A story about love can “unspool the complexities of caste,” says Nikhil Pandhi, the editor of Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist Anthology of Love Stories published by Zubaan Books, an indie feminist press based in India. Such stories not only serve to give space to the rich, inner lives of Dalit communities but they can be an important resource for anyone who is keen to understand caste. “Rather than quoting an academic treatise, I felt like it is just much easier for them to read a short story,” says Pandhi.

A collection of 17 stories from across India, Love in the Time of Caste makes love the prism through which one can observe, absorb, and critique caste regimes in India. The book powerfully illustrates the ways in which the violence of casteism permeates all aspects of social relations while simultaneously structuring Dalit lives, psyches and sociality too.

Unsurprisingly, these are not sappy love stories with happy endings. Rather, “this is love that is anchored in embodied violence that is so real” that even dreaming, fantasizing and desiring can become perilous. Caste is necropolitical, says Pandhi, but the writers in the book rearrange those desires and reframe circuits of connection and belonging. The stories span a wide range of themes, certainly love but also revenge, inter-caste and intra-caste relationships, heartbreak, healing, toxic masculinity, Dalit women’s agency, the absence of childhood, and, quite often, quests for freedom.

Pandhi states that the stories attempt to explore different ways of inhabiting love. Even the conversation on love “is so saturated by heterosexism and a hetero-patriarchal Brahmanical understanding that it’s hard to even get at it.” To unravel this knot requires a subversion of these norms from within. One goal of the collection was to “rethink Dalits as passionate subjects and Dalit life as capable, in a very critical fashion, of generating new ways of affiliation.”

Anchoring these reflections on love is a deeply considered anti-caste, Dalit feminism that is stitched into the fabric of every single story in the book. Pandhi defines anti-caste, Dalit feminism as “a rejection of Brahmanical norms, Brahmanical sensitivities and sensibilities around touch, around intimacy, around how desire should be performed, around this obsession with respectability politics, around expressions and economies of flesh.” Yet it is not defined by negation but by its capaciousness and creativity.

Pandhi says that he has twenty pen drives of unpublished love stories and he believes this is intrinsically connected to “Dalit feminism as a creative and critical project that is expanding outwards, that is global in its scope, that is looking at global feminisms, but is very conscious of the fact that it also represents something that has a frictious relationship with what is normative feminism in the Indian context.”

In the foreword to the anthology, writer Anita Bharti asks what keeps Dalit life intact despite the excess of violence, harm, injury and humiliation being meted out on a daily basis? Pandhi believes that Bharti’s prescient question is “urging us to think about the fact that hope or that compassion, that maitri, emerges because there is a very intimate understanding of what pain is, what pain does. And one of the things that vedana or pain does is it also potentializes chetana. It also potentializes consciousness. Consciousness is only known to someone who actually knows.”

Buy the book:
Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist anthology of love stories edited and translated by Nikhil Pandhi — https://zubaanbooks.com/shop/love-in-the-time-of-caste-a-dalit-feminist-anthology-of-love-stories/

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“I had always placed my queer identity and my Palestinian identity in different buckets,” admits writer Tareq Baconi. This changed when he began writing his memoir, Fire in Every Direction, a first-person account of young Tareq, a Palestinian boy living in Jordan and gradually coming to terms with his sexuality.

“Through the writing of this book, and as I became more involved in Palestine organizing, I realized that this separation is obviously a false separation,” Baconi says. “Not only that, I began to understand that I came to Palestine through a queer lens, and specifically through my experience of identifying as queer in Jordan, sort of breaking apart or resisting these hegemonic structures that are placed on us.”

Fire in Every Direction is Baconi’s second book, and it is a surprising pivot. His first book, Hamas Contained:The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, was a scholarly work rather than a personal and intimate reflection. The memoir positions coming out as gay and coming out as Palestinian as deeply connected journeys. Along the way, it also reframes and expands the “coming out” trope, the moment when an individual discloses their queer orientation. Queer coming of age stories often position the “coming out” as a triumphant finale, but Baconi’s book instead focuses on the long road ahead for a gay Arab man, showing that the Westernized coming out framing is not one-size-fits-all and requires recalibration, depending on the culture one belongs to.

Fire in Every Direction is a unique and timely book, published at a time when settler colonial violence in Palestine refuses to abate. “It’s heightened in this moment of genocide, when you understand actually that what’s happening in Gaza is because decolonization of the globe or pushing back against empire and colonialism in the West is unfinished business,” he says.

By embracing and embodying the intersections between queer and Palestinian identity, Baconi’s memoir offers a true path to decolonial and liberatory futures.

Further reading:
—Fire in Every Direction by Tareq Baconi: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fire-in-Every-Direction/Tareq-Baconi/9781668068564

—Hamas Contained:The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance by Tareq Baconi
https://www.sup.org/books/middle-east-studies/hamas-contained

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Today, in the United States, the right to vote is more precarious and more contested than ever. “I have had front row seats to voter suppression,” writer, poll worker, activist and Georgia resident Anjali Enjeti tells me, referring to Shelby County v. Holder, a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2022 that gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Enjeti explains that things have been going downhill ever since, because “states can now enact voter-suppressing laws and policies that erect tremendous barriers,” especially for Black, brown or Indigenous Democrat voters.

Enjeti’s recent book, Ballot, is a history of voting in the US, and it certainly delivers. However, along the way, the book equally exposes a corrupt and manipulative system that destabilizes democracy by making it harder for people to physically go and vote.

Being a Democratic voter living in the state of Georgia offers a particularly important vantage point, in her case.

“I’ve been gerrymandered out of districts that I helped flip blue in 2018. I’ve seen it. I felt it. My dropbox for my absentee ballot was closed down. It used to be close to my house,” she says, “now it’s 30 minutes away. I was directly impacted, as many voters have been, who live in these red, Republican-led states that have been enacting a cascade of laws.” With almost no oversight from the federal government, she adds, these laws “have a wide berth of destruction.”

Even as the Republican party has been shamelessly and strategically enacting such destruction for decades, she says, Enjeti is unsparing in her criticism of the Democratic party. She admits that while there were more checks and balances that affected both Republicans and Democrats at some point in time, the Democratic Party today is entirely overrun by corporate interests. Democrats are neither able to counter the vile and dehumanizing rhetoric deployed by the Republicans, nor effect a bulwark of opposition to their policies.

“There’s something ingrained in Democrats about the fact that they want to be friends with extremists,” she says. “They want to erase themselves and their belief system because they feel that that will get them the ability to be elected again…They care more about donations from billionaires for their next election than they do about actually serving in office. They will watch Palestinian babies being blown up and vote for more weapons going to Israel because they care more about the belief that that will get them reelected than they do about the fact that we’ve had some of the largest protests in this country since the Vietnam War for a ceasefire, for stopping the armament of Israel.”

In her book, Enjeti wanted to give readers a sense of the magnitude of this moment and the role of elections, but she is aware that voting is only one element in a vast political ecosystem.

“I have been a progressive activist for many years, so I’ve actually never felt that elections paved the way to liberation,” she tells me. “We’ve got strikers. We’ve got protesters. We’ve got people boycotting corporations. We’ve got a big mix of tools in our toolbox, and voting is one of them. We need to not have the police, we need to not have ICE, but we can hold that and understand that we’ve got to have the abolitionists and then we’ve got to have the people doing something about elections. We have to hold these multiple roles at the same time, and elections are still very important.”

Further reading:
Ballot by Anjali Enjeti https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ballot-9798765126202/

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“Satire is dead. Long live satire,” Tanzanian political cartoonist Gado declares, laughing, as we sit down to discuss the role of satire, humor and cartoons in modern public discourse. Godfrey Mwampembwa - pen name “Gado” - is a prolific and prominent political cartoonist with a career that has spanned three decades.

Gado’s talent for drawing, coupled with a voracious interest in the news, led him to cartooning at an early age. Studying architecture at the university in Dar-es-Salam did not quite hold his attention, and he landed a job at The Daily Nation, Kenya’s leading daily and one of the largest newspapers in Africa. He took off for Nairobi, young and alone but eager to learn. He felt he was lucky to find mentors and an environment that was open to his ideas and creativity.

Over his many years working for The Daily Nation, Gado boasts of having offended every possible powerful person in Kenya, as well as in the broader African continent.

“I have no regrets,” he says, despite having endured threats, silencing attempts and high-pressure backdoor negotiations which found presidents, ministers and businessmen demanding accommodations.

“I am one of those people who has a knack for disrespecting authority,” he jokes. But Gado has a steadfast commitment to his work, and believes that provocations via satire “enrich the debate and bring to the table ideas and things that we are afraid to discuss.

”But when it comes to poking fun, how far is too far? I ask.

“I remain true to the principles of satire,” Gado replies.“One of the things about good satire is it doesn’t punch downward. You always punch upward. And so, in a situation like Gaza, you won’t do a cartoon to laugh at Palestinians. It would be ridiculous. But that does not mean you shouldn’t do drawings on what is happening in Gaza, because satire remains a medium that should delight, it should poke fun, it should educate, and it should also punch upward in the sense that satire should always afflict the powerful and not the minorities and the marginalized.”

The rapidly evolving global media landscape has brought about a shift in how media is consumed. The decrease in print runs of newspapers has meant that fewer and fewer editorial cartoonists are being hired, while the advent of streaming services and video-based social media has also meant a decline in viewership of satirical late night talk shows. Gado believes that “satire is in turmoil in many countries” due to a political climate dominated by right-wing movements, censorship and cancel culture. But he remains hopeful:

“I might not have answers in terms of ‘the how’ and what are we going to have in the next 10 years, but I’m very confident that it will survive. Satire still remains a very powerful tool to speak truth to power.”

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“Border regimes are some of the most normalized forms of violence,” writer and activist Harsha Walia says, because even the most progressive people “really struggle with the idea of abolishing the border.”

Recently, the murder of Renee Good in the bright light of day, in Minneapolis, has sparked outrage across the US. However, this is a culmination of the past several months of an escalation in the war on migrants and in policing practices. The stories of Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk and Kilmar Ábrego García were early signs that an escalation in abductions and brutalization was coming. ICE now appears to be wielding spectacular levels of power and unleashing daily violence on a new scale. Walia, who has followed and written about borders and migrations for several years, is horrified at what she is seeing but not entirely surprised by this escalation.

Walia wants to broaden the scope of this conversation. Today ICE “is one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the United States. In fact, its budget outpaces many militaries of the world.” But even before there was ICE, the core function of any border regime is to “enforce borders, to enact deportation and detention, and to escalate border enforcement in different places.” This escalation can occur at the border itself as with US border with Mexico or as a maritime build-up with the Caribbean or “inland” which means within neighborhoods and within the so-called territory of the US.

“Even though at different times, the spectacle and horror is different, the ideology and premise is the same, which is to terrorize migrant communities and to enact detention and deportation...It is not to always deport people, but it’s to make them more vulnerable to employers and to the social context in which migrants live.”

In offering a brief history of ICE, Walia stresses the bipartisan nature of the agency. It was created by George W. Bush in 2003 in the aftermath of 9/11. “An immensely violent and large agency,” ICE comes out in a moment “when the war on terror was increasingly merged with the war on migrants.” But she argues that it is the Clinton administration that “laid the ground for border militarization as we know today. And that was by putting in millions of dollars to securitize the border, all of these different operations in California and Arizona and Texas to basically make it so that crossing the border became a matter of life and death for people.”

The Obama and Biden administrations have followed suit and have been instrumental in harnessing brutal bordering practices, a key element of which has been the externalization of the border. They have poured billions of dollars on “border enforcement into other countries, which is why now Mexico has a much larger detention and deportation system than the United States, because the US has outsourced its violence to countries in South and Central America.”

None of this takes away from the fact that Trump has taken it to new levels by putting thousands of ICE patrols on the streets, by pausing US visa applications from 75 countries, and by giving leeway for hate speech and racism against migrants. Walia warns against exceptionalizing Trump’s villainy because “Trump did not create this entire administration or structure. All of the infrastructure that goes into border enforcement predates him.”

Additionally, Trump is part of a global trend “whether it is the escalation of Zionism and Zionist and genocidal violence, the escalation in India and of Brahminical Hindutva forces, and we can look at other parts of Europe where this is happening.”

Walia rightly points out that even if the American empire collapses today, countries like India and UAE will push the same horrible agendas. Thus regardless of American hegemony, “there is no denying that transnational accumulation, capitalist accumulation and empire-making is no longer the domain of the imperial core. Even if these are sub-imperialisms, they’re advancing at a rate that is unfathomable and causing violence on people’s lives and misery for people in ways that are unfathomable.”

Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg because “there are over 17,000 agencies that have jurisdiction over migrants in the United States.” Any of these could be empowered if ICE is gone. “So it’s about understanding that it’s not about abolishing ICE. It’s about abolishing the system and the power that ICE upholds.”

Further reading:
Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1553-border-and-rule

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“This is a brutal sanctions regime.” Writer, political scientist and educator Geo Maher emphatically reminds us about Venezuela. A bipartisan strategy that began with Barack Obama and got much worse under Donald Trump, sanctions have been a deliberate effort to keep Venezuela in a long term chokehold. The seeds to destabilize Venezuela were thus sowed decades ago, even as last week’s US strikes in Caracas left dozens of Venezuelans dead and the unlawful kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro by the United States shocked the world.

Maher is disturbed by the speed with which the situation is moving, but has been well aware that “something was coming,” he tells me. He has written two books on Venezuela, a country that captured his imagination many years ago partially because he instinctively knew that when it came to Venezuela, he was being lied to. He decided to go see for himself and was bowled over by the mass mobilization movements that brought the charismatic Hugo Chavez to power and longstanding grassroots efforts of the Venezuelan people to take back their country from a greedy and corrupt capitalist system.

In this conversation, Maher offers a long view on a maligned and misunderstood country. The US obsession with Venezuela goes way back. While this current conflagration is certainly about oil, it is also due to the fact that US settler ambitions have been consistently thwarted by Latin American independence movements going as far back as the type of resistance mounted by Venezuela’s Simon Bolivar in the 19th century.

In recent years, it is not just the desire for oil, but the competition for this very oil (currently available to Russia and China) that has driven the US’ aggressive political project in the country. Meanwhile, Venezuelan resistance to this imperial violence is the subject of lore. Despite sustained efforts to vilify Hugo Chavez and to mount and fund various coups against him while painting him as a crazy dictator, the grassroots movements remain strong. Maduro may not be as popular or as powerful a politician as Chavez, but Maher says that it is precisely the fetishization of individual figures like Maduro - the eccentric, the rabid narcoterrorist - that obscures insights. “It was this obsession with this single individual, as if a single individual could ever make a revolution, which was not the case - or that a single individual would be ultimately in control of something so sprawling as the Venezuelan state.”

Today, people are suffering due to “the major contradiction of the oil economy, which still plagues the Venezuelan state today,” says Maher. “Because of oil, nothing is produced. It’s very difficult in the context of an oil economy to produce the things that people actually need. As long as you’re reliant on that oil money and those imports, you are politically vulnerable to imperialism and to the global capitalist system.”

Despite different chronologies, regional specificities and frameworks, comparisons with Iraq ring loudly and true. Unhinged American colonialism, an obsession with oil, brutal swathes of sanctions and several wars in Iraq make it a striking analogy to understand Venezuela. In Iraq, there were fake arguments about WMD, and in the case of Venezuela, Maduro is being charged with narco-terrorism and a drummed-up fentanyl crisis (Venezuela does not produce fentanyl). There is no basis for the drug charges being brought against Maduro, Maher says. In fact, “they’re already backing off the claim that the Cartel de los Soles even exists.” Maher adds that one of the charges - “possessing machine guns” - is particularly laughable.

“You’re charging a head of state with the possession of machine guns. This is one of the most bizarre things that I’ve seen.”

What’s clear is that it will be a long road ahead for Venezuelans and the region as a whole. It is also becoming clearer that none of this will necessarily prove easy for Trump, Marco Rubio and the rest of Trump’s cronies, who have almost certainly bitten off more than they can chew. Maher retains faith in the people of Venezuela. Today, when the definition of democracy appears diseased and flaccid, he sees the Venezuelan people’s movements as a blueprint for ushering in what could be a radical democratic structure. There is no way to predict how this situation will unfold, but when it comes to Venezuela, Maher’s convinced of one thing: “Any kind of occupying force will be doomed.”

Further reading:
--We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution https://dukeupress.edu/we-created-chavez

--Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela https://www.versobooks.com/products/147-building-the-commune

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Ramallah-based culture writer Lama Obeid finds that the genocide has brought about a paradigm shift - not only in the realms of cookery, cookbooks and recipes, but also in the very food that Palestinians are being made to consume.

The attack on food, foodways, health and nutrition is sustained, deliberate and systematic, and works alongside tactics of starvation and hunger. Not only is there widespread scarcity, but the food that is available is processed, unhealthy and acts as slow poison.

Lama begins by explaining the disruptions in the food supply chain amid frequent raids in the Jenin refugee camp, for example, and Palestinian cities being cordoned off from one another. The immediate effect of this is that Israeli produce proliferates in the market, and often these foodstuffs turn out to be settlement products that are labeled as Israeli. The genocide in Gaza has completely collapsed the existing system. Even during the 18 years of brutal blockade, Gaza produced its own food. Strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers, seafood and other produce was even allowed from Gaza into the West Bank.

“Especially the strawberries,” Obeid says. “It’s an alternative to the Israeli strawberries. We do have some strawberries growing in the north, but the climate in Gaza is more suitable.”

Over the last two years, fresh produce has become a priceless commodity. Processed food is everywhere, and Lama reports that, in addition to canned beef and beans, which have been a staple of UN rations, “unfortunately, there are things that even I’ve never seen canned before.”

Lama is horrified about the distribution of canned boiled eggs and canned chicken, for example, all of which are probably “zero percent healthy.”

Another way to ensure Palestinians have no access to fresh produce is Israel’s tolerance of (and often participation in) settler attacks on olive farms. These farms, often small in size, can sustain entire families.

Palestinian food was always political. Cookbooks often emphasize the impact of the longstanding occupation and attempt to preserve and archive recipes with a sense of urgency - archiving under fire. But the sense of urgency has become the norm, and the genre of the traditional cookbook has been replaced by something different - food bloggers and writers who double up as journalists reporting on the genocide using food as lens. Mona Zahed’s book Tabkha is actually subtitled Recipes from Under the Rubble. Lama reminds us that Zahid from Gaza was displaced with her family and “wrote this cookbook during her displacement to document also the family recipes, and also to try to support her family.”

The recipes in Tabkha work against erasure in terms of archiving the heritage, but the cookbook is also a way for her family to literally survive the imminent threat of erasure.

Food bloggers have become popular over the course of the two-year genocide, and many use these platforms to raise funds for their families. Renad Atallah was only 9 years old when she gained a large following after making cooking videos, smiling radiantly even as bombs rained down and ingredients became more and more scarce. Similarly Hamada Shaqoura began posting videos of himself cooking and distributing food to children. His videos have a tongue-in-cheek humor as he glowers at the camera while stirring vats of food. His humorous affect alongside images of large quantities of food work against the stereotypes of wretchedness and emaciation.

Palestinian cuisine and gastronomy are no longer confined to preserving heritage or exploring culinary tradition, but rather are about capturing the nitty-gritty of survival in wartime. Lama points out that, even as these chefs write or blog about these recipes, they have no ingredients to actually make them, and they “unfortunately, are not eating these recipes. So what is being documented now in Gaza are the basic staples, very basic staples, and what we would call ‘war food,’ or the food made from rations.”

There are very few silver linings, but at a time where everything and everybody have been exposed, Lama is relieved to note that there is no tolerance for the ways in which Palestinian food has been appropriated and normalized as Israeli food. Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi, for example, has collaborated with Palestinian chefs, thus giving the impression that this is one cuisine and one shared heritage and thereby obscuring the violence of the occupation. But now, Lama says, such collaborations have stopped.

As a third generation Palestinian refugee displaced from the town of Ein Karem in West Jerusalem, Lama continues writing about food with a proudly Palestinian and sharp, political lens. Lama is fatigued by the Israeli-Palestinian debates around food and believes that the solution lies in turning her gaze to the past and diving into many untranslated Arabic works about food, because Palestinians have always made attempts to “record their own cuisine.”

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In more than two dozen books spanning Iraq, Bosnia, Palestine and Vietnam, poet, translator and scholar Ammiel Alcalay has crystallized a piercing critique of American imperialism. He illustrates a commitment to places and people upon whom the bloody trail left by American excursions is inscribed, whether abroad or at home.

Alcalay has crafted a unique insider-outsider approach grounded in poetic practice, a study of languages, and that embraces a wide range of materials: news, poems, letters, books, essays, reports, speeches, music, art, comics, radio, conversations, and more. His work goes against the grain of institutionalized forms of writing and allows for an excavation of political, historical and literary narratives that have been deliberately buried, obfuscated and redirected.

Our conversation was wide-ranging, yet focused on historicizing and contextualizing the present moment as genocide continues in Palestine, as American universities unravel with shocking speed, and as the grip of authoritarianism and fascism tightens worldwide. When it comes to Palestine, Alcalay reflects on past events that have created the material conditions for the genocide to take place with full global complicity, all in the bright light of day.

From 2018 onwards, he says, the world has been in a state of immense tumult, with demonstrations in Lebanon, Chile, Columbia, Hong Kong playing out alongside the Hirak protests in Algeria and the Great March of Return in Gaza.

“Suddenly, boom, coronavirus - everything shuts down,” Alcalay says. “Enormous freedom of movement curtailed.”

He adds that Gaza was very much on his mind as he realized that these social movements and their ensuing suppression would create resounding and long-lasting reverberations that would likely become compounded in Gaza. He was right. It is clear, as he says: “We’re all heading to Gaza. That’s the model for the world.”

The “Gaza model” evokes what Aime Cesaire called the “imperial boomerang” whereby empire’s violence abroad inescapably boomerangs its way back home. Examples abound as terrorizing ICE agents roam the streets in the US and brutal practices of incarceration in North America, Europe and Asia mimic Israel to a fault.

For Alcalay, however, one has to go even further back to understand the “Gaza model.”

“The war in Iraq is a gaping hole in US behavior, thought, culture, politics, etc. It’s like a blast crater, and so many of the things that have been happening in Gaza -- withholding of food -- all of that happened in Iraq, was done by the US, and they killed hundreds of thousands. And the general culture has no clue whatsoever about any of that.”

To a large degree, American wars in the Gulf, and the amount of violence inflicted on Iraq through sanctions and “shock and awe,” have rarely penetrated the public psyche. Gaza has shocked the world, Alcalay explains, not only because these forms of brutalization have been obscured from the public, but also because of the horrifying speed and quantity with which they are being deployed. And simultaneously, the culture of protests has also changed over the years. The protests trying to stop the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11 lacked the immediacy and collectivity that was present during the war in Vietnam, proving that modes of control and surveillance have successfully proliferated. The vicious and swift suppression of pro-Palestinian protests in the last two years is proof.

Despite these sombre assessments, Alcalay continues writing, translating and teaching. He has been buoyed by the success of Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, since Alcalay was instrumental in bringing him to an American audience. In particular, he has been furiously translating and collaborating creatively with writers in Gaza.

“This is a big year for books,” Alcalay says. He co-translated Nasser Rabah’s poems, and the volume Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece was published by City Lights books this year. He is awaiting the publication of the translation of a work by Alaa Radwan, a student of the late Refaat Alareer, and his collaborative book titled Imperial Abhorrences created with Gazan artist Kholoud Hammad is forthcoming.

Further reading:
—Controlled Demolition: a work in four books by Ammiel Alcalay https://asterismbooks.com/product/controlled-demolition-ammiel-alcalay

—After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture by Ammiel Alcalay
https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816621552/after-jews-and-arabs/

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“Food is politics,” Omer Al Tijani declares. “The documenting of cuisine and culture is an act of resistance against the ongoing oppression that we have been experiencing in Sudan.” In a country ravaged by war and where hunger has been weaponized in extreme ways, Omer’s extraordinary cookbook Sudanese Kitchen works against invisibility and erasure.

Sudanese Kitchen is a culmination of decade-long efforts to document Sudanese food and foodways, and to combine the genres of ethnography, archive, memoir and art into one work. The author and his team of photographers undertook a culinary journey across Sudan and took the time to sit down with members of different communities across the country to learn about their food. The book thus becomes a testament to the resilience, resistance and creativity of Sudanese people who keep their traditions alive despite having to endured decades of strife.

Originally from Khartoum but having grown up in the UK, Omer found himself listless at the food options during his university years. They were “not feeding my soul.” And unfortunately, there was no Sudanese restaurant to be found. This is when he started to teach himself to cook the food he had always known in his Sudanese home. He would nag his mother and aunts to give him recipes, and would patiently attempt to recreate dishes based on somewhat haphazard, intuitive instructions. Over time, Omer realized that he was on to something and the collecting of recipes transformed into a more ambitious endeavor.

When Omar Al-Bashir’s regime fell in 2018, and Sudan erupted into revolt, Omer took off to Khartoum to participate in the protests and to also pursue what was now definitely turning into a book. This moment of transition that lasted a couple of years was filled with hope. “It was an energizing period,” Omer says, and one that he touches on several times in his book in an attempt “to keep the revolution alive.” He knows that these are important memories “given the state that we’re in now where we have this two years long war.”

Sudanese Kitchen opens with a photograph of a mural memorializing a young martyr and the following page carries a dedication to all the martyrs of the December 2018 revolution and to the family members who “nourished the bodies and minds of Sudanese youth.” Right away, Omer grounds his book in the connected nature of revolution, liberation and Sudanese practices of food and sustenance. As the book progresses, vivid color photographs of landscapes, foods and markets are interspersed with infographics and lists. There is a timeline of key events in Sudanese culinary history that outline the important moments of agricultural history as well as a map of its current agricultural landscape. There is an inventory which lists all the main ingredients used in Sudanese cuisine as well as an illustrated glossary for pantry items, cooking utensils, Sudanese terminology and even some proverbs.

Along the way, Omer weaves together the story of his family with the history of contemporary Sudan. Every few pages of recipes is punctuated by short autobiographical sketches. He starts with his early childhood in Khartoum and then recounts the difficulties of migration to Britain. At university, Omer embarked on his cooking journey. He started making trips to Sudan in 2018 and with two photographers in tow, the group systematically documented, prepared and photographed the dishes for over a year. Long road trips took them to the Nuba mountains and also deep into Al Fashir, and they made several stops to talk to people and to record recipes and cooking styles.

In Sudanese Kitchen, food becomes a lens, a theory, a history, an aesthetic, and a manifesto. Despite the beauty of the book, it does not make for easy digestion (pun intended). It insists on political engagement and demands an interest in Sudan’s history, geography and culture. However, it is still very much a cookbook and remains grounded in the recipes. Omer is enthusiastic about making Sudanese food accessible to all and the recipes have been tried, tested, and translated so that everyone can give it a shot, and allow themselves to partake and immerse in the incredible and rich heritage of Sudan.

Buy the book:
Sudanese Kitchen by Omer Al Tijani (Almas Art Foundation, 2024)
https://www.almasartfoundation.org/publications/12-the-sudanese-kitchen-the-sudanese-kitchen-omer-al-tijani/

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Writer, scholar, and educator Sunny Singh explains that everything she does “centers around finding ways to undo empire.” The world we have inherited is “an ongoing colonial project” and thus “the wars, the genocides that we’re watching now, are still the same colonial wars.”

Imperial powers have poured vast resources into usurping power through shaping narratives. “Before a single shot is fired, before a single grain of rice is confiscated as it happened in the Bengal famine; before a single package of aid is blocked, as is happening now in Gaza, there is a war of stories.”

All of Singh’s work emphasizes the importance of writing back to these narratives and thus refusing those stories. Her recent story collection, Refuge: Stories of War (and Love), attempts to decenter the traditional war narrative by focusing on women’s perspectives. The stories are sparse, moving reflections on violence and suffering.

At a stylistic level, the new collection might seem like a departure from Singh’s previous object of study: Bollywood cinema. But Singh argues that her writing on Bollywood comes from this same place of anti-colonial politics.

Her 2023 book A Bollywood State of Mind: A Journey into the World’s Biggest Cinema is a memoir, but it is also an homage to the world’s oldest film industry. Singh offers an intimate glimpse into her own peripatetic childhood and youth, punctuated by songs from Hindi movies, family conversations about films, as well as happy memories of going to the cinema. As an adult, Singh was shocked to see the prejudice— even disdain— around scholarly writing about Bollywood. The scholars would insist on a very academic, objective, and neutral view, and Singh says that this “kind of demand is never made of a Hollywood scholar, or a French or Italian cinema scholar.”

Singh wanted to write about Bollywood through an “emotional core” while paying attention to how “stories work” and “how they impact people and how they impact culture.” She believes that Bollywood historically had an anti-colonial impulse, even though some of today’s overtly nationalist cinema is disconcerting and needs to be critiqued. Unfortunately, “empire is built into the [Indian] nation state’s DNA,” Singh says.

Singh’s commitment to amplifying stories and storytellers that are marginalized in the mainstream is also evident in her founding of the Jhalak prize, an annual literary prize awarded to BAME writers (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic) who are residents of Britain. Fed up with all-white juries, all-white longlists, and the false refrain about the lack of Black or brown writers, Singh decided to found a prize dedicated to her grandmother, whose words were an inspiration to her as a girl: “If you see something wrong, fix it.”

The prize is now ten years old, but it has been an uphill battle to get mainstream media to even cover it. They also had a member of parliament who even accused them of racism. But Singh laughs it off and soldiers on. “The issue is not individuals, it’s the structure. I’m interested in knocking down the structure.”

Singh says that almost 40% of children in the UK are now from a minority ethnic background, and publishing books by writers of color is urgent. “Every time that child reads a book that features someone like them, that features their family, that features their story, that’s one kid who’s had a little chip out of that imperial propaganda worldview knocked out. That’s a child who’s had one tiny taste of freedom.”

Further reading: https://www.sunnysingh.net/

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Kenya’s Muslim population has “long experienced political and economic marginalization” says Samar Al-Bulushi, anthropologist and author of War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, United States and the War on Terror. Samar traces a rather under-explored contemporary history; that of Kenya’s role in the US-led War on Terror. The book investigates the ways in which Kenya emerges as a significant geopolitical player during the first two decades of the 21st century. With the US outsourcing its wars, Kenya was molded into a willing and violent partner in counter-terrorism programs.

At the heart of Samar’s book are Kenyan Muslims—the real subjects of counter-terrorism policies, and the militarism, surveillance and policing that it sets in motion. She explains that “Kenya is not a site of drone strikes. It’s not a site of US bombing. It’s a site of much more mundane daily policing.” But these forms of policing have profoundly destabilizing effects. Just as US counter-terrorism policies have waged a war against Muslims globally, so too has Kenya but on a local level. Samar’s research urges for a clearer and granular understanding of these linked US-Kenyan histories.

“We’re looking at 20 years of specialized police bodies that are accountable to no one, that operate in a very similar way to the ICE agents that we’re seeing deployed on the streets of L.A., D.C., and across the United States today. They’re not uniformed. They operate in vehicles that are unmarked so they can appear out of nowhere, no warning, knocking down doors, shooting people in their beds in the middle of the night.”

“And that,” Samar says, “is a dramatic change in terms of the experiences of Kenyan Muslims.”

It took several years of research for Samar to excavate these histories and to map them along a historical, geographical and cultural spectrum. Samar worked in the field of international human rights, and was with a group called the International Center for Transitional Justice when the Kenyan election violence of 2007 and 2008 shook the nation. “I was struck by the fact that all of my colleagues immediately jumped because so much of the violence had been perpetrated by the Kenyan police.” However, they also started offering “very prescriptive solutions for Kenya, one of the core ones being police reform.”

This was also exactly the moment that the US military command for Africa (AFRICOM) was being launched. Samar started to ask what “it would mean to put Kenya and the United States in a single analytic frame to be thinking about imperial entanglements.”

Samar spent a lot of time conducting research in Mombasa and the Kenyan coast, and she was invited into the intimate space of families whose relatives have been detained, disappeared and tortured. She also conducted interviews with activists who have been at the forefront of local organizing against these dangerous and often unlawful policies. These are touching stories that Samar places right at the beginning of each chapter thus humanizing and enlivening what is a scholarly, dense and theoretically challenging book. Samar found that these histories go far back to colonial times and to the early era of decolonization, but realized that an enormous cultural apparatus allows for these stories to remain under-reported and thus, for the most part, concealed. Kenya “has presented itself on the global stage as a peaceful country…as a leader…as modern, as civilized, cosmopolitan; every conceivable frame that will ensure that there’s little to no scrutiny.”

But the moment for scrutiny has arrived. As Kenya enters one of its most turbulent moments in recent history with the Gen-Z protests against the financial and economic policies of President William Ruto, police brutality and horrific policing methods are now in the limelight. Ruto can’t simply be replaced because “we would simply have business as usual with a new face.” Samar believes that the protesters need to broaden their understanding of Kenya’s history while also building solidarities with similar movements worldwide.

One such learning moment presented itself with the deployment of Kenyan police to stabilize Haiti. On the one hand, they might simply be following American orders. On the other hand, with the Kenyan government cynically invoking the language of Pan-Africanism to justify this deployment might, in fact, “opens the door for both Kenyans and Haitians to be learning more about each other’s histories and struggles against colonialism and imperialism.” Samar insists, optimistically: “There will always be that spirit, right?”

Further reading:

War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror by Samar Al-Bulushi https://www.sup.org/books/politics/war-making-worldmaking

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Eid’s scrutiny revolves around whether this plan meets even the bare minimum of fundamental rights for people in Gaza, and for Palestinians as a whole. The plan, he says, is only focused on the first phase of hostage exchange and is vague about the next two phases, and deliberately exclude any Palestinian representation. Another bare minimum would be to call what has been going on a “genocide.” Despite a global consensus on the term from weighty international bodies, Eid is outraged that this ceasefire plan is premised on genocide denial. He wonders “whether this will really put an end to the ongoing genocide, or the genocide itself will take a different form.”

Born in Nuseirat refugee camp, and having lived in Gaza all his life, Eid embodies the struggles, and the resilience and fiery resistance of a generation of Gazans, all of whom have endured Israeli occupation and apartheid, including the series of brutal sieges. He reminds us that Ilan Pappe called Israel’s pre-October 7th policy in Gaza “incremental genocide,” and that Richard Falk, former UN Special Rapporteur, similarly called it a “prelude to genocide” several years ago. This time around, however, he says that it has been exponentially more violent and more genocidal.

“Gaza is the largest refugee reservoir,” Eid explains. He walks us through the history of how Israel created the Gaza strip in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly displaced to the South, and then could not enter Egypt. Gaza has become “the cradle of Palestinian nationalism and the Palestinian revolution,” he says. From the late sixties onwards, “all Palestinian uprisings, the emergence of the Palestinian revolution, started in the Gaza Strip itself.

“So there it is: Israel wanted to punish the Palestinian people by punishing Gaza.”

In fact, Eid was in Gaza when the “deadly hermetic siege” of 2006 was imposed and was meant “to punish Palestinians for voting against the two-state solution, for voting for resistance, or rather, for voting against the Oslo Accords.”

Even as the Israeli onslaughts continued unabated over the years, it was 17 years later that October 7th presented Israel with the perfect opportunity to take its historically punitive approach towards Gaza to horrific new levels.

The 1993 Oslo Accords are a point of strife for Eid. We turn to his provocative short book Decolonizing the Palestinian Mind, which is an incisive analysis and rebuke of the “racist fiction of a two-state solution” for Palestine. The critique, inspired by Edward Said, argues that the Oslo agreements sowed the problematic seed of statehood but by cutting Palestine into two states. “Palestinian neo-nationalism is about everything that beautifies occupation, endorses normalization and defends the racist two-state solution as the solution to the Palestinian question regardless of the glaring fact that it denies the rights of two-thirds of the Palestinian people, namely refugees and Palestinian citizens of Israel,” writes Eid (31).

Eid is enraged that the Palestinian people have been persuaded to believe that “they could live, coexist rather, with settler colonialism, with apartheid, with ethnic cleansing.” This is impossible because, “first of all, you need to dismantle apartheid, dismantle settler colonialism, dismantle occupation, and after that you can start negotiating about coexistence.”

For Eid, who is a literature professor, these journeys must begin by immersing in the ideas of great revolutionary thinkers like Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara, Edward Said, Steve Biko, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani, among others. It is vital to work towards decolonizing Palestinian minds and making them see alternative and radical futures for Palestine.

Eid moves between intellectual and political clarity and frenetic despair. The personal loss, for Eid, has been too tremendous to even grasp: 45 relatives killed, 39 colleagues at Al-Aqsa University, 288 of his students.

“I am part of this culture of sumud - of steadfastness and resistance,” he reminds me. “This is the lesson I have learned from my people.”

Further reading:
Banging on the Walls of the Tank: Dispatches from Gaza by Haidar Eid (Foreword by Richard Falk), Between the Lines Books, 2025 https://btlbooks.com/book/banging-on-the-walls-of-the-tank

Decolonizing the Palestinian Mind (Afterword by Victoria Brittain) by Haidar Eid, Between the Lines Books, 2025 https://btlbooks.com/book/decolonizing-the-palestinian-mind

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Sisonke Msimang is clear that she is, first and foremost, an African.

“Despite the fact that Africa is not a country, I experience myself, I feel myself, to be African,” she tells me. Sisonke was born to South African activist parents and grew up “a child of the freedom struggle.” Even though she moved around a lot, Sisonke feels at home in many countries and continents, as well as within the global Black diaspora.

South Africa, however, remains a political and intellectual anchor. By the time she finished university there, “freedom was on its way,” and for Black South Africans, the challenge of building the country was monumental. After working in development and human rights organizations for several years, Sisonke experienced a “loss of faith in what international institutions could do, and what it meant to use the language of human rights.” The gap between what was promised on paper and in charters and the reality of the state’s conduct felt “viscerally clear.” She turned to writing to articulate these precise concerns, and to make sense of “a moment in which the promise of freedom and the promise of the liberation struggle was beginning to fade.”

Sisonke is the author of two books and dozens of essays and articles, all of which are deeply political and incisive works of cultural criticism centering Black women, race and racism, and Africa. Palestine has also been central to Sisonke’s writing, engagement and activism. She believes that progressive South Africans have instinctive solidarity for Palestine because they, too, have experienced apartheid and occupation.

“The parallel struggles between our people are impossible to ignore,” she says.

Yet questions of solidarity and the precise shape of political activism and engagement have also come under strain in an attention economy that is miserly and quick to devolve into a virtue signaling circus.

“I try very hard to remember, and to be rooted in what activism felt and looked like before we lived online,” she says when asked about why we choose to focus on some struggles and not others; why Palestine and why not Sudan or Congo? Before the times of social media and online activism, “there was no requirement, no capacity to be an activist on all issues at one time, nor was there a sense that you were somehow a lesser person, you were somehow less committed to social justice or to activism.”

Online activism creates a double bind because it functions as a “kind of panopticon,” according to Sisonke; there comes about a “surveillance of activism as performance.” It forces a politics of gesture that is preoccupied with visibility. “One can both seem to be more engaged than one actually is because of social media and because of what’s visible. And then one can also be assumed to be less involved and engaged…in ways that are not seen and not known to others on Sudan or Congo, simply because one is posting about Palestine.”

However, Sisonke sees a silver lining amidst the gloom and dejection of news from Gaza. In Australia, where Sisonke is now based, the genocide has brought Indigenous and Palestinian groups together, and mass mobilizations have started to take shape. Given the high levels of Islamophobia and anti-Indigenous and anti-Black sentiment in the country, there is now “a real feeling amongst groups, at community level, of folks who are othered by this settler colony, that we see each other and that we are very much in solidarity.”

Additionally, Sisonke also notes that there an “upswell in radical media” with new podcasts, substacks and writing initiatives popping up, speaking back to mainstream Australian politics. Palestine has made radical solidarities possible.

“What might be the role of the writer today?” I ask. Sisonke believes that everyone, and not just the writer, should be on “the front lines of fighting for justice.” But she is aware that it is particularly hard when there is a genocide being carried out, and when those very forces “have the power to silence you and to punish you for speaking up against that genocide.”

“It’s both more important and more difficult than ever to just be a human in this time,” she says. “So, I think the role of the writer is no special or no different from the role of anybody else. It is to show up and to speak the truth about what it is that you see.”

Subscribe to Sisonke’s newsletter: https://sisonkemsimang.substack.com/

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On October 25th, 2023, writer Omar El Akkad wrote a tweet about Palestine: “One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” The narratives about victims and victimizers were already so disproportionate, and the institutional silences so loud given the brutality we were plainly seeing, that El Akkad’s words immediately clicked.

The tweet went viral. It also became the title of El Akkad’s literary memoir that emerged out of his rage, shock and despair at the lack of public outcry against the live-streamed genocide of Palestinians.

"Will everyone have always been against this?" I ask El Akkad. It has now been two years. The slaughter continues. It is literally nonstop. Even the notion that somehow, someday, the world will take a substantive stand against this feels optimistic, even arcane. Shouldn’t the tide have turned by now?

El Akkad admits that the pace of change is at once glacial and agonizing, adding that he has a tendency for comprehending “pattern recognition.” When it comes to Palestine, he considers the time frames that have accompanied "other acts of colonial theft," and notes that "in some of those cases, we're talking about hundreds of years.”

We attempt to unpack the cynical wisdom has always been lodged in the middle part of El Akkad’s long sentence; the part which speaks to accountability, complicity, the safety of silence, and the act of naming, the “calling a thing what it is.”

El Akkad’s memoir was one of the first mainstream publications to engage with the horror unfolding in Palestine in a resounding way. It offers a map, and even more importantly, a language to grapple with the utter moral failure of a world that just will not stop a genocide.

The book alternates between recounting his family’s movement from Egypt to Qatar to Canada and tracking what was happening in Palestine from October 2023 onwards in the form of lyrical vignettes. At the core of this book is the story of El Akkad’s loss of faith in Western liberalism - an almost imperceptible yet powerful ideology that the West is a world governed by laws, rights, democracy, freedom of speech, all that good stuff. All of Western culture and Western institutions are invested in holding up this narrative, and El Akkad admits that he spent much of his life believing in these ideals and even chasing them. “Until the slaughter,” he writes.

“Even my superhuman capacity to compartmentalize has fallen apart over the last two years. There is a level of direct hypocrisy and there's a level of intimacy and immediacy to the violence and to the slaughter and to what is an ongoing genocide that essentially destroys that capacity.”

"Why has the narrative of the good liberal West endured for this long?" I ask.

“These are systems of endless taking," he replies. Systems like colonialism and capitalism are “systems without ceiling.” More importantly, these systems have built up an “immense narrative power that creates conditions where you can simultaneously be the underdog and the empire.” But he warns that this risk-reward mechanism that has undergided these systems is “being blown completely out of the water.” Today, every powerful Western edifice has fallen; from journalism to human rights to international law to education. And this is because eventually, “the snake starts to eat its own tail.”

El Akkad perfectly articulates the existential precipice that the world finds itself on, but he does not see any use for it. It seems futile to expound on the writer’s duty to witness and speak truth to power at a time when institutional silences reign supreme, and those that are in power concoct narratives that justify the indiscriminate killing.

“I've now borne witness to more dead kids than I can count. What the hell good have I done? I'm watching the most inhuman things be done every single day. And maybe I come up with the most profound or beautifully written way to write about it. Who cares? All of the sort of ready-made answers that I've kept in my back pocket that allow me to justify what it means to spend your life telling stories feels so incredibly hollow right now.”

We return to the theme of time. El Akkad says that “in ten, twenty, thirty years time, there's gonna be so many beautifully written novels about all of that horrible stuff that happened way back then. And they're gonna be written by the same people who are saying absolutely nothing right now. And they're gonna win awards and they're gonna be treated with such reverence because it's gonna be safe.” He says that this will be infuriating but he is certain that the maybe book he has written “doesn't do anything at all, but at least it's not that, right?”

Further reading:
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/777485/one-day-everyone-will-have-always-been-against-this-by-omar-el-akkad/

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In the US, Maxamed realized that the violence of American military interventions in Somalia during the 1990s that had displaced his family and turned them into refugees boomeranged right back into their lives in San Diego, California. This violence had become part of the daily lives of the large population of Somali refugees in the San Diego area in the form of “militarized police units breaking down people's doors to deliver search warrants…Imagine someone who experienced the trauma of war, refugee resettlement and now has militarized SWAT teams breaking down their doors?”

Even as Maxamed explores this vicious cycle of surveillance, policing, and brutality in great depth, he foregrounds the fact that “Somalis have found a way to resist that violence and to build life and homes in the context of deprivation.” Maxamed witnessed these modes of resistance and world-making firsthand with his family and the larger community. He speaks about “the ways in which we came together, we organized, we built lives, we built community without very little state intervention, where that intervention was often violence.”

While Black Muslim Refugee focuses on San Diego’s Somali refugee community, it also stages a much broader intervention. For starters, the book offers a history of contemporary Somalia, tracing where the country, as well as its diaspora, finds itself today. Secondly, given his personal experience and having conducted extensive interviews with Somalis who have spent years in limbo in refugee camps, Maxamed formulates a complex and cogent critique of humanitarianism.

In particular, we speak about “humanitarian violence,” a concept that seems like an oxymoron to many who see humanitarianism as force for benevolence and charity. Here, Maxamed explains that the refugee camps are places of great precarity where people are enclosed and lack freedom of movement. Food scarcity is a daily reality and cruel forms of calorie rationing means that families often go hungry. In addition, the policing and hyper-securitized environment are not conducive to safety and general wellbeing.

Finally, a key feature of Black Muslim Refugee is Maxamed’s exploration of the experiences of the Somali triple identity formation of simultaneously Black, Muslim, and a refugee. At a time when border regimes are more draconian than ever, when anti-Muslim hatred is on the rise and when anti-Blackness has become structural to policing, Maxamed’s research feels particularly poignant. By virtue of being Black, Muslim and refugee all at once, he believes that Somalis might be able to pave the path for strategic organizing against police and against militarism, broadly.

The Black Lives Matter movement became a turning point for young Somalis as African-Americans, Somalis, Nigerians and Caribbean people came together against police harassment. For Somalis, it became clear that straddling all three identities meant they had a unique understanding of the situation, and Somali youth began mobilizing and coming together more than they had before. “Now, as of 2025, Somali youth are in leadership positions in Black Lives Matter movement.”

Maxamed believes that these Black, Muslim and refugee Somalis are changing the system from within by arguing that BLM is not just an American issue but that violence against Blacks and Muslims is a global and diasporic issue. Thus, “young Somalis are actually changing BLM organizing to think beyond the United States.”

Is there any hope for radical futures when it comes to the abolition of policing? I ask. Maxamed is hopeful. Exposure to BLM activism and organizing has allowed us to see a future “in which police are not considered natural and normal, but are an aberration to everyday life.” Maxamed believes that a radical future is possible due to a radical past: history has shown us that “there have been alternatives to policing that have existed and continue to exist, and that we can function as society outside of that.”

Further reading:

Black Muslim Refugee: Militarism, Policing, and Somali American Resistance to State Violence by Maxamed Abumaye. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/black-muslim-refugee/paper

Further reading:
Black Muslim Refugee: Militarism, Policing, and Somali American Resistance to State Violence by Maxamed Abumaye. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/black-muslim-refugee/paper

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If you’re being censored or policed, “you learn to recognize the signals your body sends you,” writer Anna Badkhen explains. A few months ago, Anna had turned down an invitation to participate in PEN America’s World Voices festival to protest their “absolutely despicable treatment” of Palestinian writers and journalists. She articulated the reasons for her boycott in a letter which she posted on social media, and in response, Anna received a missive from PEN America that, to her, sounded very much like a threat. She realized right away that it physically triggered memories from when she was a young journalist working within the totalitarian state structure in Russia.

Censorship did not always mean obviously grisly modes of surveillance and violence, and Anna understood this early on in her career. Her recent article titled “The Pen and the Sword: Censorship Threatens Us All” exposes the ways in which dissenting opinions are censored without any legible arm twisting involved. In publishing and in journalism, the “machine of censorship” does not simply involve strikethrough edits or refusal to publish a particular author or a straight-up ban. It can be much subtler with an editor pushing for certain line edits, tonal changes or asking for the use of different terminology. It can also come in the guise of a conversation where the threat to comply is veiled. It is about making the writer bend to a particular narrative through subtle turns in language and style.

Anna has refused to take off her keffiyeh for the last two years, and says that Palestine has unmasked everything and everybody. She believes that “the literary establishment and all the so-called liberal intelligentsia in the United States and in the West overall” can be placed in three categories today: “Groups that are genocide deniers, groups that are unable to stand by in silence, and then a group that is racist enough to be okay with not saying anything.”

For Anna who is a writer with 7 books to her name and over 30 years of experience in writing about war, it is the third group, the silent ones, that are deeply disconcerting. Their silence is not only a sign of complicity but of a more troubling type of self-censorship. Even if any individual writer or journalist or academic has everything to lose from speaking out about Palestine, Anna insists that we should all be cultivating a “moral sense of proportion.” After all, it is not her home that is being “firebombed” but it is the Palestinians that are living with extraordinary levels of savagery wreaked upon them for over 600 days.

Yet another mode of stealthy censorship that Anna exposes is the kind of journalism practiced by the New York Times who have succeeded in creating and sustaining a caste of people who are “Progressive Except for Palestine.” This PEP group has fomented deep divisions in the US and Anna believes that the New York Times must be taken to court “the way that Radio Mille Collines went on trial after Rwanda.” Justice could come sooner, however. Resistance would require journalists to walk out of newsrooms right now yet the structures of dehumanization are so deeply embedded within the very people who claim to do the work of truth-telling. This dehumanization has become the norm because we are currently living in “a world order facilitated by the absolute failure of love.”

As we contend with gloomy, existential questions about a world gone awry with hatred and violence, Anna insists on snapping out of it to speculate upon radical futures for our planet. She evokes James Baldwin’s beautiful line about how love has never been a popular movement: “The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people,” Baldwin said. Anna builds on Baldwin to remind us that “love is an active verb” and that love has “to be practiced, to be maintained.” It is simple. Rising out from the spiral of hatred and from the ashes of violence can only happen if we “cultivate love.”

What is the role of writer in a time of genocide, I ask? Her reply comes through a poem by Zbigniew Herbert who wrote that “you were saved not in order to live, you have little time, you must give testimony.” For Anna, this translates into an “obligation to remember to speak with humility” and “an obligation to remember the difference between professional risks and the daily life and death of the people to whom we owe witness.”

Further reading:
-”The Pen and the Sword: Censorship Threatens Us All” by Anna Badkhen, The Markaz Review https://themarkaz.org/the-pen-and-the-sword-censorship-threatens-us-all/
-For all the writing by Anna Badkhen: https://www.annabadkhen.com/

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Whether its legacy figures like Cecil Rhodes, Mahatma Gandhi and B.R Ambedkar, or various military men or aggressive phallic sculptures, statues are the public’s direct and unavoidable encounter with institutionally constructed histories. They represent the supremacy of colonialism, race, caste and gender, and so movements centered on either dismantling or building them have become critical for understanding charged debates around history and memory today. Rahul Rao’s book The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire explores these global controversies, and offers radical insights into how the past, present and future is made and re-made through statues and monuments in the public spheres.

Rahul’s inquiry began with a simple question: “How can an apparently inanimate object like a statue arouse so much fervor, and affect those attacking it and those seeking to preserve it?” These questions about arousal and attachment led to the realization that like large advertisement billboards, statues are non-consensual: “They enter our sight lines without permission, right?” They wield power because of their assaulting presence. Rahul found himself turning to the language of psychoanalysis to understand our collective relationship to statues and to move past the “ordinary observation that statues are phallic objects. He found that statues are a “a peculiar combination of aggression and vulnerability,” and this is precisely why their exposure in the public sphere “makes them vulnerable to attack and to reinscription.”

These questions prompted a journey through places where statues and monuments have elicited a frenzy: South Africa, Ghana, US, UK and India where protesters were dismantling statues, as powerful political institutions were erecting new ones. These overlapping and opposing actions were occurring at a dizzying speed, as movements like RhodesMust Fall, Black Lives Matter as well the Covid-19 pandemic were unmasking systemic inequality worldwide.

India, for Rahul, is at the heart of this book with two of the middle chapters dedicated to exploring statues of figures of Gandhi, Ambedkar, Vallabhbhai Patel who are in a volatile constellation of moving and shifting, resurrected and felled within the Indian polity. The popular Indian culture of “darshan”—the act of making eye contact with god (rather, the idol of a god) —is a significant moment of worship and, in fact, manifests itself in the building of statues not just of gods but also of revered figures. They become ways to both claim space, and of “asserting identity, asserting pride in a particular community, in its history, in its mythology, in its icons.” From the 1960s onwards, the Dalit movement was successful in building statues of Ambedkar all over India and this was “probably the most viral statue building phenomenon anywhere in the world.”

However, Rahul zooms in on the last 10 years, as the Hindu right-wing attempts to respond to history and memory-making through their own rush to build statues. He travels around Gujarat in the hope of understanding the ways in which the legacies of Vallabhai Patel and Gandhi are being valorized and desecrated, respectively. In an attempt to build tourist infrastructure for the museumization of figures like Patel, indigenous people are forcibly displaced from their land. Thus, within this “heartland of Hindu right politics” Rahul encounters a dystopic new India where dynamics of settler colonialism are “unfolding in the postcolonial state.”

The book, as well as our conversation, returns to decolonization, and ways in which the concept has been co-opted and corrupted by right-wing movements. Even as the world looks bleak and the situation in Palestine only worsens, Rahul urges new ways of reading and re-engaging with old school thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ambedkar. “We need to relate to these figures less like trophies or canon. We need to engage in less of the sacral reading and in a more comradely reading.”

Further reading:

The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire by Rahul Rao (Pluto Press, 2025) https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745350769/the-psychic-lives-of-statues/

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Despite filmmaker Hassane Mezine’s and my own fairly immersive knowledge about Fanon’s life and work, our conversation inevitably turns to Fanon’s theory about violence. For Hassane, growing up in an Algerian family in France meant that the conversation about the war of liberation was all around him yet many aspects of it were also taboo. As a teenager, Hassane had come across Fanon’s work and instinctively knew that it carried the “keys” to the real story of the Algerian-French war as well as to colonialism, slavery and racism; explosive topics that Hassane had become introduced to from listening to reggae music and books like Alex Haley’s Roots.

The French school curriculum did not assign Fanon in any official way and to this day, Fanon remains what Hassane calls “une patate chaude” (a burning potato) because “when you get it in your hands you don’t know what to do with it.” Fanon believed that the colonized have the right to use violent means to fight their colonizers, and that, in fact, this violence can be “cleansing” and transformative for those oppressed by colonialism.

Hassane believes that France rebuffs Fanon by insisting on a singular focus on his ideas about violent resistance which allows them to sidestep the real issue: Fanon was an astute observer and active participant in the Algerian independence war against the French. Engaging with Fanon would mean acknowledging that “it was very violent during the colonial era. Recognizing that would mean to accept that we're still in a colonial era.” France's pervasive racism, mistreatment and violent policies towards its own Black, Arab and Muslim communities as well as its existing overseas territories is glaring evidence not only of France’s past but also of the extent to which coloniality remains embedded within France’s political and institutional structures.

As Hassane went deeper into Fanon’s works and began working on a documentary project about Fanon, he had a poignant realization: “Fanon is talking about love. And the path toward love in a very violent system is to defend yourself.” Building off writer and activist Houria Bouteldjia’s ideas on revolutionary love (and who also appears in the documentary), Hassane finds that Fanon is advocating for dignity through self-defence and is advocating living together peacefully, without any hate and supremacism.

Hassane’s empathetic approach to Fanon is apparent in his documentary film Fanon Hier, Aujourd’hui (Fanon Yesterday, Today) and which I wrote about in detail in 2019 when it first came out. Made without much funding and using a “guerilla” approach, the documentary is a crucial contribution to studies of Fanon and one of the rare few works that successfully brings Fanon’s ideas into the present. Fanon Hier, Aujourd’hui is divided into two sections; the first half is biographical (yesterday) and the second half is focused on theory and praxis (today). The first section combines intimate portraits of Fanon’s life with a historical overview of French colonialism, and the Algerian liberation war in which Fanon became involved. The second section features a vibrant global journey that excavates the pertinence of Fanon’s ideas in Algeria, South Africa, Niger, Palestine, Martinique, France, Portugal and the United States. Hassane interviews writers, activists and artists who view themselves as the “wretched of the earth” whether due to oppressive conditions in the Global South or as mistreated migrants in the Global North. Fanon’s ideas unequivocally offer them a path towards liberatory futures.

I ask Hassane to look back at the documentary’s journey of the last five years. The film has been screened in several countries and Hassane has been invited to speak about it in slick Western academic auditoriums, as well as in scrappier settings in Niamey and Bethlehem. The screenings and encounters in the Global South are the most memorable to him because even if people may not have read Fanon, they connect with the documentary instinctively. He remembers the West Bank students who loved the film and wanted to listen to Hassane’s commentary but had to rush off before the checkpoints closed. Such students “understand Fanon much better than some PhD students that have studied Fanon for many years just in theory” in the US and Europe.

We come to the question of Palestine and wonder about the potency as well as the futility of Fanon’s prophetic writings, since it has now been 22 months of a broadcasted genocide.. Palestine was central to Hassane’s film about Fanon and he concluded Fanon Hier, Aujourd’hui with an interview with Samah Jabr, the only woman psychiatrist out of about a couple of dozen practicing psychiatrists in the West Bank. Jabr spoke about how Fanon’s ideas on overcoming inferiority complexes and on protesting for liberation can be therapeutic. Hassane explains that in Palestine, “we have a typical 19th century type of European colonialism with 21st century technologies.” For him, this is what makes Palestine different from places like Congo or Sudan that are experiencing crises rooted in neocolonialism and strands of imperialism that impact people who are “supposed to be sovereign but are not.”

To that end, Hassane still believes that even though Fanon’s ideas are extremely important for grasping present-day colonialism, they have to be updated. Fanon should be read alongside thinkers like Kwame Nkrumah and Walter Rodney who have had the similar theories about liberations.

As Fanon turns 100 years old, revival might be in the air but Hassane warns against “fetishism” around the thinker. Rather, Fanon must be viewed as a “toolkit.” Hassane’s hope is that his film can inspire people to read more Fanon and to apply his ideas to find “psychological balance’ in their own lives. And if they are able to see the “future with a different perspective, then to me, this is mission accomplished.”

Watch the documentary film Fanon Hier, Aujourd’hui (2019) directed by Hassane Mezine:
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/fanonhieraujourdhui/487559888

Further reading:
“The radical afterlives of Frantz Fanon” by Bhakti Shringarpure, Africa is a Country https://africasacountry.com/2019/06/the-radical-afterlives-of-frantz-fanon

Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love by Houria Bouteldja, MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781635900033/whites-jews-and-us/

Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, scholar and revolutionary, would have turned 100 years old this year had his life not been cut short by leukemia at the age of 36. By then, Olivier Fanon, the son of Frantz and Josie Fanon, had already spent his childhood in Algeria, Tunisia, Ghana and other places where his parents were active participants in the anti-colonial struggle for Algerian independence. He was five years old when his father had a serious relapse and was flown to the US for more advanced treatment, and where he passed away.

Today, 64 years later, Olivier is a living embodiment and vocal defendant of his parents’ anticolonial ideas, their fierce loyalty to Algeria, and their searing critique of France, despite Olivier’s choice to live a quiet life outside of Paris.

Olivier reflects with some heaviness on the 100th anniversary of his father’s birth, remembering him as a man who had “a short but intensive life.” Even though 100 represents a long passage of time, Olivier says that for him, “Fanon is alive every day, because I was brought up in the memory of my father, which was kept alive by my mother after my father's death.”

Perhaps inadvertently, the conversation becomes Olivier’s love letter to his mother, Josie, who guarded her husband’s legacy with a ferocity, and herself lived her husband’s anticolonial ideas. Frantz and Josie were companions in life and work, and they were not simply “contemplators or historians of the revolution, they were actors in the revolution.”

“My mother was a moudjahida,” Olivier declares. And after Algeria’s independence, Josie chose to renounce French citizenship and made her life in Algiers with her son. More importantly, Josie blazed a trail of her own as a prolific journalist who reported on political movements and upheavals in Haiti, South Africa, Vietnam and Iran.

Olivier and I spoke about his mother’s solidarity with Palestine. In 1967, Josie sent a telegram from Algiers to Paris, to the publisher of Les Damnés de la Terre, asking them to remove Jean-Paul Sartre's preface from future editions of the book. Like several other French intellectuals, Sartre had taken a pro-Zionist stance and signed a manifesto in support of Israel during the Six-Day War. For Olivier, it is a plain illustration of his mother’s steely political will. He called it a Josie trademark: “She's not into nuance, she's not into discussion, she's not into compromise, she's not into diplomacy.” She insisted on swift and politically charged action.

This year, even as his globally influential father turns 100 years old, France continues to snub his legacy, and perhaps even actively seeks to bury it. Yet, Fanon seems to be everywhere. As the genocidal war on Palestinians continues into a third year, Fanon’s words and ideas are evoked again and again.

I ask him about the challenges of preserving his father’s fraught but important legacy. He is clear about what he has been tasked with, and believes that reading and rereading Fanon is urgent in 2025, especially for the sake of empowering liberation movements in Palestine and Western Sahara. Unsurprisingly, he has been plagued with invitations for talks and conferences to commemorate his father’s centenary. But talking and having fancy receptions is not enough, Olivier says. “If you want to claim Fanon, do something. Act.”

Further reading:

• Frantz Fanon, a biography by David Macey (2000) https://www.versobooks.com/products/2272-frantz-fanon

• “Josie Fanon and her fidelity to Palestinian liberation” by Jessica Breakey: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/josie-fanon-and-her-fidelity-to-palestinian-liberation

• Fanon Hier, Aujourd'hui (film). Directed by Hassane Mezine (2018)

• Fanon. (film) Directed by Jean-Claude Barny (2025)

• Chroniques fidèles survenues au siècle dernier à l'hôpital Blida-Joinville au temps où Dr Frantz Fanon était chef de la cinquième division entre 1953 et 1956. (film)Directed by Abdenour Zahzah (2024).

Credits:
Production: Pauline Bigotte
Research: Bhakti Shringarpure & Greg Pierrot
Editing: Didier David Moutou
Title Music: "Cottonstorm" by Bayern Boom Beat

Anthropologist Maura Finkelstein had always incorporated Palestine in her university teaching and felt that, as an anti-Zionist, Jewish American academic, it was her moral obligation to do so. She knew well the type of repression and harassment that Palestinian academics experienced at US universities, but thought that being a Jewish scholar would likely protect her. Absurdly, Maura became the first tenured American academic to be fired for allegedly making Jewish students at the Muhlenberg College campus feel unsafe due to the “antisemitic” content of her coursework and social media posts.

As Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine began escalating, academia was one of the earliest industries to start collaborating with governments and other powerful institutions to bring pro-Palestinian faculty, students and staff to heel. Repression, sanctions, harassment and censorship of pro-Palestinian sentiment is being normalized everyday.

From the outside, these efforts on behalf of academic institutions appear like a chaotic barrage of intersecting events, but Maura reveals the shocking levels of sustained coordination required for the harassment to result in punitive action such as suspensions and terminations. For example, the Muhlenberg chapter of Hillel International, which was involved in attacking Maura, is directly connected to Israel and to the Israeli Defense Forces. The board of trustees and many high-level administrators also boast ties to Israel. Additionally, powerful Zionist organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) play instrumental roles in influencing policy and actions on American campuses.

For two years, Maura has been put through the wringer and experienced the full might of these repressive entities. It started when Maura received what she calls a “completely monstrous email” sent by the college president to a campus-wide listserv. The president condemned the October 7th attacks and insisted that “now is not the time to think about history, now is just the time to mourn Israel.” Maura replied with an email corrective to that same campus-wide listserve. Within a few days, a student complained about her Palestine-focused readings in the classroom. That is all it took - one complaint and one email - to rapidly activate an entire campus surveillance network: Attacks on her snowballed; complaints multiplied; entire Whatsapp groups were created with pro-Israel students monitoring her every move, both in person and on social media platforms. Soon there were warnings from administrators, then a suspension, then an investigation. Finally, Maura was fired.

Recently, it has become evident that academia has been very quick to cede authority to these malevolent, coercive forces. This has caught many by surprise, as American universities have historically projected a faith in progressive, liberal values with missions to uphold academic freedom, increase diversity and speak out in the name of human rights.

What is wrong with academia, we both wonder? Maura accepts that most academics are trying to hold onto their jobs in a horrible economy, and refusing to engage in this resounding moral challenge of our time is, alas, the easiest way to keep getting a paycheck. Yet, she is also enraged because she does not see the point of holding on to our vocations if “we can't actually be committed to the theoretical and ethical claims that we make in our work.” It is this silence, and this inability to commit to an ethical stance, that is “part of the reason that academia has been so easily dismantled over the past few years.”

“I think everyone who has ever written anything or taught anything that had the word ‘liberation’ or ‘decolonization’ or whatever…everyone who's done that and hasn't said anything about Gaza, then none of your work matters. It doesn't mean anything.”

“It sucks to get fired,” she admits. “We work most of our adult life to get to this position. But also, it's a small thing to give up when everyday I'm watching Palestinians in Gaza who've lost everything.”

Maura’s resolve has only strengthened since her firing from Muhlenberg, and she plans to continue speaking out against the genocide while learning how to sharpen her activism for Palestine through work with The Sameer Project on fundraising for Gaza.

Further reading
The Jewish supremacy at the heart of the Zionist project by Maura Finkelstein, Mondoweiss https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/the-jewish-supremacy-at-the-heart-of-the-zionist-project/
Follow Maura Finkelstein’s substack

Maura Finkelstein

Writer, ethnographer, anthropologist, anti-Zionist. Author of “The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai” (DUP 2019)