The histories of difference and oppression are contained in the body as contours of joy, suffering, and ultimately liberation. By life, or by death, liberation comes. The body that’s defined is defined because of what it’s not. Separate. Surprising. Abnormal. By not corresponding with the assigned expectations, the body is assigned another meaning, a meaning according to whom it belongs. Odd. Queer. Freakish. The body of the non-conformist is the body of an aberration, an elephant in the room, a monster. But the monster is not another, the monster, to somebody, is I. The monster speaks. Then that I is a monster who speaks to you.
Monks once hoped to turn lead into gold through alchemy. But consider the cauliflower instead. It takes just two genes to transform the ordinary stems, stalks and flowers of the weedy, tasteless species Brassica oleracea into a formation as marvelous as this fractal, cloudlike vegetable.
This is the true alchemy, says Christophe Godin, a senior researcher at the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology in Lyon, France.
I put down my bags in front of Room 903 and froze as I looked at the single-use key in my hand. Fourteen days. Locked in this room. I clutched the key and started walking briskly away. Up and down and round the long silent corridors of the 9th floor. My last chance to take a walk, I told myself. But it was really to process the feeling of incarceration. I didn’t realize what a gift freedom was. Until now when I was about to lose it.
I finally mustered enough courage to open the door, pulled the bags into the room while using my foot as a door stopper, then slipped the key card into its slot on the wall. The lights came on, I shut the door, and turned around. I was in a short, narrow corridor. Bold avant-garde designs on the carpet and on the walls met my eyes. Stunned momentarily by the illogical metamorphosis from the corridor’s functional décor and my perception of severe incarceration, I quickly embraced the lusciousness of the accommodations as I pulled my suitcase behind me and turned right towards the bedroom. Atingle with anticipation.
When Alfred Hitchcock talked about creating suspense, he often used the analogy of “the bomb under the table”. He was referring to a scenario where the threat is seen by the audience and unknown to or ignored by the characters. Climate change is a bomb waiting to go off. Many people believe we are sleepwalking into tragedy, and that our response is too little, too late. In her latest book, Dreamland, Rosa Rankin-Gee explores a nightmarish scenario of rising sea levels in the UK to great effect.
Once upon a time, I decided to start answering the question “Where are you from?” with “The middle of the Pacific Ocean.” I never followed through, though I still think it’s a good answer. I have spent so much of my life bouncing back and forth between the United States and India that, for me, the concept of home is more like a stationary probability distribution — a phrase that I filched from a statistics paper once, and which is likely to make less sense to most people than “the middle of the Pacific Ocean.” After all, the latter at least counts as a place.
All of which is to say that the central themes of Kazim Ali’s Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water resonated so strongly with me that I cannot pretend to be objective about how much I loved the book. I was captured by its compelling themes of global desi homelessness and what it means to love places that are not our own — what it means when none of the places we love are our own, but we belong to them anyway.
In 12 probing essays, Savala Nolan explores her intersectionality of race, gender and body awareness with an unflinching honesty that is both revelatory and unsettling. The essays are personal and confessional but informed by an awareness of larger historical narratives rooted in American culture.
“The great poem of this century can only be written with refuse,” the narrator overhears a man say in a cafe, echoing T. S. Eliot 100 years ago. It is an increasingly pressing project, as the refuse keeps piling up, but also increasing is the need for imagination in transforming the refuse into something that will move us.