But, until the government doesn’t sort out what the rights of these refugees are, the rights of these people living on this soil for 4-5 decades, it's hard for the other 2 entities [NGOS and civil society] to agree on something concrete,’ says Alam. The film ends with more questions than answers about Karezi, which, perhaps, best reflects his reality. When I last spoke to Wahidi, she said she could no longer get in touch with Javid. The film ends with Karezi jobless in Afghanistan, hoping to find daily wage jobs as a laborer or similar. But he wants more for his children—as does every Afghan parent—regardless of whether they choose to stay. The problem is, for now, that both situations seem equally bleak. Still, Karezi finds comfort in knowing that he and his family are home, where their identity will not inhibit their plans. ∎ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Untitled, digital embroidery on fabric. Mohammad Sabir (2024) SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Profile Quetta Afghan Refugees State Repression Afghan Deportations The Failed Migration Documentary Film Musician Taliban Undocumented Afghan Refugees Faiz Ahmed Karezi Rani Wahidi Dari Farsi Proof of Registration Card Incarceration Civil Society NGOs CNIC Afghanistan Employment Unemployment ANMOL IRFAN is a Pakistani freelance journalist and editor. She works on gender, climate, and media, with a focus on South Asia. She also runs a book club in Karachi. Profile Quetta 14th May 2024 MOHAMMAD SABIR is an Afghan artist who graduated from Kabul University and recently completed his MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London. Through his practice, Sabir investigates the ongoing discrimination towards the ethnic Hazara minority in Afghanistan. Sabir highlights this in his Genocide series (2016-present), using intricate Hazaragi embroidery motifs on human bones as well as on cut trees, clay pots, and personal objects. His works have been exhibited in Kabul, Los Angeles, Tehran and Figueres. On That Note: Climate Crimes of US Imperalism in Afghanistan 16th OCT Chats Ep. 6 · Imagery of the Baloch Movement 28th FEB Chats Ep. 1 · On A Premonition; Recollected 13th NOV

In the immediate wake of the COVID-19 crisis, disaster and religion became intertwined for many Rohingya refugees in the camps of Cox's Bazaar, allowing spurious claims to sway a vulnerable population. FEATURES COVID-19 and Faith in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR In the immediate wake of the COVID-19 crisis, disaster and religion became intertwined for many Rohingya refugees in the camps of Cox's Bazaar, allowing spurious claims to sway a vulnerable population. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Reportage Cox's Bazar Rohingya Refugee Crisis Bangladesh COVID-19 Religion Faith Leaders Intimate Partner Violence Disaster & Faith International Law NGOs Internationalist Perspective Humanitarian Crisis Human Language Longform Literacy Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Reportage Cox's Bazar 27th Feb 2023 COVID-19 IS directly impacting the most vulnerable section of society in Bangladesh—its Rohingya refugees—a community which narrowly survived genocide in their native Myanmar, now subjected to mass displacement in the region. Combined with the impact of Cyclone Amphan and Cyclone Yaas in 2020 and 2021 respectively, Bangladesh’s constant battle with the climate crisis is well-documented. The mass displacement and persecution, however, continue to impact the largely overlooked refugee population. Approximately 1.2 million Rohingya refugees have been living in the 27 camps in two sub-districts of Cox’s Bazar district since 2017. Late last year, there were state-led actions that alarmed both humanitarian and human rights groups. The Government of Bangladesh, in December 2020, began moving Rohingya refugees from Cox’s Bazar to Bhasan Char, a secluded island without adequate healthcare infrastructure or protection against extreme weather events like severe cyclones and tidal surges. So far, more than 20,000 people have been moved, out of the planned 100,000 refugees to the low-lying silt island. Grappling with the effects of double displacement, initially from their home country and now being forcibly shifted from refugee camp to camp, coupled with the uncertainties about their legal status and insecurity over their future in their host country, the plight of the Rohingyas is a humanitarian crisis that shames humanity. Faith and Health of the Rohingya Refugees In 2020, several months of lockdown measures, put in place by the Government of Bangladesh to protect against COVID-19, led to a severe loss of livelihood for many of the country’s vulnerable and poor. In Cox’s Bazar, women-headed households, persons with disability, and elderly people have resorted to strategies that affect their health and well-being. Women and children are eating less nutritious foods and fewer meals in a day, reducing the quantities they eat. These harmful dietary practices are a result of their socio-economic conditions, especially loss of livelihoods and limited food relief during the COVID-19 crisis. It speaks of people on the brink, left to their own devices, and at the mercy of their faith. The Rohingya people are predominantly Muslim. Their community leaders are usually imams and muezzins leading prayers at mosques. As witnessed the world over, several COVID-19 conspiracies were at play. This emerged as the case with both Rohingya and Bengali communities, who turned to faith in trying and testing circumstances and in the face of uncertainty and scant information. These are usually the circumstances in which people who have lost all hope resort to religion. Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar too believed that COVID-19 was a punishment and a test of their faith. Disease and health, thus, became entwined with spirituality, religion, and other spheres of life, including financial struggle. For this article, we interviewed imams, muezzins, women faith actors, and local NGOs who were instrumental in raising awareness on COVID-19 preventive strategies, surveying 100 households from both the Bangladeshi host populations and Rohingya refugees in Camps 15 and 19 in Cox’s Bazar. At the inception of the pandemic, in the throes of fear and insecurity on the ground, there were numerous conspiracies about the government in Bangladesh, just like anywhere else in the world. During Jummah prayers, religious leaders who initially supported fatalistic notions about COVID-19 virus were encouraging people to wash their hands to maintain cleanliness, and to wear masks. In the face of uncertainty and scant information in the pandemic, both Rohingya and Bengali communities turned to their faith in trying and testing circumstances. In 2020, Dhaka Ahsania Mission (DAM) set up a health outpost in Camp 19, and provided basic health services to the people living in the camps. The health staff assisted people with COVID-19-related measures and treatments. The DAM facility had referred 26 suspected cases—22 Rohingya members and 4 villagers—to the nearest hospital, where two positive cases were found amongst the Bengali villagers. The health outpost provided screenings for COVID-19 symptoms and referred them to the hospitals, while for the non-COVID-19 cases they provided treatments. As per the data provided to us by DAM, over 400 patients were treated, consisting of both Rohingya refugees and host community members. An official from DAM mentioned the following about the caseload: "As per health data, there were 367 positive cases and 10 deaths amongst Rohingyas across 32 camps. Within Camp 19, there were five positive cases in refugees and three hospital staff tested positive. Approximately 5,000 positive cases in the host community." This must be viewed within the larger context of limited facilities for testing within the camps in Cox’s Bazar. A medical doctor noted that only 25,000 had been tested so far out of 1.2 million people as of January 2021. Specifically in Camps 15 and 19, there are no sentinel sites. Inside a Rohingya Refugee Camp (RRC) Masjid. Courtesy of Abu Yousuf Shazid Another NGO, Dushtha Shasthya Kendra (DSK), undertook an initiative for public health messaging, generating awareness and providing timely information and discussions with around 700 Rohingya community members. They employed an interesting approach of using public speakers and microphones in the mosques, as well as door-to-door campaigns for providing information on COVID-19 preventive measures. They provided training to community and faith leaders, dispelling some of the rumours and misinformation that were rampantly spreading in these communities. With the collision of science and faith, there were interesting ways in which Rohingyas resisted and adapted to the new circumstances. From an outsider's perspective, it appeared that faith leaders were fatalistic, which percolated amongst other community members participating in our group discussions. Rohingya men and women were concerned that the elderly were susceptible because they did not remain “clean,” presumably concerning their personal hygiene. Many people shared that initially they had lots of misinformation and misbeliefs, believing COVID-19 was an act of God to punish the non-religious. Depending on who their community leaders were, such views would be either contested or encouraged, especially during prayertime. While there is a strong feeling that the pandemic is religiously ordained, a significant proportion of the people still believe it to be as a response to their sins; or nature's response to man's cruelty, or even due to a lack of belief in Islam. There were strong associations between cleanliness and the disease. Several rumours emerged about what causes COVID-19, just as it was commonly observed in countries in the Global South as well as Global North. Qualitative data indicates people received COVID-19 information through social media, public spaces like tea stalls, religious gatherings, and meetings at mosques. While there is a strong feeling that the pandemic is religiously ordained, a significant proportion of the people still believe it to be a response to their sins; or as nature's response to man's cruelty, or even due to a lack of belief in Islam . It is essential to note that these fatalist attitudes were the result of a combination of misinformation, manipulation, and inappropriate channels of information that the Rohingyas had limited access to. In the absence of large-scale humanitarian support, abandoned by their host and persecuted by their native country, the Rohingyas largely relied on their faith to tide over challenging circumstances. Hearing their stories about the painful and arduous journey from Rakhine state to Bangladesh, it is remarkable that these communities continue to thrive and survive in the face of challenging and dire circumstances. They relied on their community leaders, unelected Rohingya called “majhis,” for information and guidance to not only make this journey to Bangladesh but also manoeuvre the flailing political, administrative, and governance structures in the camps. Religious actors & women leaders With the merging of faith and public health, a key group of actors emerged as powerful and influential in changing beliefs and attitudes about COVID-19. Imams and muezzins played a crucial role in promoting healthcare in the Rohingya community, and several humanitarian NGOs relied on these religious leaders to promote preventive messages on COVID-19. Within the Bangladeshi community, the imam is a leader of the community revered for their exemplary adherence to faith. Imams in the Rohingya community play a similar role, and thus it is widely accepted that an imam’s verdict and messages about COVID-19 are sincere and trustworthy. Majhi, although originally a term used to refer to the leader who helped Rohingya refugees flee from Myanmar to Bangladesh, was also the name of the camp in-charge in Cox’s Bazar. The majhi system was initially established by the Bangladeshi authorities to manage the influx of refugees in 2017, but over the years it became an administrative position elected without participation and representation of the Rohingya communities. In effect, majhi were no longer the traditional leaders or elders of the Rohingya communities, and they neither reflected nor represented the voices, needs, and aspirations of these displaced groups. Several NGOs trained and addressed misconceptions held by the imams and muezzins and enlisted their support in delivering COVID-19 messaging during prayers. Interestingly, some imams married scientific facts with religious edicts. A Rohingya teacher said: "Lots of people live here and it is difficult to manage them. If any message and information are needed to deliver to the people, the leaders act as the main role. For NGOs and other officials, it is not possible to reach all people. The leaders also discuss different issues with the officials." Religious gatherings, especially jummah/Friday sermons called by the imam, appear to be the best source of information for the masses. A woman leader, who actively participated in the DSK NGO’s training programmes, noted that every Friday at the time of prayer, the imam discussed how we could be safe from the coronavirus. However, since women do not usually go to the mosques, those who attended the training from DSK would share what they learnt with other women near their homes. She also shared that since schools were closed due to lockdown measures in 2020, they lost out on a vital and reliable source of information. They had to pay approximately 100 takas ($1) per month for school, hence many could not afford going to school. A COVID-19 DSK awareness poster in a refugee camp. Courtesy of Abu Yousuf Shazid There were other information sources that were reported as the highly trusted and least trusted information sources for COVID-19: radios, television, posters, billboards, social media channels, and websites. People relied on social actors from both health and religious institutions, such as community health workers, majhis, imams, madrassa teachers, traditional healers, and members of the Tablighi Jamaat. Some depended on their friends, neighbours, and community health events for health-related information. Of these, community health workers and faith leaders such as majhis, imams, and madrassa teachers emerged as the top three sources of information as reported. Imams and muezzins were considered as trustworthy by the community members. The majhi system was initially established by the Bangladeshi authorities to manage the influx of refugees in 2017 but over the years it became an administrative position elected without participation and representation of the Rohingya communities. In effect, majhi were no longer the traditional leaders or elders of the Rohingya communities, and they neither reflected nor represented the voices and aspirations of these displaced groups. Rohingya members were skeptical about messages received from posters and radio as these did not explain much of the instructions they had to follow. Many times, these were in languages—English or Bengali—they were not able to read or comprehend easily. The lack of educational and literacy programmes for Rohingya refugees is pivotal to understanding Rohingya communities. Rohingya refugees are not allowed to read and write in the local Bengali language. There are no integration programmes available for refugees in Bangladesh, particularly for the Rohingyas. Although the Rohingya language, Ruáingga, has some affinity to the Chittagonian dialect spoken in Cox’s Bazar, many refugees are unable to read and write in Bengali. The refugee members have poor literacy rates due to systemic persecution and lack educational opportunities in Myanmar, and continued negligence in Bangladesh. The access to and continuation of education for Rohingya girls is very limited. Parental attitudes towards education for girls reportedly shift once girls turn ten years old as societal norms may allow girl children to be married. With limited economic means young girls are not enrolled into education programmes run by NGOs in the camps. Their educational attainment levels are well below average after having fled genocide and war in Myanmar, a symptom of the abject exclusion of the Rohingyas from education in both host and home countries. Male teachers provided a different perspective on how religion was limited in its capacity to counter the global coronavirus pandemic. One of the teachers who was interviewed clarified that there is nothing related to COVID-19 in the Quran or Hadith, although Islam asks everyone to stay clean. He went on to reflect how teachers were “trying” to unlearn misinformation that they gathered through various mediums like social media or others. The madrassa teachers also had a role to play in the COVID-19 response. Firstly, teachers from schools or madrassas are very respected people in Rohingya society, an intellectual privilege that allows them an ease in delivering their messages. Rohingya exclusion from society, education, and other opportunities has fed into cynicism over science and outsiders, and they heavily rely on local actors and leaders whom they trust rather than external social workers. While the teachers are involved in the faith-based committee, they also have access to mobile phones which means they can access updated information. Their involvement in the training and awareness programmes has helped NGOs to build trust with refugee community members. This process has been capitalized to deliver COVID-19 preventive messages to the people, through teachers who have a unique way of perceiving and explaining scientific ideas with religion to counter misinformation amongst the people. Rohingya refugees are not allowed to read and write in the local Bengali language. There are no integration programmes available for refugees in Bangladesh particularly for the Rohingyas. Although the Rohingya language, Ruáingga, has some affinity to the Chittagonian dialect spoken in Cox’s Bazar, many refugees are unable to read and write in Bengali. Despite religious leaders being male figures, there were local women leaders who actively participated in religious activities. Although women leaders have lesser authority than their traditional male counterparts, Rohingya women can reach out to women leaders easily. Imams and muezzins did not interact directly with women and children because their religious responsibilities were largely centred around the mosque. An Arabic teaching room in an RRC Masjid. Courtesy of Abu Yousuf Shazid Since women did not have access to religious and educational spaces, they were more likely to have untested misbeliefs and attitudes towards COVID-19. Some women leaders in the Rohingya communities were included in NGO training and were enlisted for house-to-house visits and providing information on COVID-19 preventive steps. However, their numbers are few—most women leaders continue to believe and share their misinformation about COVID-19. For instance, a 35-year-old female leader (name withheld) explained her understanding about the cause of COVID-19 as being an “order from God,” and that we need to keep ourselves “neat and clean” in order to prevent ourselves from being infected. They have little access to information, with limited to no educational opportunities, and are unable to voice their opinions and apprehensions in relief and awareness programmes. Such misinformation is, of course, not limited to Rohingya or Bangladeshi women. In order to stop the flow, the government, humanitarian actors, and media will have to take steps to rule out every possible rumor with scientific fact. This should be accessible and available in several languages, written and orally presented widely. This reveals the fact that women are less considered for group and organized meetings; they remain as passive receptors of information passed onto them by their husbands. This provides fertile ground for the spread of misinformation and misconceptions, often used to suppress women further in such isolating circumstances. There were physical and social barriers that determined the uptake of COVID-19 preventive messages, such as low literacy levels, cultural and linguistic differences between host and refugee communities, and no access to basic health, educational, and livelihood opportunities. Local faith and community leaders can play a vital role in addressing vaccine hesitancy and cultural biases related to vaccine uptake amongst both Bangladeshi and Rohingya communities. Since women did not have access to religious and educational spaces, they were more likely to have untested misbeliefs and attitudes towards COVID-19. Some women leaders in the Rohingya communities were included in NGO training and were enlisted for house-to-house visits and providing information on COVID-19 preventive steps. However, their numbers are few. Gender experts are also alarmed at the increased rates of domestic violence during the pandemic. There have been numerous cases of intimate partner violence against women isolated with abusive partners. Women’s responsibilities and workload were overburdened as men were barred from going out during lockdown. COVID-19 has had a huge impact on women’s rights and their access to justice. There are strict restrictions imposed on them, which became stricter during the pandemic: limited movement outside the home and adherence to follow instructions. Several rumours reported by Rohingyas were shared by a senior official from DAM NGO during a telephone interview. "Rohingya people were scared. They used to say: 'If we go to the health post, we will be sent to Bishan Char island, or we may go missing. We may even be killed.” The official interpreted these rumours as symbolic of a genuine mistrust between the health system and refugee populations. However, they reflect the harsh realities of the Rohingyas who have no one to turn to and who fear further persecution from authorities, constantly coming across government initiatives that push them further into destitution. The Future of Humanitarianism in Cox’s Bazar No country was prepared to face such a pandemic, and yet, for persecuted communities like the Rohingyas, these uncertainties and health emergencies are symptomatic of a larger phenomenon that isolates, negates, and further reproduces the injustice and unfair conflict that they have faced not only with the government authorities. Misinformation and mistrust is not a unique phenomenon to the Rohingyas but it is important to unpack why people are peddling conspiracy theories instead—lack of information, spread of disinformation campaigns on social media and the Internet, and politicians and society leaders questioning the severity of the pandemic while silencing the needs and voices of Rohingya refugees. On September 29, 2021, Mohibullah, 46, chair of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights (ARSPH), was shot and killed by unidentified gunmen in Kutupalong camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Several human rights and NGO workers have criticized this killing as not only silencing Rohingya voices, but also refusing to have a dialogue with the refugees for their safe future, either in Bangladesh or in a safe return to Myanmar. Many believe that the non-state actor Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), an armed group present in the camp, is responsible for this violent and gruesome murder. With disarray in camps and limited resources from humanitarian actors, violence has become rampant, resulting in murders and abductions. It is the responsibility of government authorities to ensure the protection of people in the camps, including refugees, activists, and humanitarian workers from both the Rohingya and local community, many of whom have shared concerns about their safety. Any humanitarian effort should build on an understanding of the underlying drivers of conflict, violence, and issues affecting social cohesion within the local Bangladeshi communities in Cox’s Bazar. Social cohesion factors such as a sense of social or group identity, sense of community, and attachment to place can be important adaptation drivers when considering how populations respond to public health and other crises. These factors, together with community-based leadership, including faith-based leadership, can play an important role in the development and increasing social bonds central to Rohingya capacities when confronting COVID-19 and a range of other hazards. Mapping out power relations and structures within and beyond the Rohingya community could help meaningfully engage with the persecuted minority. The battle for citizenship and statehood for Rohingyas is long and dates to colonial history and negligence by Burmese authorities. While these groups await their uncertain future, it is the responsibility and mandate of neighbouring countries like India and Bangladesh to be proactive and participatory in their approaches to the needs of this population. While the humanitarian world debates whether Myanmar is culpable for the genocide of the Rohingyas, their day-to-day needs and lived realities can no longer be brushed under the carpet or silenced through more violence. ∎ 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:

"How would Rafi Ajmeri have fared in the Progressive era that was dawning just then?  Would his liberal attitudes have hardened into dogma, or would he have swung to conservatism in the Pakistan to which his brothers migrated as he too probably would have?" FICTION & POETRY Four Lives "How would Rafi Ajmeri have fared in the Progressive era that was dawning just then? Would his liberal attitudes have hardened into dogma, or would he have swung to conservatism in the Pakistan to which his brothers migrated as he too probably would have?" VOL. 1 SHORT STORIES AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Artwork by Prithi Khalique for SAAG. 3D motion and interaction design. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Artwork by Prithi Khalique for SAAG. 3D motion and interaction design. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Short Stories Karachi 25th Nov 2020 Short Stories Karachi Raaga Generational Stories Stories in Dialogue English Urdu Language 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: Earlier versions of these stories have appeared in Aamer Hussein's collections, albeit not as an interconnected set in conversation with one another as they are intended to be published here. Shefta 1. AS a young man, Mustafa Khan Bangash was given to revelry, wine and the love of dancers. His pen-name was Shefta. He composed verses for his lover Ramju, who many years later wrote her own book of poems. They say he had another lover too. He took lessons in prosody; his verses were improved by illustrious contemporaries: Momin Khan Momin, then later Mirza Ghalib. At the age of thirty-two, he set off on a pilgrimage to the Holy of Holies. On the way he and his fellow-passengers were shipwrecked on an island from where, for many days, they found no rescue, no route to freedom. They lived on a diet of sifted salt-water and herbs. When he returned to Delhi after an absence of two years and six days, Shefta had lost his taste for wine and the love of dancing women. In this city of poets, musicians and courtesans there were also many scholars and saints. Where once he had written of rapture, he now wrote lyrics of renunciation. He still sat beside his master Ghalib and watched the older poet drink, but Shefta no longer raised a glass with anyone. 2. - In 1857, during the Uprising in Delhi, the conquering British accused him of sedition and of fraternising with rebels. He was imprisoned without proof for seven years. His family’s land and properties were confiscated. He was released to see his wrecked and haunted city rebuilt and transformed, the traces of his life erased. Delhi—his birthplace, his prison, his grave. Though he does not know this yet, the task of vindication will fall to his descendants who will fight for freedom. Some will make their home in the new nation of Pakistan. But that’s in another century, in another story that has yet to be written. Uncle Rafi I can’t remember when, exactly, I first heard my mother and aunts talk about Shaikh Rafiuddin Siddiqi, known as Rafi Ajmeri, their maternal uncle whose delightful volume of short stories, Kehkashan , was published only after his early death at the age of 33. I do recall that when I began to take an active interest in modern Urdu fiction, my aunt and then my mother told me of Mamu Mian, as they called him. He had, in his youth, been considered more than promising; already well-known in his 20s, he published fiction and essays in journals such as Sarosh and Saqi . He was handsome and highly literate; although he grew up in Ajmer, where his maternal grandfather Nawab Haji Mohammed Khan had settled, his mother’s family were from Kabul, so Persian was spoken around him. His Kashmiri father was highly educated and encouraged his children in literary pursuits; both Rafi and his sister, my grandmother, published at an early age. They were an articulate, gregarious family; the brothers and sisters quoted Saadi, Rumi and Khusrau from memory; they had heard Iqbal recite his poems in their own home. They also sang and narrated the story-songs of Rajasthan where they were born and raised. I heard these stories and songs in my Karachi childhood from my mother, and with even more enthusiasm from my grandmother during long summer holidays in her home in Indore, and that’s certainly where, at least in part, I inherited my love for old stories. Grandmother married in 1914 and soon devoted herself to family pursuits, while Mamu Mian wrote story after story, spent most of his time in Delhi, and travelled from town to town in search of material. He often visited my grandparents in Indore. My mother, a schoolgirl then, remembers him on his last trip there, in 1937. He was afflicted by a mysterious ailment they referred to as melancholia, and strolled in the garden leaning heavily on his older sister’s arm. Today his condition would be called severe depression. He’d fallen in love with a distant cousin who probably returned his feelings but, in those changing times, he just hadn’t had the courage to propose: she’d married someone her parents chose for her. When the young woman’s mother heard about Mamu Mian’s feelings, she said: He only had to tell me. But it was too late. A few months later, while visiting his niece in Bombay, Mamu Mian was found dead. A literary acquaintance who will remain unnamed, was left in charge of his stories. My uncle complains that Kehkashan was randomly edited; some of Rafi Ajmeri’s stories were lost forever, and others plagiarised and published in other people’s names. However, Kehkashan survived. But though Rafi’s life’s brief story was as fascinating as any tale he might have written, no one in my family had managed to preserve a single copy of his book. It wasn’t until ’97 or ’98 that my friend, Asif, a descendant of one of Uncle Rafi’s earliest editors, unearthed a copy of it in Karachi, which he xeroxed and sent me. (Thank God for Pakistani libraries.) For days I inhabited Rafi’s world. His fiction was set in the increasingly modern milieu of his own time; it barely touched on the princely India my grandparents, and their now-married older daughters, inhabited. He wrote about students, young women and men, seeking their fortune in a competitive late colonial world. The prevailing tone of his stories is light and witty, wordly but never cynical, tinged with romance. (In one, a young woman manages to reach her lost love by an astute or accidental use of subtitles in a silent film.) Later stories show an awareness of the nuances of class and the economics of marriage. In ‘Muhabbat ka bulava’ (my own favourite), a young man falls in love with his friend’s sister, and when his loved one’s very rich father forbids the marriage, not only do the lovers elope, but the hero’s friend escapes with them to set up a life away from the rigid social norms of his family. How would Rafi Ajmeri have fared in the Progressive era that was dawning just then? Would his liberal attitudes have hardened into dogma, or would he have swung to conservatism in the Pakistan to which his brothers migrated as he too probably would have? Or would his fictions have echoed the calm voice of conscience? No way of telling, though one short, bitter text of his suggests another direction he might have taken. Here retells, from an old song, the legend of the bandit Daya Gujjar, who robbed the king’s wife of her jewels to please his demanding wife. Amma ko mera Ram-ram kehna Behna ko mera salam Gujri ko bas itna kehna Reh jaye joban ko re tham Daya ab aana nahin Daya julmi ke phande Daya phaansi ke phande (Give my greetings to my mother and sister, but to the Gujri just say to make good use of her youth: Daya isn’t coming back, he’s in the clutches of the oppressor, the noose is around his neck). As I read it, I could hear my grandmother’s singing voice. My hair stood on end as it did when I first heard it at the age of nine or ten. Lady of the Lotus 1. Her daughter gave her the red diary with a sketch or a poem printed on each page, as a gift for her fifteenth wedding anniversary in February. She had a meeting that morning, and a formal dinner to attend in the evening. Her husband had a difficult day. He didn’t want to go. The next day she was at the airport at noon, to receive the ‘Mother of the Nation’ who was coming home from a trip abroad. Later, a meeting at her sister-in-law’s house, to discuss the situation and progress of Muslim women. Her husband told her he’d had disturbing news. In the diary, she wrote: Just when I feel on the edge of a discovery—an illumination. Between then and June, after her opening entries, she used it only to write down the words of the songs she was learning. Her handwriting intertwined with the printed words and pictures on the pages. 2. June was a musical month. Her teacher, whom she called Khan Sahib, invited connoisseurs of classical music, including Shahid Ahmad, the editor of the literary journal Saqi, to hear her sing. She performed three raags— Khambavati, Anandi and Des — without making a single mistake. Her teacher was quite satisfied, her husband was pleased, the audience impressed. She was thinking of her deadline: a text to be handed over to She the next morning. A musician from Bengal, Begum Jabbar, played the sitar very well. She sang Khambavati and Darbari. Her teacher was satisfied, she wasn’t. She missed a farewell party for her friend Jane who was going back to America. At the next session four days later, Begum Jabbar played well again, Khan Sahib sang well, and her songs were well-appreciated. Her husband was very pleased with her singing, her teacher exultant. Two days later, she was singing again at a concert; she didn’t feel she sang too well; her teacher was most dissatisfied. There was a series of dinners to attend before the music conference at the new Arts Council began. Amanat Ali and Fateh Ali were performing on the opening night, she enjoyed their recital; on the second, Nazakat Ali and Salamat Ali were good in parts, but she was bored by the vocal gymnastics of Roshanara, Queen of Song. She started to learn the new Darbari tarana . It was a composition by Tan Ras Khan. She tried to sing a Thumri in Bhairavi, with her own improvisations and embellishments, but she didn’t make it. She practiced Darbari in the evenings for twenty minutes. She cancelled a party at her friend Suad’s, to practice a new Malhar, but he made her sing Anandi. She waited for him at 5.30 and he appeared at 8.30. She wanted to sing the Malhar she’d learnt but instead he made her sing Aiman and Kedara. June was ending, and she had another deadline, for the Morning News this time. She wanted to sing Malhar. He made her sing Darbari. She wanted something new and he made her repeat old lessons. Then he started her on a new raag, Mian ki Todi . She practiced Des and Bhopali, shifted to Bahaar, wanted to sing the rest of them, but he moved her to Malhar. She’d hoped he’d teach her the new string, but he made her revise the oldest. She didn’t like them much. A full Darbari with a new Tarana, and a new Khambavati at last. Satisfied ( she writes). 3. She notes her deadlines in the diary, but she doesn’t write about driving her children to school in the mornings four miles from P.E.C.H.S to Clifton, or picking them up for lunch. She mentions the parties she attended, but not the night she came back laughing because the Portuguese Ambassador had called her the Maria Callas of Karachi. She doesn’t record the passing of the seasons, the walks to the lake in the mild evening breeze, the flowers and fruit she grows, or the frangipani fallen on wet grass or picked off the branch in the morning for her hair. 4. July. Khan Sahib arrived unexpectedly. She revised Anandi, learnt a new Khambavati. Some beautiful new improvisations: Satisfied (she writes). A few days later, another unexpected visit. From Jahan Khan this time, her teacher’s maternal uncle. He started her on Khambavati. Ai ri mi jagi piya bin sagri rain Jab se gaye mori sudh hu na leni kaise kahun man ki batiyan… Ustad Jahan Khan comes by regularly now (she writes). Her pages were filling up with the lyrics of the songs she learned. She was practising ornamentation, Alankaar, in Khambavati. 5. In August, Ustad Jahan Khan brought her voice down to a lower pitch by half a note. She sang all her songs without the accompanying harmonium . The discovery amazed her and surprised everyone. She was not very satisfied with her voice at that pitch. The next day her teacher tried out the old raags at the new pitch, with only the tanpura . Every note was in tune. He will teach me morning raags in the morning ( she writes) and come in the evening to teach me evening raags . 6. After trying out several raags in Khayal, Ustad Jahan Khan struck upon Dhrupad, which her husband liked very much. She started to learn Raag Durga in the Dhrupad mode, with the Khamach rhythm; unusual and rarely recognised. She sang with the pakhwavaj , a single, two-faced drum, instead of the usual paired tablas . Eri mai nand kunwar eri mai nand kunwar eri mai nand kunwar maaa-aai nand kunwar maa-aai nanda Her voice throbbed and soared. 7. When a blister appears on the first forefinger (she writes) it is a sign that you have achieved the perfect pitch. One hour a day should be set aside, sacredly, for the practice of taans and sur sadhan: the art of song. 8. Her children will remember the concerts in the garden on nights lit up by flares or by the moon, they remember the songs and remind her of them, when she sang what, and even the words and melodies. They sat around her as she sang, or listened from the open window. They learnt her songs like the grey African parrots in their aunt’s big cage, half-understanding the words; they delighted her by singing raags in the bath, but when she persuaded them to take formal lessons all but her middle daughter would run away. They will remember her favourite book: The Lady of the Lotus , illustrated with classical miniatures: a story from her native Malwa, of Baz Bahadur and the poet-singer Roopmati, whose melancholy verses their mother set to music and sang. Years later, her son will find her a copy of the book she lost in transit, and find some of those verses. But it’s a new edition. Had I but known what pain with love would come, had I but known Jo main aisa jaanti preet ki ye dukh hoe I would have banished him by beat of drum, had I but known Nagar dhandora peetti preet na kariyo koe Did the rain fall that year of 1963? None of them remembers now: they think it never came. They remember, though, all the years she longed for rain and missed her native Malwa, and how she exulted when it finally fell. 9. After trying her voice out in several pitches, Ustad Jahan Khan brought it back to the original note. He said he’d been worrying over it for days. 10. So, what did it mean to you, the singing? Her son will ask her as he transcribes, and reads back to her the words of her diary. She remembers it all, the rooms, the faces, the applause, the ecstasy and the fall. Expression, she will reply, and release. The poetry in the music is thought, and through singing I expressed those thoughts. Sometimes late at night, the lady of the lotus will sing to herself, those songs, of rainfall, separation and exultation. Later, her son, who never wanted to, will also sing to find release. But one night, he will stop mid-song, terrified of the audience around him and the failure of his voice, and swear he’ll never sing on stage again. He will exchange the ecstasy of music for the dry solace of thoughts; he’ll write, but he inherits from her the pursuit: of austere phrase, soaring note, throbbing pulse, blistered forefinger. 11. She abandoned the diary with a final, terse entry. 23rd Nov 1963. Dinner at Khan Sahib’s house. Music after dinner. Sang Darbari. No exhilaration after singing. After this, there are only poems, wedding songs and musical notations. Dove 1. OFTEN on those long afternoons in the old house in Badayun when sunlight spread golden carpets on the stones and the older women had taken in the washing and the children were tired of playing hopscotch in the open courtyard or leaping from balcony to balcony, the girl would go to the terrace and shelter in a stone pavilion with a novel or write couplets in a notebook and then, as if she’d invited it over, the dove would begin to call her from a tree, and its call would lie like a shadow on her skin, but she never saw the bird that gave her invisible company. 2. For years after she left and crossed borders and moved houses in Karachi then Lahore and then Pindi and back to Karachi, and was known as the country’s queen of melancholy verse, she thought her invisible friend had abandoned her. Yes, but once in a top floor bedroom in a tall empty house in an Islamabad paralysed by strikes and demonstrations against a corrupt regime, as she stood looking out of a window at a flowering jacaranda, she heard the dove’s call from the tree’s upper branches, and she wondered how its plaintive song could ever have seemed to her to be the harbinger of joys to come. ∎ 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

The Revolution won’t materialise / out of your mere thoughts. | · FICTION & POETRY Poetry · Myanmar Skulls The Revolution won’t materialise / out of your mere thoughts. "Skulls" by Hafsa Ashfaq. Mixed-media, digital illustration & acrylic on paper (2023). 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. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 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 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. 4th Apr 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:

HISTORIAN Manan Ahmed Asif Manan Ahmed is an Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. He is a historian of South Asia and the littoral western Indian Ocean world from 1000-1800 CE. He is the author of four books, including The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India, and Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore . HISTORIAN WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

“Recently, I spotted an issue of Harper’s harboring a cover story about the apocalypse. It is subtitled 'The Sense of an Ending,' which I reckon is less of an editorial choice than the wave of a white flag to imagination.” BOOKS & ARTS Into the Disaster-Verse AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “Recently, I spotted an issue of Harper’s harboring a cover story about the apocalypse. It is subtitled 'The Sense of an Ending,' which I reckon is less of an editorial choice than the wave of a white flag to imagination.” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Essay The Editors Disaster History Environmental History The Leftovers Matthew Schneider-Mayerson Peak Oil Apocalyptic Environmentalism Libertarian Culture Peakists Affect Stoicism Montaigne Late Capitalism Giovanni Arrighi Endism Mark Bould Anthropocene Literature Rancière Kristin Ross Environmental Disaster Jia Tolentino Climate Psychiatric Alliance Climate Anxiety Avant-Garde Form Apocalypse Disaster & Faith Banality Martin Heidegger Jacques Derrida Philosophy Nino Cobre Green New Deal Chicago New Haven Lahore Karachi Gotabhaya Rajapaksa Aragalaya Ranil Wickremasinghe Floods in Pakistan Romanticism Seneca Dasein Walter Benjamin W.H. Sebald Pliny the Elder Pliny the Younger Vesuvius Volcanology Christian Eschatology The Book of Revelation Earthquakes Qiyamat Ruins Nature-History Geography of Disaster Bedour Alagraa Anna Tsing Environmental Humanities Energy History Popular Culture Nihilism Climate Pessimism Climate Optimism Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Doomers Oil Production Lynne Segal Ethics The Hunger Games Fossil Fuel Divestment Ashley Dawson The Local and Global Intimacy & Disaster Friendship John Cassavetes A Woman Under the Influence Gena Rowlands Visual Art Brian Dillon Disaster & Language Greta Thunberg Simultaneity Agency Amit Chaudhuri Anglophone Literary Discourse Mary Oliver Amy Hempel Doubt Essay Form Climate Change Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Essay The Editors 12th Mar 2024 I am sorry for every mistake I have made in my life. I’m sorry I wasn’t wiser sooner. I’m sorry I ever spoke of myself as lonely. Mary Oliver Just once in my life—oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life? Amy Hempel Rapture. July 2017. Some months back, at work, I daydreamed about disappearing. I felt invisible regardless, and the world did not seem quite right for me. It seemed not quite right because it rarely isn’t for anyone at all. A plot hatched. A plot to be raptured. It was something of a lark, but not really. At the time, the final season of The Leftovers was airing, and I found Evie Murphy’s hoax to be aspirational. It was easy to imagine. My friend Chris would ordinarily be the most likely to notice my absence, but we’d fought months earlier and had since been avoiding each other. My roommate would probably assume—if he wondered—that I was sleeping at some boy’s place. “I think I’m coming down with something,” I said out loud in lab the next day. Everybody in the lab told me to go home, as expected. Once home, I booked an Airbnb for two weeks. I’d considered Milwaukee, which I’d passed by once, but landed elsewhere. It was a house overlooking the lake. It was cheap. It was beautiful. I’d have it all to myself. It was meant for four or more. I packed lightly. I bought a new toothbrush and razor, split my medications into separate bottles, and put unread books on my nightstand. I did the dishes, threw out the trash, folded my clothes, and got to the train station early. All on my own! It was the first time I’d been punctual in months. See, for the past two years or so, I’ve tried to kill myself several times. Some were not at all intended as cries for attention, but it was fine. I made peace with them being seen as such. Thrice, I stockpiled an increasing number of benzos, along with increasing amounts of alcohol, and went to sleep. Each time, I woke up in the afternoon, befuddled. The third time, I could no longer make sense of my body’s ability to metabolize a month’s worth of prescription pills. And that was that. Others were indeed intended for attention, and I reliably got caught. I became good at pretending I meant it, at the tearful apology administered while thinking unspeakable things. But what I never said—because no one wanted to hear it—was that though my friends and family did a great deal for me, they also greatly exaggerated their importance. And, honestly, how could sixty 2 milligram pills of clonazepam be so unsatisfactory? Then when I was gone, they never found out. I wanted to keep up the disappearance, like a character in a spy novel you let yellow in your bathroom. I’d fake my identity! Become the ghost of some much-lauded novel! I knew, of course, that any such story would end with deportation, but still. It was a nice daydream. Things were different on the train back home, two weeks later. Everyone who wanted me alive had gotten lucky, they wouldn’t know just how much. I knew that most ways of narrating the story would elicit some proclamation that I was “burned out!” and I needed to get away. Which was fine. But it wasn’t true. A strange new axis of time snuck in. Any time before, I would’ve gotten caught. Once, years ago, my sister had called the police when my flight didn’t land on time. Now, I was perfectly capable of life in whatever narrow sense it meant. The day after I got home, Chris walked over to my desk in lab, frowningly. “Where have you been?” he asked. “Just seeing someone,” I said. “Probably not anymore. Why? What’s up?” “So you weren’t sick?” “No. Well, I was, but nothing major. I needed a break.” I don’t think he bought it, but he didn’t push it. I’d missed him, he’d missed me. The following Sunday we watched the new episode of The Leftovers , as we had the two years before. Laurie Garvey went scuba-diving, possibly to commit suicide. It was marvelous. I spent two weeks at that lakefront house, armed with Diet Cokes, pre-made deli sandwiches, cookies, and a carton of cigarettes. I watched old seasons of The Leftovers . Then Lost . Then The OC . I kept my phone on silent. I didn’t hear from anyone. My greatest act of attention-seeking got none at all. I slept till mid-afternoon each day. After a week, I thought I had bedsores. Then I got restless. I fumed, as I still do, about society’s extreme moral judgment of suicide, which I consider—if I’m honest—just as much a human right as any other. We cannot, we must not, ask anyone to live if they do not wish to. We mustn’t ask for them to relinquish that right, no matter how terrible it may be for the living. It was odd, I thought later, how the future returned. Privately, reflexively fuming about moral beliefs much bigger than me was an old sensation, but more than that it was a new one. An idea whose absence I had not noticed rustled back to me. A knot tied loose. Passively, I began to make decisions. A sprinkling of the still “so much to see, so much to do, so much to read.” For a little bit there, I remember thinking very hard about time and the world in the way I imagine Bill Bryson must, like an unfinished picture book freshly encountered. It was chronological. That’s one way of narrating it, which makes it sound very triumphalist, if it weren’t for how funny it was. Forced solitude cures suicidal ideation—hurrah! But then there was something else too. I learned about a very strange people. During my little Eat, Disappear, Bon Iver retreat, I read only one book I’d pulled from the bottom of my to-read pile that I assume I bought because I used to have a morbid fascination with libertarian culture: Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture . A suicidal person and a peakist walk into a bar. Someday, there’ll be an audience for a very niche joke. Between 2005 and 2011, the particular subculture of “peakism” emerged in American society. Peakists believe that global oil production, in particular, had either already peaked or was about to. So is everything: food supply, energy, topsoil. Things are about to get dire. The global economy is on the brink of collapse, as is capitalism itself. As a group, peakists are left-leaning and white; they hold graduate degrees; they’re pessimistic about the possibility of political change. Peakists are survivalists, but ordinary. They stockpile resources, grow their own food, ride bicycles, compost, and try unsuccessfully to convince their friends and family to buy into this impending doom and gloom. They make fringe websites, write books, and become YouTube stars: like “Oily Cassandra,” who preached peakist dictums while performing a striptease. They do not often meet : they become hermits. The more pessimistic amongst them foresee apocalyptic scenarios, like in The Day After Tomorrow, The Happening, and Mad Max . Warfare over scarce resources. Famine. Epidemics. Billions dead. The slightly less pessimistic see a post-peak world with more self-sufficient communities. Yet, they live, despite having all the makings of a suicide cult. These are people who had seemingly answered Camus’ famous dictum that “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” On the heels of the Great Recession, the burst of the housing bubble, Occupy Wall Street, peakists are, by their own definitions, convinced not of the resilience of capitalism but its imminent collapse. Perhaps the strangest thing is that very few of them (28 percent) have ever been involved in formal or political activities related to energy or environmentalism (most who made up this figure had only attended a meeting or so). They see the apocalypse coming not by way of radical Christian millenarianism or eschatology but as an extrapolation of what we all know. To foresee the end of American imperialism or global capitalism: if only. And, of course, of course: it’s a shame to have so little hope—which must be what their friends tell them, making them want to gouge their eyes out. But at the same time: how much evidence do we really have, at that guttural, searching level, that peakists are irrational? I can’t imagine believably pathologizing such beliefs or compartmentalizing them into “religious fervor.” If a peakist dies by suicide tomorrow, won’t we do what we always do—ascribe it to mental illness instead of seeing it as a reasonable conclusion of their own ideology? I can’t say why, but peakists have been crowding my head, fuming in it, ever since. I found the forums, the books, and Oily Cassandra. I want to hold onto that. They’re in this “category” I can’t quite name, a resolution that I know has many more forms. I want to find enough things to fill this category, to figure out what it really is. I won’t be trying to kill myself again anytime soon. I’ve been reassuring my friends and family that I’m no longer suicidal for a while now. I reassure them that I’m no longer suicidal because I sense that the things that feel suicidal seem to be expanding. They don’t yet know I actually mean it now. Which is fine. Chronology still matters little to me. Even the possibility of all this newness peakists see coming feels woeful. But there is something about this time, in forward motion, that feels unanswered. Into this computer screen bubbles the thought, I know these people, don’t I? Team Sweet Meteor of Death. May 2023. If this is dying, death sure is noisy. It’s all gotten a bit much, see. All this anticipation of extinction. Almost as if we’ve all signed some collective suicide pact, waiting in the wings to be euthanized. Almost none of us have any ability to change things, which has ossified into an excuse for some very loud resignation. Almost as if Stoicism has finally prevailed as the most wise tradition in moral philosophy. Montaigne once praised the tranquil nature of peasants who had been ravaged for war, plague, and destruction, and remained stoic above it all. Perfect little saints, those peasants. The ones who paid no mind to the horrors they endured. They accepted it all willingly, and quietly. But we’re not those peasants. We’re certainly not quiet. We seem perhaps a little too willing. I’m talking, of course, about the apocalypse and that all who anticipate it do so with such wildness. Despairing with such hedonism, we herald autumn upon a single fallen leaf. Every moment in time brings cultural affirmation of an infinite number of responses to climate change ranging from the gleefully optimistic to the pessimistic, and now we are at its most abyssal ebb. Everywhere, there is a feverish variation of that Larkin verse: Most things may never happen: this one will. And that faint hint of the absurd , an inner voice insists, for the sake of completeness. More than a faint hint. Recently I spotted an issue of Harper’s in an airport harboring a cover story about the apocalypse. Subtitled “The Sense of an Ending,” which I reckon is less of an editorial choice than the wave of a white flag to imagination, the story is mostly a long list of apocalyptic trends. One could conclude that it is about reaffirming Giovanni Arrighi’s idea of late capitalism’s impending “systems collapse,” but mostly, it’s a lengthy primer of, and thus more about, Christiandom’s long history of thinking about the end times. I couldn’t say. It’s horribly imprecise. In the most recent editorial of the Real Review : “If every summer is the worst on record, then all summers are one summer, an identical experience; disaster as inevitability.” Alas, alack: we are going to die. Mark Bould’s The Anthropocene Unconscious deconstructs apocalyptic tropes in culture: the match cut montages in films and television shows, the attempts towards making the apocalypse ridiculous, the consumer demand for hours upon hours of television shows about the world after the Big Thing happens. At some point in the early days of The Pandemic, I realized just how homogenous my to-read pile of books, recently or imminently published, really was. Disaster. Catastrophe. Death. Precarity. Crisis. Extinction. Apocalypse. We could quibble all day about each of their different meanings, but boy, do they blur together nowadays. I started keeping a list of all this apocalyptic stuff when the pandemic began (like Riley on Buffy the Vampire Slayer , I feel an urge for the plural—unhappy with the real one and doomed by all possible choices, I proffer a gluttony of apocalypses). The list kept me from feeling too useless, but soon it became so long I started using tally marks. Before I stopped counting entirely, I had a tally of seven pieces in the New Yorker , with the annotation “somehow mostly about Trump?!” I do not recall any of them, but the note sounds plausible. I did, however, write a generous paragraph on Amanda Hess’ piece “Apocalypse When? Global Warming’s Endless Scroll” in the Times. Then other lists of lists. Philip Lehmann wrote about climate engineering: he began by listing recently-published books Generation Dread , The World as We Knew It , and Global Burning . As I read, I got caught up in a series of semantic dilemmas. Has the meaning of “late capitalism” changed, I wondered. Late capitalism today seems to mean the phenomenon of a system going extinct because humanity is too. It’s not just a pyramid scheme anymore. It’s not just about the gig economy. It’s just late, as if to a party. There was also Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All , a technocratic tract that put me off reading for weeks. Climate Change Apocalypse: A Young Engineer’s Travels into the Science and Politics Behind Global Warming , of which I received two advance copies. There was The Apocalypse and the End of History , which I did not read and did not seem to me to be about climate change at all, but the title reminded me of Rancière's idea of “endism,” a phrase used to describe the post-Soviet trend for historians and philosophers to declare something major had ended : whole eras of history or culture. There was a truly startling number of opinion pieces on climate depression, a mental health issue to which I’ve become quite indifferent because it seems to depend on “bad news”, of which we’ve never had a shortage. I begrudgingly watched The Last of Us . Bella Ramsey’s thirteen-year-old Ellie quipped: “People are making apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow.” I chuckled, then thought: if only. Used to be that whenever I read the testimony of survivors of tragedy, I retracted in anguish: accounts from bushfires in Australia, post-nuclear Japan, witness accounts from genocide in 1971 in Bangladesh, or the numerous accounts in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions reports from South Africa, El Salvador, and many other countries after years of unspeakable horror. People who have befallen no such tragedies talk like that now; they use millennial therapy-speak. Why bother calling it “climate anxiety”? Let’s call it what it is: climate nihilism. Usually, when a friend needs to vent and starts with the disclaimer that it’s “not that bad/first world problems,” I reassure them that nobody will be ranking their problems. But in this case, scale really is the nub of the issue. Whose climate nihilism are we hearing from nowadays? Who comprises all these storied authorial voices? The survivor of a flood that’s claimed countless lives writes an obligatory column or two. Quasi-simultaneously, American East Coasters, in presumably their first heat wave, tie themselves up in knots, and that’s all one hears or reads about until it’s over. Climate nihilism is very de rigueur . Like buccal fat removal and crop tops in the men’s section. With the apocalypse all around us, it's hard not to keep thinking of Rancière. Endism was not about climate change, but that tendency he saw—to proclaim an end to History or Politics or Ideology—is easily extended to Humanity. On endism, Kristin Ross wrote in 2009 that “philosophical activity undertaken under the sign of urgency is a new version of an old phenomenon: the heroicizing of the philosopher’s voice, the philosopher as prophet who can see ‘the end’ that others cannot see.” Endism is a viral meme now. There are TikTok stars who may as well all be named Francis Fukuyama. But, I insist, if we’re going to die, let’s at least take a moment to find the right words. The placement of the stress matters. We are going to die. We are going to die . We are going to die. (We are going to die. Too far?) Or we could defer to a YouTube commenter who wrote, on the partially unrelated subject of social media: “I’ve been on Team Sweet Meteor of Death for at least six years.” It’s a bit derivative, but it sounds fun! Apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow, indeed. Climate Psychiatric Alliance. July 2023. In the New Yorker , Jia Tolentino writes about “climate anxiety” and how psychology and psychiatry conduct “climate therapy.” Her sources are in unison that “climate anxiety” is a legitimate pathology peculiar to our time. “Climate anxiety,” writes Tolentino, “differs from many forms of anxiety a person might discuss in therapy—anxiety about crowds, or public speaking, or insufficiently washing one’s hands—because the goal is not to resolve the intrusive feeling and put it away.” It’s an awfully pedestrian way to think of anxiety: there are any number of things that are unresolvable, but sure, I suppose, we can sigh and pretend this “new” pathology, too, is believable. Halfway through the piece, Tolentino pivots, pondering her own luxury to pontificate about climate change. It's a welcome pivot, to be sure, but it seems designed to be surprising . A young Filipino woman, Isabella, skewers the Western tendency to be “thinking about the Earth, and journaling about it.” Isabella survived Typhoon Ulysses; she experienced more immediate emotions of panic and grief, with little time to process them. Later, a Native American fisherman impacted by the Exxon Valdez oil spill confesses to living and organizing through a sense of vengeance. None of this is surprising, of course, but it allows Tolentino to end ambivalently. For whatever reason, the story’s surprise element is conveyed most through Tim, a Floridian millennial with whom the piece begins, a man whose journey is meant to seem epiphanic. Tim majored in mechanical engineering. He later traveled to Indonesia, where he felt “dazed by grief” upon the news that orangutans were going extinct. He traipsed around the Sumatran jungle, returning unable to stop thinking about polluted water and carbon footprints, and with a viral case of climate anxiety. He went through a breakup during the pandemic and spiraled into a deep malaise. He then improved through therapy through the Climate Psychiatry Alliance. When we return to Tim at the end of the story, we discover that he had undiagnosed A.D.H.D. “He’d come to suspect,” Tolentino writes conspiratorially, “that he’d sometimes used climate anxiety as a container for his own, more intimate problems.” Well, duh. That’s obvious for the same reason this essay may feel obvious: humans are self-indulgent. That is fucking banal. Not so for Tolentino. Save the global pandemic, Tim suffered no natural disaster. He did, like many of us, suffer more prosaic disasters. Breakups. Intense isolation. An undiagnosed condition. In the meantime, psychiatry constructed a whole new pathology to ascribe to his fixating mind. Tolentino unfurls it like some freshly discovered ancient scribe. I may be a formerly suicidal person, but I’d like to think I’ve never thought of myself as uniquely grappling with anything at all. This is what everyone deals with. Isn’t climate anxiety, or even active crisis, always simultaneously in the domain of the intimate and the global? The notion of “climate anxiety” can support a plausible story of a fixating mind. But it cannot support a plausible story of disaster-induced anxiety: a brand-new thing! The neat story can ascribe anxiety to climate change, even pathologize it. An unrelated diagnosis can undo it entirely. Pathologies are often fragile and fictitious. And that’s fine to admit! My own woe led me, rather inexplicably, to study the very thing breeding peakists and nihilists—climate change—and I insist it’s fine to admit to all the conflation. The Climate Psychiatric Alliance cannot possibly be “holistic”; there will always be something greater one will attempt to perceive. And that’s fine! It would not be cruel to deny its categorization, which, I suspect, might be what the Climate Psychiatric Alliance might argue. Yes, I find the pathologizing of “climate anxiety” simplistic and ahistorical. That doesn’t mean that I dismiss the psychic toll of impending disaster. Relationships or careers crumbling as orangutans go extinct? Depressed because you lost your job at the same time as islands far from you are sinking? Therapy’s great for that. Disaster is always personal, always omnipresent. It’s a given. Not the apocalypse— disaster . The kind that reaches into our lives. The kind that is never unique because it lives in skies, seas, selves, and cheap similes. It patiently grows until we can see it. Like any life lived, it aches. Elsewhere, it blazes across scales. In every part of our being and everything else too. Disaster, like life, is all-encompassing; let it be so. Carbon footprints cannot assess pain, for pain is comorbid with far too much. So is disaster. Twin Bed. October 2017. I’ve just realized that I’ve lost another of my closest friends, a friend from college. I’ve sent her so many texts I feel like I’m in a Taylor Swift song. She loves Taylor Swift. I hope she listens to more of her music and gets back to me. “You will lose people!” Zoya is telling me very gravely. Zoya is one of my childhood best friends. She does not tolerate self-sabotage. “And you need to grow up about it,” she continues, because, of course, she does. “I know you’re really bad at letting people go, but you need to get better because this shit happens. People lose friends.” My friend hasn’t gotten back to me. She never will. I’m really not quite sure why the end of a friendship is so much more emotionally gutting than most everything else in life. It’s confounding. Once, my mother didn’t speak to me for six months, and I spent them with no knowledge of how long it would last. I have lost romantic partners. Friends, though—those are some real disasters. They have so little cultural weight. You can’t use them as excuses. The last time I met my friend, I was staying at her apartment in New York. As usual, we shared the bed. One night, halfway to sleep, she told me about the moment she was certain we’d be in each other’s lives forever. A year or two earlier, we’d had a very big fight on Christmas in Chicago. Drunk, we went to a CVS together because we needed to pee. Outside the bathroom, we happened upon a corkboard where the store’s staff had pinned wish lists for a Secret Santa party. That’s so sad, I said. That’s so fucking condescending, she said. It was a glorious fight. I argued that it was really sad because the things they asked for were really cheap and for family members: "$7 airplane model for my son,” “$4 bar of chocolate for my mom.” Wasn’t it enough that they had to work till 2 AM over the holidays? She argued that regardless of my insistence on some sort of solidarity, I was looking down on them. We yelled at each other for twenty minutes, fumed all the way back to my place, and didn’t speak for two days. Neither of us apologized, and then one day, I needed her help, as the only fellow biologist, for an important presentation, and without noting what had happened, we were friends again. Such things happened with many of my friends. But she and I rarely fought because when we did, it was terrible. We once cleared a roomful of drunken partiers dancing to EDM music. Our fights required resolution, or else. The night she recounted our sole unresolved fight, she told me that that was when she realized that no matter how angry she got with me, I was too much like family to her. When I remember that fight and its desperate need for resolution, I return to something about respect. I still think I had a point in that fight, but she did, too, because she has a strong moral compass. Even if I was sometimes at odds with it, I respected it. It was close enough to mine that I could understand it. We didn’t need to say anything that time, I noted in bed. We trusted in each other’s goodness enough to know it was just about the yelling. I don’t understand how we got from then to now. Sleeping next to each other in a twin bed like only significant others and best friends can, we went to sleep cozy and loved. That’s gone now. No fight took place, but I must have done something morally unconscionable because I cannot imagine her having any other reason. I don’t know why it hurts so much, but I have a strange feeling it has something to do with how common it is. Other situations garner far more sympathy. The loss of a friendship is devastating—and banal. People talk about how time heals all wounds, but I am not a paper cut, I am not a severed salamander capable of regeneration, I am not a time-traveler with something other than now. Now, I am indicted for reasons I do not know, and I believe I never will. But Zoya’s right. I’m too old to pretend these things do not happen. I’m walking home as she tells me. There are times even the most romantic amongst us must master moderation. The air was misty when we started talking. It seemed so wispy and idyllic. But now it’s snowing quite heavily, and I must be more pragmatic. My jacket has a hole in the back, and there’s snow wedged near the bottom of my spine. There are more urgent concerns. There is no such guarantee against such losses. A moral compass is no match for the bigness of this world, its ability to keep us separated for the rest of our lives, and its agility with turning fickle decisions to certainties. How much of disaster resides here? In a lost friendship. In days and nights. In the anhedonia of the mind. Do people sit back and wait for the end of days because they’re afraid of losing things or because they already have? Always-Time. November 2019. I’m co-presenting in a session at an Environmental Humanities seminar on “Futurity.” At my suggestion, we've started with a clip of the cold open from the first episode of The Leftovers ’ final season. The clip shows 19th-century Millerites in white robes, standing on the roofs of their houses. They’ve been told a date for the apocalypse. On that day, a husband, wife, and their child climb up onto their roof and wait for it all to end. The day passes, and another date appears; one date after another, they wait, but the apocalypse never comes. The number of believers dwindles; only the wife continues to have faith, and still it does not come until finally, the crushing ignominy makes her a village pariah. The clip ends, and I want to say that now, all of a sudden, a scene I have cried over seems stupid. I’m struggling, really struggling, to figure out what to say next, to move past the Millerites, to find something to say about our future, let alone our “futurities.” Why did I suggest this clip? I’d felt it was relevant to faith, the apocalypse, disaster, change, something—but now I have no idea what I was thinking. Suddenly, I feel it’s a bit irresponsible to equate climate change with apocalypse when, instead, it’s just the same old disasters, except many more and faster. That contraction of time may make it feel like the same thing, but it most certainly is not. And what the fuck is “futurity” supposed to be? I start talking about death instead. About new historical literature on death in the Anthropocene. The collapse of the self in the face of climate change. This happens reflexively, desperately, because as luck would have it, I’m well-versed in the philosophy of death, and remixing snippets of my greatest hits fills up the necessary space. After, there’s a good minute or two of silence, and soon, we’re taking a break for food, piling hummus and tahini and pita onto disposable plates. I’m spending most of my days through gritted teeth. I’m quite exhausted. Look at us, Ivy-Leaguers reading esoteric expositions that are all different ways of saying how our children and grand-children will face the consequences of climate change if we let the Earth warm 3 degrees or more. Our children? If?! How can I emphasize this enough: I have zero idea what exactly I’m supposed to feel when anyone with half a mind knows that we careened off the face of a cliff a long time ago, but is finding ways to avoid admitting that they’re always looking down. Am I missing something here? Am I the only person stupid enough to feel this way? Greta Thunberg is sailing across the Atlantic. The Argentinian artist Nino Cobre—sponsored by an environmental nonprofit that seems to have nothing better to do with its money—paints a mural of her on the side of a building on Mason Street in San Francisco. A friend active in the Sunrise Movement tells me she’s exhausted, and her words are all collapsed together with the frustration of her novel-in-progress and the stress of medical bills. I walk out of a class and watch students marching across campus protesting Yale’s lack of action on divestment from the fossil fuel industry. Bernie Sanders details his Green New Deal, and it is the most ambitious set of policy proposals by any candidate. Along comes Jonathan Franzen. “You can keep on hoping,” he writes darkly, “that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.” Franzen writes that a kind of denial of climate change catastrophe is present in progressive politics and climate activism. He disparages the “climate activists [who] argue that if we publicly admit that the problem can’t be solved, it will discourage people from taking any ameliorative action at all. This seems to me not only a patronizing calculation but an ineffectual one, given how little progress we have to show for it to date.” This is the last straw. Here we have a writer who has put down in plain terms the defeatism I feel so often, and I dislike him for it. Luckily, everyone else seems to as well. Why? The easiest part of the answer is that Franzen belittles the Green New Deal with elitist disdain, thumbing his nose at people with bold plans of action. But beyond that, I struggle. Maybe we’re angry because, although there is more than a kernel of truth embedded within the argument, our cynicism and his are keeping us from the work. Sure, I can admit a lot of the work of idealism just isn’t needed. But nobody needs to hear that all we have left to do is to sit back and wait for the apocalypse either. In truth, what we’re all really annoyed by, I think, is the conflation of the affective response of defeatism with righteousness. I may be entitled to feel defeated, but that does not mean it is the right thing to be. Obviously, I’ve felt all along that there’s utility in not admitting what I really believe; why else would it be so much harder than admitting it? But let’s face facts. In a matter of a year or two, climate pessimism will be everywhere very soon, and though we’re fighting for mass action, we’ve really had no good antidote to climate pessimism while we wait. I feel like many of us like to think of climate catastrophe as wholly unique, a real apocalypse. Which it is, but it also isn’t. All the disasters in history have made it so that what we will get is not totally unique. Climate pessimism is what we get when we start to pretend as if nobody’s studied disasters at all. As if people haven’t witnessed them and lived to tell the tale. As if people from the Alaskan Arctic to earthquake-prone island-nations have not been preparing for decades. As if war hasn’t paralyzed peoples for generations, and armies and bombs haven’t obliterated them; as if drought didn’t spark the tinder box of civil war in Syria, and hurricanes haven’t already ravaged New Orleans and Puerto Rico and earthquakes haven’t already devastated Indonesia and Haiti and Kashmir—and oh look, Puerto Rico again too. Climate change isn’t one seismic wave that knocks us all out, and we all know this, but we talk like it is. It will be like it is : a patchwork of storms, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, tsunamis, droughts, wars, genocides, civil wars; now here, then there, just much faster, then simultaneously, and many more at an unprecedented scale. Is that better or worse than the apocalypse? What I tell myself is: if humankind had never faced disasters before, then perhaps I could sit around being righteously defeated. It’s a very strange time to be a historian of disaster, which I’m beginning to think of as synonymous with the environmental historian. Yet somehow, alas, I am ardent that this is what I meant to do. I chose this, very actively, this second doctorate, which I realize everyone finds outrageous. And my choice is more confounding because what is it that I am doing ? Looking? Yes, looking. Looking at disaster is paralyzing. Hasn’t that always been the case? Would that be a good reason to stop doing it? Of course not. But the short answer is too short, and the long answer is too long. Sitting here, typing in Bass Library in the extremely peculiar town that is New Haven, inside an empire hell-bent on its own destruction, I want to say it outright: around the time an appropriate arrangement emerges, we will all be dead. But anyway. Simultaneity. November 2022. On a summer afternoon in Colombo, at one of the protests urging the ousting of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, I found out that Roe v. Wade had been definitively struck down. I avoided social media, for I was in another place just as afraid. The aragalaya in Sri Lanka had been ongoing for much of the year. With economic collapse came power cuts, inflation went rampant, making all essential goods unaffordable for most. At the same time, I was in the archives, poking my head out every so often for an oral history interview. I was speaking to one diver and reef biologist. At some point he discussed a particular site that has long been a tourist hotspot. His voice cracked, and he began to speak at a lower volume. That site in particular made him sad. I paused to ask him how it felt to be there. “Nothing’s there,” he said. “All white.” We parted ways. I mulled for a long time why it was that the death of coral reefs is often a synecdoche for climate change catastrophe, and not the far better one: sadness. Rajapaksa crept out of the country in the middle of the night. Ranil Wickremasinghe, an equally troublesome man, became President, cracking down on the aragalaya with an abrupt zeal. Something broke between the day before and the days immediately after Rajapaksa’s departure. Those days, people talked how it all now felt a bit pointless, if I asked. They had no fuel in their tuk-tuks, no electricity at home, food was being rationed, shops were shuttering. Then the floods in Pakistan began. Before anyone quite knew the scale of it, I had been on the phone with our co-worker in Karachi who apologized for not having gotten back to me; she’d had no internet or electricity for a week. I told her there was no need to apologize. A question sat momentarily in my mind before it slipped away. That was in July. It is now November in New Haven, and the simultaneity of crises continues to reverberate, as I assume it must for everyone. Recently, SAAG began fundraising for the Women Democratic Front in Pakistan. I read Ibrahim Buriro’s dispatch from his village of Sabu Khan Buriro in Sindh. I was ashamed, because the catastrophe he described sounded quieter than the din in my head, but it felt worse. I didn’t know how to picture it: what losing that many people looks like. There was none. Only centuries-old paintings of the deluge painted by those who predicted the end times. I read the late K Za Win’s poem , written in protest of the military coup in Myanmar, and tried to picture it. I could only see the first row of protesters at a march. Should we resist the urge to project our imagination onto such disasters, as long as we do not not fail to attend to them? The question that had popped into my head before I knew about the floods was: “How bad will it be?” It’s like wishing for the gift of prophecy, even though it would likely cripple us. I wish I could go back to other moments of writing my essay where I was less incredulous of the scale of disaster. Where I can sense myself searching to know what it feels like, to truly relate. I’d like to know if being a witness to the simultaneity of all this is at all useful. I want to know when I’m old enough to stop pretending such things do not happen. I want us to prepare better, together. I want it so badly. Today marks first snow. It’s snowing quite heavily, and I know I must be pragmatic. We may distract ourselves. We may take a moment, and only that. We may distance ourselves, and not only that. A Bunch of Plinys. May 2020. Why on earth did I turn to a second doctorate—to history? I get asked this almost every day. What all those faces say is: this is a crazy person. I answer truthfully. I knew this is what I wanted my life to be, to mean. It is what I want to do. But why? I’ve taken stabs at a number of answers over the past few weeks in this document. They became more and more obscure. Like a tawdry poet, I first went to the Romantics and the sublime. That ambivalence in the face of destruction: horrific, godly, cosmic, perhaps beautiful. But I don’t need any more fucking ambivalence, I am fat with it. I went to the Stoics. To Seneca and Epictetus; to Montaigne, who is not a canonical Stoic, but for me cannot be seen as anything but. But as comforted as I often feel by Stoics, they are revelatory to me almost entirely because of their rhetoric. They are patronizing. I went to Heidegger, with his grand notions of Dasein. Dasein is a human who can only be if they have the foresight to see death coming. Dasein orients towards death as it barrels towards them, with the knowledge of their past. Your futurity —to butcher Heideggerian ideas of “being”—is a state of being in which the future of you is not an unknown. It is not even in the future, really. It is already coming towards you. That was somewhat useful, but it also felt like an elevated version of the Marvel multiverse. I didn’t know what to do with him: emotionally, that is, not epistemologically. “Why does the history of disaster matter to me?” I ask, to explain “in my own words.” Well, perhaps because I feel that familiarizing destruction is key to understanding it. It’s an inexplicable moral sense. There’s a category of things I want to put my finger on, and it pivots on humans, on us; on me, and back on us. It matters because I am not special. Walter Benjamin is famous for his idea of the angel of history. The idea of the angel is simple: The angel looks back and sees catastrophe. A storm hits. The angel cannot help but be swept along into the future while his back is turned. The storm is progress. Benjamin’s oft-cited notion, shorn from context, often loses some of that ambivalent, essayistic quality that makes him so brilliant. The angel of history was a way for Benjamin to recognize what the human is; “to understand a humanity that proves itself by destruction.” Benjamin projected his ideas onto a Paul Klee painting in a rhetorical struggle, approaching history like a critic, or even a novelist (earlier in Theses , Benjamin used the more colorful metaphor of a chess-playing puppet to connote "historical materialism." The narrative arc of the angel is clean and thus, perhaps, more memorable). But he was insistent on a "secret agreement" between the past and the present. When people look upon destruction, what can seem feckless, even inhumane, can be the opposite. One needs to look back to move forward. I, too, found succor not in dictums but stories and images . They rang more new and true. For one thing, there’s something odd about the very sources of disaster history. I quickly began to suspect that humans have not historically been good at leaving first-hand traces of the horrors they’ve survived. Most of it happens via proxy. It seems sensible to think that some kind of “instinct,” visceral memory, or closeness would create our corpus of disaster stories, but strangely, none of it seems to push people towards storytelling. Not for that purpose, anyway. First-person accounts from survivors are often obtained, less so offered; often against their will and rarely in a setting of their choosing. Here's one story. The great naturalist Pliny the Elder was a man of his time: he ascribed devastation to providence. He saw Mount Vesuvius explode in 79 CE, and ventured into it. It was the first thoroughly-documented volcanic eruption, a watershed moment for volcanology. He died there. Years later, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, who was with Pliny the Elder earlier on the day of the eruption, related what he knew to the historian Tacitus. On the day of the eruption, the younger Pliny’s mother drew her father’s attention to a strange cloud. Pliny the Elder saw it and asked his nephew if he wanted to join him, but the younger Pliny refused (apparently, he needed to study). Pliny the Elder ventured by boat. “In likeness and form,” Pliny the Younger wrote in his letter, “[the eruption] more closely resembled a pine-tree than anything else… and then spread out into a number of branches.” "Pliny the Younger and his Mother at Misenum, 79 A.D." Angelica Kauffman (1785) Pliny the Elder, his nephew claimed, journeyed towards the volcano on a small ship. Before he arrived, a woman begged him to save her, and the old man instantly hopped into the role of rescuer. Having saved many other people as well, the older Pliny moved “towards the place whence others were fleeing, and steering a direct course… utterly devoid of fear.” Let’s pause here to note the implausible. Pliny the Elder was notably fat. Most likely, he dictated his observations to an amanuensis from the deck of his ship. Having witnessed presumably enough, Pliny the Elder dined, slept, and died soon thereafter. Pliny the Younger closed the letter with a self-pitying proclamation that his own experience, in Misenum, was of no import. It was an invitation, sort of an “Oh, don’t ask, it was terrible!” And Tacitus asked. So Pliny wrote another letter relating the post-eruption scene in Misenum, where the skies blackened, the streets overrun with “people crowding in masses upon us” to escape the city. Everybody feared death. Pliny’s mother begged of him to leave her to die, for she was old and she did not want to slow him down. He insisted he would not leave her. At nighttime, they returned to Misenum where everything was layered with ashes, in ruin. Pliny the Younger’s second letter is more emotional and evocative than his first. There is a sense that the details making up the knowledge of the eruption—the ash, smoke, the pine tree cloud, the wreckage, the ships, the woman who called for help, the amanuensis who noted what the naturalist saw—are veiling an emotional experience Pliny still shies away from. But he ends this second letter by warning Tacitus menacingly: “You will not read these details, which are not up to the dignity of history , as though you were about to incorporate them in your writings.” We don’t know if Pliny was writing from an impulse of ancient egotism or genuine self-deprecation. But I find an unsettling believability to his warning to Tacitus: even clear-headed observers who survive catastrophe and look back at it feel incapable of the act of doing history. There seems to be a too-authentic closeness that digs a trench, on one side of which a survivor will always be paralyzed, and the job will have to go to someone else. It is like, or perhaps is, post-traumatic stress disorder. Volcanoes took a long time to be figured out; time we do not have. Pliny’s letters about Mount Vesuvius brought volcanology into vogue for a time. And then it's almost as if there was an enormous gap in volcanology from the ancients till seemingly the sixteenth century. Vesuvius erupted again in 1631, and Etna in 1669. Suddenly everyone from Hooke to Newton, Cuvier to Goethe had some opinion. Controversies in volcanology bedeviled philosophers, natural historians, and geologists alike. Well into the nineteenth century, scientists debated ideas of volcanology that could be traced at least as far back as Lucretius. Of course, it's not as if volcanoes went on recess. I can't quite explain the gap, except by way of my own ignorance, but it seems to me that volcanoes, as a concept, are defined by modern science. Thus, perhaps for too many, Pliny the Younger's experience, and the ideas of many others, truly were not up to the "dignity of history." One scholar blames the many lost years squarely on the resurgence of Christian premillennialism, i.e., end-of-days thinking. But premillennialism also coincided with postmillennialism . What with Christian missionaries invading new lands for people to convert, there was also growing optimism for a great era for Christian prosperity; a Golden Age Millennium of greatness before the end was nigh. In this circuitous way, I ended up where I never wanted to be: Christian eschatology, where apocalypse writing always begins. I understand why. The stories are indelible. The Christian view of volcanoes for much of the early modern period does not seem too dissimilar to that of the ancients: both associated volcanoes with punishment and the fires of Hell. Just as Virgil proclaimed that the giant Enceladus was buried under the eruption of Etna by the goddess Athena for defying the gods, Christianity throughout the Middle Ages and beyond proclaimed the upswell of lava as the manifestation of the wrath of God and a damning indictment of the societies inflicted by them. Earthquakes and other disasters, even war, generated similar responses for much of recorded human history: they were all indicative of the wrath of one god or many. The ancient Greeks often blamed earthquakes on the god Poseidon. Japanese folklore blames a great catfish named Namazu. The Book of Revelation chronicles the “seven bowls” of God’s wrath, the bowls poured by angels, each one causing a catastrophic event foreseen in a vision. After the bowls of bodily sores, mass extinction in the oceans, the rivers turning to blood, a literal firebombing by the Sun, and more—finally, there is a giant, world-ending earthquake. “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since mankind has been on earth,” the Book of Revelation says, in one of its more modest moments. A rather anticlimactic denouement. Disasters have a way of creating vacancies for moral exhortations—though not necessarily theological ones. All that godsplaining needs somewhere to go. That is familiar to me. I was raised Muslim, and now whenever climate change comes up in the company of elders, all I hear about is qiyamat , or Judgment Day. It’s a busy day. Now that’s new. Growing up, people said all sorts of things were indications of qiyamat . A scandalous billboard. A particularly brazen female news anchor. On one baffling occasion, it was the way my friend’s cat meowed. Peevish uncles often used qiyamat as a nationalist, anti-India sentiment. But it’s so big now. Those uncles now know that the flood and the cat’s meow do not sit in the same category. Like scholars, they invoke human blunders. Qiyamat is a prophecy foretold centuries ago. It’s history; it’s up to the dignity of history. We may be up to the dignity of history. It depends on what we do with ourselves. I wish to dignify people through history; that is my only answer to explain my crazy decision to turn to it. That does not mean I am special. None of us are. The Ruin and the Volcano. November 2020. For Benjamin, “he who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.” W.H. Sebald did that literally. I said earlier that environmental history may well be the history of disaster. But Benjamin and Sebald take this one step further. When the question is strictly material , one could rephrase it: is the history of the disaster the same thing as the history of the ruin? Sebald was born and grew up on the outskirts of the Bavarian Alps in 1944. His father, a prisoner of war until 1947, was part of the Nazi armed forces. Images of destruction and the ruins of postwar Germany were the first things he recalled when he felt like he was returning “home.” In a famous essay, Sebald the child and the adult, reveals himself to be totally confounded by just how little there was to see of all this destruction in the lives of people: It is true that the strategic-bombing surveys published by the Allies … show that the Royal Air Force alone dropped almost a million tons of bombs on enemy territory; it is true that of the hundred and thirty-one towns and cities attacked, some only once and some repeatedly, many were almost entirely flattened, that about six hundred thousand German civilians fell victim to the air raids and three and a half million homes were destroyed … but we do not grasp what it all actually meant … It seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness. So many people all just carried on as if nothing had ever happened. That so much of it occurred after Hitler was long gone, after war elsewhere had ended, did not matter. For Churchill, Solly Zuckerman, and Arthur Harris, the strategy of total destruction was to achieve “wholesale an annihilation of the enemy, with his dwellings, his history, and his natural environment, as can possibly be achieved.” Rendered by Sebald, it is devastating, perhaps even sublime, the extent to which the destroyed environment was just as much a part of the architecture of human habitation as a city or a dwelling. “How ought such a natural history of destruction to begin?” he asked. There is no answer, not in Sebald’s novels, not in his essays. There are simply things going on unfolding: things decaying, ruins existing. He walked along the millions of bricks left behind from the air-dropped ordnances and the fire-storms and the collapse of apartment buildings, surveying the postwar city landscape excavating brick-by-brick, and found no answer as to what need there was for such destruction except for the whims of a few men. What we should fear the most is not the hurricane but when people are failed. In his “nature-history” of Paris, Benjamin merges uncontrollable disaster with a proletarian mob—it’s a possibility of great potential. The potential wobbles, though, in his words. In some places, in many places, revolution may manifest as mindless destruction—what if it’s so boundless, there is not enough potential left? There are many who covet the safety provided to many of us; they’re not wrong. The very geography of disaster, we all know, is unjust. And to me, the white-hot anger of a people wronged is more terrifying than a volcano. It is conceivable that a situation arises where it won’t matter who is seen as culpable; it is conceivable that powerful actors make it so. If we remain paralyzed for too long, repeating mantras of anxiety or the denial of its existence, it will not be a hurricane that tears us limb from limb. My friend Meg recently wrote to me about this essay. “I think sometimes you use your brain as a way to step away from the most uncomfortable parts of yourself because you are more comfortable with the realities of global disaster than you are with the personal ones,” she wrote. She’s right, but that also describes most academics. They say to write the book you want to read. Unfortunately, I can’t, for this one cannot be written alone. Now-Time. August 2023. Now somehow, now somehow, the people in the worlds I inhabit most closely—that of academia, environmental humanities, global history, energy history—don’t actually look at apocalypticism, endism, whatever you may call it, straight in the face. Even though the works that define these fields, and those continually published, are painstaking in deepening the scale of the problems climate change poses, the problem of all this pessimism is not spoken aloud, and if it is, the responses are so very trite. There are exceptions—I admire the work of Bedour Alagraa and Anna Tsing, among others—but the hush is deafening. Over the years that I have brought up climate pessimism to various scholars, I have only ever received one answer, delivered in dismissive, patronizing fashion. It is always the same answer everyone has heard many times: about the necessity of hope, rarely justified in any real or specific terms insofar as having reason to hope, but simply an expression of it. As if we haven’t heard that old canard before. As if people are incapable of holding things simultaneously. As if ambivalence or serious engagement is a step too far for academia. Any other answers are mere quibbles disguised as serious responses: “It won’t be an apocalypse,” “We need to organize.” In the very vocation set out to define the problem, to demonstrate how we got here, the people populating it have no answer to how many are responding affectively to climate change, or to the many alarming cover stories and books and articles producing their doom-scroll, or even what all those alarmist signs are a symptom of. Here, in hallowed halls, climate pessimism is verboten. The most generous version of it I’ve heard is by AOC in a recent Instagram Live. After spending half an hour outlining how climate change impacts every aspect of human life, she was in a bit of a hurry. “I am a big believer in ‘climate optimism’, she said. “You ever notice that it's easier to imagine everything going to hell than it is things actually working out and getting better? People are reactive, and the challenges that the climate crisis presents to us are going to require a reorganization of the parts of our society. And people don't like being proactive… I just really believe that climate doomerism and cynicism in general leads you down a very dark path.” There’s the chastisement on moral grounds, and then there are things that, frankly, sound peakist. The chastisement is typical. The biggest part of it is the idea that cynical people are necessarily doing nothing. Then there are the things at odds with the core ideas AOC has long espoused. It’s not the fault of the vast majority of people. Individualistic action will not be enough. Power, capital, and political systems are resilient. The imminent collapse roars back. “[Systems] are simply going to collapse, and we can make a proactive decision about that,” AOC argues. “Certain things collapsing doesn't mean doom. It means we need to make space for a better way. … We should not have to move heaven and earth to save these things that are collapsing under their own weight because they never made sense.” What does this mean? What silent majority is moving heaven and earth to save systems, and what exactly is collapsing again? What proactive decisions were the vast majority of people on this planet supposed to but failed to make? Is the argument that there is some sort of absence of global protest, or do we, as usual, just mean America? There is no shortage of calls for revolution; there is so much uncertainty as to its imminence despite centuries of vociferous argument. But let's run with AOC's premise anyway. If all that is true, perhaps we should also not lose many things that are precious: lives, primarily. How can anyone be sure that “systems collapse” and “death” won’t happen simultaneously? They might! A Marxist education allowed me to understand that acceptance of lives lost is at the heart of the idea of revolution. Is climate optimism too shy to admit into its arena that horrible, uncertain trade-off? For me, climate optimism is denialism that there is logic to pessimism; a relegation of pessimism to the emotional, supposedly illogical. It requires recourse to very dubious things: that imagining utopia is difficult, that our imaginations can incite action, that our actions are sufficient, that doomers are uninformed, that systems are tottering. Climate optimists often directly contradict what they elsewhere preach—that the scale of the problem is pervasive—with a strange Pollyannaish turn to hope as a cure-all. At best, it is an unfinished thought. Like mine. The overwhelming majority of peakists express views that are far-left. And of course, it should be said that some of what peakists believe doesn’t justify their survivalist thinking. They’re largely anti-capitalists who believe capitalism is short-lived, and that oil production will peak soon, or it already has. To me, either of those seems like a reason to hope—I just don’t quite believe them. Different people take the same evidence to mean radically different things. The human brain is not internally consistent in its own logic, and in this peakists are not unlike climate optimists. Peakists also believe the state has not done anywhere near enough for racial minorities. They express the belief that the US is an oligarchy, they disdain both political parties, and electoral politics in general. They sound like almost everyone I’ve met in the US who identifies with the left. Doomers, as a group, may well be overrepresented on the left. They are many of the people we are looking to recruit. Some have been pathologized with “climate anxiety.” Climate optimism would have us shame it out of them. Validation of what another might be feeling cannot exist here. To which I must ask: are we trying to lose? Then, that canard—that being pessimistic is unethical and dangerous . It’s a slippery slope argument. Like most slippery slopes, it’s facetious and determinist. It’s a finger wag—one might say “~vibes~”—as a statement of belief based on illusory evidence. Lynne Segal in the Boston Review argues that “such pessimism can dangerously align us with a form of reactionary conservatism, merely gawping at the dire state of things, apparently helpless before impending disaster.” Segal mentions the dystopia of The Hunger Games as a fantasy that obliterates utopian visions. For Segal, what combats pessimism is collective action and solidarity which produce care and joy. It is a lovely thought, but again: we have and continue to do all of this, and there is no magic threshold Segal or any theorist can come up with. Which makes it all just hoary preaching to the choir. There is no reason to believe pessimism should necessarily make one a reactionary conservative. Emotions are not partisan objects. I’ve been a pessimist, and I persist with my work. I believe it very important. As I see it, most people who dedicate time to understanding and combating climate change feel a great deal of pessimism actually: it’s perfectly natural to feel several things all at once. And while solidarity is joyful, organizing is exhausting . Ask anyone organizing a union: most of the time, it feels like we’re on a giant hamster wheel. I see no reason why my most doomer self would spurn collective action in perpetuity. It feels strange, yes: why bother fighting when you feel so defeated? But that’s precisely it. So many things are not unique about this time. Humans fight unwinnable battles all the time; chastising pessimists with variations on the same cliché is not, in fact, a solution. And neither Logic nor Rhetoric have ever been the wisest antidotes for depression , though they’ve been deployed for much of recorded human history. And also: excuse you, The Hunger Games is excellent . There is no evidence that its audience slipped into reactionary conservatism upon its end. Why would it? It ends by dismantling the dystopia. My point in all this, my reason for vacillating so violently seems plain to me now. I want admission. Our own private disasters collide with global ones, and we feel terrible. If we want to organize, surely part of the “care” of solidarity is to recognize the thing climate activists and scholars seem loath to admit: we’re not feeling good about it. And that’s fine. Sure, it will make the slogans harder to write, but it’s better than deluding ourselves that our comrades truly believe that we can pull off fossil fuel divestment and break pipelines by the end of the year, and if we do so, we’re saved . But most of us don’t believe that’ll happen, any of it. Sign us up anyway. In 2017, Ashley Dawson argued that global capitalism now is not so much about uneven development but about uneven disaster, even if Western media scarcely covers disasters in developing countries. Spectacular, record-breaking heat waves struck the Pacific Northwest, on the heels of of all those elsewhere in the Americas. Then the catastrophic wildfires devastated Hawai’i, with thousands dead, injured, or missing. I suspect those were the things we all heard about. Meanwhile, Typhoon Khanun hit the Korean Peninsula, where there have only been five typhoon-level storms since 1945, and Russia, destroying farmland, killing and injuring hundreds. Typhoon Doksuri killed approximately sixty people in Fujian province, China. The El Niño phenomenon causing drought in much of East Asia has villagers in Indonesia digging up river beds. 8,000 evacuees are stranded as the wildfires in the Canary Islands continue to rage. Wildfires rage in Greece. These are just some natural disasters. I’d wager every country is plagued by problems we parcel as political or economic that are exacerbated by climate change or energy in some way. I intend this match-cut exposition to situate us, at the very end, not so much in time but in banality. None of us know how to simultaneously obtain the stories, persons, and sentences of disaster, let alone the planet. Disaster resides. In the now-time, as in the everywhere-time, always-time, and to-be-time. It seeps. It sets up house. The doomer is Cassandra. Some may suspect she is telling the truth. They all treat her as if she is insane. In John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Gena Rowlands’ Mabel, supposedly a manic psychotic, is stranded in an aggressive family who do the opposite of what they say. They all keep insisting they must have a good time, but they never even try. All they do is caterwaul. Mabel knows how to have a good time. She reacts, she loves, she dances, she sings. She seems to know precisely what’s going on. She demands someone tell her the truth, but they never do. Six months pass in a mental hospital, where she is treated with electroshock therapy. When she returns, her husband asks her at the dinner table what the hospital was like, her eyes dart around. “Everybody’s here,” she says tentatively, like someone learning to speak. “Seems like a party.” Later, when she mentions the hospital routine, she is chastised. The cruelty of this fait accompli is immeasurable. The sane peck and pick away at you until you howl in pain. “Aha!” they’ll say in unison. Mabel asks tearfully of her father at the crowded table: “Dad, please stand up for me.” He stands up. She says no, not that, sit down. “Please stand up for me.” He stands again. “I don’t understand this game,” he says. “Good times from now on,” Mabel’s husband yells. “Things are gonna get better and better and better, and then they’ll get better than that and then they’ll get better.” I do not endorse this ridiculous notion that this is how we should treat pessimists. I do not endorse it because oftentimes, I agree. Oftentimes, I don’t. So what? What are we so afraid of that we can’t admit how afraid we are? What’s the worst that can happen? That with their last breath, the doomer turns to smirk and say: “Told you so”? At the Sentence. December 2022. It is the day before 2023. I don’t know what I was yesterday, but I am a pessimist today. Not so long ago, believing in climate change at all was the strangest kind of inversion: we, the believers, were equivalent to the Millerite pariah; the deniers the apocalypse-skeptics, all the people who rolled their eyes at religious zealots. Now it feels that axis has spun, bewilderingly pitting optimists and pessimists at opposite ends. Of course, we all have our reasons. We think they are good. But is there an axis at all if anyone can be of two minds? Recently, I pulled up my list on the impending apocalypse, and instead of alarm, I felt inadequate to actually work on climate change for a few reasons. The first is embarrassing. In the beginning of the 2020, I fell into a deep writing slump, and aside from the words on these pages—which I considered diary entries—I have written nothing since. That is until two days ago when my friend Sarah read this draft and forced me to complete it as an editorial. What’s worse, I’ve lured you into reading about disaster, but I still don’t know what it means. What is it? As far as I can tell, the disaster we chronicle does feel more like ruin. Like Sebald, that’s the only way I can really picture it, and the picture is after the fact. Not writing had an interesting effect on my brain. For the first time in my life, the closest I can come to original thought is in visual art. Six months ago, I bought some fancy artist papers and a canvas, acrylic paints, India ink, and I started to paint something I’d sketched out. I’d learned to embroider over the pandemic so every time I just didn’t know to make something, I’d correct it by using thread. Not to give anything form, just to fill space. I tell myself they’re supposed to be columns and I let the stitching falter, to make myself feel better. I’m making an old ruin. So, in other words, I learned how to embroider, paint, color, and flounder solely to attempt at making a point. Isn’t that something? "Untitled" Acrylic, india ink, thread. By the author (2022) Two things bubble out: aesthetics and death. In recent years, I’ve become a particular fan of Derrida, which is surprising, because for quite some time, he was more impenetrable to me than even Heidegger or Foucault were. Then just the other day, I read Brian Dillon on the subject of Derrida. Dillon writes: I see now why Theory was so attractive to a young man, a boy really, who had lost both parents within five years. These writings seemed to confirm not only that disaster was real, and general, and happened even at the smallest levels of language, but also that catastrophe could be turned. Art was nothing but an acknowledgment of this moment when you realized the cracks had been there all along… I fell in love with such moments of collapse. “Aestheticizing,” we’d learn to say of such love; I hate the word to this day. As if there was anything available, anything left, except aesthetics, except an effort to frame the wreckage in the aftermath, at the last. The way Dillon links Derrida’s personal history to disaster and language makes my heart skip a beat, as does the defense of the aesthetic. It would be wise to use every thinker or theorist in this crisis this way. Trying harder than we have before to humanize one another, a prosaic thing to say, but what tactic could be sounder? What is it about the aesthetic that can feel like it might just save us, save everything, even if not in the literal sense? In an earlier draft of this essay, I’d written: “Nobody, not even Greta Thunberg, needs a mural of Greta Thunberg.” I really believed that at the time, very deeply, like I believed all things. But whenever I’m sure, I begin to suspect myself more. The whole premise of my woes on disaster are linked to the aesthetic, particularly the avant-garde. I, too, hate the word “aestheticizing.” The aesthetic is the one realm instinct has yet to fail me. I cannot explain why I love something aesthetically: I do or I don’t. That’s how it is with language. The thing I’d missed about disaster for a long time was how banal it is. I’d failed to keep up with where it was—which was everywhere. When I stopped writing, for example, it was as if there was a crashing. A compaction of words occurred, and words began to slip away from me, as if a whole era’s trace in the geological record had just collapsed in on itself. That is a ludicrous analogy, but I wanted to make it, and so I did. Because I am not required to be equivalently important to the geological record. I did not sign a legal document or swear an oath, “I will never use language that may imply that two things are equal in importance even if I do not mean it.” I made the analogy because language and aesthetics are battlegrounds. They shift. We try to keep up. We fail. We try to specify them. We fail. And we will always fail because they make up the “we.” We fight this losing battle so hard. We even pretend we’re winning. We play with things that seem very real all the time. Right now, we’ve fixed time on terms that are wholly mine. The world outside is moving faster than us. It doesn’t care. That may lull you into thinking that what is happening does not matter, but we do this all the time. We fix borders, even though we know they do not exist, which is why what our brains somehow seem incapable at holding many things at once. We foreclose the simultaneity of disaster. For no good reason, and against our principles, even the best of us hold onto borders for dear life. Floods devastated villages, towns, cities, and peoples across Pakistan—and actually, Afghanistan, and this omission does actually matter. Border disputes and lynchings occurred so close to us that some of those killed may even have popped up on your Tinder at some point. In Sri Lanka, economic and political collapse may have seemed joyful in what it brought forth—the mass protests—but in truth, the disaster crippled the whole island-nation’s well-being, health, ability to work, to heal, to move. In the Maldives, an archipelago not far away from Sri Lanka, a brutal Islamist government has cracked down on the most benign of citizens, all whilst a drug epidemic and gendered violence continue unacknowledged. There are some luxuries some places have: its writers do not need to write anonymously, for instance, as I do not. It’s only occasionally even crossed my mind. But we know just how many places this is not true for. We all accept how little agency we have over the climate crisis individually. But we do have agency: over time, over our minds, over our language, over our aesthetics—all places disaster will reach into and hollow you out unless you grab ahold of it. My own agency is in these words; if there’s something other than ideas or a shoulder to cry on to offer, I haven’t found it yet. Has all this been about politics? That’s the wrong question. In The Origins of Dislike , Amit Chaudhuri writes: “That word, “about”, is a key term in Anglophone literary discourse, and is meant to enforce a dichotomy between creativity and thought, writing and event.” The “about”, he says, “may be dispensed with in a way that allows poetics and politics to flow into each other.” I want to return to the category: that question I asked myself many years ago. What is it that I have been writing for all these years? It reads like a diary. Slowly, it became an essay. Thankfully, I saved the original drafts because as I read back, I sensed continuity. It is being published as an editorial. It’s all a category problem I bring up because my insistence that this be seen as an essay, not a declamation, is characterized by doubt, by my inability to give you direct answers as a form of mimesis for the mind. The problem with doubt is the insolubility it creates with myself. On the one hand: I am not pertinent here. I am not at the center of the point I am making. None of this has anything to do with me. But maybe: I am pertinent here. I am at the center, and although I do not like it, I chose it. It is self-centered. It is all about me. And everyone’s pertinent here: the individual and the collective need not be at odds. Queen Bed. June 2023. I spent a few nights at my friend Nur’s place in Brooklyn just before I left for Colombo earlier this month. It was good for me. No, it was necessary. The night before I left, I awoke abruptly at 3am. I’d had a dream about my lost friend, the one I hadn’t heard from in years. I didn’t even know where she lived anymore, though I assumed she still lived in New York. On a lark, I searched on Instagram and came across a montage from a few months earlier. She’d gotten married. I watched it over and over. I sat up, elated, pausing the video to look at her face. She was happy. She was mid-laugh in every photo. I could hear it, that laugh that was like if Phoebe Buffay was a cartoon witch. I recognized other faces from college. They were adjusting her hem, holding her hands, or stiltedly smiling. I was so happy; she deserves nothing less than such joy. I didn’t even notice that I was crying. My simultaneous reactions were extreme. It felt so strange to catch myself in the process of feeling them. I felt guilty the next day when I asked Nur the next day as she got off a work call if I could talk to her. I told her how the two sentiments were completely separate: my genuine happiness for her and my self-pity. I remember them differently, even. I’d pored over every frame because I was desperate to know if she was happy, and she was. I’d cried for a long time, before I called Zoya. Whether I schedule my confiding or not, I feel guilty. Neither Zoya nor Nur had any advice for me; they just listened. Until this time, I thought I’d gotten quite good at letting my friend go. I thought of her now and then. When I read the melodramatic letters of Pliny the Younger, I remembered thinking how funny she would have found them. I remember this one time years ago when she, too, had gone somewhere alone: Paris. I don’t know if she “disappeared,” only that, as she told me later, secretively, that she’d had a grand time. I didn’t pry. Speaking to Zoya and Nur was an admission of defeat. Turns out, I’m still not good enough at letting people go. But it also turns out that nobody expected me to be. Maybe what Zoya had wanted to do was permit me to think I could. Maybe she changed her mind. Either way, she did not say, “told you so.” It was kind. Kinder still to admit that it doesn’t work. Then I knew something else. The problem was considered fixed. For some, it’s easier when a problem can be marked “complete.” I cannot control other people, only myself. A knot tied loose is two or more threads dangling in the wind. Different friends see different hues in us. Those hues don’t disappear just because they aren’t perceived. They’re still there, but it doesn’t feel like it, which is the problem. I hope to reunite with them my whole life. I’ll hold candles for them, like Kevin Garvey in The Leftovers . “People hold candles, Nora,” he tells an old lover, presumed dead for decades. It’s unfathomable to me that people live with regrets they know they will carry. Kindnesses were done. Then they were over. Things were accepted, and with yet more friends, I receded into the black. Which is nowhere at all, or so it feels. This time I’ll tie a different knot. ∎ 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:

“Not only has the neighborhood lost much of its middle-class transnational identity, but it is also being erased in the media and from the collective memory of Dubai. The livelihoods and lifestyles of Karama’s former inhabitants are threatened as the space for economic participation diminishes with the establishment of more exclusive, privatized, and upper-class modes of living and leisure in the area.” INTERACTIVE New Dubai's Capital Accumulation: The Story of Karama AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “Not only has the neighborhood lost much of its middle-class transnational identity, but it is also being erased in the media and from the collective memory of Dubai. The livelihoods and lifestyles of Karama’s former inhabitants are threatened as the space for economic participation diminishes with the establishment of more exclusive, privatized, and upper-class modes of living and leisure in the area.” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Live Dubai Demolition Event In Grief In Solidarity Development Gentrification Karama Jadaliyya Nationalism UAE Street Art Old Dubai New Dubai Dubai Creek Dubai frame Tourism Luxury Tourism Working-Class Spaces Property Rent Gap State-Sponsored Privatization Burj Al Arab Dubai Roads and Transport Abu Dhabi Middle East Capital Capital Expansion Production of Space Wasl Hub Housing Crisis Brand Dubai Deira Enrichment Project Legal Regimes Lack of Legal Recourse The Denial of Citizenship Nationality-based Hierarchies Immigrant Neighborhoods Employment State Modernization Narratives Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Live Dubai 5th Jun 2021 “ Karama: An Immigrant Neighborhood Transformed ” is an essay by writer Bhoomika Ghaghada, published in Jadaliyya . Karama is where Ghaghada grew up. It is a place where Bollywood music was part of the background soundscape, where one could hear people speaking “ in Hindi, Urdu, and Tagalog. ” Of course, that was in the early 2000s—well before the gentrification of Karama began. Flanked by the Dubai frame were “ Old Dubai ” and “ New Dubai, ” signifiers for tourists who wished to see what “ historical ” neighborhoods looked like. Once a trading port and an affordable haven for South Asian immigrants, Karama has convulsed with massive change, what with the expulsion of many of its former residents as part of Dubai's vision of itself: a glitzy, skyscraper-dominated, upper-class, and rarefied space. As part of our online event In Grief, In Solidarity in 2021, Ghaghada—introduced by editor Vamika Sinha—read her poignant and incisive essay, one which is all the more important because of the dearth of writing on and from the large South Asian diaspora in the UAE. This rent gap became apparent and significant enough in 2014, soon after Dubai won the bid to host Expo2020. There was plenty of vacant land in Dubai, but two factors made building in undeveloped areas less attractive. First, Dubai was hit hard by the 2008 global financial recession. A bulk of real estate projects were put on hold and many were canceled. With the help of its neighbor city, Abu Dhabi , the Dubai real estate market would recover over the next five years. Second, developing new areas on the outskirts of the city was a relatively costly endeavor with a slower return on investment. It involved greater planning, land preparation, and setting up comprehensive infrastructure—inner roads from existing arteries, metro lines, and water and power lines. This financial reality made Karama an attractive site for redevelopment and capital expansion. 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:

"For most dissenters in Pakistan, whether it's a movement like the PTM, or journalists critical of the state, the first reaction of the state's representatives is to characterize them as traitors, or funded by foreign governments." COMMUNITY Progressivism in Pakistani Higher Education AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR "For most dissenters in Pakistan, whether it's a movement like the PTM, or journalists critical of the state, the first reaction of the state's representatives is to characterize them as traitors, or funded by foreign governments." SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Interview Karachi Pashtun Tahafuz Movement Postcolonial Feminist Theory Feminist Organizing Progressivism Deniz Kandiyoti Lyari Sociology Mama Qadeer Refusal of Anthropology Anthropology Baloch Missing Persons Slums Dissent State Repression Statelessness Gulalai Ismail Matiullah Jan Lahore LUMS Urbanization Islamophobia Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Interview Karachi 27th Aug 2020 RECOMMENDED: Questioning the ‘Muslim Woman’: Identity and Insecurity in an Urban Indian Locality by Nida Kirmani (Routledge, 2013) 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:

ORGANIZER Tooba Syed Tooba Syed is a grassroots political organizer and gender researcher. She has been organising for over a decade with grassroots movements of peasants, urban working class, students and women. She is a Founding Member and currently Secretary of Information and Publishing of Women Democratic Front and a member of the Awami Workers Party, Punjab. She teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. ORGANIZER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak created a devotional body of work that confronts alienation and Partition, while attending to humanity’s final asylum in the embrace of lifeforms between garden and forest. As his feminist protagonists withdraw, growing increasingly reclusive and almost arboreal amid narratives of class and betrayal, Sumana Roy reflects on Ghatak’s decisive critical creative and technical choices as embodiments of his ethos. | · BOOKS & ARTS Review · Kolkata Ritwik's Trees Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak created a devotional body of work that confronts alienation and Partition, while attending to humanity’s final asylum in the embrace of lifeforms between garden and forest. As his feminist protagonists withdraw, growing increasingly reclusive and almost arboreal amid narratives of class and betrayal, Sumana Roy reflects on Ghatak’s decisive critical creative and technical choices as embodiments of his ethos. Ephemeral III (2025), watercolour on acid-free paper, courtesy of Sonali Sonam. I always put it down to coincidence, the easiest way to explain things. Ritwik Ghatak and I were born on the same day, though half a century apart, and plant life would come to frame the way we both experience the world. I am fifty years old now, exactly the age Ritwik died at. Writing this essay with that awareness—strange as it is confusing—takes my thoughts in directions they might not have otherwise. There’s a tree in Sahaj Path , the first tree I ever saw. That can’t be true, of course, because I would have been about three then, in my first year at school. It is in the generic nature of trees to not be remembered, but this is slightly different. It’s not a blob of green that I remember as a tree; it’s black, black as soot, like burnt tree trunks. The tree, though, is not burnt—it is alive; a human sits inside it, as dark as the tree and its foliage, as dark as its shade. Sounds a bit childish, I know, but no other living form had enchanted me like this. I say ‘living’ with caution and affection, for I would discover a living likeness of the soot-black tree soon. On a bus from Siliguri’s Court More to Bagdogra, where my father’s sister lived—a journey we made no more than twice a year, in spite of the short distance, for the lack of availability of transport and time—I would see it. The bus was moving slowly, its speed curtailed by the rush of workers emerging from the Chandmoni Tea Estate. There it was, outside the window to our left—it hadn’t moved since the last time I’d seen it. A tree exactly like Nandalal Bose’s. Ritwik would have seen that tree in Sahaj Path . It is with such a tree that Meghe Dhaka Tara begins, its branches spread wide, without shyness or self-consciousness, as if to expose its leaves to all the light it could get. It is to the right of the screen, Nita walks out of its shadow. I could also rephrase this: the tree releases Nita into the world after protecting it from the glare of the world, perhaps of life. It is tempting to see the tree as analogous to the protective womb, after which the human is left on its own. For the first forty seconds of the film, the camera looks at things that don’t move—the trees. The camera shows no interest in looking for a human, such is its initial indifference to the centrality of the human figure in art. A woman in white emerges out of the shade and shadow of the trees, a black-and-white contrast emphasised in a black-and-white film; so similar to Nandalal’s linocut. The canvas begins to move. A train passes by. A man is singing, aa aa aa aa . His back is to the audience. The camera isn’t interested in his face. It takes in the vegetation by the riverbank. Sharp, tall grass pierces the top half of the frame; it pokes the sky. From looking for punctures in the sky, we are dragged downwards to the earth, to a torn slipper on a human foot. The camera has become plant-like—it is moving like trees do, in the north–south axis; like plants, it has become indifferent to the human face. After the restoration of attention to human affairs, to the crises of poverty, particularly new poverty (surely there must be a term equivalent to nouveau riche for those suddenly rendered poor by catastrophic circumstances), the camera seems to long for a sighting of the plant world again. Only four minutes have passed. It’s enough to give us a sense of the family whose life we will be following; it’s also enough to tell us that human lives will be complemented and annotated by the histories of their changing neighbours, plant life. ‘Nabin Sangha’ enters the frame. Humans, tall and small, chew the foreground, but it’s only as much real estate as the mouth occupies on the face. Behind them is the sky, made jagged by the uneven height of trees. It is not just an assemblage of different species of trees that we see, but a more urgent history of settlement, of planting. Pollinators, mostly two-footed ones like those in the foreground, are responsible for their settlement on this land. Ritwik is giving us a history of dislocation, of people as much as of plants. The name of the neighbourhood club, common in Bengal and other spaces that came to accommodate Bengalis evicted by the forces of history, is telling—the plants are as ‘nabin’, new, as the humans here; they might soon be propagated to other places, near and far. In Ritwik’s films, we see a new kind of horticultural unit, one that emerged so naturally that it hasn’t been recorded in our architectural or ecological history. Neither garden nor forest, it is as domesticated as it is wild. In Rabindranath Tagore, for instance, we find both an admiration for the beauty of the garden and an instinctive rejection of it as a unit foreign to landscapes and geographical formations such as ours. In practice, both he and his son Rathindranath—who would adopt favourite characteristics of Japanese, Italian, French and Mughal gardens into Santiniketan’s Uttarayan, the cluster of four houses that Rabindranath would design and live in—were internationalists, welcoming of travelling flora from other continents. As a concept, though, Rabindranath seemed to be suspicious of the garden, the way the unit had come to be imported from outside the Indian subcontinent, particularly Europe. The controlling impulse necessary to design and execute gardens would have challenged his ethics and aesthetics. They would have been too neat, too premeditated. ‘Bon’ over ‘bagan’ for him, the forest over the garden, though he would have been thinking of the jungle more than the forest, a space then still outside human intentionality. Satyajit Ray, in his foreword to Ritwik’s book Cinema and I , writes about the latter’s lifelong preoccupation with the Partition, how it shaped his films, gave them their subject and energy. What hasn’t been noticed is how the post-Partition Bengali family is seen through the concomitant new ordering of plant life. Land had been divided; how could the creatures of land, humans and plants, live in older units anymore? ‘Unit’, after all, is the root word for ‘unity’, and, with that gone, how were we to find plants except in fragmented and foraged units? This is what Ritwik—like John Clare, who was disoriented by the Enclosure Act of 1809, the privatisation and fencing of shared land—records in these scenes: broken sentences, broken song, broken land, its broken vegetation. Orchards, forests, gardens, fields, they are units of unbrokenness, a way of looking at the world where looking becomes equivalent to owning. The ambition of the zamindar was to own as far as his eyes could see. The philosophical idea of the plantation must owe to this, the idea of unbroken rows of the same plant, as well as the ownership that comes from this manner of control and ordering. The people in Ritwik’s films do not have the luxury of such a ‘vision’; time limits their lives as much as space does. They live from day to day, and, in Meghe Dhaka Tara , from month to month, salary day to salary day. In this, they are like trees, they who live outside capitalism, outside mortgages and pensions and EMIs. In these films is the ‘bagan’, garden. But the architecture of Ritwik’s gardens is arbitrary, its scope and ambition limited by space and poverty. What can the gardens of a homeless people look like? Indifferent to expectations of geometry and species that had given form and beauty to gardens in Japan and Italy, for instance, these borrowed spaces became an archive of their ad hoc living. Grammatical gardens are a record of ambition and purpose, the gardens in Ritwik’s films are a record of foraging and found plants, found and functional art. The trees are not here to add beauty, just as human faces and bodies do not exist to draw attention to the beauty of their anatomical form. They are just there—like the sky is, or like shadows are, because they are. Our eyes meet them like they do relatives of our own species, without formality or introductions. Yes, they are relatives, for they live alongside humans in residential spaces, by the well and by a stream, bringing shade to a tin-roofed house, fruit to a half-starved family, outliving the human who brought them here. My heart bustles in recognition when I see them, for I grew up in such a neighbourhood myself. In Siliguri’s Ashrampara, my neighbours, families whose memories and eating and living habits were formed by the agricultural produce and rivers of Bangladesh before they, like seeds, were flung into spaces unfamiliar to their ancestors, created such gardens. Chilli plants by a streetside water drain, pumpkin and bottle gourd vines climbing on to tin roofs of kachcha toilets, unseasonal marigold flowers from a leftover garland used to worship a goddess, fresh coriander from seeds scattered near the well, where they grew beside ghritakumari, and there, often, a banana plant offering fruit, flower or stem, and always, always, an assembly of kochu leaves, waiting to be devoured. Roses became fences, valued more for their thorns than their flowers, to keep strangers away more than to attract; the tulsi that would, every Saturday, bring together a congregation hungry for the airy sweetness of batasha, thrown up into the air, Hari-r loot, then gathered from the earth and put urgently inside mouths; shandhya malati and nayantara, that flowered better when neglected; and greens, so many kinds of shak that it seemed the Bengali had evolved from the cow. Every morning, flower thieves, with a lanky bamboo pole in their hands, collecting flowers for their gods, never missing an opportunity to break a branch from a tree to plant in their garden—finding and foraging, planting and pollinating. From the ‘sangha’ to ‘sansar’, the club to the room, Ritwik makes this migration through song: ‘ Ghorete bhromor elo gunguniye ’. The bee’s come singing into the room. Where there is bee, there must be flower? What we have instead of the glamour of flowers—and I’m struggling to remember whether the camera ever pays attention to flowers at all—is bamboo. The strips of bamboo and the stripes of the saree that the women wear mirror each other all through his films until he’s established, almost naturally, that the refugees of his world are like bamboo: this is their habitat, they will stick to each other to form clusters, they will be chopped off from time to time, used, repurposed, taken away from their family, but the roots will allow growth again, life and height, length and the seeking of light, until they are dismembered again. The stripes in the women’s sarees run parallel to each other, like the strips of bamboo in the walls of the room do—the ends of both, saree and fence, have to be cut abruptly. Sometimes they continue on to men’s bodies, to the stripes of their lungi. Perhaps no other filmmaker has documented the culture of everyday bamboo design in eastern India with such an artist’s homely attention as Ritwik. These moments of distraction from the thoroughfare of human traffic are almost akin to a tendril looking for support, for something to hold. The varying rhombuses of bamboo fences give the eye this hold, this pause. The ninth minute of Meghe Dhaka Tara is long, the eye spans and embalms the frame, it takes in details of the weave of the bamboo before it moves to something that Ritwik’s camera turns into its relative: hair, hair on the heads of women, Nita’s in a bun, Gita’s left open, the craft and compulsion of human hands on bamboo visible, as it is in the bun; the freedom of the bamboo groves, alive and loose, as in Gita’s open hair. Nita’s name bears the etymological impress of ethics and morality, a human-brokered life; Gita’s name derives from song, it is freer, as much as music is free, or freer than morality. Ritwik’s eyes look for echoes, they find it—echoes of bamboo in the sarees, particularly those that Gita wears, where the shadow-and-light serve-and-volley dims and glows. About a quarter of an hour has passed. Ritwik returns the trees of the first scene to us, we now see more of them, more of their bodies; we see more of the river, too, which pushes the trees out of the frame slightly, gently. What takes up space are the shadows of these large-bodied trees, their girth a visible birth certificate, a mark of fixity, perhaps even of constancy, who can tell, in contrast to the river whose water moves, like the people in the film. The brother—played by Anil Chatterjee, in one of the most unforgettable characters in cinematic history—sings, his accompanists are birds, they cry, though I don’t know why the English language calls their tongue ‘bird cries’. Like a musician uses caesura, Ritwik uses music: for a break between stanzas. In the film’s first scene, Nita emerges from the trees, not exactly like Venus from the sea in Botticelli, but the shared lineage of human and the elements, plant and person, is established right away. A little more than a quarter of an hour later, she walks from the right to the left of the screen. Her brother sits under a tree, rehearsing. Ritwik ensures that we see him as part of the tree trunk, the bodies of humans assimilated by the camera’s angle as once was possible in mythology; Nita, too, is part of this gift of the gaze: she, her brother’s lone audience, melds with the aerial branches of the tree. She, provider, sister, daughter, girlfriend, has to become more than one species. This is why Nita moves out of her Krishnachura- and Radhachura-like body to become bamboo soon after, the transition happening as soon as she gives some money to her brother. It’s Nita’s birthday. A Jagaddhatri Pujo will take place. Ritwik has decided to abandon subtlety. Jagaddhatri, as her name indicates, is a goddess of the earth; according to the Kena Upanishad, she asks the elements, Agni and Varuna and Vayu, to move a blade of grass. Ritwik takes Nita, her father and brother to something like grass. Coconut and betelnut trees, tall, and taller than the hills in the background. They walk on the unlaid road, through marshland and paddy fields, the stalks ankle-deep in water. Other species crop up on the screen: boatman, shaluk, lotus. ‘Poetry of the earth is never dead,’ one of the characters says. Jagaddhatri; the plants. Ritwik doesn’t leave it there—like Bibhutibhushan in Pather Panchali , he emphasises the beauty that can be had by those without money, like Apu’s sister Durga in the novel, like Nita’s singer-brother in this film. ‘Dhanyo khetra’, the blessed land, the land of such agricultural bounty is a phrase central to Ritwik’s vision. For the Bengali audience, there would also be the cultural conditioning of ‘ Dhono dhanye pushpe bhora ’ of D.L. Roy’s song, the celebration, in spite of Partition, of the plentiful plant life that made Jibanananda’s ‘Rupashi Bangla’. Children run out of a small school a few scenes later. As if to frame this freedom, Ghatak allows a branch to graze the frame from the left. To him, the plant world is a metaphor that emphasises, by contrast, the unfreedom of social life. ‘How do you all stay indoors in the evening? I find it difficult to breathe,’ says Gita, to which Sanat, still undecided between the two women, ‘music’ and ‘morality’, offers to take Nita out for a walk. Their house is framed by trees, their father by an umbrella, the heads of both mirroring each other, as it is possible only in a drawing book. Sanat complains about Nita being chained down by responsibilities, to which she offers a stronger metaphor for the loss of freedom: ‘Besh toh, make a glass frame and put me inside it, like a wax doll.’ And, almost immediately, two opposites are offered: marshland and meadow, there is freedom in both, even if there is stickiness. For when Nita stands up to go, leaves stick to her saree. Over and over again, Ritwik turns her into a tree, a giving tree. A job has been found, she requests her brother to drop her off at Sealdah. The landscape changes; it’s thornier, wilder. The tree is different—it is no longer on the right side of the screen but the left; it has more branches than leaves, it is less spread out, some of its branches even amputated. Soon, the camera is on the brother. He’s singing, entering the world of plants, whose bodies are flecked by light and shade; wild grass waits nearby in every frame. Nita, though, was doing the opposite, emerging from the trees. The camera refuses to move; it has become the tree. Nita passes by, he asks her for twenty-five paise, to shave, and the camera begins moving. The brother runs after her, his shadow slightly thinner than the older, time-fed trees. The branches offer shade, they also stand rooted while humans are rendered homeless. The camera, momentarily happy to be a tree, now begins running—it, too, is scared of becoming homeless. Catching up with her, he realises that it is not his sister, only someone in the same generic white saree with a slim border. The unknown woman smiles. Her eyes are downcast, instead of the goddess’ halo, her bust-sized image: the white saree with the border running like a train line whose other track has been eaten by time or water; the echo of that thin horizontal line in the vertical strap of her handbag, a marker of her working woman status, a new self in a new land. Not halo but branches of trees crowd the frame. She is of the trees, even if she has a face, even if she is human. The woman smiles. The brother laughs. He begins singing. Another tree appears. Now it’s to the right of the screen. He is standing under it and singing. The camera moves with him as he walks. His shadow moves. The shadows of the branches remain still. He moves from right to left, a bit like the Urdu script at first, and then like musical notation, the arohan and abarohan, travelling to and fro, to and fro, the return to the ‘sama’, the home. But where is home? Do shadows return to the trees at night? Ritwik changes the composition of the halo that announces a goddess’ status. The branches of trees a little while ago, now it’s smoke from the mother’s cooking that frames her face, so that the halo is diffused, a blur, in spite of the branches of the trees right behind, as distant as cloud. Another woman enters—her hair is open, her saree is striped, the bamboo seems to be emerging out of her body, she goes out for a walk by the lake. It is Gita, with Sanat. Nita is walking back home. Irregular dots of darkness fill the screen—blobs of tree heads, their fraternal twins lying as shadows on the ground, more restful. Nita’s face is dark, light falls on a portion of her hips. Books clutched to her chest, she walks; her sister and boyfriend are sitting by the water, singing. Nita looks, then looks away, and walks past the scene. The camera moves to the sister and her new audience. Her shoulder-length hair has been left open. For a moment, they look like branches of the tree behind her—both move. The camera moves too. Gita is laughing after her flirtatious sermon to Sanat about staring at her with his mouth open. Nandalal’s tree, from Sahaj Path , is behind her. Its many branches make her look like a many-armed Durga; the man is made to look like Mahishasur. She jumps, he follows. We are inside stripes again: bamboo walls, fences, light and darkness. The composition is of an afterlife of the plant world—wooden windows with sticks inside them that keep animals away and divide the sky and the view. The sister in the striped saree enters through the gate; all is bamboo and wood, even the sister. Ritwik takes care to emphasise their form and texture, a continuation of their life, a life made possible by a new host and a new environment, like the refugees of Partition have had to adapt to. Bamboo and smoke, different as they are in behaviour, move in various patterns and orientations, making the walls of the house look like a happy museum of the afterlife of trees themselves. From inside the house, various kinds of plant life emerge, among them, paisleys trapped inside diamond-shaped cages on Gita’s blouse. Things change, Sanat and Gita are married, living in a flat in the city: the bamboo patterns, Nita’s saree, now in a dark colour. Instead of a house scavenged and salvaged from bodies of plants, we see a skylight in iron frames. The soft stripes of bamboo and clotheslines and sarees have given way to the stern lines of glass and steel, staircases and doorframes, ventilators and windows. Nita’s bag is now a pattern of checks. The door curtain, in all likelihood a Manipuri weave not uncommon at that time, has diamond-shaped rhombuses. As soon as the door opens, the camera moves to the solid lines of the threshold. These lines are bureaucratic, they keep apartments sturdy, they want to serve ambitions of permanence; how different they are from bamboo, in whose DNA it is to be ad hoc. Smoke cruises up here, too, but it’s not the smoke of Nita’s mother’s kitchen; not clay oven but ashtray. Ritwik is showing us the props of culture: a Bankura clay elephant stands beside truncated shadows of window bars, tuberoses in a vase on the table, puppets on the wooden cupboard, nature is being diminished here, everywhere. But the camera is restless for the lines in Nita’s home, its stripes: clothes, clotheslines, serrated tin roofs, bamboo nailed together, diagonally falling shadows. These are informal lines and rhombuses that derive from the grace of the natural world. It is the freedom of this informality that allows shadows to enter frames before human figures, shadows picking clothes from ropes and wires, slightly ghost-like, more like trees. Ritwik relies on the light-and-shadow opera to highlight the human drama through the eaters of light, the trees. After the light and night of ‘ Je raate mor duwarguli bhanglo jhore ’, of ‘ shob je hoye gyalo kalo ’, of everything turned dark, the camera moves like a plant, like the eye, searching for light. And then it moves like writing in the Devanagari script: trees and houses, conical tops, roofs, tin, concrete, all of these in a rush, so that it seems like the camera wants to escape from homes and the homeless for now, till it rests and waits, on foliage, on plants, to the ad hoc gardens that connect inside our eyes to indulge the sense of what is now called ‘social forestry’. The father, leaning against a tree for support, speaks to a doctor about Nita. One displacement happens after another—Nita, first rendered homeless by history, now moves out of the house to a bamboo room nearby, her equivalent of a temporary tent, her ‘nirbandhobpuri’, a town without friends; then she has to leave home for Reid Chest Hospital, another instalment of displacement. Ritwik begins making her more tree-like with greater urgency, as if that could protect her. After the audience’s discovery of her tuberculosis, we meet the trees—they take over the screen, Nita’s head now a blob emerging from the lower bottom of the screen. She’s being displaced from the screen too, history repeating itself over and over again. In a darker saree now, she’s the colour of tree trunks and branches, until she merges with the tree trunk in a scene. Ritwik is cutting out something else simultaneously—shade and shadow. By the ninetieth minute, the shade of trees is gone. There’s just bare land, the shadows of the trees far away are like birds whose shadows don’t reach the earth. A train cuts the screen. She, like the trees, doesn’t move. A couple of minutes later, she opens her umbrella standing under a tree, a double umbrella as it were. Every now and then, Ritwik’s camera surveys the land: palms of various kinds, a leafless plumeria, after the news of Gita’s pregnancy. In the foreboding of both birth and death, Ritwik turns to plants. After the camera shows us Nita’s blood-stained handkerchief, we see trees moving wildly in a storm, and her curly hair, as if they were relatives. The vegetation around Reid Chest Hospital is different—a coniferous-looking tree stands to the left of the frame, it offers no shade, only the fur of fog and the skin of the sky. Nita is sitting, her brother comes with news about Gita’s son, their two-storeyed house, until she breaks into one of the most famous dialogues in Bangla cinema: ‘ Dada, aami kintu bachte cheyechhilam ’, Dada, I did want to live … The camera loses balance as it were and surveys the trees. That’s how the film ends—with tree and tree and tree, almost like how it began, except for the woman who has gone missing from life, from the screen. ******* Fifteen seconds into Subarnarekha , no image has been given to us, nothing except the auditory, ‘Vande Mataram’. The first visual: trees, slim, unrevealing of age, a bamboo in the middle, another an arc; the cohabitation of various sizes, even shapes. The Indian flag goes up on the bamboo pole; another bamboo, bent, serves as trellis over a gate. In bamboo as flag pole, Ritwik is hoping for the new Indian nation to have the tensile strength of bamboo, to be flexible, supportive and all-purpose, for all its citizens to make whatever they can of it. For the moment, though, there’s chaos and uncertainty, differences more than unity—a teacher in a new school teaches English and history, another Bengali and Sanskrit, history and historiography available only to those living in English; Dhaka versus Pabna; caste divisions. A child’s mother is lost. The word ‘udbastu’, refugee, floats around. Gandhi’s assassination emerges as newsprint in a newspaper office. Nabajibon Colony, the new settlement for those without homes, is constructed almost entirely of bamboo, as if the new (‘naba’) life (‘jibon’) must have the plant’s resilience. Ritwik draws the opposition between the old and new through metaphor. Both the sarod and the ektara are musical instruments that derive from plant life, but he gives us classical music before a Baul’s song. Hence bamboo—for the people, like the people; the roofs, doors, windows and walls of the houses in Nabajibon Colony, the Baul’s musical instrument. In the first ten minutes of the film named after a river, we see bamboo being split and cut everywhere. Partition, people, plants. A bamboo republic. Ghatshila’s plants enter the census of our imagination: bamboo, banana, papaya, species that grow easily, often on their own, without care, like these people must. When the little girl Sita asks her brother whether Abhiram, the boy who has lost his mother, will come with them to the new place, we are given no answer, only a sign, almost Buddha-like—she plucks a flower and leaves. The mill, where her brother has found work, is beside a sal forest. After reaching Ghatshila, the first thing Sita says is, ‘Dadamoni, come and see how beautiful the garden is …’. The little boy Abhi is still crying. An oleander—poisonous oleander—stands behind him. Rabindranath’s song sprouts: ‘ Aaj dhaner khete roudrochhayay lukochuri khyala re bhai, lukochuri khyala ’. Sunlight and shade are playing hide-and-seek on the paddy fields … What grass was to Jibanananda Das, paddy is to Ritwik. It’s to the paddy fields that his homeless want to return. Paddy and bamboo, related sub-families. We see a barren landscape from time to time, stony, bare-branched trees, but in their forms is still the intimation of being alive—unlike the ruins of the aircraft from World War II, with its exposed steel rods, weeds around it, the camera making it look like a foreigner, a UFO, the runway unfriendly, trees pushed to its corners, like eyelashes in the eyes. Sita and Abhi run through a place with different kinds of plant life: the bare and low, spiky and tender leaves. Some of these are inside the ruins of the airfield’s buildings; no roof or inhabitants, no windows, no doors, only frames, like the leafless trees. Ritwik is intentional. The little girl is called Sita for a reason, the story of her name from the Ramayana is abridged for us in a dialogue—how the Sita of the epic was found in an agricultural field, her link with ploughing cultures, and, though we are not told this yet, how Sita returns to the earth after her test by fire, a premonition of what is to happen to the Sita of this film. ‘Sita is the daughter of the earth …’ We are shown that earth: of rocks, river, bark, stone and trees with tiny heads, and tiny human heads half-hidden among large rocks. Outside their house are lonely species: a few palms, shrubs, skinny young trees, standing without discipline or order. They are at home. Abhi returns from the city, educated and eager to finish writing his novel based in Ghatshila, for which he has found a ‘big publisher’. Both he and Sita are surprised to find each other grown up, their bodies longer, their hearts in longing, they walk through the sal forest. The trees are tall, very tall—the camera, so long habituated to a sparser population of trees, goes a bit mad, it begins moving from left to right, taking in the trees one by one, until it is overwhelmed. This is Ritwik’s interpretation of Wordsworth’s ‘Ten thousand saw I at a glance’—the uncountability of this unit of plant life, its impress, its freedom and rush, its nurturing and caging. The sense of time—and space—in the forest, where one can’t tell when the first tree was planted, that this is a history very different from those that have been written about human lives, allows Abhi to begin talking about his novel. It might have been classified as autofiction today. He begins narrating the story of his life, third person to himself. Walking towards the trees, he raises his arms—they become branches, and he a tree for a moment. The camera then moves to the back of his head, so that he, like the other citizens of the forest, becomes part of this republic of faceless beings, the trees. He asks her a question, to which she says ‘no’. Light and its opposite fall on her face, and the camera integrates her into the blur of trees behind. How long has she felt like this, this ‘love’, Abhi asks Sita, without using the word. ‘A long time,’ she replies. The camera goes berserk in trying to capture this sense of Time—Ritwik does a few 360 degrees, all we see are the trees of this forest, long trunks, and then the river. Abhi and Sita return to bamboo, to home, to the vines that are growing on bamboo trellises, to the houseplants. Occasionally, we spot oleander, a palm or two, overgrown green in the pilot’s clubhouse, or a flower vase on a table when someone says ‘caste is everything’. When Abhi’s mother dies and he recognizes her from memory, Ritwik takes us to the child Abhi and where is he? Swinging from a tree, like only a little boy can. Twenty seconds later, after the graceful undulations of the roots from which the little boy was hanging, and the shade of the banyan, both unquantifiable and amorphous, we see the sternness of electric poles in a railway station. Their relationship is shown through plant metaphors: trees skirt the agricultural fields as they talk, while the tanpura, made from a gourd, is strung; when the wedding is fixed against her wishes, a dry palm leaf scratches the frame; when Abhi leaves and Sita asks whom she should share her sorrow with, the camera shows treetops far away. The wedding day arrives. The alpana of paddy stalks, grain and leaves sit on the floor, leading our eyes to Sita, whose face is painted with stylised designs from the agricultural world. And suddenly she’s gone. A woman says that she was scribbling something. The camera focuses on the alpana, its details, leaf and leaf and stalk and leaf, and the plant alpana grows and glows towards light. Years pass, trees and peace have disappeared from their lives in the cramped city. Listening to her sing, the little son asks, ‘Ma, what do the dhaaner khet, the paddy fields, look like?’ The song will return at the end of the film, but, before that, there are other plants. Haraprasad, having lost everything that he valued, returns to Iswar and tells him that he’s a ‘baajey-pora taal gaachh’, a blasted palm tree. The landscape turns barren gradually. In the end, though, the little boy Binu, orphaned, stands with Iswar, his newly found maternal uncle, under a tree. They have just got off the train, Iswar has been asked to vacate his residential quarters. Homeless once again, the camera turns to a tree. And then to song and soil, to the wave on the paddy fields—the literal and the figurative find a home: ‘ Dhaaner khete dheu …’ The film ends as it had begun—by resting on plants. ******* Water in instalments, river, rain, ripple, inside boat, on plant, on tree. Water and sand, mother and child, river and bank. Trees by the river, like ripples of heads. Three minutes of this survey of life by the river Titas, and our eyes rest on an old tree at last—we meet its relatives, not on land, but their reflections on water. Soon more, not alive but their afterlife: boats, trees now travelling on water, unimaginable during their life on land; bamboo, fence, wall, house, basket, where grain is being winnowed, thatched homes. They come alive again, rounded trees and dancing papaya plants. They return to water, to boat, its wood, but mostly its bamboo, arcs and shelter, fish caught and put in baskets, covered with a flat woven bamboo piece. To land again, where the tree’s roots are, where they provide the shade necessary for dance and home, for celebration under trees. The canopy—tree branches become Ritwik’s sky; two tree branches connect two corners of the screen, like a ceiling connects walls; men fight with them too, with bamboo. Ritwik begins to make us see, again, the optical osmosis between plant and person ... ... an unconscious woman in a man’s arms, horizontal, is like the tree branches in the following scene; the floral patterns on the bride’s forehead, the wedding garlands, the eating and rejection of light, darkness and luminosity, how Ritwik’s camera catches light falling on the flowers in the garden and those on the wedding saree, the shola kadam flower on the topor, the groom’s crown. These are echoed visually by the houses of bamboo and straw, as if they too were topor-like, and the palm tree behind the small temple. At the moment of leaving her parents’, the bride weeps holding a plant—the holy basil in the tulsi mancha—and her butterfly tiara makes her plant-like. There is no getting away from this way of seeing. Ritwik shows us the boatman’s katha, its stylised botanical patterns; he warns the husband about his wife’s beauty gathering attention with a proverb borrowed from—what else?—the plant world: ‘ Lau er opor najar lagau na kintu ’, be careful that the bottle gourd doesn’t catch attention. A close-up of the woman’s middle-parted hair is turned into a relative of the sugarcane leaf’s long midrib; shadows of leaves dance on the bodies of women so that their bodies and limbs become branches. Ram’s aged, scraggly beard is not very different from the straw hanging from the roof. There’s the stamp of the botanical everywhere: flowers on dhaak, diamond patterns of bamboo designs in kitchens, straight lines of jute sticks, bow and arrow; a galaxy of water hyacinth amidst which sit planets of boats, boats of potatoes. Tree shadows lick the water everywhere, old trees snuggle up to their shortened noon shadows, the dheki moves up and down and up and down, avoiding the hand that feeds it grain, crushing grain. Men and women erupt in anger, the violence of the plant idiom: ‘ Tomarey kauwa ja, oi dhaan khete giye kauwao ta ’, telling you something is like telling the paddy field … The little boy’s name is Ananta. Infinite. He runs through the paddy fields blowing a paper horn. Nabajibon, paddy, bamboo, it is to this that Ritwik returns, this is how history is reborn. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Review Kolkata Ritwik Ghatak East India West Bengal Arboreal Cinema Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 12th Mar 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:

In the wake of the devastating effects of the monsoon season in 2022, villagers in Sindh contend with the loss of their livelihoods and the ecological disaster that’s become increasingly familiar. Sabu Khan Buriro was initially submerged, but the nearby Hamal Lake continued to overflow. Villagers, distrustful of the indifferent and lethargic Pakistani state, took it upon themselves to maintain and strengthen flood protection bunds. THE VERTICAL Dispatch from a Village Near Hamal Lake, Sindh, in August In the wake of the devastating effects of the monsoon season in 2022, villagers in Sindh contend with the loss of their livelihoods and the ecological disaster that’s become increasingly familiar. Sabu Khan Buriro was initially submerged, but the nearby Hamal Lake continued to overflow. Villagers, distrustful of the indifferent and lethargic Pakistani state, took it upon themselves to maintain and strengthen flood protection bunds. Ibrahim Buriro The weather in northwest Sindh remained hot and humid a month after the torrential monsoon spell that wreaked havoc in the region. Among the ceaseless deluge, the struggle to save major cities in northwest Sindh, such as Dadu, Sehwan, Johi, Mehar, and Warah, continued. In the aftermath, people themselves have taken charge of strengthening and monitoring flood protection bunds, reflecting mistrust of the state and its elected officials. As per the official statistics, which are still believed to be under-reported, rainwater and floods have impacted 33 million people, displaced nearly 10 million, and killed more than 1500. 1.5 million houses and a million livestock have also been lost, and hundreds of thousands of acres of crop fields—15% of the country’s rice crop and 40% of its cotton—have been ruined. The full picture of the destruction will only emerge once the water level recedes and surveying becomes possible. On the morning of 24th August, our village, Sabu Khan Buriro, was flooded due to intense water pressure from the overflowing Hamal Lake. The rising water soon breached the flood protection bund, and as water gushed into our village, our priority was to bring our valuables and belongings to dry patches of land. Wading through waist-deep water and in some areas chest deep water, people couldn’t take anything other than bed sheets, charpoys and some rice and wheat grains. They were forced to retreat to elevated surfaces like the flood protection bunds, which were soon packed with people and their belongings. Official rescue efforts are rare in these areas, but surprisingly, the district administration sent 5 mini trucks to evacuate the village. In a state of panic and shock as the water submerged the village, the people were evacuated and most of us ended up on the road. But this is not a story about my village alone. It’s the story of an entire region dispossessed by the floods and unprecedented rains, and the specter of poor governance, unchecked capitalism, and climate disregard that has enabled ecological collapse. Mass migration has begun. Families on the roads are forced to stay on charpoys without shelter, food is scarce, and people are struggling with basic necessities. Many people left for cities unwillingly to save their lives, but still there are hundreds who stayed back in dry areas near villages to look after their livestock or moved to safer places with the help of local boats as flood water levels increased. Thanks to the timely help of comrades from the Women Democratic Front, a Pakistan-based socialist-feminist organization, in our village, my family and I succeeded in rescuing essential goods before the village was delinked from mainland Sindh. This is the story of an entire region dispossessed by the floods and unprecedented rains, and the specter of poor governance, unchecked capitalism, and climate disregard that has enabled ecological collapse. One of the biggest challenges we are facing after rescuing our families is making contact with people who decided to stay behind. When the flooding began, the elected MPA’s family, a major feudal family in the area, instructed people to leave, but many refused in order to look after their livestock and save what little grain they could. It's impossible for 'elected' MPAs and feudal families to understand the logic of village residents. Our livestock and the rice and wheat saved from last year’s harvest are all we own. It is difficult for villagers to leave the only assets they rely upon at the mercy of the government, because we’ve learned over our lifetimes that the government isn't serious about helping people in the long term, indulging instead in corruption around flood relief goods without any long-term planning. Many of the villagers migrating have brought cattle and other livestock with them, fearing the animals would suffer from deadly ailments. Caring for the livestock and arranging for their fodder has become an additional responsibility on top of people’s own survival, but to neglect them would further threaten people’s livelihoods. The livestock and the products they offer—wool, eggs, milk, and more—are not only a source of essential nutrients, but social wealth as well. With their crops destroyed and livestock impacted, people are left with no source of earning or income for the year ahead. As villages and crop fields have turned into lakes and wetlands, cities, water sieged from all sides and acting as makeshift refugee shelters for flood-impacted people, have become a breeding ground for different diseases. Diarrhea, malaria, fever, skin diseases, and respiratory illnesses are spreading, and one of the major priorities for flood-displaced people has been the provision of medical care along with food. But in addition to physical ailments, for displaced persons, the traumatic experience of losing their homes and becoming refugees has led to psychological issues that largely go untreated and ignored. In the medical camp that we organized through the Awami Workers Party and Women Democratic Front's help, many patients, unable to sleep at night or during the day, asked about sleeping pills. This trauma has been repeating, and worsening, for those living in the floodplains of the Indus. My grandfather's brother, Hakim Ali, who is visually impaired, has spent 60 years in the fields and villages of our region. He learned to herd with his brothers in childhood and then passed that knowledge onto his sons, and now grandsons and granddaughters. He has brilliantly memorized how to navigate around the village and the grasslands around Hamal Lake, and in the mountains and fields of Kachu. He says he has never before witnessed such a long monsoon. This is the first time in his life that he has had to take refuge in a city. Signs of despair and restlessness are visible in his body language, as limited space in the city has snatched his freedom to move about in familiar open spaces. The unique experiences of each impacted person tell a tale about people's relationships with their surroundings, land, and ecology. In addition to physical ailments, for displaced persons, the traumatic experience of losing their homes and becoming refugees has led to psychological issues that largely go untreated and ignored. I first experienced displacement when I was in the 8th grade due to the floods in 2007. We lost our wooden and mud huts and were forced to take refuge in Kamber city, 30 kilometers to the east towards the Indus River. Again in 2010 floods destroyed our houses, crops, livestock, and everything on which we had established our livelihoods. My parents spent the next couple of years selling assets like crops and livestock, saving up bit by bit to slowly build a solid house for us. One summer it was a mud-made room, the next, it would be a wooden part of the house. Enduring in this way, our parents made a house out of their labor, patience, care, and most of all, love. Now, a decade later, we’ve once again lost our homes and entire livelihoods. Located along the edge of Hamal Lake in Kamber Shahdadkot District, Sindh, we and hundreds of our fellow villagers have been facing an ongoing water crisis for several years now. Due to water scarcity in the Indus River and little rainfall, Hamal Lake has been completely parched for the past couple of years. Last summer many pastoral families from our village and nearby villages who completely rely on the lake migrated nearer to the Indus for grasslands and herding. When this monsoon started, the long awaited rainfall bore happiness and hope—the hope of rebuilding the lake, of rebuilding the livelihoods entirely dependent on wetlands, of food for our livestock in the arid zones of Kachu where rain creates the possibility for grasslands to emerge. In the last couple of decades, however, rain has either become scarce or bursts forth and the dry soil is unable to soak it in, leading to floods and bringing misery and destruction in another form. The rain continued for a month. At one point it rained for 72 hours without a break. As monsoon spells came to an end in the second half of August, my family, village, and nearby villagers lost everything they had invested in the land: rice crop seeds, rice paddies, fertilizers, and their labor. People here depend on crops, livestock, and Hamal Lake’s wood and fish. In these desperate times, it’s a harsh reminder of how working people and farmers suffer doubly in an extremely unequal and unjust state and society. The government has not learned anything from the floods that have marked the second half of the twentieth century. During the floods of the 1990s, 2007, and 2010, cities had remained safe, but this time, what many are comparing to a doomsday, continuous rain has hardly left any home undamaged. Other than its capital city Karachi, every sphere of public life in Sindh has been disrupted. As village life is uprooted and completely devastated, semi-urban or urban areas aren't safe as well. Food crises have worsened, and inflation is skyrocketing as wheat flour mill owners and small shopkeepers to big dealers hike up prices to cash in on the miseries of the flood-displaced population. The rain continued for a month. At one point it rained for 72 hours without a break. As monsoon spells came to an end in the second half of August, my family, village, and nearby villagers lost everything they had invested in the land: rice crop seeds, rice paddies, fertilizers, and their labor. Climate change is intensifying the monsoon spells. When Hamal Lake dried up last year, it destroyed livestock and wildlife, the livelihoods of millions of people who depend entirely on the lake to make their ends meet. The story of Pakistan's largest lake, Lake Manchar, is no different. In recent years, it has been either completely parched or filled with contaminated water. When rain is scarce, the Indus River water is diverted to upper stream areas or dammed. But this year it’s threatening to inundate two districts in Sindh. These dual problems of drying and overfilling are directly connected to monsoon cycles becoming increasingly unpredictable in nature. According to environmental scientists, Pakistan is the sixth most vulnerable country to climate-related changes. From dried lakes to heavy monsoons, scorching heat waves and extreme winters, this is already our reality. Local, provincial, and federal governments lack preparation for climate emergencies, and their inefficiency in addressing these crises has furthered people's suffering. We can't let governments hide behind words like ‘unprecedented,’ 'natural disaster,’ or ‘punishment due to our sins.’ These are man-made disasters and a crisis of governance at the regional and international level. Economic priorities of profiteering at the cost of ecological disruption have resulted in mass miseries for the working classes. In the epoch of the Anthropocene, worsening air quality, water scarcity, extreme heatwaves and unprecedented rains are becoming a regular feature, not just devastating entire livelihoods but disrupting entire populations. Rain and floods in Sindh are not natural disasters but manifestations of inadequate infrastructure planning as well as consequences of inappropriate efforts to mold and control nature. Rivers, lakes, and natural water streams pave their own ways through the land, and disturbing their natural routes is only causing disasters. If we are to save ourselves from these devastating monster monsoons—as they are being called this year—or deadly heat waves, we need to radically rethink our relationship with nature. We collectively need to reassess our misplaced and delusional drive to alter nature according to our unbridled desires. We need to call out the elephant in the room: Capitalism. And we need to put reins on the unprecedented commodification of everything. If we do not do this and organize against this life-threatening crisis, we will be left with nothing to take protection or refuge in. Each season of the year in South Asia will bring with it a hitherto unknown face of devastation. ∎ The weather in northwest Sindh remained hot and humid a month after the torrential monsoon spell that wreaked havoc in the region. Among the ceaseless deluge, the struggle to save major cities in northwest Sindh, such as Dadu, Sehwan, Johi, Mehar, and Warah, continued. In the aftermath, people themselves have taken charge of strengthening and monitoring flood protection bunds, reflecting mistrust of the state and its elected officials. As per the official statistics, which are still believed to be under-reported, rainwater and floods have impacted 33 million people, displaced nearly 10 million, and killed more than 1500. 1.5 million houses and a million livestock have also been lost, and hundreds of thousands of acres of crop fields—15% of the country’s rice crop and 40% of its cotton—have been ruined. The full picture of the destruction will only emerge once the water level recedes and surveying becomes possible. On the morning of 24th August, our village, Sabu Khan Buriro, was flooded due to intense water pressure from the overflowing Hamal Lake. The rising water soon breached the flood protection bund, and as water gushed into our village, our priority was to bring our valuables and belongings to dry patches of land. Wading through waist-deep water and in some areas chest deep water, people couldn’t take anything other than bed sheets, charpoys and some rice and wheat grains. They were forced to retreat to elevated surfaces like the flood protection bunds, which were soon packed with people and their belongings. Official rescue efforts are rare in these areas, but surprisingly, the district administration sent 5 mini trucks to evacuate the village. In a state of panic and shock as the water submerged the village, the people were evacuated and most of us ended up on the road. But this is not a story about my village alone. It’s the story of an entire region dispossessed by the floods and unprecedented rains, and the specter of poor governance, unchecked capitalism, and climate disregard that has enabled ecological collapse. Mass migration has begun. Families on the roads are forced to stay on charpoys without shelter, food is scarce, and people are struggling with basic necessities. Many people left for cities unwillingly to save their lives, but still there are hundreds who stayed back in dry areas near villages to look after their livestock or moved to safer places with the help of local boats as flood water levels increased. Thanks to the timely help of comrades from the Women Democratic Front, a Pakistan-based socialist-feminist organization, in our village, my family and I succeeded in rescuing essential goods before the village was delinked from mainland Sindh. This is the story of an entire region dispossessed by the floods and unprecedented rains, and the specter of poor governance, unchecked capitalism, and climate disregard that has enabled ecological collapse. One of the biggest challenges we are facing after rescuing our families is making contact with people who decided to stay behind. When the flooding began, the elected MPA’s family, a major feudal family in the area, instructed people to leave, but many refused in order to look after their livestock and save what little grain they could. It's impossible for 'elected' MPAs and feudal families to understand the logic of village residents. Our livestock and the rice and wheat saved from last year’s harvest are all we own. It is difficult for villagers to leave the only assets they rely upon at the mercy of the government, because we’ve learned over our lifetimes that the government isn't serious about helping people in the long term, indulging instead in corruption around flood relief goods without any long-term planning. Many of the villagers migrating have brought cattle and other livestock with them, fearing the animals would suffer from deadly ailments. Caring for the livestock and arranging for their fodder has become an additional responsibility on top of people’s own survival, but to neglect them would further threaten people’s livelihoods. The livestock and the products they offer—wool, eggs, milk, and more—are not only a source of essential nutrients, but social wealth as well. With their crops destroyed and livestock impacted, people are left with no source of earning or income for the year ahead. As villages and crop fields have turned into lakes and wetlands, cities, water sieged from all sides and acting as makeshift refugee shelters for flood-impacted people, have become a breeding ground for different diseases. Diarrhea, malaria, fever, skin diseases, and respiratory illnesses are spreading, and one of the major priorities for flood-displaced people has been the provision of medical care along with food. But in addition to physical ailments, for displaced persons, the traumatic experience of losing their homes and becoming refugees has led to psychological issues that largely go untreated and ignored. In the medical camp that we organized through the Awami Workers Party and Women Democratic Front's help, many patients, unable to sleep at night or during the day, asked about sleeping pills. This trauma has been repeating, and worsening, for those living in the floodplains of the Indus. My grandfather's brother, Hakim Ali, who is visually impaired, has spent 60 years in the fields and villages of our region. He learned to herd with his brothers in childhood and then passed that knowledge onto his sons, and now grandsons and granddaughters. He has brilliantly memorized how to navigate around the village and the grasslands around Hamal Lake, and in the mountains and fields of Kachu. He says he has never before witnessed such a long monsoon. This is the first time in his life that he has had to take refuge in a city. Signs of despair and restlessness are visible in his body language, as limited space in the city has snatched his freedom to move about in familiar open spaces. The unique experiences of each impacted person tell a tale about people's relationships with their surroundings, land, and ecology. In addition to physical ailments, for displaced persons, the traumatic experience of losing their homes and becoming refugees has led to psychological issues that largely go untreated and ignored. I first experienced displacement when I was in the 8th grade due to the floods in 2007. We lost our wooden and mud huts and were forced to take refuge in Kamber city, 30 kilometers to the east towards the Indus River. Again in 2010 floods destroyed our houses, crops, livestock, and everything on which we had established our livelihoods. My parents spent the next couple of years selling assets like crops and livestock, saving up bit by bit to slowly build a solid house for us. One summer it was a mud-made room, the next, it would be a wooden part of the house. Enduring in this way, our parents made a house out of their labor, patience, care, and most of all, love. Now, a decade later, we’ve once again lost our homes and entire livelihoods. Located along the edge of Hamal Lake in Kamber Shahdadkot District, Sindh, we and hundreds of our fellow villagers have been facing an ongoing water crisis for several years now. Due to water scarcity in the Indus River and little rainfall, Hamal Lake has been completely parched for the past couple of years. Last summer many pastoral families from our village and nearby villages who completely rely on the lake migrated nearer to the Indus for grasslands and herding. When this monsoon started, the long awaited rainfall bore happiness and hope—the hope of rebuilding the lake, of rebuilding the livelihoods entirely dependent on wetlands, of food for our livestock in the arid zones of Kachu where rain creates the possibility for grasslands to emerge. In the last couple of decades, however, rain has either become scarce or bursts forth and the dry soil is unable to soak it in, leading to floods and bringing misery and destruction in another form. The rain continued for a month. At one point it rained for 72 hours without a break. As monsoon spells came to an end in the second half of August, my family, village, and nearby villagers lost everything they had invested in the land: rice crop seeds, rice paddies, fertilizers, and their labor. People here depend on crops, livestock, and Hamal Lake’s wood and fish. In these desperate times, it’s a harsh reminder of how working people and farmers suffer doubly in an extremely unequal and unjust state and society. The government has not learned anything from the floods that have marked the second half of the twentieth century. During the floods of the 1990s, 2007, and 2010, cities had remained safe, but this time, what many are comparing to a doomsday, continuous rain has hardly left any home undamaged. Other than its capital city Karachi, every sphere of public life in Sindh has been disrupted. As village life is uprooted and completely devastated, semi-urban or urban areas aren't safe as well. Food crises have worsened, and inflation is skyrocketing as wheat flour mill owners and small shopkeepers to big dealers hike up prices to cash in on the miseries of the flood-displaced population. The rain continued for a month. At one point it rained for 72 hours without a break. As monsoon spells came to an end in the second half of August, my family, village, and nearby villagers lost everything they had invested in the land: rice crop seeds, rice paddies, fertilizers, and their labor. Climate change is intensifying the monsoon spells. When Hamal Lake dried up last year, it destroyed livestock and wildlife, the livelihoods of millions of people who depend entirely on the lake to make their ends meet. The story of Pakistan's largest lake, Lake Manchar, is no different. In recent years, it has been either completely parched or filled with contaminated water. When rain is scarce, the Indus River water is diverted to upper stream areas or dammed. But this year it’s threatening to inundate two districts in Sindh. These dual problems of drying and overfilling are directly connected to monsoon cycles becoming increasingly unpredictable in nature. According to environmental scientists, Pakistan is the sixth most vulnerable country to climate-related changes. From dried lakes to heavy monsoons, scorching heat waves and extreme winters, this is already our reality. Local, provincial, and federal governments lack preparation for climate emergencies, and their inefficiency in addressing these crises has furthered people's suffering. We can't let governments hide behind words like ‘unprecedented,’ 'natural disaster,’ or ‘punishment due to our sins.’ These are man-made disasters and a crisis of governance at the regional and international level. Economic priorities of profiteering at the cost of ecological disruption have resulted in mass miseries for the working classes. In the epoch of the Anthropocene, worsening air quality, water scarcity, extreme heatwaves and unprecedented rains are becoming a regular feature, not just devastating entire livelihoods but disrupting entire populations. Rain and floods in Sindh are not natural disasters but manifestations of inadequate infrastructure planning as well as consequences of inappropriate efforts to mold and control nature. Rivers, lakes, and natural water streams pave their own ways through the land, and disturbing their natural routes is only causing disasters. If we are to save ourselves from these devastating monster monsoons—as they are being called this year—or deadly heat waves, we need to radically rethink our relationship with nature. We collectively need to reassess our misplaced and delusional drive to alter nature according to our unbridled desires. We need to call out the elephant in the room: Capitalism. And we need to put reins on the unprecedented commodification of everything. If we do not do this and organize against this life-threatening crisis, we will be left with nothing to take protection or refuge in. Each season of the year in South Asia will bring with it a hitherto unknown face of devastation. ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Photograph courtesy of Rahmat Tunio (2022). SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Dispatch Sindh Climate Change Floods in Pakistan Capitalism Women Democratic Front Awami Workers Party Sabu Khan Buriro Hamal Lake Livestock Crops Trauma Displacement Anthropocene Environment Sehwan Warah Dadu Environmental Disaster Disaster Capitalism Flood Protection Corruption Pakistan IBRAHIM BURIRO is pursuing a Masters degree in Development Studies at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi. He organizes around issues of ecology, particularly on the subject of the free-flowing Indus River, and has been active in the students' rights movement. Buriro belongs to a remote village in Sindh impacted by flooding. He writes in Sindhi and English. 12 Mar 2023 Dispatch Sindh 12th Mar 2023 Save Karoonjhar Zuhaib Ahmed Pirzada 19th Jul The Lakshadweep Gambit Rejimon Kuttapan 29th Mar It's Only Human Furqan Jawed 26th Apr Pakistan's Feminist Wave: A Panel Zoya Rehman · Amna Chaudhry · Tooba Syed 27th Sep On the Ethics of Climate Journalism Aruna Chandrasekhar 22nd Aug On That Note:

“I think of works like Shona N. Jackson's Creole Indigeneity, and fleshing out the narrative of brown movement. And, importantly, doing it in a way that decenters the United States, because, with indentureship we're talking about the movement from South Asia largely to the Caribbean.” COMMUNITY Romantic Literature and Colonialism AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “I think of works like Shona N. Jackson's Creole Indigeneity, and fleshing out the narrative of brown movement. And, importantly, doing it in a way that decenters the United States, because, with indentureship we're talking about the movement from South Asia largely to the Caribbean.” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Interview Romanticism English Postcolonialism Gayatri Spivak Postcolonial Poetry Romantic Literature & the Colonized World Colonialism Race Post-George Floyd Moment Black Solidarities Indigeneity Creole Indigenous Space Vijay Prashad Ruhel Islam Hufsa Islam Browntology Brown Left Kinship The Undercommons Diaspora Guyana Australia Subaltern Studies Intellectual History Internationalist Perspective Indigeneous Spaces Egbert Martin Henry Derozio Immigration Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Interview Romanticism 13th Nov 2020 I couldn't imagine devoting any more time to Keats and Wordsworth and Shelley and Byron. So I turned to Brown Romantics where I looked at how Romantic ideas, philosophies, politics, and techniques were mobilized ends towards nationalist ends by 19th century writers in India, Australia and British Guyana. RECOMMENDED: Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell University Press, 2017), by Manu Samriti Chander. 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: