Literary theorist Aneil Rallin rejects the conventions of academic, scholarly writing being didactic. Instead of kowtowing to the distrust of playfulness in academia, he brings to the fore in his research poesis that can purposely by “playful or elliptical or weird or whimsical or mixed-genre or creative.” COMMUNITY Radical Rhetoric, Pedagogy & Academic Complicity AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Literary theorist Aneil Rallin rejects the conventions of academic, scholarly writing being didactic. Instead of kowtowing to the distrust of playfulness in academia, he brings to the fore in his research poesis that can purposely by “playful or elliptical or weird or whimsical or mixed-genre or creative.” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Interview Radical Rhetoric Politics of Citation Rhetoric Rupture Composition Queer Spaces Pedagogy June Jordan Susan Griffin Politics of Location Location Adrienne Rich Complicity Complicity of the Academy Academia Nature of Credibility Corporate Queer Identity Gloria E. Anzaldúa Eunice de Souza Women's Participation Gender Gender Studies Women and Gender Studies in India Queer Activism Nature of Radical Activism Universities Experimental Methods Trinh T. Minh-ha Whimsy Playfulness Centering the Silly Fragments Mixed-Genre Multimodal Personal History 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 Radical Rhetoric 18th Jan 2021 Along with scholars like Trinh T. Minh-ha and Susan Griffin, I want to reject the notion that academic scholarly writing has to be pedantic, or that it can't be playful or elliptical or weird or whimsical or mixed-genre or creative. There seems to be a distrust in academia, of playfulness and creativity, it's not seen as serious or critical or important. But, I like bringing together lots of different forms, critical writing and anecdotes and notes and analysis and snippets of conversations and fragments and juxtapositions. RECOMMENDED: Dreads and Open Mouth: Living/Teaching/Writing Queerly by Aneil Rallin. 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:

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

Information asymmetry, shadowy military operations, mining mafias, and the consent, or lack thereof, of the working class in how their information, labor, and presence are used are all tied to the production, distribution, and consumption of food, energy, and water in India. For climate journalist Aruna Chandrasekhar, this understanding, as well as the proximity of Operation Green Hunt to her hometown, led her to journalism. COMMUNITY On the Ethics of Climate Journalism Information asymmetry, shadowy military operations, mining mafias, and the consent, or lack thereof, of the working class in how their information, labor, and presence are used are all tied to the production, distribution, and consumption of food, energy, and water in India. For climate journalist Aruna Chandrasekhar, this understanding, as well as the proximity of Operation Green Hunt to her hometown, led her to journalism. VOL. 1 INTERVIEW AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Andhra Pradesh 22nd Aug 2020 Interview Andhra Pradesh Climate Climate Change Investigative Journalism Coastal Displacement Anthropocene Parachuting Mining Freelancing Environmental Disaster Environment Power Dynamics Operation Green Hunt Bombay Diaspora Diasporic Distance Journalism Ethics of Journalism Displacement Evictions COVID-19 Forest Collective Energy Crisis Telugu Tamil Movement Organization Corporate Power Adani Group Coal Visakhapatnam Vizag Port Cities Labor Rights 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. There is an imbalance of power to be corrected—how do you level a playing field where, for centuries, you have oppressed, displaced communities, and always justified it for your own benefit? RECOMMENDED: " How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades " , NY Times . By Somini Sengupta, Jacqueline Williams, and Aruna Chandrasekhar. On how the Adani Group lobbied successfully to mine for coal in Australia and subsequently transporting it to India and contributing to energy and climate crises in both India and Bangladesh. 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

For the editorial team, FLUX was an event about the immense shifts frequent whiplash of ideas, norms and political realities we were experiencing; wearily towing vessels we knew were obsolete day in and day out. INTERACTIVE FLUX · A Preface For the editorial team, FLUX was an event about the immense shifts frequent whiplash of ideas, norms and political realities we were experiencing; wearily towing vessels we knew were obsolete day in and day out. Divya Nayar · Kamil Ahsan · Vishakha Darbha On Intent FLUX was held on 5th December 2020 during Volume 1 of SAAG. The event's discussions were largely in the context of US politics, with some exceptions, and thus focused more on American diasporic views than our content in general. For the editorial team, FLUX: An Evening in Dissent was about the immense shifts frequent whiplash of ideas, norms and political realities we were experiencing; wearily towing vessels we knew were obsolete day in and day out. Things that seemed, finally, ripe as they could ever be had suddenly turned utopian. A global pandemic that had stranded us all emotionally and psychically. A sense—despite the defeat of Donald Trump—of a heightened sociopolitical danger amongst the US Left in the wake of the historic progressive defeat of the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren campaigns in the Democratic primaries. A dissipated progressive movement. Disillusionment with local and national politicians who reneged on promises to defund the police following a summer of protests after the killing of George Floyd. A media landscape monopolized by corporate elites. A lack of inaction on meaningful abolitionist goals, from prisons to detention centers, that had gotten mainstream attention in unprecedent fashion just weeks or months earlier. As the panels with Nikil Saval, Kshama Sawant, Bhavik Lathia, Jaya Rajamani discussed, this retrenchment of the centrist wing of the Democratic Party—the old guard, that had seemed tenuous for some time—was at the time asserting itself powerfully in the form of cabinet appointment announcements and a sense of unease that, truly, not much would change. What could we do whilst in eternal quarantine? Most crucially: where could we find optimism? We found it in media spaces, in the poetics of internationalism, in the attempts to think about capitalism & neoliberalism during a global pandemic in internationalist terms, whilst also being specific about what we wished to highlight about the American context. Whether it was housing rights protests in Philadelphia, protests to tax Amazon in Seattle, or harsh truths about the Left's failure to engage with key demographics based on statistics from the general election, even the demoralizing moment gave us a great deal to be honest about. Meanwhile, those in other countries offered great succor and support in community building. All of this was reflected in the design system by Divya Nayar & videography by Vishakha Darbha that allowed the event to move smoothly. The background generative artwork shown above was created by Designer Neha Mathew was literally evokes fluid topography: the sense of the grounds shifting beneath our feet heightening our sense of change and even danger. Scroll below to subscribe to our newsletter today & get exclusive news about our upcoming in-person and virtual events. Navigate through FLUX: An Evening in Dissent through the links below, or watch the full event on YouTube or IGTV ( Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 ) Natasha Noorani's Live Performance of "Choro" Jaishri Abichandani's Art Studio Tour Kshama Sawant & Nikil Saval: A panel on US left electoralism, COVID-19, recent victories, & lasting problems. Tarfia Faizullah: Poetry Reading Bhavik Lathia & Jaya Sundaresh: A panel on the US Left & its relationship with media in the wake of Bernie Sanders' loss. Rajiv Mohabir: Poetry Reading SAAG, So Far: A Panel with the Editors DJ Kiran: A Celebratory Set On Intent FLUX was held on 5th December 2020 during Volume 1 of SAAG. The event's discussions were largely in the context of US politics, with some exceptions, and thus focused more on American diasporic views than our content in general. For the editorial team, FLUX: An Evening in Dissent was about the immense shifts frequent whiplash of ideas, norms and political realities we were experiencing; wearily towing vessels we knew were obsolete day in and day out. Things that seemed, finally, ripe as they could ever be had suddenly turned utopian. A global pandemic that had stranded us all emotionally and psychically. A sense—despite the defeat of Donald Trump—of a heightened sociopolitical danger amongst the US Left in the wake of the historic progressive defeat of the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren campaigns in the Democratic primaries. A dissipated progressive movement. Disillusionment with local and national politicians who reneged on promises to defund the police following a summer of protests after the killing of George Floyd. A media landscape monopolized by corporate elites. A lack of inaction on meaningful abolitionist goals, from prisons to detention centers, that had gotten mainstream attention in unprecedent fashion just weeks or months earlier. As the panels with Nikil Saval, Kshama Sawant, Bhavik Lathia, Jaya Rajamani discussed, this retrenchment of the centrist wing of the Democratic Party—the old guard, that had seemed tenuous for some time—was at the time asserting itself powerfully in the form of cabinet appointment announcements and a sense of unease that, truly, not much would change. What could we do whilst in eternal quarantine? Most crucially: where could we find optimism? We found it in media spaces, in the poetics of internationalism, in the attempts to think about capitalism & neoliberalism during a global pandemic in internationalist terms, whilst also being specific about what we wished to highlight about the American context. Whether it was housing rights protests in Philadelphia, protests to tax Amazon in Seattle, or harsh truths about the Left's failure to engage with key demographics based on statistics from the general election, even the demoralizing moment gave us a great deal to be honest about. Meanwhile, those in other countries offered great succor and support in community building. All of this was reflected in the design system by Divya Nayar & videography by Vishakha Darbha that allowed the event to move smoothly. The background generative artwork shown above was created by Designer Neha Mathew was literally evokes fluid topography: the sense of the grounds shifting beneath our feet heightening our sense of change and even danger. Scroll below to subscribe to our newsletter today & get exclusive news about our upcoming in-person and virtual events. Navigate through FLUX: An Evening in Dissent through the links below, or watch the full event on YouTube or IGTV ( Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 ) Natasha Noorani's Live Performance of "Choro" Jaishri Abichandani's Art Studio Tour Kshama Sawant & Nikil Saval: A panel on US left electoralism, COVID-19, recent victories, & lasting problems. Tarfia Faizullah: Poetry Reading Bhavik Lathia & Jaya Sundaresh: A panel on the US Left & its relationship with media in the wake of Bernie Sanders' loss. Rajiv Mohabir: Poetry Reading SAAG, So Far: A Panel with the Editors DJ Kiran: A Celebratory Set SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Generative artwork by Neha Mathew. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Event The Editors 2020 US Election US North American Diaspora Internationalism Crisis The Disillusionment of the Left Post-George Floyd Moment Defund the Police Racial Justice Pandemic COVID-19 FLUX Internationalist Solidarity Literary Solidarity Nikil Saval Kshama Sawant Natasha Noorani Darakshan Raja Jaya Rajamani Bhavik Lathia Tarfia Faizullah Rajiv Mohabir Divya Nayar, formerly Design Director at SAAG, is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer currently at Code and Theory. She is based in Queens. KAMIL AHSAN is an environmental historian at Yale, a Franke Fellow in Science and the Humanities, and the founder of SAAG. He is an essayist and critic currently based in New Haven, Lahore, and New York. VISHAKHA DARBHA is a multimedia journalist, currently an Associate Producer on The New York Times Opinion audio team, formerly with The Atlantic, Mother Jones, Vox , and Grist . She is based in New York. 5 Dec 2020 Event The Editors 5th Dec 2020 Chats Ep. 9 · On the Essay Collection “Southbound” Anjali Enjeti 19th May Nation-State Constraints on Identity & Intimacy Chaitali Sen 17th Dec FLUX · Kshama Sawant & Nikil Saval on US Left Electoralism & COVID-19 Nikil Saval · Kshama Sawant 5th Dec FLUX · A Celebratory Set by DJ Kiran Darakshan Raja 5th Dec FLUX · Poetry Reading by Rajiv Mohabir with Marginalia Rajiv Mohabir 5th Dec On That Note:

ARTIST Mukhtar Kazi MUKHTAR KAZI is a self-taught artist based in Thane, Maharashtra. His work engages light through abstract forms. His work The Sea and the Sahel was exhibited with Stranger’s House Gallery at the 15th edition of the Dakar Biennale, or Dak’Art - Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain, in Senegal. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

As Pakistan's militarized disappearance of everyday Baloch civilians continues, the vitality of the community in the age of social media has come to be preserved through “dossiers of memory”—online archives housed in tweet threads and on Facebook groups. These archives are tools of resistance—declarative visual pleas to local and global audiences that affirm the presence of the disappeared Baloch and connect their struggles to worldwide movements against enforced disappearances. · THE VERTICAL Essay · Balochistan As Pakistan's militarized disappearance of everyday Baloch civilians continues, the vitality of the community in the age of social media has come to be preserved through “dossiers of memory”—online archives housed in tweet threads and on Facebook groups. These archives are tools of resistance—declarative visual pleas to local and global audiences that affirm the presence of the disappeared Baloch and connect their struggles to worldwide movements against enforced disappearances. Sameen Agha, My House is on Fire (2021). Marble & mixed media on canvas. Who is Next? “Now that I have cleaned the dust from my son’s photograph, where should I keep it to find some relief? Wherever I place it, I feel as though the photograph is looking at me and talking to me.” These are Nako (Uncle) Mayar’s words, shared in a Facebook post on 19 December 2023. Nako Mayar first caught public attention when his photographs and videos went viral during a sit-in protest in Turbat , held against the extrajudicial killing of Balach Mola Bakhsh by the Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) in November 2023. He was later seen participating in the “ Long March against Baloch genocide ” to Islamabad, organized by the Baloch Yakjehti Committee. The public were deeply moved by the sight of this elderly man holding a picture, crying, cursing, lamenting, and pleading—showing the photograph to everyone who visited the sit-in or sat near him to express solidarity. “Look how handsome my son is”, he would say. These visuals of Nako Mayar were shared widely on Facebook and Twitter, making Baloch people aware of his plight. Nako Mayar, holding a framed photograph of his disappeared son, Fateh, during a protest. Image courtesy of the author. Nako Mayar hails from Zamuran, a sub-Tehsil of Buleda in district Kech, nearly 70 kilometers south of Turbat city. He spent most of his life as a shepherd, relying on subsistence farming. After the 2006 assassination of Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti during a military operation in Kohlu Dera Bugti—which ignited the current and fifth wave of the Baloch nationalist movement—however, the political situation in the region deteriorated. As military operations intensified in the B-areas (rural areas policed by Levies and Frontier Corps) of Balochistan, Nako Mayar migrated to Tehsil Buleda, district Kech to escape the violence. Buleda, more populated and equipped with slightly better facilities than Zamuran, offered relative safety compared to the isolated, violence-stricken rural areas. Additionally, military operations often targeted remote villages, forcing residents to move toward more concentrated settlements, where they could be easily monitored and controlled. In Buleda, he continued to live a modest life, relying on his goats and sheep. His son, Fateh Mayar, was a diligent student who attended school in the mornings and taught English at a local language institute in the evenings. Fateh earned his pocket money from teaching. According to Nako Mayar, his son Fateh was forcefully disappeared from Turbat Bazaar on 14 June 2023, when he went for Eid shopping. This incident completely altered Nako Mayar’s life, transforming him from a free and independent shepherd into a political subject. In many of the videos shared on social media, Nako Mayar can be heard saying, “My son is innocent. He doesn’t even have a Computerized National Identity Card (CNIC). He’s still a child, less than 18 years old.” One of the most poignant lines he often repeats while looking at his son’s photograph is, “I am cursed for giving my beloved Fateh an education. If you come back, I will not let you study. If he had been a shepherd, maybe nobody would have cared about him. I am seventy years old, and he is my only son. My son used to go to school in the morning and to the language institute in the evening. He is not involved in any kind of anti-state activities. His records are clear—they can check the school and language institute attendance. If he were involved in any such activities, how could he have taken his relative to the Frontier Corps camp doctors when he was stung by a scorpion? This should not happen to anyone.” He continues, “If the tyrants do not give me justice, may God hold them accountable. Oh God, question these tyrants on my behalf.” The story of Nako Mayar and his son Fateh is not just about personal tragedy but is emblematic of a much larger human rights crisis faced by countless families in Balochistan. Fateh is just one of thousands of young Baloch, predominantly students, who have been forcibly disappeared by Pakistan’s military and paramilitary forces. In his search for justice, Nako Mayar is one of many family members who tirelessly protest outside press clubs, march along roads holding photographs of their missing loved ones and engage in social media campaigns led by political organizations such as the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP) and the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC). They demand answers and the safe return of their sons, husbands, and brothers. Central to their struggle are the photos they hold. These photos, once treasured as personal memories, have now become powerful symbols of protest, keeping the stories of the disappeared alive. More than just reminders of the past, these photos break the silence that surrounds enforced disappearances, turning personal grief into a powerful act of public resistance. In Nako Mayar’s case, the photos of his disappeared son, Fateh, have become much more than just images. They represent a father’s grief, his unbreakable resilience, and his refusal to let his son’s story be forgotten. These photos draw people in, making them feel the weight of Fateh’s disappearance and compelling them to engage with his story. The photographs are not just keepsakes. They are reminders of the love families still hold and the pain they endure. Every time Nako lifts Fateh’s image at a protest or posts it online, he is refusing to let his son’s story be silenced. He is fighting against the state’s efforts to erase Fateh’s memory. These photos demand answers, pushing families and communities to keep speaking up for those who no longer have a voice. They push the stories of their loved ones out of the darkness, out of prison cells, and into the public eye. The fight for visibility and justice has also found its way into the digital realm, where families and activists have created virtual archives, to ensure that the stories of the disappeared are neither forgotten nor ignored. Social media platforms have become crucial sites for preserving these memories and amplifying their resistance. The “Voice for Baloch Missing Persons” (VBMP) Facebook page is a digital archive created by families to record the stories of their missing loved ones. Since its formation in 2009, VBMP has documented thousands of cases of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Faced with a lack of attention from national and international media, families and activists have turned to social media to share their stories and gather support. Photograph from a sit-in camp near the Quetta Press Club. Image courtesy of the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP) Facebook page. Beside the Quetta Press Club, VBMP maintains a permanent camp where portraits of the missing are displayed prominently. These photographs, larger than typical ID photos, are arranged in rows. The camp, lined with these images, serves as a powerful reminder of the families’ pain and their relentless demand for justice. Each day, VBMP’s page posts updates, counting the days since its encampment began and marking the time that families have spent waiting for answers. Digital platforms have also become vital tools for connecting the local struggle in Balochistan to a global audience. By using hashtags like #ReleaseAllBalochMissingPersons on digital sites, families are not only reaching out for local support but also appealing to international human rights organizations and diaspora communities. These posts, shared repeatedly, create an online archive of pain and resistance, reinforcing the community’s presence in digital spaces even as they are marginalized in physical ones. Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC) emerged in 2020 after the killing of four-year-old Bramsh Baloch’s mother, allegedly by one of the local death squads believed to be operating under Pakistani military intelligence. This devastating event sparked new waves of protests, with BYC leading numerous demonstrations, including the Long March against Baloch Genocide in 2023 and the Baloch Raji Muchi in 2024 . These events, led by Baloch women, brought attention to the suffering of the community, calling for basic rights and an end to state violence. Every year, on October 4, the family of Shabir Baloch —one of the many forcibly disappeared activists—launches a campaign, demanding answers. For his wife, Zarina Baloch, and his sister, Seema Baloch, the fight is not just for visibility but for recognition, acknowledgment, and the hope of bringing Shabir back home. This year on October 4, Zarina Baloch and Seema Baloch, launched a protest campaign demanding the whereabouts of Shabir Baloch. Zarina, Shabir’s wife, is often seen at protests, both in person and online, holding a placard that reads, “Am I married or a widow?” Zarina Baloch holds a sign with the words, “ Am I married, or a widow? " Image courtesy of X. Shabir Baloch was born in the Labach district of Awaran. He began his political journey as a student activist and was later elected as the Information Secretary of the Baloch Students Organization, Azad chapter (BSO-Azad). The BSO was banned by the Pakistani state as a terrorist organization due to its radical separatist stance on the issue of Baloch liberation. Shabir was arrested by the Frontier Corps while visiting Gwarkop, a village seventy kilometres far from Turbat city in the Kech district, with his wife, Zarina, during a raid on 4 October 2016. Along with Shabir, twenty-four other Baloch were detained in the raid, but all were eventually released—except for Shabir. Since then, his whereabouts remain unknown. “It was less than two years into our marriage when Shabir was abducted,” Zarina says. I still hear our laughter echoing in our bedroom when we were together.” For the past eight years, Zarina and Shabir’s sister, Seema, have been searching for justice. On 12 October 2016, Zarina went to the police station to file a report, but the authorities refused to register her case. In November 2016, she filed a petition in court, hoping to find her husband. Zarina and Seema brought Shabir’s case to the attention of international organizations like Amnesty International and the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, but they received no response from the Pakistani government. The Pakistan Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances also took up Shabir’s case but failed to recover him. Instead, according to the Human Rights Council of Balochistan (HRCB), the commission intimidated and harassed Shabir’s family during the hearings. On October 4, 2024, HRCB tweeted , “On one occasion, a justice on the commission told Seema not to attend any more hearings. When she insisted, he remarked that if she was not a woman, she would have been kicked out of the office.” This is the struggle faced by every mother, sister, and wife of men, forcibly disappeared in Balochistan. These women protest and march tirelessly, often breaking down mid-speech while demanding answers, overwhelmed by panic attacks and grief. They find themselves navigating complex and indifferent government institutions. When they go to police stations to file their cases, they are refused. When they knock on courts’ doors, they are given endless dates for hearings without resolution. They work to have their loved ones’ names added to the lists of human rights commissions, but nothing changes. Instead, they are met with harassment, intimidating calls from authorities, and false assurances. Each day, the size of their case files grows thicker. With each passing year their hope and determination remain unwavering despite the system’s continued failure to deliver justice. One such file belongs to Saira Baloch—a plastic folder filled with photographs of her brothers, Asif and Rasheed. They were both arrested by Pakistani security forces at Zangi Nawad, a picnic spot in District Noshki, on 31 August 2018. Saira explains that while the security forces initially acknowledged the arrest, they later denied it. It has been six years since, and the family has received no information about the alleged crime, whereabouts, or legal basis for their detention. A folder with images of Asif and Rasheed. Image courtesy of X. Salman Hussain, an anthropologist, describes these files as “dossiers of memory.” It is a personal archive containing photographs, National Identity Cards, First Investigation Reports (FIRs), police complaints, court hearing dates, and handwritten notes from relatives. Personal notes often detail the dates and locations of abductions or provide outlines of speeches that families deliver at protests. The caption of one of Saira’s posts on X captures the essence of these memory dossiers, “Our happy life has been imprisoned first in pictures and then in files. Our wishes, dreams, and desires to live are locked inside this file. Will he (the disappeared) ever be able to come out of these torture cells and files?” T hese personal archives are much more than collections of old photos and documents, they are records of dreams, struggles, and resistance. When families share these photographs alongside their personal notes, they turn the images into powerful reminders of those who are missing, keeping their stories alive. With no physical remains to mourn, they use photographs to fill the space between life and death—where the missing is neither fully gone nor truly present. Sharing these photographs on platforms like Facebook or X is not just about raising awareness—it’s a way of saying, “We’re still here, and we will not be silenced.” Each post is a reminder that the state has failed to provide answers, yet these families will not stop demanding justice. For many relatives, searching for their missing loved ones has taken over their entire lives. Most of their days are spent protesting on the streets or sharing their stories online, refusing to let the world forget. By sharing these images, families also reclaim control over who is seen and remembered. Kashmiri and Palestinian scholars have called this a form of “counter-visuality,” where images serve as a tool to resist erasure and assert presence in spaces where they are denied. When a loved one disappears, families do not just lose a person, they lose part of their identity. They exist in a painful state of limbo, caught between being present and absent, struggling to find answers. Roles like wife, widow, parent, or child no longer fit. Instead, they become new political subjects, voices of resistance, marching in protest or campaigning on social media. Relatives who were once viewed as powerless victims have turned into powerful voices speaking out against state violence. This phenomenon extends beyond Baloch women, who have become symbols of resistance against enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Similar movements can be seen around the world. In Argentina, the Organization of Mothers of the Disappeared (Mothers of Plaza de Mayo) was formed in 1977, marking the first public protest against military rule. To this day, every Thursday, the Madres march around the Pirámide de Mayo in the center of Buenos Aires. In Guatemala , tens of thousands of people were disappeared during the 1960-1996 civil war between the military and leftist guerrilla forces, leading to enduring grief and activism by the families left behind. Likewise, in Jammu and Kashmir, the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) continues to fight for justice and accountability for those who have vanished under state-sponsored repression. In each of these cases, women have used public grief and emotional expressions—such as weeping and mourning—as powerful political tools, transforming fear into collective resistance against state violence. These movements against enforced disappearances have given rise to influential political figures such as Estela de Carlotto, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Parveena Ahangar and Mahrang Baloch. Every time a new story of disappearance is shared online, the community holds its breath, wondering, “Who is next?” This question echoes through every gathering and protest, a reminder that the pain of enforced disappearances is far from over. A young girl at a protest holds up a frame with the question “Who Is Next?” Image courtesy of X. Who’s Next by Qasum Faraz translated by Sajid Hussain (2013) Life is a poster pasted on the city’s walls. With the passage of time, It changes the names and photos emblazoned on its chest. Some days it’s Allah Nazar, Some days it’s Abdul Nabi. On every remorseless road of time and occasion, On every square, The wind distributes bits of my self- Like pamphlets. There is a strike tomorrow: All the shutters in the market will drop their gaze. Time and space will become one in the din of rallies. The day and the night, The month and the year, Will wear the same colour. Every letter on banners, placards, and foreheads, Will march along with a sea of its own. Who knows what will happen then? I, as a character of a global story, Stand at a distance and think: “For whom?” Someone, from behind, puts a hand on my shoulder, And whispers, “Life is a poster pasted on the city’s walls.”∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Balochistan Pakistan Civilian Activism Archive of Absence Resistance Resistance Movement Enforced Disappearances Disappearance Militarism Protest Extrajudicial Killings Counterterrorism Department Long March against Baloch Genocide Baloch Yakjehti Committee Zamuran Buleda Kech Shepard Subsistence Farming Assassination Kohlu Dera Bugti Baloch Nationalist Movement Rural Policing Violence Monitoring Turbat City Turbat Bazaar Childhood Computerized National Identity Card Education Levies and Frontier Corps Human Rights Human Rights Violations paramilitary Military Occupation Voice for Baloch Missing Persons Memory Grief Public Space Photography Justice Visibility Social Media Facebook X Quetta Press Club Baloch Raji Muchi 2024 State Sanctioned Violence Baloch Students Organization BSO-Azad Liberation Gwarkop Amnesty International United Nations Working Group Intimidation Security Dossiers of memory Anthropology Counter-visibility Erasure State Erasure Who is Next? Qasum Faraz Sajid Hussain Poetry Translation Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 5th Mar 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

DESIGNER Neha Mathew Neha Mathew is a graphic designer and interactive artist currently a Graphic Designer at Laundry Service, previously at Creative Theory Institute. She is based in New York City, Washington DC and Toronto. DESIGNER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Beatrice Wangui's quest to challenge Kenya’s punitive seed laws tells a larger story about the nature of indigenous knowledge and preservation, as well as that of agrarian labour, situated in a longer history of the public and private approaches to agriculture that are promulgated under the guise of modernization. THE VERTICAL Beatrice Wangui's Fight for Seed Sovereignty in Kenya AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Beatrice Wangui's quest to challenge Kenya’s punitive seed laws tells a larger story about the nature of indigenous knowledge and preservation, as well as that of agrarian labour, situated in a longer history of the public and private approaches to agriculture that are promulgated under the guise of modernization. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Profile Kenya Climate Seed Sovereignty Agriculture Farming Beatrice Wangui Seed Saving Indigeneity Indigenous Seed Exchange Seed and Plant Varieties Act Agrarian Economy Rural Farmers Seed Savers Network Seed Banks Community Building Gilgil Nakuru County Sustainability Food Systems Organic Farming Environment Climate Change Agricultural Labor 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 Profile Kenya 22nd Apr 2024 Farming has always been a bonding point between my father and me. When I ventured into agriculture, I only understood food systems from the point of small-scale farming. As a way of learning, my father would often bring some seeds and cuttings when he went somewhere new. This was one of the ways we introduced new foods to our small farm and onto our plates. In 2012, the Kenyan government enacted a law that made seed saving and exchange illegal, thereby posing a threat to an indigenous system of seed exchange that has persisted for eons. When I arrived at Beatrice Wangui’s house she was showing farmers how to build a vertical garden. Her home is an oasis in the dry Gilgil area and a large group of farmers, local and from other countries, stood around her as she showed them how to make a blend of manure, charcoal dust, and soil to grow vegetables in. This is a regular activity on her small but well-sectioned agricultural island. One side of her farm is a thriving bunch of vertical gardens teeming with leafy greens. Corners on the ground spot herbs like mint and rosemary. There is a short spread of beds hosting at least six varieties of managu (black nightshade ) , terere (Amaranth ) , mitoo (slenderleaf) and saget (spider plant). Now 59 years old, Beatrice has been an organic farmer for many years as well as champion of seed sovereignty. Indigenous communities in Kenya have had to work around the systemic effects and hurdles in the way of corporate capture of seeds, promulgated in the form of millions of US dollars by international seed companies to monopolize the seed sectors in Africa. I wanted to dive into the world of seed saving to see how people responded to or worked around the law that criminalized these traditions. Beatrice training a group of visitors on creating vertical gardens. Photo courtesy of the author. Seed sovereignty upholds the farmer’s right to save, use, exchange, and sell his or her own seeds. Seed regulation in Kenya began in 1972, ten years after the country gained independence. The Seed and Plant Varieties Act of 1972 entered into force in 1975, was promulgated in 1991, and later amended in 1994. While Kenya joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, the country had already enacted its own unique (sui generis) law on Plant Breeders' Rights (PBRs). However, this PBR law did not take effect until 1999 after Kenya ratified the 1978 Act of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV). In 2012, Kenya updated its PBR law through the Seeds and Plant Varieties (Amendment) Act . Then, in 2015, the country furthered its commitment to UPOV by ratifying the 1991 UPOV Convention, which outlines stronger protections for new plant varieties. Today, seed saving is an essential part of Kenyan livelihoods, especially in rural parts of the country. In Kenya, 70 percent of the rural population is dependent on agriculture. As a child, I remember when my parents would return from visiting new places with some form of seed propagation. They could be suckers for a new vegetable, vines, or a handful of seeds – all a means to grow the crops that caught my parents’ interest. This was how I came to know and love a vegetable called rhubarb. In many rural homes across Kenya, kitchens are not only a space to prepare food. Hanging on walls, under the traditional fire racks near the fireplace are seeds tied up in leaves along with calabashes. The warmth from the fire dries them out and the smoke makes them nearly pest-proof. Smoking is one of the most traditional modes of seed saving. In many communities, other methods such as diatomite, cow dung, soot, and ash are used. This is a tradition for most, if not all the communities in Kenya. Slenderleaf pods at Beatrice’s farm. Photo courtesy of the author. Punitive Seed Laws The Seed and Plant Varieties Act of 2012 criminalizes farmers from “selling, sharing and exchanging” unregistered or uncertified seeds. Farmers who break the law risk a prison sentence of up to two years or a fine of up to a million Kenyan shillings. Beatrice says she refused to keep silent in the face of laws that promote corporate greed over the lives and livelihoods of communities across the country. She joined other farmers and civil society organizations as a petitioner in a case against the law prohibiting seed saving. The alliance of farmers and activists has courageously spoken up against the laws, arguing for the rights of small-scale farmers to save, exchange, and use their seeds freely. Their persistence and hard work has inspired farmers across Kenya to join their cause. They hold seed exchange fairs to fight for the right to cultivate indigenously obtained and retained seeds. Apart from them, fifteen other small land-holding farmers have filed a petition to the court to amend the law. Speaking to Beatrice feels like a plunge in a well of seed preservation knowledge. On a tour of her seed-saving facility, she pointed out the strategic use of all the materials she had on hand. She explained how each element played a role in ensuring the survival of seeds for up to years in glass bottles. Even though her village has no piped water, the facility carries stacks of jerry cans filled with water. The water helps keep the temperature low which reduces heat damage. The room is also low and near the ground. Beatrice at her community seed bank. Courtesy of Gregory Onyango As custodian of the community seed bank, Beatrice is tasked with ensuring that the seeds are in tip-top shape by the time farmers come to collect them. “Farmers bring in their seeds after drying them,” she says. “And they must wait at least a season before they come to get seeds. A farmer cannot take all the seeds at the same time. There was a year we had two failed rainy seasons and only the last batch of the seeds made it.” It begins with inspecting the seeds for moisture content. If the seeds do not pass this test, the farmer is required to take them back and reduce the moisture content to the required level. The next step is to check out the seed's germination percentage. "This is done by picking about 10 seeds, placing them in a bowl, and covering them with a wet tissue. In about 5 days, we observe how many out of the ten have germinated," Beatrice explains. If three or fewer seeds germinate, it means the germination percentage is low and the seeds are not of good quality and cannot be stored. Depending on the quantity of seeds, some are stored in airtight glass bottles while others are stored in buckets. A film of ash from special trees and bushes is spread over the seeds to keep both moisture and pests off. With help from organizations such as The Seed Savers Network , Beatrice has been able to increase her knowledge and capacity for seed saving. The Seed Savers Network was registered in 2009 and to date, has helped establish more than 52 community seed banks, including one that Beatrice looks after. The Seed Savers Network, she says, taught them seed characterization which is a process they follow from when they plant a seed to when they harvest it. Beatrice Wangui in her garden. Courtesy of Gregory Onyango Beatrice is keen on passing on this knowledge to her children and grandchildren. Her granddaughter who is named after her and attends a local secondary school, is very hands-on with the project. She has grown up around her grandmother and has learned how to tell different varieties apart and how to preserve each of them. “When she is around and I have visitors, she teaches them just as well as I can. She understands how to handle seeds and crops alike,” she shares. For Beatrice and others like her, awareness of such methods and passing on their teaching is an integral part of the process without which indigenous knowledge would disappear. With help from organizations such as The Seed Savers Network, Beatrice can meet other seed savers from across Kenya and the world. As she shows me around, explaining varieties of maize, beans, tomatoes, and vegetables she hopes the indigenous knowledge, varieties, and preservation are not stifled by punitive seed laws. As she fights for indigenous seeds through the law and by practicing traditional methods, she hopes her cross-generational efforts pay off and the indigenous crop varieties stand the test. Beatrice is one of many people and organizations working to maintain the s tate of seed sovereignty . Despite the immense challenges posed by the corporate consolidation of the seed industry, the movement for seed sovereignty continues to gain momentum around the world. From seed libraries and seed swaps to on-the-ground breeding projects, countless individuals and communities are taking steps to reclaim their ancestral seed heritage and maintain biodiversity. By resisting the privatization of this vital common resource, seed savers stand as stewards of food security and biodiversity for present and future generations. Though the battle is an uphill one, the remarkable resilience and creative cross-pollination within the seed sovereignty movement offer a path toward a more regenerative, equitable, and sustainable food system. ∎ 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:

· FICTION & POETRY Poetry · Guyana Six Poems "In Ayodhya’s sacked Mogul masjid / vultures scrawl Ram on new temple bricks. / Brother, from this mandir of burning" Artwork by Kareen Adam for SAAG. Monoprinted, digitally-animated collage, ink on paper (2020). Ghee Persad I. You know straight away it’s ghee and not oil but you can’t eat it without gambling for the price of home-feelings, you may soon lose a toe, then a foot, then your leg. Call it faith—like drinking Ganga water? Call it an offering, like this sweet, that stood at the bronze feet of the ten- weaponed, tiger-riding Devi. You’ve recounted the tale of how she slew the demon-headed asura who made a compact with the gods so strong they trembled in heaven, how sugar is also divine and terrible. II. First hot the karahi with ghee and paache de flouah till ‘e brown-brown den add de sugah and slow slow pour de milk zat ‘e na must get lumpy. Like you mek fe you sista fust picknki ke nine-day, how you tuhn and tuhn ‘am in de pot hard-hard you han’ been pain you fe days, but now you see how ovah-jai you sistah face been deh. You live fe dis kine sweetness. You eat one lil lil piece an’ know dis a de real t’ing. Like when a-you been small an’ you home been bright wid bhajans play steady, how de paper bag wha’ been get de persad became clear from de ghee you been hable fe see you own face. III. You pass though ever kind watah, there is always new life to celebrate. Seawall At Morning Georgetown, Guyana 2019 What starts at night startles the dawn: rain water replenishes the trench lotus stalks and petals stand tall Seawall signs painted Namasté in acrylic Beyond, the sea silts brown as mud as a frigate soars wings of stone. And beyond: a ship with sails from 1838 I look twice— an oil rig? Another form of bondage? Pandemic Love Poem One by one the yellow jackets leave their nest, a hole covered with decaying leaves that warm the ground and an inert queen they’ve fed all autumn. What sleeps inside will one day burst into a wind of wings. What will wake a sleeping queen? Beneath my waist growing larger, the sting of nights one by one, when I am stranger and stranger to you. We sleep in a converted porch, wooden siding, the wall that insulates what’s inside it which is not you, nor is it me. The bedclothes stiffen with cold. Remember me? One by one peel the yellow sheets from our nest. Prick me with your heat from sleep. Place a cardamom pod under my tongue. Come, dissolve with me. Sita ke Jhumar स्टाब्ब्रुक के बाजार में अंगूठिया गिरी गयल रे। स्टाब्ब्रुक के बाजार में अंगूठिया गिरी गयल रे। हमसे खिसियाई बाकी हमार गलतिया नाहीं । सास करइला चोखा खावे, ससुर दारू पिये। ससुराल में परदेसिया रोटी थपथपे अउर दाल चउंके। आमवा लाये भेजल हमके जीरा लाये भेजल हमके। बाकरा ठगल हमके संगे जाने ना माँगे है। गिनिप लाये भेजल हमके जमुन लाये भेजल हमके। ससुराल में परदेसिया, मासाला पीसे अउर बड़ा तले। ओरहन पेटाइहे हमार माइ के, बाबा से खिसीयाइहे। साँइया खिसियाई हमसे गलतिया नाहीं हमार रामा। स्टाब्ब्रुक के बाजार में अंगूठिया गिरी गयल रे • stabroek ke bajar mein anguthi giri gayal re stabroek ke bajar mein anguthiya giri gayal re hamse khisiyayi baki hamar galtiya nahi saas karaila choka khawe sasur daru piye sasural mein pardesiya roti thapthape aur daal chaunke aamwa laye bhejal hamke jira laye bhejal hamke backra thagal hamke sange jane na mange hai guinip laye bhejal hamke hamun laye bhejal hamke sasural mein pardesiya, masala pise aur barah tale orahan petaihai hamar mai ke baba se khisiyai hai saiya khisiyaiyi hamse galtiya nahin hamar rama stabroek ke bajar mein anguthiya giri gayal re • Me ring fall from me finga a Stabroek. Me husban’ go vex. He mudda’ wan’ eat karaila chokha, he faddah suck rum steady. Me na nut’in’ to dem. Me does clap a-roti an’ chounke de daal. Me husban’ send me a market fe buy mangro an’ fe get jeera. Backra been tek me ‘way wid dem come, me na been wan’ fe come ‘way. Me husban’ send me mus’ buy guinip an’ jamun. Me na no one fe he mai-baap. Me does pise de masala me does fry de barah. ‘E go sen’ complaint to me mumma an’ vex wid me faddah. Me husban’ go vex wid me but nut’in’ me na do. Me ring fall from me han’ a Stabroek. • My ring slipped from my finger, in Stabroek market. My love will be angry for what was his fault. His mother’s eaten karaila chokha his father’s sucked rum. I’m a stranger in their home, clapping roti, spicing daal. My love sent me to buy mangoes, he sent me to buy jeera. Backra kidnapped me; I didn’t want to go. My love sent me to buy guinips, to buy jamun. I’m a stranger in their home, grinding spices, frying barah. He will complain to my mother, gripe to my father. My love, it’s not my fault. My ring fell off in Stabroek market. IN SHIPS [HONORING MAHADAI DAS’ “THEY CAME IN SHIPS”] West— They came dancing and despondent hungry gaunt alone do not forget the field or your blood I lost the yokes of rage in chains. Janam Bhumi In November of 2019 the Indian courts allowed the Modi administration to construct a Ram temple at the site of the demolished 16th-century Babri Masjid built by the Mogul ruler Babur. On August 5, 2020 they broke ground for the new mandir. Jai Sri Ram, now god of murder. What is real, Rushi, the forest is now deforest, home its own undoing? Trench lotuses hard as dicks release truth, even the skinks and hawks shrink back into scarcity. What of shanti—? In Ayodhya’s sacked Mogul masjid, vultures scrawl Ram on new temple bricks. Brother, from this mandir of burning, each sunrise mantra shoots itself a poisoned arrow. Each snake prays. The unlit path sparkles maya. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Poetry Guyana Indo-Caribbean Bondage Colonialism Mahadai Das Babri Masjid Ayodhya Historicity Georgetown Pandemic Creole Guyanese-Hindi Ram Temple Oceans as Historical Sites Personal History Antiman The Taxidermist's Cut The Cowherd's Son Cutlish Histories of Migrations Code-Mixing Multilingual Poetry Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 31st Oct 2020 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 this cogent meditation on the histories and psychologies of conflict that have etched survival into the essence of Afghan identity—both at home and in exile—Mahfouz reflects on family, repression, and the unseen burden of history. Spanning generations and regimes, this is a story of inheritance and idealism, where the quiet conviction of its actors gradually challenges the silence imposed by empires built on endless war. · FEATURES Essay · Kandahar In this cogent meditation on the histories and psychologies of conflict that have etched survival into the essence of Afghan identity—both at home and in exile—Mahfouz reflects on family, repression, and the unseen burden of history. Spanning generations and regimes, this is a story of inheritance and idealism, where the quiet conviction of its actors gradually challenges the silence imposed by empires built on endless war. "Self-Portrait" (2016), digital print, courtesy of Latifa Zafar Attaii. The Captive Mind Our two-story house in Kandahar stood inside a compound with a garden of colors where roses of many kinds lived, competing in fragrance with the chambeli , the jasmine plant. On summer nights, the garden also brimmed with the laughter of us, the children, on bicycles, playing hide and seek beneath the stars. When winter came, the rhythm shifted. Evenings began after supper, the electricity generator shut off and the lantern lit for warmth and light. The flickering flame would stretch the shadow of the past across the wall of the present, as my siblings and I gathered by the adults. The stories shared around that lantern were not fairy tales, but inheritance. Adults spoke of many things. How someone escaped a raid. How another someone never came back. How the sound of a car slowing outside meant the worst—being killed. For them, perhaps, it was their way of reckoning, with a war they had carried into peace, and with a peace still trembling on the edge of war. I had been listening to these stories since turning six, or maybe even earlier. In 2002, however, when Afghanistan was promised a new beginning, only to end up in rubble, I began listening more closely. Something in me had opened—the way it does when your own life begins to echo the stories you've always heard. The American invasion in 2001 became my reference point for war’s meaning. Sometimes it began with something small, a radio playing an old song, or someone quietly saying how lucky we were to have this house. From there, the memories would awaken: my grandmother’s story passed to my father, his to my mother, and then to my siblings. How they had escaped from Kabul while the rockets were falling. How they had not known if we would survive the road. How a family we would have never met took us in and gave us warm food. We would watch our elders’s faces in the lantern light, tensing as the stories reached that sharp point of unknowing. Our own bodies would stiffen with theirs; vessels holding fear. But then, as their faces would soften towards the end—the ending where they didn’t die—we would relax too, sometimes getting on our knees as if leaning into relief. We clung to the parts where our families had made it through. It was because of these moments that we wanted to hear those stories again and again. Sometimes, one of us would interrupt. “Tell the funny part,” we’d say, already giggling. The one about Ana Bibi. My grandmother, asking, “ Is this rocket coming from the right side or the wrong side? ” This would make everyone laugh. Among the many stories one returned often, even more so after my grandfather died in 2007, when I was ten. In its telling and retelling, that story became more than true—it gave continuity to life, underscoring how the past is remembered, the present felt, and the future anticipated. My mother told it with quiet reverence. My grandfather had been a leftist writer, among the first to embrace modernity in the 1950s. He supported the communist project in its early promise, reforms, and a vision for a better future. But after the bloody coup and Hafizullah Amin ’s rise, that promise curdled. Friends disappeared. Dissent became dangerous. He had written against the regime, and one day, word came. His name was on Amin’s list. In the weeks that followed, each time a car edged too close to their gate, my grandfather retreated into his study, crouching beneath the desk, lantern in hand. Descriptions of the heavy velvet curtain and the earthy smell gave my mother’s story an almost magical aura. That image, though never photographed, imprinted itself on me. A dark room. A burning light. The slow terror of footsteps. I do not know if it happened exactly that way. But memory in Afghanistan is not evidence. It is transmission. In Afghanistan, each poet gives his pain to the land, or lets the land’s pain speak through him. My grandfather was one of them. He wrote during the early days of Afghanistan’s turbulent history, a time when fear came not just from war, but from the silence it demanded. Years later, when he was already living in exile in Denmark, his words still echoed in Kandahar. My mother remembered them. At one point in the story my mother liked slowing down, and from those lived experiences that she carried in memory alone, she would emerge laughing and crying with the verses from my grandfather’s most well-known poem: Caged in the dark night I was, A victim of the chains pulled tight, I was. Hands bound, lips sewn, in waves of torture, Stuck in a hellish oven of harassment and abuse. Cold sighs rose, defiant, to the skies; My patience is like a shooting star towards the galaxy. My grief went violent, beyond what my worn heart could endure. In my chest, rebellious dreams could no longer fit, Wild cries like groans set off. That poem, she’d say, was written in the days when Hafizullah Amin Taraki's communist party had taken control—a time of extreme fear. At the time people were being whisked away from classrooms, in the middle of a lecture. One of my mother’s teachers was thrown from a helicopter, a warning to anyone with a mind too sharp, a voice too loud. Those who remained were not in chains, but restrained by fear. The regime went after the intellectuals, the mullahs, anyone they thought could become a rallying point, a nucleus around which resistance might form. And then a glimmer of hope, or so they thought, and my grandfather continued his poem. I don’t know whether someone heard my secret plea, Or judged my groans as immodest cries of ungratefulness. Clamor rose on the podium of the universe. An adventure rose to heaven’s home; With red monsters, black too, that flowed. At every step they roared with anger. I knew not then who stepped near– To rescue me, or strike me with pretenses of giving Everyone that came crushed the bones of my helpless body, But at the same time, they broke the chains that snaked around me. And so, at the breaking of the chains, I laugh, But for each bone breaking, I cry. The Soviets invaded , and they began breaking old chains, but they also broke bones. My grandfather went on breathing, but in the mirror of history the jail cell he had marginally avoided never closed. It passed down, unlatched, via my aunts, my older siblings, and now it takes the shape of my silence, a silence that pulses like our family’s death drive. After my grandfather, no one believed in idealism. In Afghanistan, survival builds its house atop the buried bones of idealism. Literally. I used to think that was just a metaphor, until I read an old article from 1997. A boy named Faizdeen, only 14, had said: “I used to dig for scrap iron…but the Taliban banned us from exporting it to Pakistan when they captured Kabul. So now I dig for bones. There is no other work, and we need the money for food.” My father used to joke with my grandmother, nudging her to eat more yogurt and milk, “If you don’t keep your bones strong, they won’t sell well later.” I always thought he was being dark for the sake of humor. Only now do I realize his joke had roots. The absurdity was just a disguise. He wasn’t joking. He was remembering—the past bleeding into the present through the cracks in his humor. We inherit many things: land, names, trauma. But I also inherited my grandfather’s dreams. Whatever intellect I carry, it’s a small fire lit by the same lantern whose light he read under. In 2007, I saw my grandfather for the first time in a coffin. But I don’t remember mourning his death, I remember feeling pride. He was given a national burial. The governor came. Many of Afghanistan’s renowned poets gathered to recite verses. His funeral was not a mourning of his death but a celebration of his voice. They said he was a man a hundred years ahead of his time, a father who educated every one of his daughters. They told stories of his poverty, how he couldn’t afford even a single sheet of clean white paper. How he walked the streets and upon finding a blank piece in the trash he picked it up and wrote on it. These stories brought him back to life, each retelling pulling him from the past, giving him breath and flesh. But even then, no one spoke of him in his entirety. His idealism was buried with him for the family's safety. And after him, idealism no longer lived with my family. The war stripped it away, leaving only the habits of survival. In rebelling, I search for his image. I was forced to quit school at eleven, not that I ever loved it, but by fourteen I began to question everything. Life. War. The meaning of it all. Fear was everywhere, seeping through the walls, hovering over us every night. Airstrikes, suicide bombings, the air and land on fire. I did feel in my own way: Caged in the dark night I was . And my chains were not that of being just Afghan but of a woman too. And then I thought of my grandfather, how he was self-taught, how he created a path for himself. Suddenly, that became a path for me too. This paid off. I became a full-time self-taught student, and in search for the meaning of life, in 2016, I went on to study physics at Arizona State University, eventually becoming a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University. I had made a promise to myself that leaving Afghanistan would mark the end of that chapter. The war and its memories would dissolve with distance. War had never made sense to me; it was arbitrary, brutal, and incoherent. The clean logic of math and science felt appealing precisely because I could grasp it. I believed that science would help me build a new symbolic order , what Lacan might call the framework through which meaning is stabilized. A clean logic to overwrite the chaos. Even as I dove into quantum theory, however, Afghanistan kept rippling back, like an unresolved equation buried in the wavefunction. At the lunch table among friends and colleagues, my jokes were always about war—the trademark Afghan dark humor that circles back on itself, where the punchline is a silence that swallows the room. I would laugh alone. While others laughed at their own easy jokes, I didn’t. Easy laughter didn’t come very easily to me. While others read fantasy to escape reality, I, driven by a neurotic curiosity, reached for Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Freud—to probe it. Surprisingly, the time away from Afghanistan didn’t take Afghanistan away from me. Instead, it made me see my country in everything I read. Partly, because in the US, Afghanistan is spoken about through the vocabulary of world power, war, strategy, collapse, and rarely, if ever, through the intimate lens of the human. I didn’t notice it at first, but the more I talked to people, the more I began to feel something unsettling inside me. Literature shaped by exile, grief, and repression mirrored a part of me that was still hovering outside language, unclaimed by words. The Afghan experience, I realized, was not just history, it was psychic. Complex, fractured, buried. In Afghanistan, I never had to ask what it meant to be Afghan. The question itself didn’t arise. But in the US, I found myself caught in a mirror stage of sorts, not of my own making, but shaped by how Afghanistan was talked about all around me. I was reacting to a reflection I didn’t recognize. And in that reaction, I began to split. A part of me wanted to disappear. Another part wanted to speak, not about policy, but about how Afghanistan felt . How it smelled at dawn after the Azan was called, when my mother added cardamom to the morning tea and my brother brought fresh doodi bread from the bakery. How it danced in the upbeat songs my father played. How it mourned in my grandfather’s poetry. How it lived in a child’s fear. How it died in a suicide bomb. And how, even then, when a bomb exploded nearby, Afghans knew to open the glass windows quickly -- so the second blast, which often came, wouldn’t shatter them over us. I began to see Afghanistan not as a place left behind, but as something returning, over and over. It returns in dreams, in the pauses between sentences. My memories speak Pashto, but my thoughts answer in English. In this process, I feel that my spoken English is shaped in such a way that lived experience arrives uncannily, half-recognizable, crossing a border just to reach me. So, I went deeper in search for voices that echoed the Afghan experience, voices shaped by rupture that spoke in fear, in silences that felt familiar. I became obsessively drawn to narratives haunted by erasure, burial, and longing—that reflected the essential and the unsayable parts of Afghanistan, helping me understand the genre-defying tragedy of a people compelled to sell the remains of humans just to survive. There is a tragedy and a contradiction in being Afghan: despite having so much history, culture, pride and poetry, our immediate past opens the door to an incomprehensible reality, where some must sell the bones of the dead just to buy bread. It’s a truth hard to hold, an irreconcilable dialectical condition. And sometimes I wonder, what if those bones belonged to the very intellectuals who once dreamed of a better future? Perhaps they were the remains of those killed by the communists for their idealism, or later by the mujahideen for the same reason. In 2019, I read Miłosz’s The Captive Mind . He wrote it in postwar Paris, after defecting from Communist Poland. The book felt so connected to my life—its psychic resonances were so familiar—I wondered if it had been written by an Afghan. Suddenly, I realized something that had never found its signifier: in Afghanistan, our minds were also captive. From the communist regime to the post-2001 government, fear didn’t disappear, it adapted. The instructions were the same, only told by new faces: don’t speak of politics, don’t say what your family thinks, don’t mention the Taliban on the phone, or the Americans either. When our experiences are not mirrored back, when no one names them, when no one writes them down, they begin to dissolve and disappear. We start to question not just the experience, but in time, we begin to distrust our own interiority. As if the silence around us means the feeling itself is wrong. Reading that book, among many, I felt the Afghan experience was not just real but legible. Not just tragic but thinkable. Afghanistan could be shown as it lives in the ruined houses of Afghan hearts, with all its beauty and contradictions. Miłosz describes the Murti-Bing pill, a tranquilizer of the mind, swallowed for peace with contradiction. He wrote of people who surrendered to ideology to survive. I recognized that surrender. My own grandfather’s writings sit in a Moscow basement, unpublished. My family warns me not to bring attention to them. “Do you want the Taliban to destroy his grave?” they ask. Against the silence, I think of my grandfather who said, “An Afghan writer shouldn’t look for applause. He must write his books, buy his own books, read his own books.” My grandfather chose to write regardless of whether he would be read or not. Untitled , Latifa Zafar Attaii (2016). Thread on Digital Print. When I left for the United States in 2016, I thought I had made my choice to live for ideas. But history is not a linear march towards freedom. One's choices are never final, they are tested at every twist and turn. In 2025, at Tufts, where I worked as a researcher, a student was taken in for writing just an op-ed for Palestine. I have this habit when I become overwhelmed, when emotions press too hard against the inside of my chest: I write poems. That night, as I felt the space around my own mind begin to enclose, I wrote one—raw and reactive. I hovered over the “publish” button on Substack, to click or not click. I found myself navigating not survival, but a negotiation between idealism and silence, safety and speech. Not only did I not publish the poem, but instead I deleted my X/Twitter and Instagram accounts because I didn’t want any likes, shares, or posts to be used in any way. And in that moment, I turned away from the person I had worked hard to become. The old instincts returned. I started watching what I said again. At home, we were taught to stay quiet. Never talk about politics. Never say what your family thinks. Live like two people, one inside the home, another outside it. There’s a name for that kind of split. In The Captive Mind , Czesław Miłosz calls it ketman : a practiced split between thought and speech that fractures the self, creating a kind of psychological contradictory duality. Under ketman , one performs the lie of the state for so long that they lose touch with their own inner truth. What starts as concealment from others becomes concealment from the self. Over time, even the desire to resist dies. Whenever we went to the house we learnt the Quran in, or when friends visited, my mother would lean in close, her voice a hush, “Remember, even the walls have ears. Not everything needs to be said.” Back in Afghanistan, fear had a shape: the sound of a suicide bomber, the rumble of a tank passing, the sudden shadow of a plane above, the silence after a kidnapping. Here in the United States, it’s different but no less present. It's a quiet kind of fear you have to learn all over again, the kind that follows you into your inbox, your social feed, your decision to speak or not. “Does the past have an expiration date…?” Georgi Gospodinov asks through a character in Time Shelter. For Afghans, it doesn’t. The past doesn't reverberate through memory and inherited fear, but comes alive in the headlines. In Pakistan, Afghan families who have lived for decades are being deported overnight. In the US, too, there's talk that Afghans under temporary protected status may soon be deported. Anger stirs inside me. Afghans are constantly at the mercy of the world. No matter the country, no matter the context, we are always waiting, waiting to be allowed to stay, to speak, to live. I hate this. I hate seeing my people cast again and again as the world’s burden. I want to write about this, about how these two acts of deportation, one in Pakistan, the other in the US, are not separate, but part of the same story. Take my cousin, for example. She came to the US on a P1 visa after the fall of Kabul in 2021, but now she’s stuck in legal limbo, uncertain if she’ll be allowed to stay. Her own family, who fled to Pakistan during the Afghan civil war in the 1990s, have lived there ever since, still undocumented, still afraid. When she calls me, she tells me she can’t even talk about her situation. “How can I add to their worry,” she says, “when they’re barely holding on themselves?' To this eerie synchronicity in the news, with two borders and one destination, Afghanistan, I want to add a truth. The continuity is not just between the displaced, but in the war itself. One refugee was driven out by the conflict that began in the 1970s. The other fled the aftermath of the US withdrawal in 2021 . But these are not separate wars. They are different phases of the same long undoing. The world, including both the U.S. and Pakistan, helped train, fund, and arm the mujahideen. The fire they lit has never gone out. Its shape has changed, but it continues to burn through Afghan lives. One of the most heartbreaking reels I saw was of an Afghan man in Pakistan. His shop was being looted, crates overturned, and a box of oranges was thrown to the ground. He ran helplessly toward it, trying to salvage what he could. I watched it and cried. Watching his face once again broke something inside me—a psychic déjà vu. I saw my parents’ past. And suddenly, memories of family came back, memories I thought I had learned to forget. One of the stories my father often tells from the time of the Civil War is of a room full of large bags of rice. In Afghanistan, they say old rice tastes better. Leaving Kabul while rockets were falling, on an empty stomach, perhaps that’s one of the reasons that memory has stayed so vividly alive to this day. One thing this perpetual war in Afghanistan has done well is strip people of their humanity, reducing their unique stories to mere headlines of victimhood. I want to tell the stories that don’t make it into the headlines, the small ones, the family ones, the ones that carry the weight of a war without saying it outright. I open a draft. I start to write about the US betrayal of Afghanistan, the foreign policies that spiraled everything that came after the Cold War. But then I stop. I read it over, hesitate, and delete it. It’s unsettling how the same instinct that made my grandfather crouch under his desk with a lantern now lives in me—surfacing as I quietly prepare to pack my bags, without knowing why. I find myself looking over the books I’ve collected. Physics textbooks, poetry, novels, and essays. Some from home, some bought here. I always thought I would build a library. It felt like a small claim on a life shaped by ideas. Now I’m giving many of them away. Not because I want to, but because something in me is telling me to prepare. It’s a quiet instinct, like the ones my family lived by for decades. You don’t wait to be told. You leave before you’re asked to. You stay quiet even before the silence is forced on you. No one has threatened me. Nothing has happened. But still I hesitate. I start writing and then stop. I delete what I mean to say. I try to explain this to myself, maybe it’s fear, maybe caution, or maybe it’s secondhand, something I inherited in those moments when voices lowered during storytelling or before we left the house, receiving instructions on what to say and what not to say. A habit passed down that became part of everyday living. A silence practiced long before it was needed. But again, as I speak to my family, it feels absurd to them. “Your grandfather was much higher than just intellect,” they say. “He didn’t publish, so you can keep quiet too.” My grandfather didn’t publish because our family was still living in Kandahar. But now we’re out. He, however, still remains in Kandahar. I'm concerned about free speech. I hate how war has reduced our ambitions to mere survival. As long as no bombs are raining down, you’re supposed to be fine. Growing up and searching for Afghan intellectuals in the books I read, I always hated that I couldn’t find them in English, in dialogue with the world. Looking back, I realize it could never have been possible—for in a country constantly at war, neither poetry nor intellect could flourish, and hope could not survive. Survival has always been more important than idealism, and you can’t live for idealism without putting your skin in the game. But survival made sense to those who came before me. Their silence kept them alive. Can I live differently? Is it possible? Every time I see an Afghan face, it is waiting at a checkpoint, a consulate, or a deportation line. But for every sad Afghan story, there’s a punchline. In my family, even the darkest recollection ended with something absurd—a sort of internal smuggler’s trade—emotion disguised in irony so the censors of sanity would let it pass, and in return, a small, uncanny, crooked laugh meant to keep the world from collapsing. Among us Afghans there is an almost tacit agreement: to live against despair, one has to laugh louder than his wounds. Humor becomes a stubborn way to insist on life’s beauty. But this isn’t your usual “hahaha” humor. It’s the kind that goes deeper than the suffering. A kind of philosophy that doesn’t deny pain, but rather makes space for it. I do this in my own way. In my stand-up comedy class, which I take just for fun , I end with the punchline: In one dream, I’m running from a bomb, afraid of being sent to heaven. In another, I’m running from ICE, afraid of being sent to the Hindu Kush mountains. My trauma has grown legs. And it keeps running. Watch out, it might kick you. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Kandahar Afghanistan Storytelling Family invasion Kabul Communist Era Hafizullah Amin Taraki's Communist Party idealism poetry trauma exile diaspora Afghan diaspora education language ketman dark humor Discourses of War War War on Terror Colonialism US Imperialism Imperialism Decolonization Colonial Oppression Colonization Memory Dossiers of memory Islam United States Pakistan Pashto Absurdity Dehumanization Human Rights Violations US withdrawal 2021 Mujahideen Literary Literary Activism Literature & Liberation Afghan literature 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. 26th Jun 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

· INTERACTIVE Live · Urdu Fiction Chats Ep. 4 · On Qurratulain Hyder's sci-fi story “Roshni ki Raftaar” Time traveling from 1960s India to early modern Egypt with the acclaimed Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder and her story “Roshni ki Raftaar.” Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. A reading and discussion of the late Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder and her short story “Roshni ki Raftaar” by editors Nur Nasreen Ibrahim and Zuneera Shah. Feat.: time travel, women in science, sci-fi traditions in Urdu compared to those in English, and much more. Must-watch: Nur and Zuneera's thoughts on the ending, speculations on whether Hyder intended for a sequel, what she might think of criticisms, how the tonal shift affects the story, and how humor functions in the story. More importantly: why do we expect or want character growth? Is there a fundamental difference with regard to character growth between the Anglophone literary tradition and the non-Anglophone one? Qurratulain Hyder is amongst the most acclaimed and influential Urdu writers of the 20th century, perhaps even the most popular alongside contemporaries like Ismat Chughtai (with whom she had a testy relationship). Best known for her magnum opus “Aag ka Durya” or “River of Fire,” Hyder was also a deeply expansive writer. Here, Nur and Zuneera discuss her use of fantasy and sci-fi framings, the manner of her world-building, and comparisons to contemporary films and TV shows in the most fun and audience-engaging SAAG Chats episode to date. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Live Urdu Fiction Posthumous Qurratulain Hyder Science Fiction Time Travel Urdu Criticism Language SAAG Chats Genre Genre Tropes Speculative Fiction Fantasy Philosophical Fiction Syncretism River of Fire Roshni ki Raftaar Sahitya Akademi Genre Fluidity Difficult Reading Esoterica Time & Space Suez Canal Crisis Narrators Petty Bureaucracy Everyday Life Indian Bureaucracy Aligarh Science Characterization Ethical Standards for Fictional Characters Sci-Fi Rockets Romance Bitterness Scientist Characters Surprise Endings Gender Tonal Shifts Humor Short Story Naiyer Masud 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. 30th Nov 2020 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:

Jaan-e-Haseena JAAN-E-HASEENA is a Lahore-based performance-activist, musician, and video-artist whose work explores the radical potential of cultural production for trans liberation in Pakistan. Her debut song “Izzat” became the official anthem of the Sindh Moorat March, catalyzing a community of resistance and chosen kinship. Drawing on her upbringing, her art emerges from a politicized consciousness shaped by sectarian violence, digital queer discovery, and grassroots organizing. WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE