What Harris doesn’t quite say is that her mother, being human, is fallible. Instead, she sticks with the fantasy Ma – an unfailing, temperate presence who compensates for other lacking, including an absent or distant father...
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Sunday, September 22, 2024
MA as fantasy
What Harris doesn’t quite say is that her mother, being human, is fallible. Instead, she sticks with the fantasy Ma – an unfailing, temperate presence who compensates for other lacking, including an absent or distant father...
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Of love as fodder for fiction and a self-concious formal experiment
Abdus-Salam is not necessarily a likeable or an admirable character, and the unnamed narrator does not tell us why he (or she) cares about him or his legacy. In many respects, Abdus-Salam is a fairly ordinary man. He chews a spiced-up tobacco mix and teaches at a suburban school while harbouring creative ambitions. While he has complex and conflicting thoughts about religion, in this, too, he is not very different from most people. He veers between opting in occasionally (going to the mosque once in a while, if only out of long-standing habit), to claiming that “God is everyone’s shield”, to doubting god privately even as he fears divine retribution in moments of crisis, such as illness. His amorous adventures, however, do make him an exceptional protagonist, if only because of how long the list of his paramours is, and how he uses them as fodder for fiction.
Monday, September 02, 2024
Against the Death of Dream (in Wasafiri, 40th anniversary issue, Autumn 2024)
I've written my first essay for the lastest issue of Wasafiri, themed Futurisms. Here's a very short extract from my essay, Against the Death of Dream:
One of the most dangerous things, Pash warned, is the clock that moves on your wrist but not in your eyes. For years I wondered at this image of a stopped clock in the reader’s eye, and the way the poet juxtaposes frozen time against water frozen inside eyes. (Sabse khatarnaak vo aankh hoti hai/jo sab dekhti hui bhi jami barf hoti hai). If to dream is to have a vision for the future, then the death of dream is to accept that the present moment is all of time, and that we must lose all hope for a safer, more loving, more leisurely time. Read in this light, I would argue that the danger is not restricted only to the loss of hopeful dreams; it is just as dangerous to lose our nightmares.
In Radical Hope, philosopher-psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear writes that anxiety can be a realistic response to the world, which suggests that anxiety-induced dreams serve to alert us to individual and collective threats. If we know how to ‘read’ our nightmares, we may find that they serve as timely warnings. In my own experience, I find nightmares to be a useful aid in reconnecting with my instinctive ‘self’. Last year, I had woken up from a miserable dream...
Please read the rest of the essay in the lastest issue of Wasafiri (119, 40th anniversary issue, Autumn 2024).