Something magical happens in the gathering of literary works. When pressed together, they begin to whisper to one another, to resonate. So it is with Guernica’s April issue. Across fiction and nonfiction, poetry, conversation, and Spotlights, these works attend to our present moment through the minutiae of human relationships. War and wonder, suspense and arrival, dread and discovery reflect through the smallest of interstices—between siblings, lovers, strangers, children at play. This issue is populated with microcosms that arc toward the universal, and the questions that press upon us in a time marked by rupture, fear, and uncertainty.

In fiction, Stacie Shannon Denetsosie’s John Wayne’s Jacket follows twin sisters learning to look beyond the similarities a mirror casts, and what begins as a conflict over boys and borrowed jackets unfolds into a deeper struggle for identity, and the fractures wrought in the process of becoming. In Abuchi Modilim’s American Actors, a group of children stage an imagined American film, shoving and fighting among themselves, their play masking a deeper grief. Beneath the performance lies the unbearable: mourning the death of a friend, and the quiet, incomprehensible truth of a world in which children are allowed to die.

In nonfiction, Daniela Gutiérrez’s Three Pages of Don Quixote, turns to the question of what books are for, and how they shape the lives that we come to inhabit, at a time when the humanities and literary institutions are increasingly under threat. Alina Ștefănescu’s Boxing: Against the Games We Are Given, traces how larger systems of power inscribe themselves onto the self–through the contained spaces of boxing, music, and memory–while refusing the closures of certainty.

In a three-way conversation led by Russell Reed, climate organizers Mohammed Usrof and Tori Tsui speak from within the insular world of COP negotiations, where disillusionment and resistance open onto a reimagining of climate justice. As a foundational installment in Posthumanitarian, a series rooted in the fundamental solidarity between decolonial and posthumanist struggles, After Activism: In Conversation with Mohammed Usrof & Tori sets the tone for a body of work that reads the universe of climate justice through its smallest, most charged sites of encounter.

In Spotlights, The Relay, by Marek Šindelka, and translated from Czech by Graeme Dibble, a train carriage is transformed into an electric field of human interaction. Darkly comic and sharply wrought, the story reminds us that even in the most transient of spaces, we are never truly alone.

Poetry in this issue moves through the intimate terrains of language, memory, and inheritance. In At Stefan Stambolov Square, Plovdiv, Immanuel Mifsud, translated by Ruth Ward, turns to the quiet surface of an ordinary place where seemingly uneventful moments gather into something held just beneath what is said aloud. In The Father’s Sin, the poet enters the fraught space between father and child, where recognition falters—I no longer understand your eyes—and a private reckoning unfolds. In dragomana, Nisrine Mbarki Ben-Ayad, translated by Michele Hutchison, writes across fractured and interwoven tongues and legacies. A lover once asked me, by the same poet, lingers in the unstable space between language and desire, measuring the distance between mother tongue and the lived experience of love. In Chronicle of My Thirty-Eighth Year, T. De Los Reyes gathers the granular textures of a life into a meditation on actualization, where the self, reflected and recast, emerges slowly into relief.

“The obscure streets of life do not offer the convenience of the thoroughfares. The traveler has to fumble his way in the dark,” Alina Ștefănescu quotes Shestov in her essay for our April issue. It seems that perhaps it is within this fumbling that something begins to take shape; meaning arrives in fragments, assembling slowly, haltingly, through small associations and connections. And if something magical sparks within a collection of literary works, it is because they remain inside that uncertainty. They refract the world until the smallest moments themselves begin to carry the weight of the universe. Perhaps, it is such resonances which allow us, even now, to recognize ourselves in one another.

Featuring, courtesy of the artists, striking original artwork by Ebenezer Edem Kwame Dedi, Jozie Furchgott Sourdiffe, Rana Samir, and Jonathan Wateridge.

Raaza Jamshed, Editor-in-Chief

The environmental movement runs on an annual calendar, a circuit of climate weeks and thematic forums each building toward the main event: the United Nations (UN) climate negotiations, or COPs, hosted each November in a regional rotation. At my first COP in 2023, I was overwhelmed by the scale. Dubai’s COP28 drew over 86,000 attendees, the largest in the negotiations’ history. But year after year, the crowd shrank into a familiar cast of faces, sitting on familiar panels and in familiar roundtable discussions. For the handful of us under the age of thirty granted access to these convenings, commonly referred to under the umbrella of “youth climate activists,”  the numbers are even smaller. We see one another time and again when we are called in as voices of a future at stake — symbols for urgency in a multilateral process plagued by growing inertia.

Tori Tsui is a defining voice in this cohort. A Hong Kong-born, United Kingdom-based climate justice organizer, she is a senior advisor to the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative and a lead campaigner on the Stop Rosebank coalition. Her debut book, It’s Not Just You, reframes eco-anxiety not as a personal condition but a political one. Mohammed Usrof entered the climate circuit as a Palestinian youth negotiator two years ago. In 2025, he founded the Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy in close collaboration with leading climate justice voices including Andreas Malm and Greta Thunberg. Together, Tsui and Usrof reflect the priorities of a new generation of so-called climate activists primed through justice-driven movements like Fridays for Future and the Sunrise Movement. Unlike the old guard, they advocate not just for climate action, but for resolute climate justice, refusing to separate planetary politics from the personal. 

The United Nations climate negotiations began at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, when world leaders pledged to ensure “a secure and hospitable home for present and future generations.” At COP30 last November, hosted in the Brazilian Amazon, that promise remained entirely unmet, the world still accelerating toward collapse despite three decades of annual negotiations. Recognizing its own insufficiency, the climate institution has begun turning to its new generation of leaders; over half of countries’ 2035 climate plans include commitments to direct partnership with youth, the result of the campaign for an NDC Youth Clause I co-organized last year. But after years of inaction and recurring silence on the Gazan genocide, which Tsui considers “a litmus test for climate justice,” many young leaders have already turned away.

In this conversation, Tsui and Usrof reckon with what remains. For young organizers failed by the institutional climate movement, is there anything worth saving? It seems the center of the negotiations may no longer be the COP but the flotilla — mobile, networked, and ever-multiplying, even as the institution recedes.

— Russell Reed for Guernica

Russell Reed: Mohammed, we first met as speakers at a fancy dinner for business leaders back at the 2024 United Nations climate negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan. A year later at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, I noticed a shift in your navigation of the climate negotiations.

Mohammed Usrof: Over time, it became very clear to me where to draw the line. There are spaces that present themselves as a chance to bring different sides together, putting corporate representatives, banks, and fossil fuel executives in the same room as Indigenous people and climate activists. But I learned that we’re just there to be completely tokenized, that it was just a chance for corporate leaders to wash some of the blood off their hands. 

This year, I declined those invitations. It was a complete rejection of any form of complicity. But I’m also someone who’s very strategic, and what’s the really strategic thing to do to create some form of change? For me, it is creating counter-institutions and building power that actually contradicts and resists the status quo. 

Russell Reed: Tori, what is your history with the UN climate negotiations? 

Tori Tsui: The first time I tried to attend the negotiations for COP25, I sailed across the Atlantic with an organization called Sail to the COP because we were lobbying against the aviation industry. At the last minute, it was relocated from Santiago to Madrid, so I missed it. The following year, I went to Glasgow for COP26 as part of an organization I helped found called United for Climate Action. Our aim was to help activists from Latin America and the Caribbean attend and navigate the negotiations, since much of civil society from that region is historically and currently excluded from these spaces.

Over the years, I became disillusioned. It almost feels like a circus sometimes. I decided not to attend COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh just a month before; I couldn’t justify my role there. Every time I left a COP, I felt exasperated, depressed, and listless — disconcerted with how little I could actually get done in those spaces. So each year, it became a choice of divestment. In the end, I didn’t go to Sharm, I didn’t go to Dubai, I didn’t go to Baku, and I didn’t go to Belém. In many ways, I feel like the UN has lost its credibility.

Russell Reed: This is a common feeling among young organizers — the negotiations began before we were born, and yet they still haven’t stopped our descent toward climate collapse. Mohammed, given that the UN has also failed to meaningfully safeguard Palestinians from ongoing genocide, why did you choose to show up to COP30 at all?   

Mohammed Usrof: The negotiations present a valuable power-building opportunity for the counter-institutions I mentioned before. Over two years into the genocide, Brazil remains complicit in trading oil with Israel. Through our exclusive research on energy mapping, we traced that complicity. So at COP30, we had the chance to work directly with the Brazilian trade unions, holding press conferences with trade union leaders and the International Trade Union Confederation. We worked in alignment with the Italian dock workers, who were protesting Italy’s parallel complicity at that same time. But it was essential to ensure that it wasn’t just a moment at COP, but part of a larger mobilization across the world, using this moment as a chance to build momentum for other moments.

Russell Reed: Tori, you have called the genocide in Gaza “a litmus test for climate justice.” More than two years after the genocide began, what does it tell us about the institutional climate movement?

Tori Tsui: We have to go beyond these two years. Long before October 7th, I started the Bad Activists Collective — part think tank, part coalition with the aim of strengthening the principles of climate justice. One of our pillars was a free Palestine. When we started posting about Angela Davis and her solidarity with Palestine, when we started posting about Sheikh Jarrah and the Israeli apartheid regime in general, claims of anti-Semitism were pretty much every comment, even from within the so-called Left and the so-called climate space. Even five years ago, all the same rhetoric was being spouted out, people telling us that Palestine “wasn’t a climate issue.”

After October 7th, a very clear subset of the climate movement mobilized and declared solidarity with Palestine. But others were extremely hostile toward it. I think it speaks volumes that some factions of the environmental movement see certain justice issues as negotiable. They don’t see it as a necessity to advocate for certain things until they absolutely must — which for me is quite cowardly. It goes against the basic principles of climate justice, and suggests that the idea of climate justice is very performative for a lot of people. It has gotten to the point where I almost hesitate to affiliate myself with the climate movement, because there are so many people in it whose views just don’t represent mine.

Generally speaking, I have found more solidarity in people who can see a humanitarian issue and don’t feel as though they have to justify that it’s also a climate issue. A humanitarian issue is also something that should be spoken about. So I have found myself organizing with fewer people in the climate space and more with people in the anti-war space, people who are fighting authoritarianism and fascism. Because I find that their politics tends to align more with mine.

Russell Reed: It is often implied that the climate crisis is a large enough challenge on its own — that engaging deeply in questions of human justice risks distracting us from the work. What do you make of this perceived separation between social justice and climate action? 

Mohammed Usrof: It’s a divide-and-rule tactic — and it’s not the first of its kind. All social justice issues and all environmental issues are interconnected and inseparable. They come from the same root causes. But even within the climate movement, people seem to find it easier to imagine an end of the world than to imagine an end to capitalism. And it’s really catastrophic that we are unable to actually imagine a better world for us as people, as Tori and as Russell have said. COP is very much a defeatist space. You might say that people who go to COP are fighting the climate fight or whatever — but please, you’re fighting for commas within climate policy documents that really don’t matter.

Tori Tsui: I have met white liberal environmentalists in the UK who have seen Ukraine as an environmental issue but haven’t seen Palestine as an environmental issue. That boils down to systemic racism. There’s a lot of conscious and unconscious bias. And I also think that Israeli propaganda is working on them — that it’s “too complicated,” that there are always two sides — these sorts of narratives keep coming up. And it’s especially ironic because a lot of these people would have said they’ve become attuned to such intersectionality since the reckonings of Black Lives Matter. People think that humanity and justice are given. They’re not. You have to fight for them, no matter what generation you live in. Justice and peace do not prevail unless they’re constantly worked at, and unless people are held accountable. 

Russell Reed: At COP29, Israel hosted one of the most prominent pavilions in the Blue Zone, with brightly lit displays touting a number of technological innovations. Above the exhibition was a big sign that read: “FROM DESERT TO OASIS.” It mirrored the precise narratives that underwrite the genocide, fictions of Palestine as an uninhabited desert ripe for Israeli development. The display exposed the uncomfortable truth that  COPs are not a unifying front for climate action, but a forum for two competing visions for the future: one that necessitates sacrifice, and one that refuses it. The genocide has shown that these camps are irreconcilable, and the institution seems to be tearing at the seams as they diverge further. In this context, do you still consider yourself an activist?

Tori Tsui: I’ve always believed that activism is low-hanging fruit. Activism just means enacting social change, whatever that means to you. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you advocate for justice, or that you get to the radical roots of the issue. The word “radical” comes from the Latin radix, meaning root, so it’s a bit ironic when activists talk about being radical or disruptive. What are you actually tackling at the root?

The term “activist” has been co-opted in many ways. There was a trend of becoming an activist before the pandemic, and it was capitalized on. And then there’s the other side of it, which is: well if you’re not an activist, then what are you? I think “organizer” is a term that comes up quite a lot — actively organizing around a specific cause. Organizing feels more proactive than activism itself, which can sometimes feel a little bit backseat. I think a lot of people are climate activists, I just don’t think there are a lot of people who truly stand for and organize for climate justice.

Mohammed Usrof: I would personally go so far as to say that I don’t want to be labeled a climate activist. What the fuck is a climate activist? A lot of so-called climate activists ignore the root causes of the catastrophe. Climate change is a byproduct of larger systemic issues. If you are an activist, if you’re an organizer, if you want to resist, you resist the core issues. Just be a useful activist. As you said, the issue is that a lot of these activists are not intersectional. We see the kind of rise and fall of the climate movement with Greta [Thunberg] — the minute she stopped serving big philanthropy’s interests by standing for Palestine, she lost her platform.

I am not a climate activist. I’m a Palestinian activist who stands against genocide, against imperialism, against capitalism, and things have never been this clear to me. I can never go back to ignoring these tragedies or the connections between them. Climate activism, unfortunately, is seen as radical when done appropriately or when done right. And that whole equation needs to be flipped — we need to get our shit together, drop the labels, and just get the principles and values right.

Russell Reed: And that brings us to your organization, the Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy. Tell us about this counter-institution, and why you founded it.

Mohammed Usrof: The Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy is a Palestinian-led research, advocacy, and strategy institute dedicated to advancing ecological justice and climate accountability by centering Palestine within global climate politics and intersecting struggles against colonialism, militarism, imperialism, and extractive power structures. We believe that climate justice cannot be separated from decolonization and anti-militarism.

As Palestinians, we must contribute to building counter-institutions — to build durable bodies of knowledge that can actually make the struggle for climate justice and decolonization more effective, strategic, and simpler to pursue. In practice, that means developing research that reveals energy infrastructures as sites of political power. The recent gas deals between Israel and Egypt, the continued arrangements between Israel and Jordan — they reflect the entrenchment of capital, fossil capital specifically, and the co-dependency built through current energy systems. The same logic runs from the colonial Anglo-Iranian Company to BP, Chevron, and Shell today. We know clearly how that has manifested into the climate movement and the COP process itself, which was shaped by Saudi Arabia back in 1994.

We also focus on building capacity for youth engagement and empowerment in Palestine — PICS grew from the Palestinian Youth Climate Negotiation Program. We want to continue building Palestinian capacities as a way to build political leadership — because it is very, very rare to see a Palestinian leader who is not targeted constantly, who doesn’t receive death threats. 

Russell Reed: While PICS has its roots in Palestine, it contributes to a range of efforts around the world. How does it embed within broader solidarity networks?

Mohammed Usrof: What is happening in Palestine is not just happening in Palestine. It has happened in Colombia, in South Africa, in Venezuela, in Nicaragua, in Fiji. Racial capitalism and colonialism are seen and felt by so many people — people who continue to suffer right now, at this very moment. So when you present the Palestinian experience in ways that relate to people across the world, it becomes undeniable. It is not only a form of solidarity to connect struggles, but it’s also a way of building power and a way of paving a path forward. We’re serving Palestinians, we’re serving the global movements, and we’re doing this work together.

Russell Reed: Tori, looking at your work opposing the fossil economy with initiatives like the Stop Rosebank campaign and the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty, where does Palestine come in? How do these solidarity networks appear in your work?

Tori Tsui: The messaging around the Stop Rosebank campaign has changed drastically since the genocide. There is a lot of focus on Palestine now, and it provides a way to shed light on this issue — to show people that the climate movement is fighting for a free Palestine. And in the other direction, for the people who follow us from the climate movement, we show that you should advocate for Palestine as well because it’s all connected. I think it comes from a genuine place, but I do think that the fact that we have to spell it out in such a way is indicative of this division within the climate movement — of people who don’t quite understand how everything comes together. I have noticed the messaging change, and I think that’s for the better.

I’ll give you an example. I gave a talk at a WaterAid event, and I showed up wearing a free Palestine badge on my jacket. They asked me to take it off. I said I would, but of course I didn’t. And for me it’s like — okay, we’re WaterAid, we support people’s access to water all around the world, except Palestinians whose water is being siphoned off for Israeli homes. Make it make sense.

Russell Reed: By the old model, they seem to think it does. Philanthropists write specific checks to specific NGOs expecting very specific outcomes, which leaves little room for intersectionality. 

Mohammed Usrof: The issue is this whole concept of NGO survival — the borders organizations place on themselves, the red lines they need to stay within. A lot of organizations don’t really follow their purpose. If they did, the world would be a much better place.

Tori Tsui: So much of the existence of NGOs is a symptom of a failed society. The state is not providing for its people and governments are not standing in solidarity with people who have been pillaged and exploited at the hands of colonialism. I feel like a lot of these organizations are redundant and just take up space and resources that should otherwise be directed to people on the ground. I think they’re money holes. And I think they provide a social license for some of the biggest polluters and some of the worst actors in the world to justify their existence — because if they give to charity, there’s a reason for them to exist.

Russell Reed: At the UN General Assembly, I spoke with an Arab philanthropic leader who noted that despite the major Western philanthropies’ total abdication of support for Palestinian relief, money has still made its way there. Not through the old channels, but through small donations in solidarity networks enabled by mutual aid and crowdfunding platforms. She suggested that this is not just a moral failure for philanthropy and NGOs — it’s a crisis of relevance. What are young people building in their place?

Mohammed Usrof: We are building strategic counter-institutions to ensure that the connection between Palestine and the broader climate struggle persists. We work directly with many of these organizations — we set the narrative on unjust transitions with Oxfam, we’ve consulted with groups like Amnesty International and the Climate Action Network. What we’re showing them is that we can be an NGO that works with states and donors, that promotes humanitarian work in Gaza, while also holding a very strict moral and political position that cannot be undermined by threats of financial withdrawal.

Russell Reed: Tori, you have been involved in many of the defining organizations of the youth climate movement. Through all the changes of these past few years, what lies on the horizon?

Tori Tsui: I’m seeing an energy of transformation. My own activism has kind of transformed. I feel like the climate space once held me, and though it held me for that time, sometimes you must let go. That’s not to say I don’t still do climate activism — it’s just my work has transformed. I believe that if you’re a campaigner or someone who is fighting for justice and liberation in any sense, you have to be adaptable and you have to go where your moral compass takes you. And right now that’s taking me to spaces that are trying to counter the rise of fascism, to talk about fossil capitalism, to talk about the impacts of the military industrial complex.

You might not brand it as climate as such, but it’s still part of it. And I’m seeing a lot of similar sentiments with my comrades — people who are transforming their activism and going into other spaces. Then there’s also the slightly sad side, which is people who are stepping away from politics altogether because it’s either too dangerous to talk about politics, or because they realize it’s not profitable — it was trendy and profitable then, and it isn’t now.

Russell Reed: It seems that as the traditional climate movement faces inertia, you are each working in new, justice-driven lanes that are growing quickly in numbers and influence. As the movement shifts toward new horizons, what will come of the old institutions — the NGOs, the negotiations? Is there anything worth saving?

Mohammed Usrof: If any old institution wants to assimilate into a culture of unity — into a collective, hopeful vision for the future that includes survival as the bare minimum — I don’t mind working with them. If there’s a way we can work together, we can. And if they work against us, or against the survival of the world, it is simply a call to resist against them once more. If they wish to pursue profit, pursue relevance, and ignore a genocide until three years later when it becomes trendy enough, those are red flags we won’t normalize. There’s no space for racism. There’s no space for Zionism.

Tori Tsui: These organizations are going to become irrelevant unless they transform. The world is rapidly changing. There’s a lot of red tape at the moment, there’s a lot of fear about politicization. But that’s how fascism wins, and the more we kowtow to it, the more difficult it will be to actually raise our voices.

It feels like this current form of the climate movement has come to an end. So we must adapt and create something new, or transform in its place. But in the face of more adversaries, you need to stand your ground. You do not water down your message. You do not placate. There are many times that I’ve adapted my messaging and my strategy to be better received in the current climate. And then I realized, wait, that’s exactly what they want you to do. They want you to water down what you’re asking for. They want you to lower your needs. They want you to suppress who you are in order to establish more of a power foothold over the current situation.

We are at a threshold — the old is going to be left behind. Something new has to take its place, and we are already building it.

What is seen can be abolished by the eyelids, can be stopped by partitions or curtains, can be rendered immediately inaccessible by walls. What is heard knows neither eyelids, nor partitions, neither curtains, nor walls. Undelimitable, it is impossible to protect oneself from it … Sound rushes in. It violates.

– Pascal Quignard, “It So Happens that Ears Have No Eyelids” (from The Hatred of Music)

1

On the first page of this notebook, I had copied a quote from Gherasim Luca: “A revolutionary thought must reject with indignation any attempt to be closed in a certainty, no matter how fascinating.”

2

Sound, itself, is not definitive— sound waves continue moving even after they reach us, losing velocity along the way. According to the notebook I kept during the summer of my twentieth year, a mother’s scream drifted past the playground and hovered near the bus stop in Bucharest just before a friend said maps would not help me understand what I saw. Nor would speaking the language. Pigeons moved back and forth between the green park benches as we spoke.  “You grew up in Disneyland,” this friend added. He was a philosophy student at the nearby university.

3

“Recordings deal with concepts through which the past is reevaluated, and they concern notions about the future which will ultimately question even the validity of evaluation,” wrote composer Glenn Gould in April 1966.

Eleven years later, Ion Grigorescu created a short, black-and-white film titled “Boxing.” In it, a naked man ‘shadow-boxes’ with his own shadow in a small studio apartment. Divided into three one-minute boxing rounds, “Boxing” borrows this convention from the sport of boxing. Grigorescu made it by first exposing the film as he boxed in one direction, then again as he boxed the other.

In the disciplinary practice known as “boxing a child’s ears,” an adult uses their hand to apply physical force to the part of a child that hears the world.

A game keeps score. A boxing match sets itself up as a game which can be won or lost. Is “Boxing” a game? Is a game always a performance? How does the performance of a game implicate players differently from the performance of an image? Is the artist struggling with an image of himself or an alter ego?

The only sound in Grigorescu’s film involves a brief crackling at the outset.

4

Pigeons carry one twig at a time to build their nests, which they refuse to leave even during fire. The words in my notebook would later resemble a nest, intended to nurture a creation, a being, a life. Even as the branch beneath the nest  died, I stayed with the thing I was building, hoping something might hatch from it.

In a Romanian city that was not Bucharest, I sat in a plaza surrounded by buildings, one of which was an Orthodox church. I remembered Lev Tolstoy describing music as the shorthand of emotion, and it was music which could have described the strange light on this plaza— music which could have carried its complexity more effectively than words. I’m referring to the posthumous orchestration of Gustav Mahler’s 10th Symphony, and how its brightness conceals the silences written by Mahler’s death. Light is the lie which imprints negatives that may later develop into revelations. 

A woman in black pants and leather sandals had paused near the statue of the saint. She assumed a humiliating position: her back hunched  over a small, dark dog, knees pressed into the cement, among the cracked concrete interspersed with pebbles. A stabbing pain wrote itself into my own scarred knees. I suspected the woman was actively leaning into pain as she crouched over this dog’s head, hiding her face from us. 

“She’s not new to the plaza,” said my friend. He called her the woman crazy with dog. To be with-dog seemed different than being with a dog, or being with the dog, and so I wondered if the woman was also pregnant—or if being with dog indicated a sort of exclusivity which prevented the woman from being with child or being with family. 

The woman didn’t appear pregnant. She was too slim, her small hips frozen over the dog’s torso like an awning, or a violin bow I once saw broken. Broken, I had loved the man who held the bow, and who broke the bow over my knee, and whose face turned the color of eggplants ripening in the sun under a tree. 

In Disneyland, we overcome things. We conquer them and collect trophies. We can’t watch anyone  suffer without making a video of it on our i-phones and sharing that video on social media. Thus did I feel called upon to reach out to the woman, creating a bridge between my life  and hers, as I walked away from my philosopher-friend towards the center of the empty plaza where the statue ruled over a woman and a dog at its feet. 

The woman looked up at me, but kept her palm over one eye when speaking, explaining that she was visiting this place with Radu, her dog. She spoke very quickly, smiling, looking down at the dog and then back up at me with the hand covering her eye. She said this place was special to both of them, to her and to Radu, whose name was special in a different way—and whose difference did not diminish the quality of specialness which applied to both. “You can call me Radu’s mother,” the woman said, before comparing her son’s name to an empty crypt, particularly Walter Benjamin’s cenotaph on a Spanish hill near the sea, but also the cave vacated by Christ, according to three women which History has chosen to believe. 

Radu’s mother rummaged through a plastic rucksack as the dog tried to lick her hand. Someone was listening to a radio show on a nearby balcony, and the voices in conversation resembled a sportscast with the rising intonations and suspenseful shrillness of losing, of winning, of scoring, but the theme was national history. I half-listened  as Radu’s mother rummaged through several books, opening each one flipping through pages and closing it until finally lifting a piece of paper from a book, holding it above Radu’s head so he could not bite it or lick it, and looking at me. 

The faded, black and white photo depicted a couple standing near a monastery building—the woman’s long, wavy hair covered half her face, revealing one sultry eye; her torso leaned into the chest of the man whose hands were in the back pocket of her jeans, as if the two had just had sex and were considering doing it again. Before I could ask, Radu’s mother flipped the photo and pointed to a faint, handwritten word in the corner, in cursive: Radu. 

“The one with long hair is my mother,” she said, “but I don’t know who this Radu was. My mother is dead but there was a man who took many photos of her and I do not know where he lives or what they did. Since finding the name, I’ve been a pilgrim, a visitor to each site where Radu took a photo with my mother. And I have watched Radu closely in case he senses something.”

As she shut the photo back inside the book cover, I noticed (again) how her mother’s hair covered half her face, and the correspondence between the photo and Radu’s mother as she looked up at me from the closed book with one hand over her eye. Only at this point did I realize I’dmissed something: she had not covered her eye when showing me the photos, and it was I who had failed to look at her eye, when given the chance. I had missed the opportunity to draw a line between the eye hidden by her mother in the photo and the man whose name now lived in the small black dog licking the woman’s toes. 

She had named her dog after her dead mother’s mysterious lover. 

Radu’s mother laid her face against the knotted black hair of the dog’s back and murmured something for which I was not the intended audience. My head spun from the unfiltered sun in the treeless plaza, with its demanding pitch of light, as when one has been sitting near a swimming pool for hours without drinking water, the brain pulverized by historical sports on radios in the background, and no sense of what to do next. 

5

“Writing is a game to me,” I told my philosopher-friend as we shared a lukewarm Ursus, a beer named Bear. “Writing is  a game that cannot be won, and there is no end to it. Those who believe they can win it with a bestseller are playing a different game. . .  a Disneyland game.” 

Disneyland didn’t yet exist when Arthur Schopenhauer found it “noteworthy, indeed marvelous, that we human beings always lead a second, abstract life alongside our concrete life.” Glenn Gould’s favorite color was “battleship grey.” 

6

During the 1970’s, as Ceaușescu’s regime rode Romanians towards starvation, Grigorescu used his own body to probe the distance between performance and recorded image by staging a series of intimate experiments secretly in his apartment. He created the film alone, and this solitude, this extraordinary confinement, is palpable in the way the subject slips between a character and a self-portrait. 

After taking multiple screenshots from Grigorescu’s film, I study them closely, seeking to glimpse the future anterior —the future already folded into the past — in them.

I assume the alter ego is the boxer on the left because he is slightly less dense and shadowy than the boxer on the right. The boxer on the left fades with each round. By the final round, he resembles a translucent shadow. But it is then, when he is least visible, that the boxer on the left seems stronger and wins the match. 

“A stopped frame outside of a movie isn’t anything, not even a photograph,” wrote Michael Wood in Film: A Very Short Introduction. 

7

According to my notebooks, in Ovid’s Tristia manuscript, the Stygian waters become Scythian waters, creating a strange relationship between these descriptors. 

Puzzled by this, I recalled that the first piece my son composed on the piano was titled “The Stygian Waltz.” He was seven years old at the time. We had just returned from a brief trip related to a book I had ghost-written for a Russian oligarch who wanted to be legible to American audiences. He lived in New York City, like many oligarchs, and had the sort of large apartment customary to Disneyland’s heroes. My editor for the oligarch’s biography was his cousin, who was a distant relative to the philosopher Lev Shestov. A convivial fellow, the editor introduced me to various opportunities, and countless freelance gigs since our first meeting in a Sibiu cafe, which we both remembered fondly. 

My editor-friend played chess with my son as I wrote. Between cigarettes and disgust with drafts, I exhaled various non sequiturs aloud, to which the editor occasionally responded. 

“Writing is a miserable occupation,” I mumbled. “Shestov was right to warn that it is easy to confuse ecstasy with calf-rapture.”

The editor sat up, pressed a large black queen against his chin,  closed his eyes completely as he said, “Shestov believed the public prefers calf-raptures to ecstasy or revelation.”

I spat in my coffee cup mockingly. “Shestov never sat in Manhattan trying to dash off a calf-rapture that will cost me my soul and its after-life.” A few hours later, as the shadows of streetlights drew night across the walls, the editor set a glass of schnapps near my computer and allowed his shadow to fall over my screen. “Shestov opens All Things Are Possible with a certain statement,” he said coyly. “Do you know what that statement is?” Since I did not, the editor quoted Shestov: “The obscure streets of life do not offer the convenience of the thoroughfares. The traveler has to fumble his way in the dark.”  

Although a rejoinder was expected from me, I had nothing to offer. The verb to fumble failed to elicit anything. “I must do the minimum here,” I thought. Poetry would suffice. This editor loved unexpected rhymes and sentimentalism, so I told him the light a traveler needs most may come from a stone, or a spark. My son fell asleep on the sofa near the marble chessboard. The editor began making the sort of romantic propositions that follow heavy drinking and poetry. Once the script began, or once he read a script into the scene, it was easier to go along with it than to risk wounding his ego or upsetting his view of the world. These scripts were pre-recorded performances familiar to both of us. Both my editor-friend and the oligarch wished to be legible to a reading public which they imagined. Both wanted to be read into the stories of their lives, and be imagined by others as they imagined themselves. Their longing to be understood assumed a human condition of equality, or equal co-imagining. But the oligarch could not imagine me outside the money he used to purchase his personal mythology. Nor could I imagine him as more than the money he flaunted. I believed then— as I do now— that what we share, or what we gather together, cannot transcend the transactional nature of structural hierarchies and narrative economies. There is no place outside the box you pay me to build in the name of fathers.

8

“It is now a criminal activity to chew sunflower seeds in public places,” Walter Benjamin wrote  in the Moscow Diary he kept when chasing Asja Lacis through the Soviet Union. Uncertain of whether to officially join the Communist Party, Benjamin decided to voyage directly to the USSR  itself, and study how Soviet rulers had improved the lives of the masses. There is a hint of surprise in Benjamin’s  affectless reporting on the criminalization of sunflower seeds. How gray and lifeless the silence that follows a surveilled surprise. Under dictatorships, absurdity is limitless. The pigeons of Moscow lamented the newfound stinginess of elders on park benches. Street vending had also become illegal. The sale of icons was made part of the paper and pictures trade, so icons stood in booths next to other paper goods “flanked by portraits of Lenin, like a prisoner between two policemen,” wrote Benjamin. 

Eventually,  the oligarch paid a boutique to print his ghostwritten biography. Every biography asserts its brand to a particular audience. To this day, I don’t think my son knows that my ghost ever wrote such a travesty. 

“Please do not include my name in any published manuscripts which come as a result of this,” I said to  the man from Tomis, about a different book, in a different year, using a different map

“Consider it lost,” he replied. “Consider it as gone as Bruno Schultz’s The Messiah. No one would even begin to know where to find it.”

When I asked my son last week what became of the Stygian waltz, he said it never existed. “There was a Phrygian waltz….” he said, “but you must  have imagined the other one. Just like you imagine all kinds of things that never actually happened.”

9

Film stills are only ‘something’ in the context of a film “projected at the right speed, 24 frames per second.” This is the speed of projection, but the speed hides a particular darkness, as Mary Ann Doane notes, since “during the projection of a film, the spectator is sitting in an unperceived darkness for almost 40% of the running time.” The film projection’s speed keeps us from perceiving the “lost time represented by the division between frames.” The stills emphasize certain moments by pausing time, stopping the flow of images, turning the instants into one “instance,” a reified image that makes an “event” from what is removed. In this, the still (or screenshot) resembles the use of textual quotation.  

 “The whole universe, our life as humans, I always felt to be related to movement and the way it becomes still,” Ion Grigorescu told Calin Bota in an interview. 

As I fracture the moving image into screenshots, I divide a motion picture into discrete images that serve as reified souvenirs. I sacralize certain images by saving them. The sacred is always at stake in the games invented by humans. 

Although the dictatorship was officially atheist, Ceaușescu’s secularism was religious. He built a religion of the state and rendered things sacred accordingly. Even the dictator’s name was hallowed: using the wrong appellation was a crime. Radu Jude remembers first hearing a Radio Free Europe broadcast at his cousin’s house and being petrified by the blasphemy. “It was beyond shocking for me to hear Ceaușescu referred to only by surname,” Jude said, since the Romanian press always preceded his surname with a superlative, ‘Our Great Leader Ceaușescu.’ Or something.

Digital archives and collections reference Grigorescu’s film as a piece produced in 1977. While viewing the credits, I pause for closer look and snap a screenshot:

The screenshot announces this as Grigorescu’s “Box” (not “Boxing”), which he made with film lab and an 8mm standard camera in November 1978.  To confirm my own confusion, I also took a photo of the film’s title and presentation on YouTube:

The time stamp for Grigorescu’s film seems to also be plagued by a shadow or shadowed by a year and a title. I’m not sure if 1977 or 1978 is the alter ego. Nor am I sure what winning this match would mean for Time. Am I in a box, or am I boxing? 

10

In his memoir, Me and Him, writer Ion Ianosi never uses Ceaușescu’s name, thus bringing to the page the spectacle of the televised speeches and the act of identification with the leader which lay at the heart of both grammar and syntax. The ‘me’ exists only in relation to the ‘Him.’ “One could say, in socialist Eastern Europe, the camera did not shoot you: you shot the camera,” Ovidiu Țichindeleanu said, speaking of Ion Grigorescu.

According to scholars, the Romanian Department of State Security (known as the Securitate) was the largest and most pervasive secret police force in the Eastern Bloc. Personal conversations and mail were regularly monitored: the “secret police” knew everything, including the dreams of its citizens. Surveillance files literally created the dictator’s citizen-subjects; the dictator’s polyphonic, paranoid gaze characterizes the tone and scope of the Securitate archives. 

Who are you in the eyes of the state? Requesting to see your Securitate surveillance file seems like an act of courage that repudiates fear of being boxed. Similarly, poetry may suggest a repudiation of facile binaries. But poetry, like a film reel, may also sustain binaries rather than refuse them. 

I wrote a story about a woman watching pigeons. I shot the camera and then focused on stanzaic divisions and lineation. Like the anchorite Simeon of Emesis who descends from solitude in order to mock the city and upset the smug order of the world, I stared at the words I had written and realized they did little to address suffering, pain, injustice, and the usual suspects that cause us to ask questions about the meaning of life, where ‘meaning’ itself is linked to the disappointment of not being in a perpetual state of “well-being.” 

At present, ‘well-being’ is also increasingly defined by corporate products, lifestyles, and multiple biopolitical discourses. In January 1965, Ludwig Wittgenstein published “A Lecture on Ethics” in which he mentioned, briefly, a near-religious experience of “feeling absolutely safe.” It is no secret that Wittgenstein grappled with his longing to believe in a god for the greater part of his life, despite refusing to mention or evoke this in his philosophical writings, leaving metaphysics to his notebooks. 

“Absolutely” is a tremendous word. I mean: there is no way to move beyond it. Wittgenstein’s  decision to italicize this word underscores its enormity. What interests me is the connection between absolutely and absolution, which is what religion seeks to do, namely, to relieve us of the meaningless suffering that is part of the human condition. To “absolve” is to render or declare (someone) free from blame, guilt, or responsibility. Absolution seeks to erase epistemic gaps. But Samuel Beckett, who shares my birthday, and whose ghost sits on my foot as I type this, showed us that we go on despite waiting for nothing, and so waiting for nothing is perhaps the truest and most consistent experience of being human.

11

Everyday, I play in my boxes and drag my ghosts into them. 

Tristan Tzara described his play, Mouchoir Des Nuages, or “Handkerchief of Clouds,”  as a tragic farce influenced by the serial novel and cinema. His stage instructions indicated that the cloud-hankie should be staged on a platform in the centre of a box-like room “from which the actors cannot leave.” 

I enjoy playing my selves against my ‘selfing.’ As a constraint, the box doesn’t permit us to ignore our unfreedom; it destroys the presumptions of neoliberal subjectivity, much of which depends on this fantasy of ‘knowing oneself’. As for Tzara, he resembles Paul Celan in how the memories of his Romanian childhood and youth never abandoned his texts. Tzara preserved them in words and images: the despair of the fallen bird, the horses of Moinesti, the window-panes framing early boredom, the streetlights strolling through the cities at night, the volition of objects, his violin, the scythed tongues of village gossip, the labor of recounting, the inflammation of all ears in a row, the echo of the mother who urges him to drink more water in every letter she mails to him. If life is a game, one plays it with the cosmos and the nature of time itself. The games that predate one’s existence, the games we are given, involve passports and papers that replace the living being in order to constitute the “national” subject, the passport-bearing human, the neoliberal globetrotter.  No man is worth anything apart from the self he displays at a custom border. We live in the virulence of that.

12

A life is “a history in which past contingencies are given the sense of necessities to come… a form of rationalization in which the truth discloses itself as a lie,” to quote Scott Wilson’s foreword to Gary Shipley’s On the Verge of Nothing.

“If you want people to envy your sorrow or your shame, look as though you were proud of it,” Lev Shestov wrote in the note numbered 55. 

There are maps in books which are not atlases. Carte de tendre was created as a salon game in the 1600’s, only to return in Madeleine de Scudery’s coded novel, Clelie. George Perec and OULIPO played with maps and other forms of ‘potential literature.’ 

“As long as I am alive, do not forget who you are comes from all I have been – and all the names on the map,” my grandmother told my father before returning to Romania so she and my grandfather could die there, and be buried in the company of their own ghosts. One should not spend eternity among the ghosts who don’t know you, among crowds of historical phantoms made by others, away from your own ancestors. As for the music of ghosts, it is a curse to die a stranger. 

In “The Relay” the entry of a single person in a train carriage sets off a ripple effect. Irritation morphes into desire, into shame, into longing as each emotion passes from one body to the next. By the time the stranger has left the carriage, a crack, imperceptible at first, has begun to spread.

Written by Marek Šindelka, translated from Czech by Graeme Dibble, and appearing first in BODY, this story transforms a train carriage into a microcosm of the world, its passengers unwilling participants in an invisible relay of uncontainable charge. Darkly comic and wickedly observed, it reminds us that even in the most transient of spaces, we are never truly alone.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

A girl boarded the train. Actually, she was no longer a girl, because she was about thirty. But there was something in her behaviour and her appearance which suggested that, body aside, she was still a girl. The lines around her eyes were from laughter rather than age. No doubt she laughed openly and often – in general, there was something a bit hysterical about her. Within every gesture, no matter how small, lay dormant a kind of thoughtlessness, impatience and coarseness. Everything was highly charged. Each of her movements could blow up at any moment. For some inexplicable reason, I couldn’t stand her from the moment I laid eyes on her.

She came into the compartment and, even though there were plenty of free seats, she pointed to a handbag on a seat and asked the elderly lady by the window to free up the space next to her. She stood in the middle of the train and, with a strange restlessness that contained a hint of aggressiveness, gestured to the seat, invoking the most ridiculous of all rights: the right of a passenger using public transport. What was the point of all this? One thing was for sure: the request had immediately made her the centre of attention. All of a sudden, there was an almost palpable tension between us, the only three passengers. There was nothing calculated about her request. It was just a kind of habit, something that had been ingrained in the girl since childhood, a strategy she had developed which had been reinforced with each new act, a peculiar, animalistic way of immediately drawing attention to herself; an egotistical alchemy she used to get attention at any cost, in any setting.

Raising her eyebrows slightly, the woman she had spoken to made room for her, moving her bag to the seat opposite. I immediately felt myself silently and quite spontaneously allying myself with this woman against the overbearing girl. I watched the girl taking off her coat, sitting down, crossing her legs, flicking the fringe away from her forehead with a strange nervous movement, placing her hands on her lap. All of this was a cry for attention – the fringe, the legs, the hands – and then when she didn’t move at all, her stillness was a cry for attention. I secretly watched her: she was sitting. Never in my life had I found myself getting angry about something as commonplace as that girl sitting. Something about her face and her posture almost sent me into a fury. I knew all it would take was one word from her, one word, and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to control myself. The provocativeness that radiated from her and filled the whole carriage was a strange gust of defiance, a kind of desire for conflict. The girl’s fingers trembled. Her arm occasionally branched off from her body as though on a rail – to throw away a hankie, to turn off the heating. She took out a magazine and absentmindedly flicked through it.

To my surprise I realized I had a terrible urge to sleep with this girl, and I was immediately aroused. And I became angry at myself for being aroused. It came on so suddenly that for a moment I didn’t know what to do. I felt embarrassed and just then the girl leaned over towards me.

“Do you want this magazine?” she said, and I stared at her, dumbfounded. I could see her features, a strong Slavonic tone in her face and in her body in general. The ponytail that swirled round her neck fell onto her shoulders and her left breast.

“I’m done with it, so take it if you want,” she said, handing me the magazine. I could feel the blood rushing unbidden to my face. I didn’t know where to look. In the middle of the girl’s chest sparkled a sun called the solar plexus: a bony disc with the rays of the individual ribs radiating out from it, and then the breasts with black lace trim clearly visible in the deep cleavage.  

I mumbled something in my confusion, thanked her and took the magazine. After that the girl paid no more attention to me, took out her mobile and began to rapidly type something on it. And I sat there with her magazine like a whipped dog. For some unknown reason I had the sense that by being given this magazine I had at the same time lost something important. I glanced at the woman by the window, but she pretended to be looking out at the countryside. Yes, the girl had definitely taken something away from me. She had taken away my anger. Or at the very least she had sealed off an invisible channel through which I could surreptitiously direct it towards her. Now that I’d been given the magazine – incidentally, a magazine which I occasionally like to buy myself – I’d have to be a complete idiot to continue to hate the girl, albeit quite privately. Against my will, the tectonic plates inside the train had been set in motion; the secret conspiracy with the woman by the window had suffered a serious breach. I felt I was shifting closer to the girl, even though that was somewhere I really didn’t want to be. There, beneath her thirty-year-old skin, sparkled her solar plexus, and on it provocatively lay, like two scoops of boiled rice, her white breasts.

But then more people came into the compartment. A family with a child. All of them panting heavily.

“I almost had a coronary,” said the father, wiping his sweaty brow. The train creaked and started to move.

“What’s a coronary?” asked the child.

“A coronary is a kind of forest animal,” said the girl with a smile, without taking her eyes off the phone. Her smile was so subtle as to be almost imperceptible. Everyone immediately turned to look at her. The child stared wide-eyed and thoughtfully nodded his head.

And off we went.

Outside the window a field, a river, a forest. Inside the compartment a fringe, arms, legs, and now the coronary. For a while the parents stared in bewilderment at the swinging leg of the girl, who was paying no attention to anything but her mobile. The child stared out of the window, no doubt with a coronary running round in his head, and the parents, suddenly flagging, didn’t have the strength to chase it out of there. An embarrassed silence. The girl swung her leg. At first the swinging began to visibly annoy the mother, but soon she got over it and the anger was passed on to the father like some kind of infection.

Suddenly it was obvious that it wasn’t just the girl’s movements which were highly charged, but the movements of everyone else in the compartment. The father reached for something, and there was something aggressive in his gesture. He reached for something as if out of spite. As I was watching the father, I suddenly broke out in a cold sweat, because it was like looking in a mirror. Like seeing myself half an hour earlier, when I was still at liberty to hate the girl, which was now impossible. The father immediately got my back up. The idea that just moments before I could have made movements like those, that I could have so visibly lost control over the outside of my body, filled me with an intense revulsion against everything the father did: now he had even begun to faintly tap his fingers on the small table by the window. He soon stopped, but after a while, as though he had remembered something, his fingers started up again, and there was something idiotically spiteful about that drumming.

Just then the girl put down her mobile and took out a packet of sweets. Jelly snakes. She ate one after another. The father secretly stared at her chewing, something stirring inside of him. He was completely beside himself. I watched the father out of the corner of my eye; I watched that mysterious voyeurism and that rage, which I knew so well and which was visible around the father’s mouth, in the faint microscopic twitching of the tissue around his lips. No-one else noticed anything, and the child even started to sing a song. But the girl had somehow managed to sneak her way into this song as well: the cow jumped over the moon, but there was a coronary lurking behind it, peering slyly through the moonbeams.

And then the thing I had subconsciously been expecting to happen happened, but it still took my breath away. The girl bent over to the father and said innocently:

“D’you want one?” and held out her hand with the bag of sweets. Not to the child, not to the mother – to the father. The blood rushed to his face and he lowered his gaze. It was all too obvious – in front of him that dreadful solar and the hint of lace and the ponytail draped over her left breast. And instead of saying something, he took the sweets and started to eat them. He put them in his mouth and chewed on them and swallowed. It was awful. He chewed and blushed. He was trapped. All of a sudden he didn’t know where to look. In front of him a thirty-year-old chest with two breasts, and all of the previous aggression was transformed into passion right in front of him by a dreadful erotic gravity he was unable to control. He immediately turned towards the window and did his best to pretend he was looking at the landscape outside.

But now that screech of shifting tectonic plates inside the train reached the mother. She glanced at the father, who was daydreaming, only occasionally chewing the remainder of his treat a little, and a flush spread across his face in waves in time with the throbbing of his heart. She glanced at the girl, who was once more typing on her mobile, oblivious to everything else. A kind of shadow passed over the mother, the faint shuddering of the earth during a seismic tremor that is barely registered on the Richter scale. That does no more than make the glasses in the sideboard clink, and yet everyone suddenly remembers – spoons halfway towards mouths, steam rising from plates, animals in the forests raising their heads, birds falling silent in the trees – that somewhere deep down in the darkness below, beneath all of those layers and deposits, lies a core which burns at a billion degrees Celsius. For a moment the mother stared absently at the core in the middle of the girl’s chest and a hot flush came over her. Would he be capable of it? Did he have the right to? I mean, his child was sitting next to him . . . But the seismic tremor was over, spoons entered mouths and the world outside the window, frozen with fear for a second, erupted once again. We move on, the landscape behind the glass undulates and that slight shadow lifts from the mother’s face, contracts with a movement like a jellyfish and floats away. But still, in the evening when she goes to put the dishes back on the shelves, she’ll discover that one of the glasses in the sideboard – the one right at the back that they never use – is cracked. And it always will be. A yearning has settled there. And from there, during unguarded moments, during those evenings when you hear dogs barking in the distance and children’s voices from the garden, when it grows dark in the forest and strange patches of cloud quickly drift by in the blue sky, at moments like that, this yearning will unexpectedly spill over into their lives.

The train began to brake. The girl stood up without looking at anyone, said goodbye and left the compartment. She was gone. It was as though we’d all had a tooth pulled at the same time. The empty seat she’d left behind was suddenly lit up. Everyone stole looks at it in turn. The train started off again and I felt a wave of dizziness. Like a hard pill to swallow, the child mulled over the coronary, the father his secret passion and the mother her yearning. And the woman by the window, the one it had all started with, the one who had kept silent the whole time and indifferently looked out at the landscape, suddenly – like a shy conductor marking the beat of all the days, weeks and years to come – began to gently swing her leg.

“The Relay,” by Marek Šindelka (trans. Graeme Dibble), and originally published in BODY, which describes itself as “an international online literary journal [that publishes] the highest quality poetry and prose from emerging and established writers.”

Though their Nalí man recently moved to an old folk’s home in Farmington, Tashina and Krishauna rummaged through their grandfather’s bedroom closet for mementos to decorate his new space, as commanded by their eldest sister, Bryanna.  

Their Nalí man had eclectic taste, collecting river smoothed rocks, and fallen bird feathers he’d tuck into Burger King cups on his dresser top alongside his turquoise necklaces, bracelets, and rings, which he kept neatly stacked in an abalone shell. His mirror was vignetted with photos of his three granddaughters. Some, just pictures of Bryanna holding a NAC feather fan against an indigo backdrop. But most of the pictures were of the twins — pictures of them taken by family members at birthday parties or NAC meetings, or at Sears. They were in their family’s eyes a matched pair. 

As Krishauna pulled drawers open and emptied out a drawer’s worth of socks into a black trash bag, Tashina wrestled with her grandfather’s tightly packed closet, his clothes hangers, as multicolored as Good & Plenty candied licorice. They continued their chores in quiet reverence with only the sound of the hangers clattering together, as Tashina removed clothing from the closet in bundles.

Tashina reached the far end of the closet, where on a fine velvet hanger hung a black garment bag so speckled in dust it looked like a sparrow’s egg. Disturbing the garment bag sent up a flurry of dust, throwing Tashina into a fit of sneezes, but once she’d removed, or rather inhaled much of the dust, she unzipped the bag. It was the exact thing their grandfather had asked them to find. 

Strips of fringe escaped the garment bag. Tashina held back a gasp as she uncovered the rest of the garment. It was a nice jacket — perhaps the nicest she’d ever seen. She ran her fingertips along the fringe; it tickled her fingers. Then she released that gasp when she checked the clothes tag. 

“Shauna, come look at this. Says John Wayne’s name on it,” Tashina said, as she tucked the corner of the collar into her hand, popping the tag out, so it rested flush with her palm. 

Krishauna dropped her garbage bag, stepping over it to lean over Tashina’s shoulder. The clothes tag read WESTERN COSTUME CO. HOLLYWOOD, embroidered in gold thread. Below that line, written in faded permanent marker, were more lines that read:

Prop Number Name Chest Sleeve Waist Inseam

The final line was inked with John Wayne’s name in faded purple. 

“You think this thing is like legit?” Krishauna side stepped Tashina and reached for the sleeve of the jacket. 

“Has to be!” Tashina said, stepping backwards out of Krishauna’s grip.

“Dang, I didn’t know Nalí man was Hollywood!” Krishauna chuckled, before her expression bloomed with excitement. “Let me try it on.” 

Tashina considered something for a moment before sighing resignedly and handing the jacket over to her sister. Krishauna pulled the sleeves over her red Monument Valley Mustang’s t-shirt. 

Screwing up her nose, she put on a smokey accent and said, “Call me the Duke.” 

“Eww, just all creepy!” Tashina squealed, before it turned into a volley of laughter. “Here let me try it on.”

Krishauna obliged and pulled the jacket off before helping her sister into the same sleeves. As the jacket came up over Tashina’s shoulders, she smiled, turning with her sister to face their grandfather’s dresser mirror. Outside the light shifted golden, setting the mirror aglow, drenching Tashina in a honeyed light. In the sun’s beams, her blue-black hair shone auburn. As she swayed to and fro, the jacket’s suede fringed sleeves glittered as they cascaded around her body. She’d never seen herself like this, beautiful, unique, and alone.

Krishauna stood entranced as well, staring at the sight of her sister, haloed by a mosaic of childhood pictures, fractals of their shared life, fragments of their fifteen years spent inseparable, with the exception of the nine minutes Krishauna spent alone, before her sister was engulfed by the overhead lamplight of the doctor. 

*

In the weeks following the discovery of John Wayne’s jacket, Tashina was strangely private, avoiding Krishauna at school, and not sitting by her on the school bus. Krishauna tried not to take it personally, but it was difficult when it was her twin. She was used to being seen when she looked at Tashina with their waist length blue-black hair and matching tomboy style. But then, one day, things changed. Tashina dyed blonde streaks into her hair and started sitting at the lunch tables with the boys who wore the black hoodies. Krishauna didn’t recognize this twin stranger anymore. 

One night, after their eldest sister had fallen asleep, Tashina nudged Krishauna awake. 

“Hey Shauna, wanna go to Collin’s party with me?”  

Collin, one of the black hoodie boys, was Tashina’s latest fixation. She’d been scheming to get his attention and believed that tonight would be the culminating moment, when he’d realize that she, with her blond-streaked hair and Sol de Janeiro body spray, would be the only one for him. Krishauna wasn’t too keen on the idea, but she missed her sister and thought that going to Collin’s party might help get things back to normal between them. 

The truck that picked them up drove up the dirt road to their house with its headlights off. Krishauna didn’t recognize the hunched driver, despite the green dashboard lights illuminating his profile, but she assumed that he was another one of those black hoodie boys. He drove a scratched long bed Dodge Hemi truck with suicide doors. 

Tashina giggled as she crawled up into the cab of the truck, which left Krishauna in the back seat. 

Before he could even put the car into drive, Tashina cried out, “Wait! Oh shit, I forgot something! Can you wait just like one more minute please, Ky?” 

Krishauna grimaced at the nickname.

“Whatever,” Kyle responded. 

Before Krishauna had even touched the door handle, Tashina had already slammed the door behind her, effectively locking her in the car, with its suicide doors. Krishauna’s hands went clammy. 

“You guys twins?” Kyle asked in a deep voice that she believed he practiced at home in his bathroom mirror.

“Yup, I’m older by nine minutes,” Krishauna said, relieved by the conversational novelty of her twin status. 

“Huh, I wouldn’t have guessed,” he said, glancing back. 

“We’re identical—we looked more identical—you know, before she dyed her hair.”

Kyle chuckled at her comment, flashing her a green tinted smile. 

“But what’s your clans?” 

She felt the subtext of his question deep within her bones. Clans before hook-up plans. 

Krishauna frowned, “Bit’ahnii?” 

At that moment, Tashina emerged out of the house, the John Wayne jacket casually slung over her shoulders in the way famous NTVS did on the red carpet—just over the shoulders so it showed off the outfit beneath. In the green tinted light, Krishauna swore she heard Kyle whisper damn under his breath. Damn was right.

The party was up on the mesa, the drive up was bumpy, and Krishauna was starting to feel motion sick. 

“Are we close?” Krishauna asked after nearly thirty minutes of driving. “I think I’m going to barf.”

“We’re almost there, you baby cry,” Tashina snapped. 

Kyle’s headlights pooled into a clearing where several other trucks sat in a circle, their beds facing a huge bonfire. Nearby, tumbleweeds flickered with firelight, casting long crisscrossed shadows onto the desert brush. Patches of dark pooled behind uneven lumps of grass and green thread. Krishauna recognized some of the black hoodie boys, most importantly Collin, who sat on the roof of his truck, his legs hanging over his rear windshield, a beer bottle winking in his hands.

Everyone stared at Tashina when she stepped out of the truck wearing the jacket and Krishauna didn’t blame them. Who was she to tell her sister what to do when she herself was sporting knee length basketball shorts and a sleeping shirt? Tashina, however, was glowing bright as a new ember in her white tube top, denim mini skirt, and leather cowboy boots. But Krishauna knew that a spark that bright could also be all consuming. 

Tashina was euphoric as she approached Collin, who quickly shooed his friends out of the bed of his truck. Like a gentleman, he helped Tashina onto the tailgate by pulling her up by her armpits. 

“You came,” he said, glancing down at his feet when he noticed Krishauna.  

“Of course I did,” Tashina chuckled. “I wouldn’t miss this.” 

Collin then tipped an unopened beer toward her, and she accepted, but he wasn’t looking at Tashina when he offered it, and Krishauna knew this because he was directly looking at her, his eyes aglow, gleaming with the orange reflection of the fire. 

“You brought Krishauna?” He chuckled. “Is she wearing basketball shorts?”

Tashina rolled her eyes, “I had to! And you know she can’t dress herself,” she said, tossing her hand flagrantly.

Krishauna overheard this and stopped short of Collin’s ride. 

“I’m going back to the truck,” she said to Kyle. 

“I’ll come with you,” Kyle responded, sighing as he glanced back over his shoulder at Tashina, who was standing so close to Collin, their outer thighs touched. Krishauna didn’t understand what her sister saw in Collin. He had long shaggy hair, like every other Navajo boy. He was just some Jawn. But at least he was nice to her. 

She didn’t tell Tashina that the previous semester, she shared an art class with Collin. It was her favorite class. Most of their art supplies were busted by her careless classmates, but not hers, her pastels, shading pencils, and eraser putty were nearly as pristine as when she first got them, albeit shrunken by use. Another thing she liked about art was that she wasn’t just good at it — she was really good at it. Someone could bring in a photograph to her and she would hand them back a hyper-realistic drawing, with shading so perfect you couldn’t even see the streaks. And since she was so good, most people didn’t talk to her — they’d just leave her alone and let her draw. Except for Collin. Sometimes, she’d be so in the zone while shading a flower-like pattern to avoid pencil streaks that when Collin tapped her on the shoulder, she’d flinch. 

He’d always ask her about her project, flashing a boyish grin and asking, “What’s the story about this one?” 

That semester she was working on a pastel portrait of her Nalí lady for her Nalí man’s birthday. In the portrait, her Nalí lady wore thick bifocal lenses and a floral scarf wrapped around her silvery hair. She’d drawn it out carefully, but she had trouble capturing the threaded strands of tinsel woven through the headscarf. Normally, she’d leave white space for highlights, because you can’t get crisp whites after putting down a cobalt layer. 

“Yeah, I fucked up on the scarf. I just can’t get this part to look shiny like it does in the picture.” She tapped on the photo reference with her fingernail. 

Collin’s lip twitched with a smile. “Let me give it a try?” 

“Sure, why not,” Krishauna said. She was fed up with the white pastel blending into the blue and her hand was starting to cramp. “If you mess up, I’ll just cover it in more blue.”  

“I won’t mess it up, I do this all the time when I detail cars.” 

Krishauna scrunched her face at him. 

He stepped away from his desk to rummage through the paint drawer that their teacher had filled with different varieties of acrylic paints, purchased with a rural art grant. 

On a Styrofoam plate, he squeezed out a pea sized dollop of paint, then he pulled out an impossibly skinny paint brush with whisker long bristles. Swishing around the brush in a cup of water, he thinned the paint to his desired consistency. Carefully, he pulled a fine white line across the scarf, then a series of dashes so that the highlight disappeared into the rest of the fabric of the scarf. 

Krishauna’s eyes widened, “Whoa! That worked and it looks good! Thank you! Oh my god, why didn’t I think of using acrylics for the highlights, duh!” And when Krishauna said this, she was pretty sure Collin, king of the hoodie boys, blushed.

Krishauna sat with Kyle in the bed of the truck. He’d sigh intermittently, between sips of beer, saying nothing. He only perked up when Tashina waved them over.

“Shauna, come here! Hurry!” 

Tashina had had one too many beers. She was too giggly and slurring her words. When she leaned down from the bed to whisper in Krishauna’s ear she could smell the beer on her breath. 

“I have to piss,” she slurred. “Collin says there’s a ditch over there.” Tashina pointed to a dry creek bed surrounded by trees. “But you need to come with me,” her shit-eating grin turning into giggles.

“Okay,” Krishauna sighed, helping her sister down from the truck bed. 

As they walked over to the dry ravine, Tashina kept laughing and swaying, nearly tripping over her boots several times in the process. 

“I think that tonight is when I’m going to seal the deal with Collin,” she squeaked, the moonlight illuminating the highpoints of her face. Even in the dark Krishauna could almost see the red ocher flush coloring her sister’s face. 

“Okay, cool, now hurry up and go piss,” Krishauna said, gently shoving her sister forward. 

“Yeah,” Tashina replied, before she lurched forward and landed on her hands and knees. 

After helping her sister to her feet, Krishauna took the jacket from her. Krishauna kept watch as her sister hobbled down into the dry ravine and disappeared behind the mesh of juniper branches. Donning the jacket, she waited for her sister to return. 

When she turned around, she was surprised to see Collin behind her. 

“You should probably get her home. She’s getting kind of rowdy,” he said, scratching his neck. “I wasn’t planning on having that kind of party. But I’m glad she brought you.” 

Krishauna felt her cheeks warm. 

“Er — yeah. I actually didn’t want to come, but she just woke me up and dragged me here.” 

Collin stepped closer to Krishauna, his head towering above her own. She admired how the moon reflected the cobalt off his shaggy black hair, and how sharp his jawline appeared with the exaggerated shadows. His skin had a smooth blue porcelain finish. Before she knew it, Collin gripped the fringe at Krishauna’s elbows, leaned down, and kissed her. 

Krishauna pushed a slender hand into Collin’s chest, pushing herself away from him. 

“You don’t know what you just did,” she said, her voice hitching with panic. 

“I-I-I’m sorry, Krishauna, I thought that you wanted…”

“I did, but you’re not mine to want,” Krishauna said, swallowing against the pit of shame lodged in her throat. 

A new look dawned on Collin’s face. “It’s never been like that with Tashina for me.”

Before she could say another word, Tashina barreled into her sister, knocking them both down into a nearby sage bush. She could feel the air rushing out of her lungs as she fell backward into the sound of snapping branches. Tashina’s hands then curled into fists within the dark sheet of her sister’s hair. All Krishauna could make out was the twangy sound of her hair plucking out of her scalp and the snapping of sage branches that dug deep gouges into the John Wayne jacket.  

“Can’t I have one thing to myself for once?” Tashina shrieked. A sharp crack then burst out of the darkness. 

At first, Krishauna believed that a branch collapsed beneath her, that is until, grainy spots began to fill her vision, and her right cheek flushed with pain. Defensively, she clawed upward, drawing her fingernails down any exposed skin. 

“Don’t dig your nails in me!” Tashina burst out. 

A fist struck Krishauna’s brow bone.

“Guys! Stop it! Stop it!” Collin yelled. “What are you doing? Stop it!” 

Eventually, someone from beyond the bush pulled Tashina off Krishauna. Collin reached down and gathered Krishauna up easily. She didn’t register the jacket slipping off her shoulders. Folding her body into his chest, he held her. 

“You whore!” Tashina spat, her shoulders heaving, as she writhed against Kyle’s arms. 

As he restrained her in a bear hug, Krishauna noticed a trickle of blood wink down Tashina’s face from one of the scratches she gave her. She would have preferred further blows to seeing her twin’s face twisted up in agony like this. A familiar weft of pain shuttled through Krishauna’s chest—pulling—tightening—turning back on itself. Her sister’s hurt. Her own hurt. When they were babies, one twin’s tears would trigger the other’s. When did that stop? Surely, it never stopped for Krishauna. 

*

Tashina considered her sister as she lay in their shared bedroom after the party. The scratches her sister clawed down her face pulsed, matching the beat of her heart. The party scattered quickly after the twins got into a fight and Kyle insisted he take both sisters home to “mellow out.” But her buzz had worn off and her head pulsed, and she glared up at the glow in the dark sticky stars affixed to her ceiling above her bed. She only had five large stars, while Krishauna had six small stars, but nonetheless, the stars came from the same pack. Her family didn’t consider affording her the option of having her own glow in the dark sticky pack. She was yet again expected to share with Krishauna. Hadn’t she shared enough? They shared the same face for Creator’s sake. And for a time, she was okay with their sameness. She never felt lonely. But gradually it changed for Tashina, in such an incremental way she couldn’t tell you the exact day it happened, just that it happened. Like the day you dip your hand into the flour bin to make frybread and feel your hand hit plastic. As a child she enjoyed being a twin; they shared a secret language of baby babbles, until real words developed. They shared a secret game called the slapping game where they’d clasp hands like they were going to arm wrestle, and one sister would slap the other’s hand.  

“We’re telepathic,” Tashina would say, nearly nose to nose with Krishauna, raising her hand to slap. “Am I going to slap you? Yes or no?” 

“No.” Krishauna would reply in that raspy feather-light voice she had yet to outgrow.

Slap.

“We’re telepathic. Am I going to slap you? Yes or no?” Krishauna would say. 

“No.” Tashina would reply. 

Krishauna was always wrong, Tashina would always slap her, but she would never slap her back. Sometimes they’d play the game so long that the blood vessels on the back of Krishauna’s hands would burst, turning her skin purple and green, but she never told their mother. Tashina once asked her, after the slapping game, why she’d never slap her. 

“I don’t want to, if it hurts you,” she said, cradling her hand into her chest. “Why do you always slap me?” 

Tashina paused for a long moment. “I don’t know. I just thought that one day you’d slap me back.” 

The pulsing scratches were now evidence that that day had finally come. 

So, they had these games and their late-night conversations and a secret language apart from their families, and Krishauna and Tashina knew they were different, but everyone else saw them as one unit: the twins. Put the twins in matching dresses. The twins get the same dolls on Christmas. Tashina was never just herself. The matching everything was one thing, but the comparisons were far more degrading: the shy twin and the outgoing twin, the fast twin and the slow twin, the sensitive twin and the happy twin. She understood that when people had two like things, they liked to compare them. I can tell you’re Tashina because your face is narrower. That one is Krishauna because she’s better behaved. While Krishauna attended the honor roll dinner in the cafeteria with their parents, Tashina was stuck in remedial afterschool tutoring. Krishauna could always make their parents proud in a way, Tashina never felt she could. 

After fifteen years of being a pair, Tashina craved to feel different. In her mind, she deserved the John Wayne jacket. For one, she knew more about it. While Krishauna was doing art and reading her anime books in the school library, she was on her school-issued Chromebook looking up John Wayne and discovered how while he was on set of the 1956 film The Searchers, a two-year-old Navajo child came down with pneumonia. Unable to get proper medical attention to her in time, John Wayne lent his plane and private pilot to the little girl and her family so they could get to the hospital. And that’s how he got his name “The Man With The Big Eagle,” from the Monument Valley Navajo extras. 

When Tashina watched The Searchers, John Wayne’s character, Ethan Edwards, was scary to her. His character was a Civil War veteran who spent years searching for his niece, Debbie, after her family was killed and she was kidnapped by the Comanche. It confused Tashina how Edwards spent so much of the film searching for Debbie only to get pissed off when he found her living peacefully among the Comanche. He’d rather kill her than see her assimilated? She couldn’t reconcile the John Wayne who could play a racist veteran who sided with the Confederacy, with the John Wayne who lent his plane to a sick little girl’s family. 

Against the familiar backdrop of Monument Valley and orchestral fanfare, Tashina struggled to reconcile her lived reality with the rough and tumble fantasy of Edwards vying to exact revenge on the Comanche, a southern plains tribe, in Utah’s arid deserts.

 How was it that they had his jacket, when everything surrounding his body of work and his behavior towards Natives, diverged so heavily from the Man With The Big Eagle story? From deep within her another question bubbled forth: who did the Big Eagle story benefit and was it even true? 

The jacket, Tashina thought suddenly, bolting up out of bed. Where the fuck was the jacket? 

***

The following morning, Krishauna awoke to the Navajo Nation’s radio station, KTTN 660, droning into her eldest sister’s bedroom from the kitchen. Her mother liked to listen to the station early in the morning, while brewing her NDN coffee on the kettle of their propane stove. She rolled over in bed, only to be greeted by the two dark eyes of her eldest sister. 

“Why are you in my bedroom?” Bryanna asked. 

Krishauna didn’t know how to explain sneaking out, Collin’s party, or the fight, or how after coming to blows with her twin, she didn’t want her throat slit in her sleep — which was probably overdramatic, but still. 

She settled with: “I got scared?” 

Bryanna’s eyes narrowed. “Bullshit.” 

Krishauna rolled her eyes. “Tashina and I got into a fight last night,” she said. 

“Did you win?” Bryanna asked, rubbing her face. 

“What do you think?” Krishauna said, drawing her hair up over her temple, revealing a bald spot. 

“Shit, she got you good,” Bryanna huffed, as she arranged the pillows better beneath her head, so that her eyes were level with Krishauna’s. 

“She did,” Krishauna said, her voice cracking slightly. 

Bryanna’s eyes widened with horror. “Oh shit, this was like a real fight?” 

Krishauna couldn’t do anything but nod back. 

“What could Tashina be pulling your hair out over for?” 

Krishauna shrunk into the bed and buried her head under her pillow. 

“Collin Rodriguez kissed me.”

“Tʼáásh aaníí? For real?” 

“While I was wearing John Wayne’s jacket.” 

“Fawk,” Bryanna said, shaking her head in disappointment. “All over a Jawn.” 

Krishauna nodded under the pillow. All night she had replayed the kiss, the sweet whisper light brush of Collin’s lips on hers, just as much as she had her sister’s blows. 

“Hold up, John Wayne’s wha—” 

“Jacket,” Krishauna interrupted. “We found it in Nalí man’s closet. The one that Tashina’s been wearing this whole time? The fringe sleeves?” 

“That jacket? Nalí man asked me to keep an eye out for that jacket. That’s the whole reason he wanted us to clean out his room.” 

Krishauna winced. “I think Tashina has it—after the fight we got separated, but we had to leave because Tashina was already so drunk—” 

“Drunk? You guys were drinking?!” Bryanna sat up ram rod straight from the bed. 

“Shhh!” Krishauna hushed, clapping her hand over her sister’s mouth. After all, their parents were just down the hall. 

Bryanna’s eyes narrowed, as Krishauna mouthed quiet with her finger in front of her lips.

“So, what happened to the jacket?”

“We may have left it on the mesa,” said Krishauna. 

Bryanna crawled out of the bed and slid open her closet door. Donning her track sweatsuit, she nonchalantly walked out of her bedroom and to the neighboring room.

“TASH, GET UP! We’re going up the mesa!”  

The wood panel walls of their trailer did little to muffle Bryanna’s booming voice, sending tremors through the mirror on her vanity. Her cross-country medals clattered against the mirror as Krishauna stared into her quivering reflection. 

Bryanna insisted on swinging by the Starbucks installed in their local Bashas’ to get her signature venti shaken espresso with brown sugar cold foam. Krishauna unsuccessfully tried to cover Tashina’s drink, but not even a venti pink drink with sweet cream cold foam could mend this hurt. Back in the sisters’ Tacoma, Bryanna swirled her coffee like it were an NAC gourd, the ice hitting the plastic cup in rhythmic circles. The radio droned on playing some twangy country song, one that their Nalí man would probably have turned up. 

In the daylight, the path up to the mesa looked idyllic–sunlit and golden–the washboard road surrounded by scraggly dusty blue-green juniper shrubs, and scattered orange globemallows. They’d been up here with their grandfather back in the day. He’d take the girls on a hike up the mesa, as soon as spring rolled in, and the snow had all melted. They’d wear long basketball shorts and baseball caps, while their grandfather chose to hike the seven miles in his heavily starched Wrangler blue jeans, straw cowboy hat, and his big old cell phone clipped onto his western belt. At least he’d wear his tennis shoes, Krishana thought with a chuckle.

“What are you laughing at?” Tashina snapped, as if Krishauna was trying to be intentionally irritating.  

“Nothing, I was just thinking about how Nalí man used to wear jeans on hikes.” 

Bryanna busted out laughing just as they hit a significant pothole. “He did, huh! Tash, remember when he made us turn over that big sandstone rock? It took all three of us to tip it over.” 

“Whatever,” Tashina said, untucking her blonde streaked hair from behind her neck to shield her face. 

“Eww, just gross with all that attitude,” Bryanna chided. 

Tashina shot a death glare at her sister. 

“Just pay attention to the road, you’re hitting all the bumps.” 

Bryanna eased the Tacoma up a steep hill that lowered into the clearing where they had the fire the night before. As they rolled over the hill, their truck sunk lower into the softened sand before they rolled to a stop near the fire pit. Krishauna hopped out of the car and looked around the site, noting the tire marks Collin’s ride left behind. 

“Okay, where do you remember last having the jacket?” Bryanna asked, giving her iced coffee another swirl. 

“Over there!” Tashina shouted, pointing to the bush that she’d shoved her sister into. Krishauna was surprised her sister could recall the night before, given how drunk off her ass she appeared. 

The girls marched over to the bush, their steps crunching over dry shale. What had once been a bush, now looked more like the nest of a very large animal. An animal that thrashed around a lot, given the tangled branches that caved inward at the center. 

“Here,” Krishauna stated. 

“Shit, I’ll be right back.” Bryanna said abruptly, leaving the twins behind. 

“Where are you going?” Tashina called out. 

“I left my phone in the car. And you two need to talk!” 

Bryanna called back, leaving the twins behind. 

Both Krishauna and Tashina squinted against the noon day sun, their mouths set in the same slight frown. A breeze whistled by, catching on their chapped lips, making words form, those that hadn’t yet been spoken. 

Hair clung to Tashina’s lip gloss as she started, “I really liked Collin.” 

“I know,” Krishauna replied. “I promise, I didn’t know he was going to do that.” 

“Are you sure he didn’t think you were me?” 

Krishauna felt her brow furrow, “I’m sure. He said he was glad to see me.” 

 Tashina considered her twin’s words, her expression shifting as her eyes hardened and locked onto her sister’s. She squared her shoulders. “We’re telepathic.”

“We’re telepathic,” Krishauna confirmed.

Tashina closed the distance between them. She reached out her hand. Krishauna accepted. 

“You tried to hurt me on purpose, yes, or no?” Tashina asked, staring at their clasped hands. 

“No—” Krishauna went to slap her sister’s hand, but at the last second grasped it on her own. “—not ever.” 

Tashina’s eyes were glassy, she glanced away. 

“There it is.” 

The jacket appeared where Collin’s truck had been parked, although when Krishauna had looked there, she’d failed to notice the heap of suede. 

*

The old folks home their Nalí was staying in was swanky as hell. They made the place look all rustic, kind of like the Ute Mountain Casino—plush blue carpets, live edge coffee tables, and big fancy light fixtures. It was funny to the twins, because their grandpa’s trailer was a far cry from his luxurious stay in Pine Meadows. As soon as they checked in at the front desk, their Nalí man was already waiting. Krishauna thought it was cute how he starched his shirt and pants for the visit. The twins tittered about the old ladies in the dining hall who gushed over learning their names from their grandfather.

“Oh, you’re Julian’s twins—you girls are so pretty, I can barely tell you apart, except for the hair, of course.” The old women with silvered perms gushed. The twins basked in their compliments. 

The cafeteria staff rolled in with their carts, plating the tables with mashed potatoes and gravy with peas and pork chops. Luckily, their Nalí still had his teeth, so his food didn’t have to be puréed, like that of some residents. 

“Somebody better get Nalí man some roses, Golden Eagle Bachelor over here,” Bryanna teased.

Their Nalí man wiggled his eyebrows at his granddaughters. “Yah, I like it here.” He speared a chunk of porkchop into his mouth. “They’re not stingy with the food!”  

“Grandpa, these girls, they found something of yours in your room,” said their mom, Marie. 

Bryanna then reached into the tote bag slung over her shoulder and pulled out the fringed jacket by the shoulder pad.

“Tʼáásh aaníí? You found shí buddy John Wayne’s jacket.” He picked up the jacket like he was greeting an old friend, setting it across his lap and stroking the sleeve. “Yeah, John Wayne gave me this jacket a long time ago, back in the seventies.” Their Nalí man squinted searching for his memories of the past, as if they were just out over the horizon. “I was an extra on set for Warner Brothers, we were filming way out there in Durango.” He pointed with a calloused knuckle in the general direction of Colorado. “This is right before,” he wet his lips, “he passed on from stomach cancer.” Shaking his head he hissed low and slow. “He gave me this on wrap day, took it right off his back—it was still sweaty, and he said, here, have this, Julian. It wasn’t until I got home, I found a golden dollar in the pocket.”  

“He used to send us a bag of oranges and peanuts every Christmas,” the girls’ father said gruffly. 

Their Nalí man pursed his lips and nodded in agreement. “He did.” 

“I was invited to his funeral in California.” 

“Did you go?” Tashina asked. 

Their Nalí man burst out laughing. “No! I went to that big boarding school out there. No California for me!” 

“But weren’t you friends?” Krishauna inquired. 

As if he sipped the hot coffee, their Nalí man hissed, “He was my buddy, but he was ayóó diigis—he was nice to me but mean to some other Indians. When we’d go to Goulding’s and get some drinks, he’d buy for everybody there, but then he’d run out there to the magazines and newspapers and say diigis things! Somethin’ about Indians being selfish, keeping all the land to ourselves. This guy, he was telling Playboy Magazine that he believes in white supremacy! And I said to him, John, what in the hell are you saying out there? You’re an actor, not the president! And you know what he says to me?”
The table waited in rapture. Krishauna looked to Tashina, Tashina to Bryanna, Bryanna to their mother, and their mother searched her husband’s face for a hint to the end of the story — but he was already shaking his head in discontent, as if he’d heard the final line of this story countless times before.

“Julian, it’s just in the Playboy,” he said in a put-upon deep voice. “Yeah, so that was my buddy, John Wayne.” 

Patting the jacket, he glanced up at Bryanna. “Go put this in my room. I want to wear it to the Spring Dance. Because things always happen when I wear this jacket, must be lucky.”

The twins exchanged a knowing glance. 

Somehow I think my life opens always on a Thursday.

The days before merely a suggestion. Somehow in front

of a mirror too small for the truth of me I am learning 

to love the ampersand of my body. Which means I own

my hunger. Which means cravings for jjangmyeon at

three in the afternoon. Too I sing offkey in the shower. 

Who are you calling a pedant. I love Ella and Louis 

in the same breath as Squidward Kenny G. I keep 

souvenirs from Macau and I can still lose my left earring 

at the drugstore. I am 5’1″ and I verily insist on that inch. 

I use charcoal to remove the stench of goopy somethings 

stuck in the back of the fridge, which has become a nebula 

of smells. I ask for impossible things: a portrait of my head

bursting into a flower, a pen that never runs out of ink,

reading the same story again for the very first time, cake

that doesn’t go to my hips, the unbearable lightness of

oranges. I have a messy house and I cry often about it. 

There is lots of crying in the long history of who I am

becoming. Somehow I think my life has been torrential 

rains that fill the balcony but my plants don’t die. I don’t 

die. I wear red lipstick like a flag and I take being your 

emergency contact seriously. On the day I was born 

interacting galaxies Arp 81 became visible after a hundred

million years. Suppose it only takes a collision to arrive 

on earth. Most of us sleep through earthquakes and I desire

to be awake for when my happiness is let loose by fissures. 

I want to learn about the world by looking at birds. Try as 

I might I can only exist slowly. When you see me bump

into sharp corners you will understand. Sometimes I can’t

comprehend that I can be loved but I am loved anyway. 

It doesn’t have to be a Thursday. It can be any day.

But life can open. And I don’t have to die. 

There are squares that recount no stories;

they prefer to spend their time recalling

that nothing ever happened in them except, maybe —

that girl who dropped her ice cream;

the boy determined to grab a pigeon;

the first date of a couple who later broke up.

The rain falling ardently each September;

the January snow and the August sun.

Squares which never saw blood or tears

except, maybe, of the poet sitting at the corner.

When you still cried with your eyes shining

and wore the school uniform

and beamed with every toy your grandma gave you,

there were many birds soaring in your eyes,

flying high up, beyond the sky.

There were vast meadows with flowers,

with colours never seen before.

I wanted to tell you: on the rare occasions you look at me

I no longer understand your eyes, for in them are neither birds

nor meadows.

I see only the look of youth, the one all too ready to execute the sentence …

I find myself guilty beyond doubt

of countless hours embracing fictitious beings

instead of holding you, kissing you, lulling you to sleep.

I left you counting those birds on your own,

lost in the depths of the meadows where I last saw you

tumbling in the soil

and growing handsome.

I met Alexandra Bellow for the first time at the University of Chicago’s exclusive Quadrangle Club. She must have been eighty-four years old. I was twenty-nine. 

A friend from grad school had asked if I could take over from him as a tutor for a student. He explained this wasn’t a typical student, but an older woman who wanted to read Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’ masterpiece. I was intrigued and quickly agreed, welcoming the idea of some extra cash. That day at the Club was my first meeting with Alexandra. It was also the first time I had ever been inside the Club. With its dimmed interior and wood-paneled walls, it had the aura of another era.

 Over a glass of wine, Alexandra and I discussed the terms of the tutorship. We would meet for lunch once a week. After eating, we’d read exactly three pages of the novel out loud; rather, she would read, as she wanted to practice her Spanish pronunciation. (Later, she would scold me if I didn’t correct her mistakes). My role would be to guide her through the reading: explain context, translate unfamiliar words, and lead our discussions. The perfect side-hustle.

Alexandra had been learning in this way for years. Long before I met her, she had approached Paolo Cherchi, a former professor of Italian in the university’s Romance Languages Department, during a party. She had asked if he knew any doctoral students working on early modern Spanish literature, who might be interested in tutoring her. Like the friend who introduced me to her, and the student who followed after me, I was one of the lucky ones. 

I knew from the beginning that this tutorship would be special. Alexandra bore the last name of Saul Bellow, the world-famous writer and a Nobel laureate no less, so I assumed she would have stories to tell. Notorious last name aside, I was astonished by what a quick Google search revealed: the daughter of two pioneering Romanian physicians, she had grown up under a brutal Communist regime and was the first woman to become a full professor of mathematics at Northwestern University. Her mother had been persona non grata under the Communist government. This was certainly no ordinary student. 

But perhaps the most surprising thing for me was her unwavering enthusiasm for Don Quixote. On that first meeting, I asked if she wanted to read more than three pages at a time. I was happy to read a chapter a week or so. “No, thank you,” she said. Would she like to read something else in addition to Don Quixote, then? Perhaps I could introduce her to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the seventeenth-century poet who championed women’s education? She smiled; I thought she seemed interested. But she said, “No, thank you.” At the time, these responses seemed to reflect the character of an older woman set in her ways. But I understand now. Her insistence on focusing on Don Quixote, dosed out three pages at a time, was a sign of her deep love for the novel.

Alexandra retired from the Mathematics Department at Northwestern at the age of sixty-one, relatively early for an academic. When I asked why, she explained that living under a dictatorship had deprived her of so much—books, films, and experiences. Growing up, she hadn’t even been familiar with the Bible. She arrived in the West with voracious curiosity, determined to make up for the time lost. After earning her doctorate at Yale and holding positions at prestigious universities across the country, she retired from teaching not to rest, but to become a full-time student. Reading Don Quixote was one of her learning projects.

Under the Communist regime, culture was subjected to intense censorship. Alexandra told me stories of how a friend of her mother would smuggle novels from the West, distributing loose pages among trusted circles. Her mother, Florica Bagdasar, would hide the pages beneath a floor tile. They would take turns reading them in secret — always out of sight from their maid whom, they suspected, reported to the Securitate, Romania’s infamous Secret Police agency. Florica, the first woman to lead a ministerial cabinet in the Romanian government, earned enemies after establishing relations with the West during her tenure as Minister of Health. Both she and Alexandra were harassed, surveilled, and ostracized for years, so their maid spying on them was a real possibility. “Feeling like you could not trust someone so close must have been terrible,” I told Alexandra. She shrugged, letting out a chuckle. “Well, she might have been a spy, but she was actually really nice. I liked her.” That reply was so characteristic. Alexandra saw people in all their contradictions, giving them the benefit of the doubt even if their actions were hurtful.

I like to imagine that Alexandra’s secretive mode of reading taught her to savor every word. Perhaps she learned the pleasures of slow, reflective reading while waiting patiently for the next chapter to arrive over the weeks. And perhaps this was why she insisted on reading only three pages at a time, too, with Don Quixote. Indeed, after our Saturday meetings, she would go home and go over the pages again — sometimes to ensure she had understood them thoroughly, sometimes just for the pleasure of rereading. I am not sure if she had always read in such small quantities, or if it was something she started doing as she got older and tired more easily. Still, her insistence on reading just three pages was in keeping with how she lived the rest of her life, as far as I could see. Little sips of wine; small bites of food; three pages at a time. Thoughtfully, patiently savoring each little thing, she lived with a quiet and unassuming intensity.

Alexandra would call me her “maestra,” her teacher, though I never believed I had much to teach her. I felt embarrassed every time she introduced me this way to her friends or to the servers at the restaurants where we met. In truth, our sessions felt more like conversations between two friends bound by a shared love for an old book. Yet she insisted I had something to teach her. She trusted my knowledge and was always interested in hearing my takes. She asked endless questions about the narrative’s smallest details — for example, the words used to describe the characters’ clothing — and diligently took notes, the pen shaking in her fragile hand. She treated me with great respect. Our age difference, the difference in our backgrounds — they never seemed to matter to her. I was a student navigating an institution notorious for its sometimes-cruel rigor, in a professional field full of hierarchies. But Alexandra’s trust and desire to build a bridge between us were beautiful reminders that knowledge could be made in community.

During lunch, we often discussed politics. She was passionate about it and always eager to hear my opinions — sometimes almost quizzing me on that week’s news (which, I confess, I sometimes reviewed while on the train to see her). I found her interest remarkable. She worried deeply about the world, even as she knew she wouldn’t be in it for much longer. Much of what was happening painfully reminded her of the past. “Ay, ay, ay, querida amiga,” she’d always say. 

When the pandemic hit, and Alexandra’s beloved sense of liberty was upended by lockdown, she wrote to me: “I am reading and rereading Cervantes. It is no doubt a marvelous antidote for today’s craziness and public hysteria.” Much like the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha, Alexandra lived in pursuit of freedom. In the novel, the ordinary man Alonso Quijano becomes the adventurous Don Quixote, only to transform into the Knight of the Sorrowful Figure before, ultimately, returning to his original self. “I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose,” Cervantes famously wrote. With these words, Don Quixote declares himself the only author of his destiny. His imagination and willpower give him the radical freedom to be whomever he wants. Alexandra, too, morphed by her own resolve: she was born a Bagdasar, later became an Ionescu-Tulcea, and died Alexandra Bellow. I do not think this was just a simple case of a woman taking on her husbands’ surnames. Rather, I think she was choosing, reinventing herself as needed every time. She even kept Bellow’s name after divorcing him and remarrying, transforming it into her own.

As time passed, our conversations shifted beyond politics to include our personal lives. She was a rather private person, but slowly opened up to me. Little by little, she shared stories about her life in Romania, her family, and her marriages. She talked about the night she met Saul Bellow at a party in Hyde Park. Saul, then at the peak of his career, approached her confidently. “Have you read any of my books?” he asked her. “No,” she replied cheekily, “have you read mine?” She also told me about their trip to Bucharest in the 1970s to visit her dying mother. After this, Saul would go on to write the novel The Dean’s December—in which a Chicago intellectual accompanies his wife, an internationally-acclaimed astronomer, back to Communist Romania to bid farewell to her sick mother. Bellow was notorious for fictionalizing realities too close to home, turning the people in his life into barely-disguised characters. I was not happy to see his version of my friend on the page: Minna, an elegant and brilliant scientist who is, nonetheless, condescendingly described as a “schoolgirl” and  “gold-star pupil” for her dedication to her work. But Alexandra was generous about this. “He had to. He was a writer. That is what they do.”

Eventually, I also came to understand her love for Don Quixote. Her third husband, the Argentinian mathematician Alberto Calderón who had passed away suddenly in the 1990s, had also adored the novel. Alexandra spoke of him often. By the look in her eyes, I could see how much his death hurt, and how much she still loved him. In a rare moment of emotional intimacy, she once told me that reading Don Quixote was her way of keeping him close. 

Alexandra had come into my life at a crucial juncture. My own young marriage was brittle, and my home, not always a refuge. So my time with her felt like an oasis. Even on the coldest of days, I would take the train to see her, leaving close to noon while my husband was still asleep in bed. In the hour it took me to get to the Northside, I would desperately call my mother to ask for advice about my relationship. Or I would reread the pages for that day, or simply let myself drift from the responsibilities of writing my dissertation. I preferred the loud, chaotic, and crowded cars of the Red Line — even the frigid gusts of wind each time the doors opened — to being at home, where the silences between me and my husband were growing longer and harder to break. We had married after being accepted into the same doctoral program, shortly before moving to Chicago; colleagues and partners, we shared classrooms, professors, and friends. But under the pressure of starting graduate school in a different country, we had begun leading different lives under the same roof. I was excited for everything ahead of us: the conferences and trips, the new people and projects. Whereas he preferred to remain at home, reading and working in solitude, smoking, wrapped in silence. He believed I was neglecting our relationship. I believed he was taking it for granted. 

It was difficult to picture a life without him — my college crush, best friend, and long-time intellectual confidant. Yet I could not reconcile the path I felt drawn to with the life he envisioned for us. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew our marriage was ending, but I was too afraid to confront this painful reality. Perhaps that was why my dates with Alexandra felt like a window into possibility. Here was a woman who had lived through a dictatorship, been through three marriages, and built a brilliant career in a relentlessly male-dominated field. And she was happy. She was radically independent. She loved life. That I found such vitality in an eighty-something-year-old woman was a lesson for me. So I tried not to ever cancel on her, even when the workload of graduate school felt overwhelming, or when I was not at my best after a late night of too many beers. Eating and reading by her side often felt like the best part of my week.

We met religiously every Saturday. Alexandra was a woman of habit, and we had our favorite spots and menu items: Francesca’s in Edgewater, where we would share a creamy tiramisu; Ascione’s in Hyde Park, where we loved the delicate crab cakes and beet salad; Athena, where we always started with skordalia and taramosalata; Alvi in River North. Seeing her each week — elegantly dressed in her beautiful, colorful scarves, wearing her quirky socks, bright lipsticks, and bold jewelry, smiling even on the most brutal days of the Chicago winter — brought me deep hope. She offered me words of comfort now and then, but actually, my greatest comfort was simply reading with her. She radiated vitality and a joyful kind of strength, so being in her presence made me feel that I could embody those qualities too, even when it felt impossible. She never complained about the cold in Chicago; on the contrary, she adored the city. She always insisted that I order dessert, claiming she was too full but still never failing to have a taste of mine. Before she got sick, she always ordered wine — even if she only took the minutest sips from glasses that always seemed to stay full. She laughed a lot, particularly at Sancho’s mishaps, sighing in satisfaction after reading our three pages. “¡Qué divertido!” she’d say with a chuckle. 

Like me, Alexandra was especially fond of Sancho, Don Quixote’s loyal squire. She delighted in his irreverence and particularly loved his wise and sometimes-cryptic proverbs. She would often write them down in an effort to learn them (and she would). Her Spanish was phenomenal. I could be wrong, but I believe she learned it during her marriage to Alberto. I always had the sense that in keeping the language alive in her mind, she kept Alberto’s memory alive. They must have loved each other in Spanish.

Don Quixote was likely one of the few readings I did for pleasure during my doctoral years. Reading it in company and out loud — precisely how Cervantes’ readers would have read it in the seventeenth century — constantly reminded me that literature is at its best when shared. Books bring people together, and their meaning only shines through when they are read in community. When we make them part of our relationships, they come to life, turning into objects that sustain us. Like her beloved errant knight, Alexandra allowed herself to be transformed by the stories she loved. 

Like Sancho’s and Don Quixote’s, ours was an unlikely friendship. Sancho is a humble and rustic peasant, while Don Quijote believes himself to be an honorable knight. Sancho has one foot firmly set in material reality, while Don Quijote conjures a world of his own. And yet, they need each other, learn from each other, and evolve together. Alexandra and I might have been divided by age, our differences in upbringing, and our cultural backgrounds: she, a cosmopolitan Romanian, and I, a recently-arrived student still finding my feet away from Mexico. She was a scientist, and I, a humanist. Often, the servers at the restaurants would look at us puzzled, unsure of the nature of our relationship: was I her granddaughter or caretaker? Was she my teacher? But none of our differences mattered at the table. I was a struggling graduate student with a half-written dissertation and a crumbly marriage, but Alexandra imagined me a wise teacher and worthy friend. And just as Sancho gradually enters the world Don Quixote created for himself, I, thanks to her, came to believe it. 

At the beginning of the novel, the relationship between Sancho and Don Quixote is practical. Don Quixote hires Sancho as his squire. But as the novel progresses, we witness their relationship evolving from one of utility to one of intimacy. This happens through constant conversations where their opposing worldviews rub up against each other. It took some time, but my teacher-student relationship with Alexandra, similarly, evolved. Slowly, she began to trust me. She allowed me to hold her arm as we crossed the street. She accepted my help to cut her food. (Perhaps she came to see that vulnerability, too, could be a form of freedom.) Increasingly, I felt uneasy about receiving compensation for what I saw as just spending time with a dear friend and a dearly loved book. I once tried to refuse her check, only to have her look at me dead serious: “If you don’t take it, I won’t see you again.” There was no arguing with that.

Over the course of five years of conversations and countless to-go boxes of food (she always ordered too much), we got to know each other, three pages at a time. Alexandra was reserved with her emotions and prudent. For years, she had spoken to her mother only in banalities, out of fear that the Securitate was listening. Perhaps that is why she was so discreet with her words. But she also had a dark sense of humor (in her own words, a “Romanian” sense of humor), a sharp wit, a critical eye, and a tender heart. She never spoke ill of anybody (except politicians) — though I could see she relished my occasional mean jokes. 

I left Chicago in 2022. With graduate school and my marriage behind me, the future felt wide, even though I carried that grief that comes with moving on. The city had become my home; had witnessed my loneliness and my becoming. Saying good-bye to Alexandra was one of the many reasons why it was difficult to leave. Our meetings were woven into the fabric of my life, and leaving also meant saying good-bye to Don Quixote. 

In one of my recent visits to Chicago, during one of the last times I saw her, she told me: “I hope I can finish Don Quixote before I die.” It broke my heart. Her health had begun to deteriorate and she undoubtedly knew that with her age, that goal would be difficult to attain at three pages a week. Nonetheless, she never rushed, never disturbed her routine. She lived at her own pace, somewhat stubbornly. She never read Don Quixote to check it off a list. Don Quixote was a structural part of her life that had accompanied her for decades, and rushing to finish would have meant rushing to live.

Months later, when I learned she was dying, I asked her grandson Miguel if I could send a voice recording of myself reading her the last chapter of Don Quixote out loud. I wanted, perhaps foolishly, to help fulfill her wish of finishing the novel. In the end, Don Quixote snaps out of his madness, realizing all his adventures were rooted in his bookish imagination. He returns to being Alonso Quijano and comes to despise the chivalric novels he once lived by. When he is on his deathbed, a weeping Sancho begs him not to die: “Look, don’t be lazy, but get up from that bed and let’s go to the countryside dressed as shepherds, just like we arranged: maybe behind some bush we’ll find Señora Doña Dulcinea disenchanted, as pretty as you please.” It is a shattering but beautiful moment between two friends who are about to separate forever. Sancho — who constantly refuted his master’s fantasies — now clings to them, refusing to accept the reality before him. At the heart of Sancho’s plea is a painful truth: this time neither books nor imagination can upend the reality of death. In hindsight, I see now that my recording was less for Alexandra and more for myself, a way to say goodbye to her. Like Sancho, I wanted to return to our shared past, perhaps hoping we could read three last pages. It was my way of telling her to stay, even as I knew she was ready to go.

According to what her grandson later told me, Alexandra refused to listen to the final chapter. Maybe she was too tired, or maybe there was simply never a right moment amid the routines of her final days. But her refusal now seems so poetic, wise and intentional — so Alexandra. In that chapter, Sancho tells Don Quijote: “Don’t die, Señor; your grace should take my advice and live for many years, because the greatest madness a man can commit in this life is to let himself die, just like that.” Alexandra did not die “sin mas ni más,” “just like that.” She certainly did not “let herself” die either. I like to imagine that she obstinately protected her freedom until the very end, like she always had done. That she chose to go on her own terms after living a remarkable and beautiful life, just as determined and stubborn (porfiada, Cervantes would say) as the protagonist of her favorite book. She left this world with Don Quixote’s dreams intact, never having witnessed the unbearable sadness of his ending.   

My copy of the book is worn now, full of post-its and scribbles. A material reminder of a friendship I could not have imagined. Next year, I will teach an entire class on it for the first time. How will I bring some of the joy I found with Alexandra into the classroom; the delight of reading aloud, of letting a book stitch lives together? Who knows, perhaps three pages at a time? 

Who loves God fears no evil, our mothers say.

What we mostly did on Saturday evening was play games: hide-and-seek, football, King-and-servants, God-and-devil. Sometimes we would hunt lizards and birds, or push our tires around the village laughing and screaming, or climb the guava tree and move on the branches like the grandbabies of monkeys, or drive the pickup that my father abandoned – our playhouse – and pretend it was moving, and running past every car on the highway. But this Saturday, we didn’t want to do our regular things. We wanted to act out an American movie and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot. We wanted to burn down the world like American actors. We wanted to shoot guns that had tender and dangerous sounds like the guns of the American actors. We wanted to scream, “fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.” We wanted to be fearless and crazy like American actors, we wanted to waste humans so that their blood would splash on our bodies like rain.   

After throwing cooked rice and beans to our eight lizards, through the little holes we carved on top of their house, an Oxford Cabin biscuit carton, we chose our roles.

“Ebube! I will be the one to kill everyone,” Dumdum said.

“You won’t kill me,” I said. “You will kill all my men.”  

“But we can’t have two last men standing.” 

“I don’t care. You will not kill me.”

“We – have – two – last – in…” 

“Nnaa don’t talk. Ebube, if you don’t want to act in this movie, say it now.”   

“Did you forget that this game was my idea?”

“If it was your idea, so what? It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters. Why didn’t you think of it first?”

“You are selfish. Do you know how many games we have played that were my ideas?” 

“I won’t argue with you. You won’t kill me.” 

“What about – about – me?” 

“Nnaa, you will be . . . you and Otubolo will be the ones to watch us. We can’t have three gangs. That is why I want to kill Ebube and his men and be the last man standing.” 

“Did you see the shape of your mouth just now? You can even kill everyone in this world, but you will not kill me.”

Nnaa laughed. 

“Let’s do it this way – we will just fight like the Americans and set the whole country on fire.” 

“Better. Let us set the country on fire.”

“I – I want – want – to see the – the country – the whole country – burn,” Nnaa said and demonstrated with his hands as if to show us his love for the bloody movie we wanted to act out, because he must have thought that his stammer made it look like he was lying, or didn’t believe in our acting and actions. 

“Otubolo will be very happy to see the country burn down,” Dumdum said.

When Otubolo was alive, he loved all the games we played: police-and-thief, hide-and-seek, spirits-and-angels, football, God would blow his fat trumpet and I would still be counting. He would enjoy watching us act out an American movie because dead people didn’t watch films in hellfire, heaven, or purgatory. Hellfire was where God roasted the people who did not remember to keep all his commandments. Heaven was where the chosen ones danced and worshiped Him. Purgatory was for people with small sins. We heard after God sent people there, he would give them razors to cut down giant-giant trees. We heard he would watch his creatures suffer-suffer and say to them “I warned you, but did you listen? No.” People in these places didn’t have time to be watching anything called a film because they were surviving the torment of the afterlife. Otubolo would laugh today when he saw our actions and shootings. 

We picked up our catapults on the dashboard. Since my father gave up on the pickup, whenever we played in the pickup, jumping or screaming or dancing or shooting, what I saw on the dashboard was not our catapults. I didn’t even reimagine the photos of the frowning terrorists and their red eyes, in front of the newspaper that decayed with the shits of chickens, whose guns were long and fat and alluring like the guns of American actors. My eyes kept showing me the things in my mind: the newspapers and files and diaries my father would spend most of his mornings arranging on the dashboard, so that they looked like wrappers stacked on top of each other. 

The mad chickens that slept in our playhouse shit on the rubbers of catapults. Tiny maggots swam in the shit, celebrating life and the privilege to exist in shit. We wiped the smelling shit under the rust seats of our pickup, wore them around our necks, climbed out through the driver’s window one after the other, held the back of our shirts,  turned the key of our imaginary Mercedes, and started running to Nwanganga’s shop where we would carry one of the many dead televisions for the movie we wanted to act out. We would act out our movie behind the TV, and Nnaa and Otubolo would watch us and pretend that we were on the TV. They would scream and laugh when we shot each other. We increased the gear of our Mercedes to 4, vummmmmmming and mmmmmmmmming with our mouths and throats. 

We drove past family houses where rituals never evolved: fathers praying with kola nuts, men listening to the news, shaking their heads, waiting for the radio to start making shhhhhhh noises so that they could argue about the headline or call our president “a goat” again, mothers holding the lower jaws of their babies, scooping and shoving the pap they made without sugar into their mouths, women fanning or kneeling to blow the fire in the makeshift stoves their husbands built for them, children submerging their feet in wet sand to build houses that would have the shapes of their small feet, dogs moving around siblings eating garri and ogbono soup hoping one of them would throw a bone of fish so they could dive the bone, grandmothers singing for their stubborn grandchildren and designing their faces and buttocks with Dusting Powder, grandfathers retelling stories about the war and their youths that they had told multiple-multiple times, men smoking weed and whispering to the wind and smiling-smiling like they would never cry for death in this lifetime, and naked children pouring sand on their heads and shouting and jumping. Their fat navels shook like they would drop and burst like eggs.

Wooden kiosks stood in front of a few houses. Their shapeless outlines floated on the road like the sketches of branches and birds when they fidgeted in Ogbunnaga River. Sachet Cowbell, sachet Milo, OMO, and gin hung on the ropes nailed to the edges of the windows facing earth, supported by the beams resting on the windowsills. Tired lanterns, looking hungry and thirsty without fire and smoke, hung from the wires descending through the jagarajagara tarpaulin ceilings. Three kiosks were almost empty. They had only boxes of pencils, sharpeners, blue biros, packets of exercise books, drawing books, clear plastics containing boiled groundnut, bitter kola, and kola nut. In Mama Bongo’s kiosk, there was a dark human shape stretching over the boxes of pencils and packets of exercise books. The dark thing was the silhouette of Mama Bongo who was lying down on the carpeted floor of the kiosk. She was pregnant. She was always pregnant. Mama Bongo was always sleeping in her kiosk. She would sleep, wake up, sleep, wake up, sleep, wake up, as if sleep belonged to only her. The way she slept all the time, and didn’t enjoy life, made me angry. We pushed our gears to five. The wind started blowing trumpets in our ears.

Three bald men, including Otubolo’s father, were sitting on the rubber chairs in front of Kurency Bar, laughing and teasing themselves. Glasses of thick palm wine assembled on the small wooden table in front of them, vomiting white foam. About five flies moved around the glasses singing. Behind the men, bushmeat was smoking on an iron net over a steel drum signed AWA GOD PAS MAN with red paint. The oil dripping from the bushmeat and flooding the embers in the drum was making a sizzling noise like the sound of rain in tree branches. If Otubolo’s father knew we were on our way to carry a TV at Nwanganga’s shop for the American movie we wanted to act out for his son, buried in the desert, he would shake hands with those men and follow us. 

London, Mama Tomtom’s hungry thin dog, wandering in front of their house, barked at us. Dumdum yelled at the useless dog. We laughed. The dog continued to bark at us as if an ant was hanging on his throat. We laughed at the way his lungs deflated and inflated when he barked and entered gear six. The stupid animal continued screaming like he had become mad all of a sudden. 

We overtook a few mothers returning from burials, traditional marriages, weddings, farms, markets, and ministries. Ogene, Chibobo, and Chinchin, pursuing each other like rats because of their rubbish police-and-thief game, wouldn’t stop laughing. Our tears blurred the movement of goats, plantain trees, laughter, kiosks, and motorcycles, so that it seemed like they started melting.

Our Mercedes jerked and jerked and jerked and jerked in front of Nwanganga’s shop. We rested our hands on our knees and opened our mouths before we fainted.  The entrance area was piled with different brands of televisions that Nwanganga wasn’t able to repair, televisions he had declared dead. The evening sun glittered on the screens so that it looked like the televisions would display beautiful actors anytime soon. The board marketing, NWANGANGA TV WULD, with its rope tied around one of the beams supporting the tarpaulin over the entrance, danced in the wind. A gigantic TV occupied the table on the veranda. There was a board in front of the table with the writing, 4 SELL, written with charcoal instead of white chalk. 

Littered inside were people’s TVs Nwanganga would declare dead soon. If there was light, Nwanganga would turn on some of those TVs, and the people in them or whatever they displayed would dance like water, blurry, making a shhhhhhhh noise. Nwanganga was resting his bald head on the wooden table crowded with different shapes of screwdrivers and bolts and things from the televisions he had scattered. Maybe he was sleeping or dead or praying; he was probably praying because he loved God more than his only son, Jesus Christ. The walls advertised different posters of Jesus: when Jesus was crying and dying on the cross, when he was eating bread and enjoying wine, when he was walking on water without shoes, when he was flying to heaven without wings, when he was bleeding from his belly, when he was blessing fishes and bread for a hungry village. It was as if Jesus was the one helping Nwanganga to repair the televisions he dismantled, or as if Jesus was his apprentice or whatever. 

The mango tree opposite Nwanganga’s shop gave half shade to his shop. Behind the shop, coconut trees, guava trees, mango trees, and ukwa trees rose from different compounds. If this was harmattan season, when most mornings bled mist, the mist would swallow the branches of those trees so they seemed connected to the sky. Children were screaming and crying in the houses surrounded by the trees, while the mothers in the compounds discussed the coming farming season and price of manure.

Nwanganga’s shop wasn’t in the center or front of the village where most shops were. It was on a lonely road in the village. There was a container opposite his shop, a chemist. On the left door of the black container, PAPA EJIMA KLINIK, was nonsensely written with faint blue paint. Papa Ejima usually opened his chemist shop at 8:00 pm. He would be at Last Card Bar now, drinking palm wine, rubbing his fat belly, laughing like a toothless baby. A tall cashew tree stood opposite the container, giving shade to the container brewing heat. After the cashew tree, different sizes of fences built with bamboo and ogilisi trees lined up chaotically. No shops. No kiosks. No saloons. No bars. No dogs and goats. Nothin-nothing. It meant that the talkative women who knew our mothers wouldn’t see us and report us to our mothers that we came to Nwanganga’s to carry a TV. Our mothers and their friends didn’t like seeing us do things that would make us happy the way their love for Jesus made them dance every time. They were overprotective like the mothers of chicks. They always wanted us to do things their own way.

Dumdum bent to carry one of the televisions, a black and white television, judging from its wooden body. He tried to lift the television and let out a long moan and farted in our faces. Nnaa and I ran immediately and pulled our shirts to our noses.  

“Dumdum, are you stupid? What did you just do?” I asked.

“It was a mistake. I swear to God.” 

“Liar. Liar. It was not a mistake.”  

“I am sorry. I swear with my life, it was a mistake.” 

“Your fart smells like a dead rat!”  

“My fart doesn’t smell like a dead rat! It smells like a good fart,” Dumdum said. “Will you and Nnaa help me carry this television or not?”

“E – Ebube,” Nnaa said.

“I won’t move from here until the smell stops,” I said. 

Dumdum sat on the television. “If you don’t want to act out the movie anymore, I will go home. Everyone farts. I don’t have time for nonsense today.” 

We let our shirts slide off our noses and moved to help him, spitting and spitting and spitting because it was as if the smell of his rotten fart had saturated our tongues. We bent, grabbed the parts of the television that our tiny hands could hold, tried to lift it, and moaned in unison. We couldn’t lift the television. We tried again, we lifted it to the level of our knees and dropped it. We spread our legs wider, our buttocks jutted like the red buttocks of old turkeys. We gritted our teeth and moaned. This time, the fart escaped from Dumdum’s red buttocks like a storm. Nnaa and I left the television and ran. Dumdum laughed. 

We covered our noses with our palms, “Dumdum, I don’t want to act anymore,” I said.

“I am sorry, Ebube. I don’t know what is going on with my buttocks today.” 

“Nnaa, you can have my role. I am not acting anymore.”

Nnaa shook his head, “Thank you. I don’t – I don’t want to – act.”

“I am sorry. I will control my buttocks now.”

“Swear that – you – you won’t do – do – it – again,” Nnaa said.

Dumdum touched his index finger on the ground, touched it on his tongue, and pointed it to the sky, “I swear with my life, it won’t happen again.”

“You will die if you fart again,” I said. 

“I will die if I fart again.” 

“I swear, if you fart again, I will go home.”  

“Me too. I – I will go – go – home.” 

“I won’t fart again. I will tighten all the muscles in my buttocks.”

I raised the bottom hem of my shirt and buried my face in my shirt and freed it. Nnaa repeated what I did. We looked like tiny masquerades. We moved toward Dumdum. He stood in the middle of the televisions, arms akimbo, like a confused new madman.

Yankee passed through our shadows unfolding and swelling in the dirty grass by the road. He was smiling and chewing his teeth. He always chewed his teeth. We wanted to laugh at his pointed shoes, but we raised our heads and pretended to watch the birds in the moving sky. Since he was deported from America, he roamed the village more than Udene, the funny madman. The men said the injection the white people gave him before deporting him would make him walk and walk and walk without getting tired. They said he may die walking up and down. We often wished we were Yankee, who had lived and enjoyed half of his life in America. If we could live in the Statue of Liberty for just ten minutes, we wouldn’t care if Americans gave us the injection. We wouldn’t care if they deported us, even though we wouldn’t go to America to sell cocaine like Yankee. 

“We don’t even need that fat television.” I pointed at the small SHARP TV, almost the exact size of the TV that my father had brought from Abuja during one of his journalism jobs. “The TV over there will do.”

“I want us to carry this big TV since Otubolo will join Nnaa to watch the movie,” Dumdum said. “And why do you two have your clothes over your faces? I told you, I won’t fart again.”  

“Leave our clothes. But we don’t need this big TV. Otubolo is a ghost. He doesn’t need a fat TV to see us.” 

“It is true. Otubolo doesn’t – doesn’t –  doesn’t need a fat – fat – fat TV to see us,” Nnaa said.

“But a fat TV will make the movie sweeter,” Dumdum said.

“But we are not able to carry the fat TV,” I said.

We stared at the TV, sad that our tiny hands couldn’t lift it.

When we wanted to carry the fat TV again, we saw Philo approaching. She was smiling but wasn’t chewing her teeth like Yankee. It was as if Philo and Yankee planned to take this road to wherever they were going this evening. Yankee was not a problem. We liked him because he had lived in America, and didn’t beat children. Philo was a threat to happiness. She wasn’t a happy woman. She enjoyed punishing, or chasing kids doing what made them happy like dancing or singing or shooting or screaming or fighting. One afternoon, she flogged Akara because he was dancing in weak rain that was not even bending pawpaw trees and knocked Somsom who forgot to greet her. Akara and Somsom’s mothers blocked her on the road, pointing their index fingers to her fat lips swamped with red lipstick, they assured her they would beat her together if she mistakenly beat their sons again. Philo had not flogged Akara or Somsom since then, but she didn’t stop flogging children. She wouldn’t miss any opportunity to flog a child. 

“What is happening there? What are you doing in the middle of those televisions?” she asked. 

Philo came back pale from Ashanti, Ghana, last year. The veins in her skin were green. Our mothers said she wasted her life in Ghana doing night work. They said her veins turned green because she had a sickness that would kill her soon. They said she returned home to die. They said she was a candidate for hellfire. Philo would often spend her mornings, or afternoons, or evenings at Eliza’s kiosk or Makilicha’s salon talking like an old parrot and laughing at her jokes. She was a jobless woman always looking for kids to flog. 

“Are you not the ones that I am talking to? Are the three of you deaf?” her voice vibrated in Papa Ejima’s container.  

Nwanganga walked out looking confused. He looked at us and then turned his head to Philo. He looked at us again and rolled his eyes toward Philo. He repeated it one more time and moved his eyes permanently in Philo’s direction. His long beard was pressed like it was ironed due to the way he had positioned his head on the table. 

Philo bent to find a cane. Dumdum rushed to lift the small SHARP TV, but he couldn’t. He tried again. What he released shocked Nnaa and I. It sounded like the voice of thunder when it tore the sky and vibrated his shorts. The smell could wake up a sleeping dog. He left it and ran. Nnaa and I removed our shirts from our faces and ran behind him. 

“You could have waited for me to find a cane,” she yelled. “Idiots.” 

I turned my head, Nwanganga was now moving toward Philo, smiling like a baby that tasted sugar for the first time. Philo’s smile looked like the smile of a burnt goat. Her kind of ugliness was supposed to be a big taboo on earth. I didn’t know why they started smiling. I didn’t care. I turned to catch up with Dumdum and Nnaa who had taken the three-road junction leading to the desert. Even Philo’s evil heart wouldn’t stop this movie we had planned to act out. The trees were speeding past us, but they weren’t moving, so that it seemed like the wind from their branches was cuddling our smiles and bodies with grace and tenderness. It was as if the wind was a person today: a mother. The trees whose branches were green, red birds circling and poking their wings in the quiet green, and the ones that lost their branches to fire, looking bare and sad, continued outrunning us. We continued trying to outrun our shadows.

The desert had the calmness of our village after the storm invaded, but the tweets of birds kept poking its quietness like pins. The sun conquered the sky, splashing over the palm trees, so that it looked like their long branches soaked the yellow color. It was overflowing over the cassava trees, bamboo, so that it looked like it was spilling through their green leaves and dissolving into their bodies. When the sun was this gorgeous, I always imagined it could scream or yell. I always imagine it could drag our Otubolo out of his grave the way Jesus dragged his friend, Lazarus, out of the darkness called grave. I would never forgive Jesus for the partiality. He saved only his friend and abandoned all the dead children like Otubolo after saying that children should come to him because his father’s paradise was ours alone. The new ixora flower we planted on Otubolo’s grave had withered, but we had not uprooted it yet. We were hoping it would come back to life. We watered it every evening and poured chicken and goat shit on it every two days. We were also hoping the water we poured on the ixora flower would reach Otubolo inside the grave. Our friend would be thirsty and tired from death.

Dumdum squatted beside Otubolo’s grave. “Otubolo, are you sleeping? Wake up. Ebube and I want to act out an American movie. You and Nnaa will watch us.” 

“Have you ever thought that maybe Otubolo doesn’t hear or see us? He is in the world of the dead,” I said. “We are in the world of the living.”  

“If he doesn’t hear or see us, why does he often come to play with us in our dreams?” Dumdum asked.

“He – he –  is – a spirit,” Nnaa said. 

“Exactly,” Dumdum said. “Spirits see us, but we can’t see spirits. That’s what my father told me.”

“But isn’t he supposed to be in heaven? Dancing and singing for God?” I asked. “Remember what Prophet Fire-fire said. He said that immediately after someone dies, he or she will go to heaven to face the judgment throne. After the judgement, the person will be accepted in heaven if the good things they did on earth were bigger than the bad things they did. He also said that the people who are accepted in heaven will sing and dance for God forever.”

Dumdum stood up. “Do you believe what that useless Prophet Fire-fire said?”

“Yes. My – mother says – the – same – same thing,” Nnaa replied.

“Prophet Fire-fire is talking nonsense. So, God created us to live, suffer, die, and return to heaven and dance and sing for him forever?” Dumdum asked. “Ebube, the next time you see Otubolo in your dream, ask him why he is not in heaven dancing and singing for God. Nnaa, you too. Ask him if he is tired of dancing and singing for God. I will ask him, too. Maybe heaven is where one goes to become Michael Jackson.”

Dumdum grabbed his penis and screamed like Michael Jackson, or rather, like a monkey. Nnaa and I laughed. 

Nnaa sat beside Otubolo’s grave and pretended to watch an invisible television. He looked to his right and believed Otubolo was sitting and smiling at him. He pointed at Dumdum and said, “I think – think – the – Ameri – American that is – black – black will finish – finish the American that – that is – is white.”

The white American was Dumdum because of his fair complexion.  

Dumdum jumped from one cassava ridge to the other, positioned his hands as if carrying a gun, and started shooting my men with the imaginary gun. Kpokpokpokpokpokpokpo, his mouth played the music of the gun. My men began falling and dying and vomiting blood and bulging their eyes. I screamed like Otubolo, dove by a cassava ridge and rolled and rolled and rolled and stopped by the dead body of one of my men holding a black and white photo of his grandmother. The dead body was a cassava stick. I dragged the neck of his shirt with my left hand, gripped his neck with both my hands, pushed him up, and slid under his body, so that he became my bulletproof. His head dangled when the bullets from Dumdum’s gun entered his buttocks and shoulders. He opened his mouth as if he wanted to give me a message for his grandmother, but his front teeth and blood arrived in my mouth. The blood tasted like sweat or salt or urine. I spat everything to his beards. When Dumdum stopped shooting my men to put bullets in his gun, I left the neck of the dead man and kicked him in his belly before he could land on my face. His head hit a rock and opened. His ears and nose spilled blood. The blood covered the head of a dead bird in the grass. I jumped on the cassava ridge in front of Otubolo’s grave and started shooting Dumdum’s men with my imaginary gun. He lay down behind a cassava ridge, and screamed, “fuck you, fuck youuuuu, yo fuck youuuu.” I opened my legs like the American soldier we had seen in a movie, careful not to march on Otubolo’s grave, and continued firing on his men – kpumkpumkpumkpumkpumkpum. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck youuu,” I screamed. His men were falling right and left in my imagination, screaming. 

Nnaa started clapping. “Otubolo, I – told – told – you the – Ameri – American that is – is black will – fini – finish the American that – that is white.” 

My bullets finished. I hid behind the cassava ridge by Otubolo’s grave to pack bullets in my gun. 

“Come out and face me man to man,” Dumdum yelled. 

I peeped, he had thrown his gun. I stood up, threw my gun, marched forward. Nnaa was rubbing his fingers. He was tense. Dumdum rushed and held my right leg and tried to lift me. I hit my elbow on his back. 

“Jesus!” he yelled. He knelt with his right knee and grabbed my right leg and moaned. I stood tight. He moaned again and farted. I gave him a knock on the center of his head. He stood up and held the neck of my shirt with his left hand. I held the neck of his shirt with both my hands. Nnaa stood up immediately. He knew the acting had turned into a real fight. The smell of the fart was choking everything in me. 

“Why did you knock me like that?” 

“Why did you fart while we were acting?” 

“Bend your head, I will knock you back. If I farted, did I stop you from farting too? Bend your head now.”

“Let me tell you, Dumdum, you are talking nonsense.”

“Otubolo is –  watching – us,” Nnaa said. “Don’t – don’t fight.”

I wondered if Otubolo was standing behind me, or behind Nnaa, or if he was in our middle begging us not to fight around his grave.    

“Stammerer. I don’t care if God is watching us,” Dumdum said, left my shirt, and raised his right hand to knock me. I immediately left his shirt and held his hand, and we struggled and rotated like two birds drinking water from a river. Nnaa was nervous. He was moving around us, unsure of who to hold, unsure of how to separate us, unsure of what to do. He was conflicted like a goat that had grass and a bone in his mouth.  

“Bend your head for me let me knock you back!”

“I will not allow you to knock me.”

Dumdum stopped trying to knock me and held my shirt with both hands. While trying to maintain his balance, I punched him in his belly and pushed him. He fell on the flower on the grave and remained there. We remained silent and, in that moment, everything in the desert became new and sharp. The beaks of the birds chirping on the tree branches were yellow as if they poked the evening yellow sun. The leaves started changing to red as if fire was consuming them, then they became golden in seconds instead of ashes. They molted their green like snakes. The wind patting our legs was gentle as if it learned gentleness from blowing the grass and trees. The sky was rust like the color of water after nails decomposed in it, but almost golden. The yellow in our eyes was raging, like yellow tears would roll out of them if we cried. Even the houses on the hill that stood across from the desert like the Wall of Jericho Prophet Fire-fire used as an example whenever he talked about worship and faith, seemed to be moving or contracting or perishing or growing in the sun that rested behind them. Their shadows lay on the hill like pregnant goats, swaying over trees, bamboo, birds, women returning from farms, and boys running after grasshoppers because they didn’t have a friend in the grave they should be doing things for. Anyone in my village, Igbu, whether in their kitchen or compound saw what happened up there in Umunya. Silhouettes of children pushing tires ran past one of the houses. Someone had started a fire somewhere in the desert. The smoke was wrapping the birds, chekeleke, flying in a circle in the sky.

I lay down on the left side of the grave, and Nnaa lay down on the right side. We closed our eyes and pretended we were dead. This was the only way we could ask Otubolo to forgive us for killing the flower we planted for him. Although we would plant another flower, it was necessary we showed him we were sorry; we wanted him to know that we were not happy that we killed the flower playing a stupid game that led to a fight. Pain could also be a beautiful thing when expressed in silence. 

After Otubolo was buried, we came back to the desert the following day, lay down on his grave to let him know we were still with him, still his friends. When the rain fell and reduced the height of his grave – washed away the sand – we laid down on his grave to console him. When the first ixora flower we planted on his grave withered, we laid down on his grave because we have souls that will never wither like flowers, souls that connect us to Otubolo. We could feel the texture of the sun, like thick-thick smoke, on our faces. I could imagine Otubolo dancing and singing for God alongside all the dead people in this world. I swear, Otubolo was tired of dancing for this wicked God. Like our mothers say, who loves God fears no evil. We loved God but dancing for God forever, after we die, was an evil we feared.     

We opened our eyes. The round yellow sun was shrinking. Our silhouettes were decreasing as the sun was reducing. The sky regained its color before the sun appeared: the color of a roasted chicken.                                                           

a lover once asked me to speak عربي avec lui

I can’t make love in my mother tongue

mon fils doesn’t understand the half of what I say

I write papers in a claiming academic language that belongs to no one

at the publishing house, Safae and I discuss

lovers in the language of our elderly Arab fathers

we smile and reveal our teeth like lovely lemons in the summer

Canan and I text et on prie

on est des branches qui se sont coupées des arbres

my father is the gentle autumn just before I was born

the low light the silence the transience

one day I see a person with a سنونو on their thigh

a waiter with فرشات on his arm and a young woman with a ثعلب on her calf

the way I love is the way I dream

I need a noble being with a fleece and rosewater

under the poplar tree

to hold this body that carries who I am

to cut stripes in my skin

to put something sweet under my tongue

to extinguish my mouth

I’d like to speak to you dans ma langue maternelle

eat melon in front of an open fire and lick your fingers

feed you lemon tart in bed

tell you I want to mais je ne sais pas comment

I

can

love

in

a

لغة

in which

I’m still searching for my remains

Arabic: عربي

swallow: سنونو

butterflies: فرشات

fox: ثعلب

language: لغة

1

from deep inside a human propels another human

into the world

herself

with a breath perhaps a cry she pushes out

brown sacrifices for the slab of history

she beats herself over and over again

because it’s the only thing she can do

she takes trains and crosses this white continent 

searching for her genes in city walls

mining reburied trenches

or a golden wolf to lose herself in

2

on n’écrit pas parce que on veut

rather in order to proof our وجود

to mark the fact we survived

dit is een archief

-remnants of lives that worked underground at night

worked while the rest made love

dreamed on spotless white sheets

on soft down pillows bathed in dirt-lit cities-

a living archive of moths

sinners

illiterates

the coal-faced

inventors

infidels

sun worshippers

saints

3

we return to our blossom beds

make love with violent tenderness

with calloused hands demons asthmatic lungs

we stop nailing our guttural sounds

to our tongues

the soft أ alef became the hard A of chaff

the wheat must be separated from the chaff

the ك qaf is a complete cosmos of everything

كل كامل

your liver has دائماً been a bat

your bones carry you until your longing stops

your mind wants to grow extinct crops

anything to feed the body

to no longer have to ask 

it actually wants to know emptiness

كافي كون

and

and

and

our mothers will stop bleaching their skin

4

in winter I drink wormwood in my tea

polish my glittering scales

keep my claws sharp and don’t retract them 

I write our names on the body

just in case

genocide thrives on systems

lists archives numbers

I build a necropolis for my friends

in an olive-leaf pattern

at the market, an old woman

with a walker grabs my hand

tells me about her new watch batteries 

her cassava

on the edge a Dutch meadow 

our fingers intertwine

you talk about the dog on the island

we laugh but our brown-black skin burns

because we remember

I’m looking for the golden wolf you once were

you cry because that boy is hidden

and you flee God’s gaze

I fall

and know that you will crucify me lovingly

existence: وجود 

 whole, completely: كل كامل

enough, universe: كون كافي

always: دائماً

Ring is excerpted from Youssef Rakha’s forthcoming collection of essays, Postmuslim, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in September 2026.

ONE

A mutual friend texts me offering their condolences. I’m having an espresso outdoors on the way to boxing practice, and I have no idea what they’re talking about. “I’m so sorry,” they say. “I thought you knew.” Late afternoon, beautiful weather. It takes a while to register what happened to Mohab last night.

This also happens to be the week after the first ceasefire—Israel has started demolishing Gaza again—kids losing limbs or heads every hour. I had been stupid enough to think it was over. I had also been stupid enough to think I’d see Mohab again, though I hadn’t really thought about him since it started. I know he’s back in Alexandria for good now. He hasn’t told me himself, but I know. There is an unacknowledged fight between us, an upset over something I said in an online video. Mohab had repeatedly made the claim that, unlike its European counterpart, in its entirety Arab intellectual history was a moral sham, an opportunistic performance intended to achieve political and personal gains without having any effect on reality. When it came up in the online discussion in question, I respectfully suggested that, for such a statement to have historical validity or make verifiable sense, it needed to be research-based and confined to specific contexts. That upset him—and I’d been hoping it wouldn’t be long before we acknowledged that and were reconciled. Now the birds are singing and he is dead. 

But I never did see Mohab often. By the time we grew close he was living in Kuwait with his second wife, working as a cultural journalist. I was in love that year. The real reason I was at the literary event that brought me together with Mohab was to spend time with the older writer I loved. She lived far away, said she was coming just to see me, but once there she acted so busy, so uninterested, and so careful that no one notice the two of us were close, I felt spat on. It was hurtful but—even worse—confusing, because after two days of this I really had nothing at all to say to her, this person I’d been thinking of spending my life with against the odds. I had three free days before I flew back to Cairo, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. 

Then Mohab turned up like a savior. He was a conventional-looking intellectual, civil-servant conventional but recognizably intellectual, with a George Costanza-style bald pate and old-fashioned clothes like W. G. Sebald’s, and he cut a strange figure in the canned luxury of the globalized hotel foyer. I’d known him a little from my visits to Alexandria, when he still worked as a schoolteacher while helping to edit an alternative magazine I wrote for. I admired his intelligence, but his seeming conservatism and his tendency to moralize had kept me away. When he mentioned wanting to visit the old harbor of Bur Dubai now I jumped on the opportunity. 

It turns out he was just as alienated by the writerly hustling and schmoozing, though not for personal reasons, and from then till I left the hotel for the airport I spent practically all my time with him. I never said a word about the lover who hurt me, but when I discussed the Egyptian middle class and the moral failure of the Arab intellectual—social criticism is what Mohab and I would always do together—that’s what I was telling him about. 

The amateur slugger on his way to training is not the person I was then, but he still misses that therapy. Being here and doing nothing for the Palestinians has felt unbearably wrong, and the first thing that hits me when I get the text is this is another thing to feel guilty about. Surely I should’ve . . . But I’m not feeling guilty. I’m not feeling anything. Usually, when I’ve heard someone has died, my impulse is to contact people who know them. This time all I can think is I have five minutes to get to boxing practice. I wonder if there’s going to be sparring. I have my mouth guard but I don’t know if I want to get punched now. I put my backpack on my back, the gloves dangling from the straps the way I learned to carry them from my teenage teammates, and I set off. 

As I stride along the world looks a little different from the way it did before I got that text, a little foggier or heavier, it talks to me less and makes less sense when it does, but I’m not convinced this is about Mohab. I’m still feeling nothing as I unzip my backpack, five minutes before the warm-up, and from its dark depths a brand-new pair of hand wraps, bright yellow, pop out at me. I bought them in the lull of that past week, when the world looked relatively habitable and I believed I could understand or be in it. Then the onslaught restarted and I totally forgot about them. 

The first feeling I acknowledge now: beneath my damp amusement at seeing the hand wraps, cloud banks of sorrow like wobbling tofu. I recall that yellow, in Arabic, is the color of fake smiles. Then, tearing them out of plastic, I realize I am scared, I don’t know of what but my hands are shaking, my mouth dry, the ground trembling slightly under my feet. And because of that the mechanical chore of wrapping nylon gauze around one, then the other hand, holding the wrist and thumb in place, padding the knuckles, it all takes on a therapeutic meditativeness. As always at boxing practice, I’m in the groove of panting and sweating before I know it. 

There’s sparring, I’ll be getting punched. To warm up for sessions like this, the coach gets us to jump rope and shadow box by turns. Anxiety slides into exertion as I try to reach fifty counts without tripping, or to add footwork to a longer combo. I’m thinking about neither Gaza nor Mohab but why I chose yellow when I usually choose blue. It’s evocative of the beach—two years since I’ve been anywhere near sea spray—but it’s also evocative of malnourishment, disease, the pale faces of those whose world is rent, their loved ones hacked before their eyes. For just a moment, I imagine talking with Mohab. I remember the solace it gave me.

Not just that time in Dubai but later, when I told him about my love for the writer I met there and he told me about his for the late Student Movement icon Arwa Salih. She was older than him too, and a few years after they broke up, she killed herself. Mohab and I got to talk when we traveled to the same places and when he was on holiday in Egypt, but in between meetings, along with the entire cultural community, we had Facebook. By the time my relationship with that writer ended for real, the 2011 revolution had broken out and, resuming our ongoing social-criticism seminar, Mohab and I would discuss what this new, seemingly ideology-free path could mean for the future. 

I had just published the first big book I wrote, Mohab was writing poems again after a decade’s hiatus, and the historical moment felt generative. “History opening its door can only be a good thing,” I remember him telling me over Facebook chat, “even if at first only monsters and mutants come through.” We both knew who those might be. As a college student Mohab had plunged into and out of the Muslim Brotherhood, and when he lived with Arwa Salih in Cairo he was exposed to the mean-spiritedness of the wannabe autocrats who dominated the left: the Student Movement leaders. He got to see the way they abandoned Arwa to her death, then went on to appropriate it as a loss of their own. 

The Islamists had shown, repeatedly, what conniving populists they were, ready to betray both their fundamentalist principles and the liberal democracy to which they claimed to marry them. Meanwhile, beyond individual meltdowns or demotion to Islamist sidekick in the ranks of the opposition, the Student Movement had imploded without a trace. Mohab and I agreed that, deep down, the status quo had been a kind of synthesis of those two failures, and we embraced the revolution because the new activist community promised a third option. I was working on a new book by then, molding my heartache and the revolution into a Bolañoesque history of the nineties, and talking with Mohab was giving me more than just solace. It was giving me a sympathetic but rigorous readership of one, anecdotes and insights to work with, a sense of political communion.

He was so generous with his emotions that it never occurred to me he could be unsure of himself. But when I failed to secure a publishing contract for the book of essays the two of us thought about writing together, he grew quiet in a way that suggested he took offence. Since you don’t care about collaborating with me—this was the message I eventually got—then I won’t be going out of my way to make it happen. But I did care, and bringing up something important, humbling himself enough to stick with it, should not feel like going out of his way. It was something I’d see him do again and again with his own poetry. Whether in terms of publishing or promoting it, if people didn’t take the initiative—and people almost never do—Mohab wasn’t interested. 

By 2012 the revolution was devolving into a maelstrom. Innocent activists were held without charge while, freshly released from prison, jihadis convicted of terrible atrocities held forth on TV. Protests led to counterprotests, violence to counterviolence. The activists I had trusted to point the way in a new direction turned out to be just as dogmatic, just as illiberal as their Student Movement predecessors. The difference was—whereas members of the Student Movement were Arab nationalist and Marxist, these people were ideologically muddled. They fought for neoliberal reforms in the same breath as they called for world revolution. They insisted on treating the right-wing, rabidly capitalist Muslim Brotherhood as if it was a beacon of Marxist liberation. But they showed the same, no-longer-convincing high-minded hysteria. 

The sense that history’s door could eventually let through something meaningful was fading, though Mohab and I remained virtual comrades in arms. For opposing the Islamists’ rise to power, we both got into fights within revolutionary and intellectual circles. But something in Mohab’s Facebook posts was bothering me. They were getting longer, more pedagogic. They were tending more and more toward abstraction. Whereas before he described the situation as it was, Mohab now spoke with categorical conviction of what it should be. And when he made comparative statements, it was never clear what the yardstick was. Often what he believed were specifically Arab-Muslim problems—that intellectuals turned culture from a way to engage society at large into a form of niche careerism, for example—was equally true of the implied reference, the West. 

His political commentary hadn’t always been that way, or perhaps I just hadn’t noticed? I didn’t disagree with much of what he said, but as soon as I started to respond critically, I could see how badly he took to being argued with. It was then I realized the way he went about publishing and promoting his work reflected the same inability to compromise. In time I tactically withdrew, maintained less intimate contact, and focused on poetry and personal conversation. By the time Mohab showed symptoms of the heart condition that would kill him, I had deleted my Facebook account. When I heard his first heart attack had started literally during a Facebook argument, I laughingly said I told you so. And from then until what I said in that online video, there was a kind of plateau.

For three minutes at a time now, not remembering any of this, I spar with different partners, one after the other. It’s grueling. Training is always tough. With the other things you do, if you stop, you just look bad. But if you’re sparring and you stop you might fall, get hit, you get hurt, you suffer. The only safe way to stop while sparring is to signal I give up, which is humiliating, and even then you might not do it fast enough to avoid your head flying. The anticipation of impact keeps me on my feet however exhausted I am. I block, I parry, I pull back. I try to buy a few seconds in which to think of a sequence of moves. If I have enough energy I dance. And then it’s over—relief, a brief respite before the next round.

It never fails to move me when, at the end of a round or a bout, two people who were just trying to kill each other warmly touch gloves or embrace. The look on their faces moves me: the passionate regard they have for each other. Each knows exactly what the other has been through. 

That’s what makes me think of Mohab during the last round. It makes me think of the poems we wrote to each other. In different ways, we both paraphrased that profane line of Baudelaire’s, famously Catholicized by T S Eliot: Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère. He chastised me for using obscene words and images, and I reminded him of how criminal propriety could be. This was the closest Mohab and I came to blows, and it felt just as warm afterward. 

When I get home that night—my right brow slightly bruised, my chin smarting, my left temple throbbing with a dull pain—I’ll be angry with him. His debilitating sensitivity, his neurotic sense of being in the right. His romanticism—and he might’ve argued with this label, but in the sense of having an idealized view of reality, of measuring everything against an impossible ideal, Mohab was definitely a romantic. But it didn’t have to be that way. There was so much we could’ve said and done if he wasn’t sulking his way to a new embolism. At least he could’ve let his beautiful poems have a wider audience. 

Though there is no connection between them, that anger I feel toward Mohab will dissolve into the rage I’ve been feeling about Gaza, or the rage will dissolve into the anger, till I can no longer tell whether it’s Mohab or the world that is maddening me, the kids being killed or the fact it is no longer possible to drive alongside the Nile at night with him in the passenger seat, laughing and theorizing about the fellahin. He was in that passenger seat when he confessed to the love affair that was to end his marriage, eventually bringing him back from Kuwait even though it was over almost as soon as it started, refusing to tell me who it was. 

Mohab died alone and more isolated, it suddenly seems to me, than ever before in his life. That is the punch. The full terror of his loss will register when I feel it. Then something like shame will start dripping, burning me inside.

TWO

“On the day of his mother’s funeral in 1811,” writes Kasia Boddy in her definitive Boxing: A Cultural History, “Byron called for his page to bring his boxing gloves for his daily exercise rather than follow the coffin to the family vault. The sparring that day, the page recalled, was more violent than usual.”

For Romantic poets, Boddy is saying, sparring is a mourning rite. 

I too sparred hard minutes after getting news of a dear person’s death, a poet friend named Mohab, though it didn’t feel like mourning. Later, I started to wonder about boxing and writing in relation to dying. Poetry had been part of my sense of self for much longer than any sport, and it was a familiar way of dealing with death, a kind of defense against it. 

Whatever else it was, on the other hand, boxing was a form of violence. In the ring, Antonio Monda writes, violence “has found its alibi to become unpunishable.” Boxing, he says, “not only transcends sport, but also ethics. The ring is the only place in the world where a man can kill another without being pursued by the law.” 

Now I could see I was drawn to boxing because it acknowledged a murderous impulse that I understood to be part of me and, however partial or faulty, provided a framework to accommodate it. Its existence belied the notion that being civilized, even being a poet precluded the capacity for physical violence, which considering what modern civilization had wrought in the way of catastrophic destruction had always struck me as hypocritical. Is this the reason that I box? To feel real? 

What I wanted to know was if this mode of being could also serve as a way to mourn the dead—by working as an emotional release, reminding practitioners of the fragility of the human body, the inevitability of its demise . . . The question made me think about my life, about human life in general, as a mourning rite. Then again, writing is not just a defense against death. It’s a defense against violence, both boxing-level and psychopathic violence. Writing, I feel, frees the victim of their victimhood. By giving their subjectivity form, honoring their reality, it liberates them of a space in which, unwritten, they will be confined. 

To speak of Gaza, for example—even as a mere witness—is to render Gaza a reality beyond the facts and figures of so much unnecessary cruelty. And in the absence of the possibility to fight meaningfully on behalf of Gaza, that feels important. It feels like an effective response to a violence that not only metes out suffering and death but also figuratively flattens those who suffer it. Turns them into a blank page.

“At the root of the sympathetic connection between writing and fighting,” writes Josh Rosenblatt, journalist and mixed martial arts practitioner, “lies solitude. . . . The terror of physical destruction and the terror of the blank page are the same thing.” Not because the blank page indicates the same kind of defeat, but because its blankness—like the inability to keep your existence intact in the face of an assault—implies a kind of silence, of preexistent emptiness, gaining the upper hand.  

Summoning all those ghostly opponents to spar with on the page or screen, to write is to confront your terror exactly as you do when you fight. The boxer-poet Geffrey Davis—referencing Li-Young Lee—says martial arts are ultimately an attempt to be safe from harm; and one way this can be achieved is when by sheer force of your presence the person intending to harm you is compelled to show you love. “Perhaps, then,” Davis extrapolates, “writing is the highest form of martial arts because of its ability to embody love.” 

Perhaps the raw romanticism of boxers—their extreme moods, their brittle bravado, their all-or-nothing outlook on the world—ultimately does hold something of poetry’s essence. This is what Roberto Bolaño said when he was asked the question:

I don’t know. I don’t know what poetry is. . . . Poetry for me is an act . . . it’s a gesture more than an act—of adolescence. A fragile, unguarded adolescence that bets what little it has on something it is not known very well what it is. [He almost paused.] And generally loses.

My poet friend was like that—something unbelievably fragile about him. When I reviewed his book my piece couldn’t be published on schedule, and he was petulant as a child waiting for it. If someone said they liked the first half of his poem more than the second, he would ghost them. He spoke constantly of the need for intellectuals to connect with the masses, to be approachable and unpretentious, but the social critique he published was abstruse even to his literary friends. 

I never confronted him about it but sometimes I felt he unwittingly embodied the object of his censure. “There is an extremely fine distinction between the writer creating interactive and critical images of reality as a way to connect with humanity at large,” he once said, “and the writer creating those images to hide behind them, to shield himself against society.” In the end he died hiding—shielded even from me. And, aware of the unresolved violence between us, I didn’t know what to feel. 

My poet friend is one of many Arab writers who remain nonexistent in the West even though their work is of the same caliber as figures like the German writer W. G. Sebald. Something about Sebald’s earnest intellectualism, dry humor, and bookish distance from worldly things reminds me of my poet friend, that’s why he’s the example I think of. 

Mohab’s death says something about the Arabs’ absence from Western consciousness: the fact that, while what happens in our part of the world is always of interest and often in the news, our existence as active agents of our own destinies remains unmentionable. But there is another thing about Sebald that feels relevant to mourning my poet friend: the theme for which he is most vigorously celebrated is never mentioned in his books, not once. 

After his first visit to America—it was some five months before 9/11—Sebald was killed in a car accident almost as soon as he returned to England, where he lived.  “I’ve always felt that it was necessary above all to write about the history of persecution, the vilification of minorities, the attempt well-nigh achieved to eradicate a whole people,” he told Michael Silverblatt while there. “And I was, in pursuing these ideas, at the same time conscious that it’s practically impossible to do this. To write about concentration camps in my view is practically impossible.”

Maybe my initial, blank response to a dear person’s death reflected the same kind of allusive silence. Not that I hadn’t written directly about the terrible things that were happening in the background. But maybe, when I felt I didn’t know how to mourn my poet friend, it was because his death felt like a way to take stock of those things without mentioning them—making Sebaldian sense of them—because a friend’s death is to the demise of whole cities full of people what boxing is to war. It is an image small and bearable, indeed beautiful enough to write about. A kind of emblem. 

“For some commentators,” Kasia Boddy writes, the function of the games described in the penultimate book of the Iliad “is to ‘purify’ combat—that is, to imitate it but conceal its true deadly character.” Likewise Monda: “In every match, even the poorest and most provincial, boxers repeat the challenges of knights and soldiers, ready to do anything for their country, for their honor, and sometimes, for survival.”

Mourning was a major subject of early Arabic verse, and it often involved talk of the enemy’s inferiority as a warrior compared to the greatness of the dead man, the valor of the dead man’s tribe compared to the enemy’s, or the necessity of revenge. James Montgomery, one of the translators of the seventh-century poet al Khansaʾ, the most famous practitioner of the genre, wrote movingly about connecting with her work after a car hit his seventeen-year-old son, immobilizing him and changing both their lives forever. In grief, Montgomery writes:

Experience, memory, artifice and art are confronted by the absence of comfort, and earlier versions of a poet’s selves are rehearsed and re-inscribed. . . . An event like the one I am describing rips to shreds the veil of the commonplace and the mundane, and memory is charged with the task of remembering the future . . . for such events reveal to us that the future is little more than a memory.

That must be what I was doing while wondering what I felt: rehearsing earlier versions of myself that include my poet friend, remembering a future that had already been erased where I spar knowing he’s alive, and where boxing isn’t wondering how to mourn him while feeling unbelievably unsafe. 

Perhaps feeling unsafe is the very core of grief, grief denuded of its usual trappings. It’s the condition of being that impels me to write and to fight, whatever else it is. The more aware of death you are the more your hands shake—even as you actively fend off the feeling by doing what makes you feel safer. In the face of death you realize that activity is but an analgesic, a distraction from fear.

In the emblematic sense, a poem is a priceless thing, but I’ve often been frustrated and offended by the onslaught of poetry-positive statements I’ve encountered online: Poems will save humanity; Poems can change the world; Politicians and military leaders are afraid of poets . . . As if poetry could ever have a concrete footprint in the shifting, deadly terrain of human misery—it’s insulting.

According to the Syrian poet Adonis, the most emphatically modernist figure in contemporary Arabic letters, a poem is an exercise in “the power to dream,” including of a better world, but unless it functions as polemic, propaganda—and then what will be left of its substance?—it cannot be expected to interface with anything wider than an individual consciousness. 

In times of war, a poem emerges sovereign out of the filthy morass of subservience and pain. At best, it can be a testimony, an artifact of subjective power, an incantation that sensitizes and consoles, but has little relevance to consensual reality. Only the worst verse, it seems to me, will step directly into the political ring to aid in—generally futile—activism while the violence of history goes down. 

All known odes by al Khansaʾ, perhaps the most famous of the female pre-Islamic poets, are laments for her two brothers killed on the battlefield, and they almost all open with the poet commanding her eyes to shed tears. But, whether extolling her brothers’ skills or urging their kinsmen to avenge their death, her grief involves as much violence as sorrow. “Offense rippled your heart,” she writes in praise of one brother, “you who like a blazing arrowhead irradiated night.”

A perceived offense made my poet friend stop talking to me. In poetry, he used to say, attitude—tone is everything. Our feud didn’t pretend to be poetry any more than it involved fists or blows, but maybe my tone had the effect of a nasty hook to the head. Yet his refusal to get past that moment was an equally vicious right-hand. It was, if not a violence in its own right, then a terminal blank page, a nonexistence, because there was no way to make contact once he died. Even while he was alive, after offending him, there was no way to break through the estrangement. 

In The Fight, talking about Muhammad Ali’s preparations for The Rumble in the Jungle, Norman Mailer says, “In heavy training, fighters live in dimensions of boredom others do not begin to contemplate. . . . The boredom creates an impatience with one’s life, and a violence to improve it. Boredom creates a detestation for losing.” The boredom to which my poet friend confined himself created a detestation for what might be called success. It created an impatience with the mediocrity, hypocrisy, and easy practicality of his milieu, and a violence to stay clear of it even at the cost of being unseen. I suppose by disappointing or—to his mind—disrespecting him, I became part of that milieu. But where had he gone from there? In “The Cruelest Sport” Joyce Carol Oates describes the ideal conclusion of a fight as “a knockout in the least ambiguous sense—one man collapsed and unconscious, the other leaping about the ring with his gloves raised in victory, the very embodiment of adolescent masculine fantasy.”

This image has come to sum up the end of my relationship with my poet friend, though it is never clear in my mind which of us is on the canvas, which jumping around with his arms raised. It is not clear whose defeat his death marks, whether it was the terminal blow he gave me or an unconscious murder on my part. 

To field a punch in boxing, you either intercept it with your hand or dodge it with your head. Instead of countering, the way you’re supposed to after your adversary makes contact, my poet friend dodged me so deftly I was no longer there for him. As if I’d disappeared.

I think that happened with every one of my poet friend’s fights. The immobilized body of his adversary would disappear while he stood alone, surrounded by the ropes, staring at the empty canvas, wondering where on earth everyone’s gone. Maybe the ring itself vanished. The pain he felt would persist in the form of tremendous poems, memories of the future, but afterward—quietus. Oates doesn’t go so far as to say the knockout should be fatal but she might as well. 

Before his 1947 World Welterweight Championship fight with Jimmy Doyle, Sugar Ray Robinson, is supposed to have dreamt he killed his adversary. Taking it as an omen, the legendary fighter refused to step in the ring until a priest persuaded him it would be okay. That evening in the eighth round, when Robinson knocked him out, the twenty-two-year-old Doyle never got up again. Robinson went through a long legal battle to prove it was not his fault but, when your punch has killed your fellow fighter, how are you supposed to grieve? 

When I heard my poet friend died, I struggled to reconstruct our time together: the camaraderie that enabled us to step into the ring in the first place, the initial exchange of jabs and catches, slips, what I said in that online video turning into the right hand that stopped him, but also his refusal to counter. The only thing that was vivid in my mind was the power of his poetry, which was a different kind of blow. To mourn him, I said to myself, just read him—that’s all you have to do: to read him as if you never met him, accepting that he will be no longer. And that is the way it is.

I’m more and more convinced the real fight is to live with the blows—the lies, the betrayals, the sorrow: all that can happen in the monstrous and unending ring of human relations—knowing that you will inevitably lose. 

“Obviously, victory is often nothing more than an illusion destined to become a bitter disappointment,” Monda says. And Mailer: “For if we are our own force, we are also a servant of the forces of the dead. So we have to be bold enough to live with all the magical forces at loose between the living and the dead. That is never free of dread.”

Now I’m reading my poet friend again, letting him hurt me as I bear witness to his existence and remember what was happening when he died. Embracing dread.

“I am twenty-four years old when they amputate Baba’s foot.” So begins Mai Serhan’s I Can Imagine It for Us: A Palestinian Daughter’s Memoir. She sits by her father’s bedside in a cramped bedroom in Beirut, trying to care for him, but she cannot mend what is broken: he is a man severed from both land and body, his missing foot a brutal, haunting echo of a lost country. 

Then the story takes flight. We follow father and daughter to China, at the cusp of its global economic rise, where he is said to have built an export empire; to Abu Dhabi in 1981, in an expat compound “flanked by Palestinian aunts and cousins left and right;” to salons of turn-of-the-century Cairo; to Beirut’s war-scarred streets, cemeteries, and underground clubs; to Dubai’s dizzying towers and international ad agencies. Yet everywhere, they remain unanchored—except to the one place Serhan has never been, the place her father can never return: Acre, Palestine, before 1948. “Everywhere I go, I go looking for my village in Acre,” Serhan writes, “and when I don’t find it, I close my eyes, I imagine it for us.” 

Bringing this razed village to life is at once an act of radical imagination and meticulous research—the recreation of an origin story. Writing from post-memory, Serhan carries the traces of a home she has never inhabited, while engaging with oral histories and archival accounts. As a poet, she revives this place in language, layering epistolary notes, essayistic vignettes, and lyrical reflection, writing in fragments that echo how generations of Palestinian families are alienated by the rupture of exile. She weaves her family’s historical narrative seamlessly into the story, evoking a cyclical rhythm so that no matter where she travels, the story always returns to Palestine. 

— Olivia Katrandjian for Guernica 

Olivia Katrandjian: This is a deeply personal memoir, but it also speaks to the collective story of Palestine and its diaspora. What motivated you to take on such a task?

Mai Serhan: No one had written a story about two Palestinians in China, which is where my main plot unfolds. It pushed the theme of alienation, that cutting off, to its extreme. I didn’t see myself reflected in much of Palestinian literature either; the olive tree, the key of return, the freedom fighter—these were not metaphors that spoke to my lived experience. I belong to a generation twice removed from the origin home. We navigate different metaphors now; airplanes, transit spaces, international calling codes. We carry Palestine intellectually and emotionally, even as we remain physically cut off from it.

I began writing in 2021, before October 7, at a time when the Palestinian cause was practically forgotten. Palestinians spoke out about their suffering under Israeli occupation, but the world largely ignored it. The siege, apartheid, and settlements were met with silence. One of my goals was to reach the Western reader who had never encountered “Palestine” in their education or media, or who had only seen it through a distorted lens. 

On a personal level, I was still grieving the loss of my father and the way exile had shaped his life. He never found his footing after his expulsion in 1948. He passed away in transit, in a hotel room in Bangkok, far from any place or people he knew. These in-between spaces are not meant to hold memory, and in them, his life seemed to dissolve. His death, in that hotel room, exemplified a vanishing; a person passing through the world without leaving a trace, without acknowledgement. Disappearance, for me, is endemic to the Palestinian experience, not only in the loss of land, but the erosion of continuity, recognition, and trace. I wanted his life, and his death, to be accounted for.

In his poem “Identity Card,” Mahmoud Darwish writes, Put it on record / I am an Arab; I felt the need to put my own account on record as well, to acknowledge, to honor, to remember, and to preserve. 

More than anything, this project was a way to connect with the roughly seven million Palestinians living in the diaspora. My story is specific to me, but it gestures toward a broader Palestinian condition. I hoped it would resonate, make someone across the ocean feel less alone. 

Olivia Katrandjian: At the end of your memoir, you do exactly that—you “put it on record,” as Darwish writes,  with the words, “I am from Acre.” The memoir then breaks into a poem, formatted as a column in the middle of the page to suggest a road, or a roadblock. The sudden switch to poetry coincides with your proclamation of your identity, in a moment of ownership and reclamation. Was this your intention?

Mai Serhan: Yes, that moment marks the point at which I finally take control of a narrative that had, until then, been overwhelmingly chaotic and stripped of agency. It is also the only place in the book where I speak directly about Gaza. The shift to poetry felt necessary because poetry demands a different kind of attention. This change in mode announces a rupture with what came before and signals a step into my own authorial voice. Because the memoir up to that point is full of digressions, placing the poem at the center of the page was a deliberate way of grounding the reader, both visually and formally.

Olivia Katrandjian: Tell me about the creative process behind writing this book. 

Mai Serhan: I had been carrying this story for over twenty years, long enough to reflect and gain perspective. By the time I was ready to write it, it felt like a full-term baby, ready to be born. From the moment I began thinking about its shape, certain things were instinctive. I knew the personal and the political would be inextricably linked; that the main plot would unfold in China, which naturally presented itself as a metaphor for displacement; that the narrative would be fragmented, mirroring the fractured Palestinian experience in the diaspora; that it would resist a linear path in order to remain faithful to the journey; and that it would be a hybrid work—both because the Palestinian experience exists outside the conventions of genre, and because, as a writer, I prefer to draw freely across forms and modes to achieve the most powerful effect.

I worked largely from family narratives that were handed down to me, literature I had read, and whatever research I found about my village, and when the story required me to fill in gaps, I drew on post-memory, dramatic techniques, language, and imagination. To me, post-memory is the space between knowing and imagining. I have never been to my village in Akka and I did not experience Palestine first-hand, but through proximity, careful observation and interaction with family, I inherited a cultural reservoir of images, behaviours, tonalities, and ways of living. Most of all, I inherited an incurable longing, and that emotional weight has shaped my inner landscape and sense of self. That is why you’ll find the story moving through an affective terrain, where the intimate and the geopolitical are completely intertwined. To imagine, then, was a process of bridging the gap, between what I know and feel, and what could be and what is possible. 

Once I realized there were three plotlines, the question became how to create the narrative braid. The braiding itself, however, was largely intuitive, connecting the fragments through associative thought. I was able to jump, temporally and spatially, between pre-1948 Akka, China in 2000, and Cairo in the 1980s, sometimes through an image, at other times through a feeling, an idea, or a word. The structure first came to me as a dramatic arc, with all three plotlines complicating, rising, and resolving in tandem, echoing one another throughout. The traditional dramatic arc was essential because it held the larger narrative together in ways that its inner workings—largely poetic in sensibility—didn’t.

I paid attention to the music of language and how it reflects mood and atmosphere, creating immersion. I worked with vivid, specific, and sensory detail to turn what I imagined of my family history into something concrete, something the mind’s eye can clearly see and feel.

Olivia Katrandjian: You began writing this memoir in 2021 and completed it before October 7, 2023. How did the political situation impact your publication process?

Mai Serhan: I secured representation with one of London’s most esteemed literary agencies in 2023. By October of that year, the manuscript was ready to be pitched. The Frankfurt Book Fair would have been the perfect opportunity to pitch it, but the organizers  chose to spotlight Israeli voices while canceling four Palestinian events, including one for Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. At the London Book Fair the following March, my agent told me publishers were looking for work that sells— self-help, cookbooks, and influencer content—while Palestine remained a “sensitive” topic. By mid 2024, half a year into the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the publishing industry abroad, namely in Europe and America, was still catching up to the urgency of the moment, and I did not want to wait. So I pivoted toward the regional market, seeking publication in the Arab world.

When I pitched the manuscript to the American University in Cairo Press, it received an instant and unanimous yes, and the publication date was set just nine months later, which is exceptional in the publishing world. It felt like the book had found its home. There was a discussion about how to classify the work and whether labeling it a memoir might make it harder to sell, but I wanted ownership of the story, and my publisher agreed it was compelling enough to stand on its own, even though I was not a public figure.

Olivia Katrandjian: Palestinians are expected to be perfect victims: they must endure the injustice of occupation without resisting in order to gain sympathy from the international community, an approach which leaves out the everyday complexities and contradictions that make Palestinian lives fully human. In stories, the best characters are often the most complicated ones. How did you navigate this tension while writing your memoir?

Mai Serhan: I agree. The literature that has stayed with me most is always filled with conflicted characters who carry both light and shadow. They come alive when we explore their fears, vulnerabilities, motives, and contradictions. My relationship with my father was deeply conflicted as well; it was tender and anguished at once. He was a victim of a great historical injustice, yes, but he never allowed it to define him. Even after his foot was amputated, he didn’t give in. He went back to China and worked just as hard. This resilience is what makes him so compelling to me, both as a daughter and as a writer. He loved us, without question, but his capacity to love was constrained by his own trauma. That kind of love will end up hurting the people closest to you. 

My father didn’t just lose a home, he lost his sense of orientation, both geographically and emotionally. He came from a long lineage of landowners, so his connection to Akka ran profoundly deep, and haunted him wherever he went. The Serhan family were prominent leaders; oral histories, literature, and family accounts all attest to this. For this name to be rendered weightless and without currency meant that every attempt at reinvention, wherever he went, ultimately failed—including his effort to build a home for his own family. This is why the origin home in Akka is at the heart of the story. It makes sense of the scars. This is also why the narrative weave is so important, to juxtapose these events and in doing so, allow you to draw your own conclusions. 

To write this story from within was, for me, to free it, to affirm that we are allowed to define ourselves on our own terms, not through an external gaze or in reaction to a dominant narrative. Agency and authorship reside there.

But beyond the political considerations, the decision to write is always prompted by a question. Mine was, how do I reconcile? I wanted to offer grace, to humanize my father by looking at who he was through what he’s endured, and the coping mechanisms he built to survive. His violent dislocation in 1948 shaped him, and in turn, shaped me.

Olivia Katrandjian: As you try to reconcile with not only the different sides of your father, but with your shared history, the memoir moves restlessly across time and place, evoking a sense of running. Decades after being exiled from his Palestinian village, your father was still trying to outrun his ghosts, and you seem to inherit these ghosts from him, this need to run. At one point, you write, “Baba, I know you don’t want to look back at tapered leaves or torched homes, but it is all in you, there is nowhere to hide. Time is about to stop, so stop running, hear me out.” Did writing this memoir allow you to confront your past in a way that your father was unable to do? 

Mai Serhan: Yes, absolutely. My father showed me what I did not want to be. He was a chronic escapist who paid a terribly high price for always running, for never confronting the past and its enduring effect. I ran in the opposite direction, backwards, toward that wound, to process what he could not. Writing the memoir became a way of facing what he had always suppressed, of telling the story to heal him, even after his death.

Reading Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun was a turning point. The idea that one can stay alive through storytelling and recounting the lives of Palestinians one tale at a time, struck me deeply. Writing became my way of restoring what history and exile had scattered, assembling fragments of memory, giving voice to the silence that haunted my family, and carving out a place where we can exist fully, even if on the page. 

Olivia Katrandjian: You carve out a place for your family to exist, together, on the page, and in doing so, you paint a picture of Acre in evocative detail: you describe a spring as “steaming hot in winter, like bubbling honeycomb,” and how “the mountains would fade at sunset and blend in with the colors of the sky, orange and lavender.” What was your research process like?

Mai Serhan: Well, I have never been to Palestine, so I had little material to work with. My father spoke of horse stables and a wine cellar, but rarely elaborated. My aunt, now the only surviving member of my family’s Nakba generation, lives in Beirut. She has dementia and no longer remembers who I am; I have to remind her every few minutes. Yet she remembers Palestine vividly, recounting her life there and her exodus again and again. I never saw her fading memory as a limitation. On the contrary, I came to understand it as a living testament to the systematic erasure of our history. I wanted to embed memory loss into the narrative and explore a path forward for our generation through post-memory. It created an urgent need to gather the fragments before they disappeared.

In 2021, I went to Beirut to interview a few key people. I visited Abu Fadi, my father’s only confidante in south Beirut. I met him near the Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp, where ninety-five percent of the refugees come from my village, al-Kabri. He gave me a book written by Badr Eldin al-Jishi, another refugee from al-Kabri, titled al-Kabri: A Heavenly Grove. The cover depicted a lush, hidden garden overflowing with fruit, which to my mind was a vision of paradise. Inside, it documented everything: the village’s families, maps, songs, food, weddings, funerals, and daily life. Through it, I learned that my grandfather had been a widely influential political leader, something I hadn’t fully grasped from family stories. One detail captivated me: al-Kabri had four natural springs that together formed the largest water source in Palestine. It reminded me of the four rivers flowing beneath Man’s feet in the Bible, allowing me to imagine the village as something almost mythical, a paradise lost. Abu Fadi also introduced me to his aunt, Hajjeh Fatmeh, who was 94 at the time. She had worked as a household helper in my grandparents’ home in Acre. She described the house to me, its rooms, rhythm, the day-to-day life within it. She remembered everything about that fateful day in 1948: the panic, the hurried decisions, the moment they climbed onto a truck headed to Saida in Lebanon, the exodus itself.

Olivia Katrandjian: In your memoir, you merge political and historical narratives with your personal story, writing in vignettes that are at times prose and at times poetry. In this way, your inner fragmentation is mirrored on the page. How did you use stylistic choices to convey greater meaning? 

Mai Serhan: From the beginning, I knew I didn’t want to write a traditional memoir. I used the lyrical precision of poetry to reimagine al-Kabri, the epistolary form to address my father intimately, and the essay form to create moments of pause, breathing spaces for reflection when the story needed it.

Genre, for me, is both a guide and a constraint. It offers structure but also limits what can be said. As a Palestinian, my experience lives outside those boundaries, in the margins. I wanted my structural and linguistic choices to reflect that, to inhabit uncertainty, to bring the rupture I feel in life onto the page.

The memoir’s structure mirrors lapses in memory and the digressive paths of family history, destabilizing space and time at every turn, but there is also a solid dramatic arc that holds it all together.  

Language, too, became a site of alienation. My father spoke in the Palestinian dialect while I spoke Egyptian, creating an internal dissonance that plays out in the text. There are Qur’anic references grounding the story in Arab-Islamic identity, while my time in China added another linguistic layer—our translator in China spoke only classical Arabic and Cantonese, unable to grasp my Egyptian vernacular. I weave in classical Arabic and Chinese dialogue intentionally, to make the reader feel a measure of the same linguistic estrangement I lived.

Olivia Katrandjian: Your prose is incredibly lyrical. How did being a poet influence your prose writing, and are there other writers who blend poetry and prose who have inspired you?

Mai Serhan: Poetry taught me how to listen to the heartbeat of words, to pacing, to feel a temperature and see textures; it taught me how to breathe through words. It demands precision and whim at once so that what you deliver is the truest possible experience for the reader.

My memoir is also an act of imagination; lyricism gave me the freedom to envision a village that once was, to capture its abundance, beauty and joy. Infusing the work with sensory detail allowed me to inch closer, to intimate what I’ve never experienced for myself.

Writers who have inspired me in this respect include Etel Adnan, Clarice Lispector, Maggie Nelson, Ariana Harwicz, Anne Carson and Hala Alyan.

Olivia Katrandjian: As the descendent of Armenian Genocide survivors, I feel a deep responsibility to tell the stories of my people. The majority of Armenians live in diaspora, severed from their homeland. As Armenian American author Nancy Kricorian wrote, “Our stories are a homeland.” You, too, are a member of a people scattered by violence and exile—what does that mean to you as a writer, and how have you navigated that responsibility? 

Mai Serhan: Since you’ve drawn the connection between the Armenian genocide and the Palestinian genocide, I want to begin by saying that one of the few lights in these bleak times has been working in solidarity with Armenian writers like Nancy Kricorian, Nancy Agabian, Sophia Armen, Raffi Wartanian, and Gina Srmabekian. I also want to thank you, especially, for the brilliant work you do through the International Armenian Literary Alliance to bring our voices together.

Darwish’s poem “Who Remembers the Armenians?” tells us: I remember them / and I ride the nightmare bus with them / every night. That line has always stayed with me. Solidarity matters because it amplifies struggles that might otherwise go unheard. It brings new eyes, new ears, and new allies, and it challenges the isolation that comes from being scattered, building networks of recognition so that the Palestinian story is not forgotten. It also brings practical support, helping protect activists locally, and inspires me creatively through the exchange of ideas and perspectives.

As a Palestinian writer, I feel an ethical responsibility to write. Writing is how I carry my Palestinian-ness, how I say no, how I bear witness. Literature isn’t a frill or ornament; it’s here to stir, to unsettle, to connect. To remain coherent amid chaos and erasure is, in itself, an act of resistance. Solidarity reminds me that this work isn’t only mine, it’s part of a larger, shared humanity, a recognition that oppression and displacement anywhere matter to all of us. And it validates the emotional and moral weight of the stories I carry, the ones I feel compelled to put on the page.

Olivia Katrandjian: ​In her book, Media Framing and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage: News Narratives about Artsakh and Gaza​, Mischa Geracoulis​ writes of ​the violence inflicted on ​Armenians and Palestinians in ​Artsakh and the Gaza Strip, ​respectively, and the attempts to not only erase a people, but to destroy cultural heritage. She writes, “The removal of a targeted group’s cultural heritage removes proof of that group’s existence, ultimately distorting reality.​” In writing and publishing your memoir, you are working against this ​erasure, correcting the historical record. What were some of the misrepresentations you chose to confront in your story?

Mai Serhan: Oh, there are many. The intentional structuring of a steady, false flow of information, meant to deny, rename, smear, and endlessly rewrite the script, has been in the works for over a century. The phrase “a land without a people for a people without a land,” popularized by Christian restorationists in the 19th century and later adopted by Zionism, is one example. The memoir challenges this claim by transforming the physical homeland into an emotional and psychic terrain, proving, in other words, an intimate knowledge of place.

Another example is the statement attributed to Ben-Gurion: “The old will die and the young will forget.” As a second-generation Palestinian in the diaspora, who works from post-memory, I see this memoir as a testament to our generation’s resolve—to remember and to create, across generations, through a growing, deliberate, and sustained effort. Israel has long cemented itself as the archetypal victim, but this memoir refuses to victimize its people. Instead, it excavates the depths of injustice and, as you said, presents imperfect victims. There is no need to perform victimhood, only to be human.

There is also the myth that we were uncivilized, a notion used to justify occupation. Yet the memoir describes a beautiful alternative to the “modern project”: an idyllic village abundant with fruit, where people took root. It had mosques and churches, schools and factories, a currency and a passport, political leaders and families with deep ancestry.

Finally, there is the false claim that we sold our land and left voluntarily. The memoir offers a factual account, naming those involved in the selling of our land: how, in 1935, a company was founded in Beirut specifically to sell land in southern Lebanon and Palestine. Its founders were then Prime Minister Khayr al-Din al-Ahdab, Wasfi al-Din Qadura, Joseph Khadij, Michel Sarji, Mourad Danna, and Elias al-Haj. The company purchased land from wealthy Arabs who vacationed in Palestine, offering extortionate sums, then transferred the titles to the British and, in turn, to the Jewish National Fund. No Palestinian left by choice. We were terrorized and driven out. As Warsan Shire writes in her poem “Home,” no one leaves home unless home chases you / fire under feet. It baffles me how this simple truth is still so difficult to understand.

Olivia Katrandjian: This memoir is addressed to your father. Who is your ideal reader, and what do you hope they take away from your story?

Mai Serhan: I don’t think there’s just one ideal reader. This memoir is an open invitation to anyone willing to read and be moved; to step in and come away changed, even slightly. At its core, the book speaks to Palestinians, especially those in the diaspora who carry a sense of home they’ve never fully known. But it’s also for anyone who has lived between places, who understands displacement in any form.

It’s also for readers who are drawn to experiments in form, voice, and language; those who appreciate lyricism and hybridity.

I see the memoir as a kind of storm, one that unsettles everything so that you might see the world more clearly afterward. My ideal reader is anyone willing to enter that storm, to let it move through them, and to emerge seeing the world, and perhaps themselves, a little differently.

R had practiced contract shepherding as an ancestral livelihood from when he was five. His father had started at that age too, like his father. They say it was passed on for several centuries, from one generation to another. From late spring to early fall each year R lived in high-altitude meadows and pastures with the herd. He spent his entire childhood and early youth in the landscapes mostly veiled behind the soft blanket of mist, under the blue endless sky and unguarded land. The boundaries were blurred between one hill and another, between earth and sky, between land and water. He prized the company of K, his younger brother, over all else. R knew that although K’s desire to climb these high mountains alone never dulled, K loved to walk with him in the large meadows dotted with wild flowers and lie down on the grass for hours. When the rain trickled and the drops fell on their faces and necks, they would sit and wait for the sun to appear from behind the clouds and flood the meadows and mountain tops with its warmth and glow. When the rain ceased and the earth dried up, K would rise, and walk through the meadows nestled between rolling hills and deep forests. He loved the scent of lilies and tulips, followed the butterflies from one flower to another, and watched the eagles making circles into the sky. 

The two brothers had unmatched sensibilities: R would get up at five o’clock in the morning and walk around without being moved by the twitter of birds, or the hum of insects. K would wake up late in the morning, touch the dewdrops sparkling on the leaves, and watch ceaselessly the horizons that separated mountains from sky. He would then chase the clouds that carried him across the streams and the fields until he arrived exhausted to meet R with tea and lunch. Often K carried his camera. R enjoyed using his brother’s camera too. His out of focus blurry landscapes with simple lighting were compelling. R imagined the landscapes rising above the ground, like a heron on slender stilts, ready to take flight and get lost in the clouds. 

On several occasions, out of curiosity, K asked his brother, “Why blurry?”

R always replied, “That is how it was in historical imagination—undefined horizons fused together along the stream of time.”

R tended nearly a hundred sheep every summer. His father would settle the contract with the village farmer and bargain the price. He was accountable if the sheep went missing. The missing sheep translated to theft, no matter how he tried to justify it. In the case of death, dead bodies were offered as evidence. A dead sheep was hung on the wooden staff dug deep in the ground. The birds foraged and fought at carcasses, making merry over carrion. The smell of the rotten flesh whirled across the meadows for days. That odour, that landscape of disgust, choked R. When the silence of the dead enveloped the dark of the night R’s heart would tremble. He suffered from vertigo whenever he watched K photographing the dead sheep, hanging by their tails and heads drooping down. Their eyes popped out, as if scrutinizing the earth curiously to examine what was erased after they vanished from the living world. 

During the full moon nights, the silhouette of the dead sheep and the thousands of maggots feeding on its body camped in the labyrinth of shadows falling on the foliage. R felt the eyes of the dead follow him in his solitude, and he heard the dead whispering in his ears what was within unspoken and outside obliterated. In the daytime, when the sheep grazed, he would lift a lamb onto his shoulders and chase the butterflies until he stumbled, fell, and rolled cheerfully on the grass. 

When the mountains appeared unmoving, the moonlight gleamed down white and silver upon the grass, slithering through the hanging bodies of the dead sheep. From a distance, R watched the head of the dead sheep, its mouth agape and its expression uncanny, and felt dread rise in him. K would take a closer look at their melancholic expressions that chained him to the abyss of uncertainty and reminded him of existence as unreal and imaginary in that landscape. 

“The corpses are hung to clear off any doubts that they exist no more.”

“Death completes the circle and ends all the doubts.”

“Why make a spectacle of the dead though?”

“Maybe as a warning. The contemporary believers have a short-lived memory.”

“It’s irrefutable evidence that the sheep once existed, no matter how insignificant their visibility was!”

“Visibility is enigmatic.” 

“Yet appearance preserves existence that nourishes the sense of continuity. Appearance is almost like a promise—it creates metaphors.”

“But what about the disappeared ones?”

“Disappearance ends all possibilities of narrating stories.”

Once a lamb went missing in the mountains. R turned pale. He was filled with horror. He knew the lamb had disappeared. The sun was hanging on the horns of the cliff, about to settle down. He told K. They both paused for a while, looked everywhere and decided to leave at once. R knew the track to the big mountain, draped with dry flower petals, lured the sheep. He beckoned K to follow the sloppy direction. R dwelled on his memories. The fallen flower petals had faded away. It was painful for R to tread along the way. He remembered how his beloved used to create ephemeral and seductive patterns from the dried flower petals in her love letters. Now here he walked past the memory and remembered how she vanished from his life without a word. Grief descended upon R. His eyes welled up with tears. The split images of the flowers, the grass, and the shadows of pine trees appeared as apparitions. As they began climbing higher, the ground beneath them turned into rocks. The slope sucked in the moonlight. K noticed how their footsteps had altered the muted beauty of the meadow covered with large swathes of daisies. R was growing impatient and irritable with the turmoil of his disillusionment. As the brothers arrived at the end of the mountain, the drops of night rain transformed into icicles that hit their faces hard, melting down their necks. Fading into silence, there was something ominous in the darkness around them. Suddenly, a fierce thunder followed by a flash of lightning unsettled the stillness. 

“K, don’t you think that the beasts are roaring their resentment?”

“I asked you last time what the worst they can get by with is?”

“I have witnessed so many disappear,” said R.

“How agonizing it must be for the witness to live with the memory that envisages only necessary absence!”

The relentless rain began hammering the mountain slope. Streams of water and mud rolling down the hill swallowed the track. The air became heavier with the smell of decaying leaves and moss. It clung to their bodies and clothes. 

“Do you remember how they disappear?” asked K. 

“I imagine that over the years I have protested less. I loathe all my memories and I rarely come this way.”

“The dead may turn into ghosts and wander, but what happens to the disappeared?”

“It used to be a beautiful threshold on the track where we used to walk past. I remember vividly how the horizons would expand as the flowers, the grasslands, and the trees would be engulfed by the steeper cliffs. During the night the fireflies lit the path and there would be no nocturnal sound of footsteps.”

“Eventually the men in boots started appearing, and they knew we had no protectors.”

K was pulled in by the spell of the mountains. An emptiness came over him. He asked R, “Shall we come back tomorrow?”

“We would have to start all over from the beginning and take a different way.”

“I know the story of the disappeared.”

“Do you know the geography?”

“Should we try going backwards?”

“I remember how we crawled and soared high in those mountains! My memory through those steep edges guards my nostalgia.”

“There was an unfinished cliff that overlooked the valleys. Slowly it shifted itself elsewhere. It was a time when one could still embrace the reason to exist in between the lines.”

“It is evident now. We own nothing, not even a flock of sheep.”

There was a long lull. Lavender wafted as the ashen fog floated. Everything disappeared. R and K made their way back.    

The sun was up. After walking for a couple of hours both brothers stopped for a rest in the open land, whose vastness added a sense of freedom for R and boredom for K. They were tired. K ran his fingers through his long hair, now drenched in sweat. He opened the knot of the cloth around his waist and tied it on his forehead. ‘If only you trusted me with my skill with a haircut…’ K laughed out loud before R could complete his sentence. They ate lunch and fell fast asleep. K remembered walking up the mountain while his eyelids drooped and he was climbing with an iron clock hanging by the rusted chain around his neck. He heard R calling him from behind. As K was about to turn back, he slipped into the honeycomb. The earth began disappearing underneath his feet. The threads of rain were let loose. The green border began disintegrating as the moths began slipping from the leaves. An invisible landscape buried in water appeared and began rising upward, slowly, glistening in the sunlight. The hanging cascades spun a cage around K. He took the death ride on the back of a dragonfly that veered upward. With no time to flutter again, it fell off the cliff. K coiled along the tattered rope threaded by the broken time. He was held in the grip of the scream. The white mist submerged the hill, bundled it up, and in a moment the haze trapped K. He became invisible and ubiquitous. Streams of silence descended from the mountains. K lay naked, gliding over the dead bodies. Echoes were chasing him away. A stranger bent over K was examining his face in precise detail until their foreheads touched.     

K then opened his eyes without moving. His heart was racing. The stranger’s wide eyes were digging into his face. As the stranger pulled away, K saw himself rising alive from the deathbed. He became aware of his hands touching the grass, and nudged R who was still fast asleep. Both stood to their feet in no time. Both had to play their roles. R was caught between falling and holding on his feet. K stood firm. The young army colonel was standing alone, confident. The joyful expression he wore on his face while touring in the mountains revealed that he was a fresh recruit. R could not place him, for he was familiar with confrontations, stand-offs, and heated arguments with these men in uniform. However, something unfamiliar about this young colonel was his curiosity to engage in conversation. The colonel was new to the mountains and did not yet know which line separated one mountain from another. 

“Where is this?”

R felt the urge to laugh, but the fear rising up inside stopped him. “Mountains are a place of indivisible existence: imaginary, real, connected, distinct, scattered, invisible, intersecting…”

“The landscape that is visible here is completely different from the landscape that I had imagined.”

“In that sense, nothing said of landscapes is true.”

“Your vocabulary is inflected with proverbial clichés.”

“We are paying the price of surviving.”

“Have you ever thought of doing something else? How obsolete to die for a landscape that doesn’t exist yet.”

And in a hurried move, the captain turned to K. 

“So, young man…Let’s see what you are hiding behind those tresses…Your calmness shows you possess imagination.”

K’s mind was blank. His eyes narrowed, and as he looked down on his chest, he became aware of the graffiti on his t-shirt. He rested his left hand near his heart and drew a long breath. The colonel didn’t take his eyes from the graffiti. 

“don’t you recognize the irony in these symbols of revolution—turning into the vicious cycle of what it stands against?”

“This is an oversimplified perception,” K said. 

“How do you understand these symbols and the song of revolution?”

“It is what defines our existence.”

“Illusions do not define perceptions of reality. Icons manipulate playfully.”

“It is the trade of being in love…witness to the ephemeral and the fragile patterns of life. Without it, we would not be!”

“Ah! The poster boy of revolution is a lovable rogue! It persistently misrepresents your problems. Their dream was seductive. Your struggle is paranoia.”

“Our struggle is best defined by our ability to live with political uncertainty. Some struggles become a way of life only with the passage of time.”

“Sartorial politics do not create nations.”

“There is a rarer privilege to exist in lightness. Imagine a landscape hanging in between the mountains over the void, bound to the crests with the spider web.”

“Is this spider net the foundation of your imagination?”

“There are two: one I can only speak of, and another that exists in the lack.”

“And how long will the net last?”

“There are numerous horizons.”

“Where do you belong?”

“I am a trapeze artist.”

“Do you think a guerrilla can become immortal?”

“A guerrilla scripts his mortality.”

The colonel laughed, and put both his hands on K’s shoulders. “Boy I think you need a haircut. And after that, you may claim your camera.”

The colonel tucked a lock of hair behind K’s ear, picked up the camera and walked away. 

K stomped his foot on the ground where the colonel had been standing. R turned around and rolled his shoulders. He clasped his hands behind his back and shifted from one foot to the other. Clueless, he thrust his fists in the air.

Early fall, the sun made its way between the tiny branches surreptitiously. The shadows of the leaves encased R who was standing in the middle of the room. It was ten o’clock in the morning. The shop he recently set up was already open. He started clearing up, though there was really nothing to be cleared away. He picked up a rag and started scraping the rust from the windowsills. 

R had rented an old space at the edge of the village. The shop was small but clean and affordable. The walls finished with mud plaster had a soft feel. R had worked the walls in deep browns and hay yellow, which gave the room an earthy fragrance and tone. The ends of straw jutting out created an uneven texture that R was trying hard to get rid of. The floor—

a series of stones chipped at the corners and sunken in the middle, uneven and scabrous—

gave an illusion of mountain meadow. The wood ceiling supported by the pine beams was covered with lightweight, translucent rice paper covering up the cracks. A hollowed-out rusted lampshade hung from the ceiling with a withering metal string in the middle of the room. It shielded the dim light from spreading out or from lighting the dark corners of the room. Between the two stained, broken windows, there was a creaking, rickety wooden door, off its hinges. A frayed piece of rope looped through a broken handle was tied tight to a nail hammered into the warped doorframe. The dark wood from the outside splintered and crumbled. The stone steps to the door were green and slippery. Inside the shop, the large looking-glass hanging on the wall stood right in front of the door. Anyone who entered the shop was greeted by their own reflection. 

As the sunlight entered the shop through cracks and holes, the place was flooded with numerous patterns. K was seated on a wooden chair, with adjustable head support, intensely examining the long-awaited haircut. R had almost finished snipping with the scissors. He was happy to have inaugurated his new shop and career. He was trying hard to cheer up K. ‘I shall shave you clean to the skin.’  

K got up from the chair. He loosened the white cloth from his neck, turned around and stood in the middle of the room with the large mirror behind him. The room in the mirror swirled like ripples on a pond – shifting proportions in all directions. Forms swayed from one side to another in a slow dance. The faces elongated, cheeks bulged, eyes blinking slowly, lips melting downward deepened the grieving process and sharpened the grotesque conditions of existence. Under the mirror, the clean wooden shelf covered with combs, scissors, razors, a box of wax, powder puff, a bottle of perfume diluted with water, and a towel hanging from a nail breathed faintly like drifting thoughts. On the left, a wooden bench, fixed for the customers to sit, waiting for their turn, was carrying the weight of emptiness on its curved legs. The soft sunlight filtering through the cracks in the windows made circles on the floor reflected in the mirror, hanging from above by invisible threads. 

The room was drowned in light as the door flung open. The colonel stepped in. A slight tilt of his head set the lampshade into oscillation. R was standing slightly to the right side, yet looking into the mirror. As he stretched out his arm it was drawn into a long, thin branch, struggling to reach the door. The light now entered from the open door that washed the shop in a trembling glow. The shop lost its fixity. The colonel’s gaze in the mirror met an improbable symmetry. His body, hunched forward, appeared to have been carved from a cracked marble. The buttons on his uniform dripped like droplets of mercury. His eyes were flickering in soft chaos. Everything lay beyond his grasp, furthering his sense of detachment. The shadows were floating in the mirror. K stood still in a timeless warp. 

I write this from Beirut, two weeks into a new war, amid another round of airstrikes. A fine dust falls with the rain over the entire city. Still, the streets remain filled. Shops open their doors. Cars and scooters pass by; there is the hum of conversations between people. Life continues in a strange, quiet sobriety. Beirut has always held this contradiction: a city that bustles even as war returns repeatedly. And in the face of violence, something stubborn persists – work, conversation, routine. The self emerges altered, but not broken.

What surfaces across the works gathered in this issue is a shared atmosphere of siege—mirrored not in scale but in texture. From Beirut to Gaza, from the Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar to imagined landscapes of Kashmir and Acre, Palestine—places haunted by systemic disappearances and erasure—these pieces inhabit terrains where life continues under assault. They test the tenacity of the self under attack.

The March issue of Guernica opens with a photo essay from Beirut. Anchored by the graffiti line Let Lebanon Live Before I Die, Wartime Beirut, Between Ruin and Routine, by Alex Milan Durie, traces the city during the first weeks of an old war. Drawn from long walks through the city, the photographs capture Beirut suspended between devastation and continuity, where routine itself appears as a form of endurance.

Nonfiction in this issue turns to the question of witness. In Youssef Rakha’s Ring, excerpted from his forthcoming collection of essays, Postmuslim, grief arrives in the space between boxing practice and breaking news: the death of a poet friend, the resumed destruction of Gaza, the unbearable fact of having to continue on. Moving between sparring, literary memory, and political reflection, the essay asks what writing can do in the face of violence that flattens both lives and language. A Month Inside the World’s Largest Refugee Camp, by Jidi Guo, takes us to the Rohingya camps of Cox’s Bazar during Ramadan. Filming inside the world’s largest refugee settlement, the writer lingers on the uneasy texture of daily life under prolonged displacement—its routines, generosities, moral dissonances, and the quiet negotiations required to remain human within systems that control survival.

Fiction in this issue returns to the fragile persistence of the body and imagination. My cousin Sami is still bulking, by the Palestinian writer L.F. Khouri follows a young man in Gaza who continues to train his body amid the wreckage of war, lifting slabs of concrete and twisted iron where a city once stood. As hunger, memory, and loss close in around him, the body becomes his final territory. In Invisible Landscape, by Kashmiri writer Gowhar Yaqoob, two brothers move through mountain pastures haunted by disappearance and death. As the terrain shifts between memory, dream, and political intrusion, the story traces how the self struggles to remain visible when the landscapes that once anchored it begin to dissolve.

In Interviews, Mai Serhan reflects on Palestine, post-memory, and the political work of storytelling. In I Can Imagine It for Us, Serhan speaks with Olivia Katrandjian about writing a homeland she has never seen, blending poetry, archival research, and fragments of family history to reconstruct a place inherited through absence. The conversation explores how narrative becomes a site where memory, imagination, and collective identity meet, and the self learns to speak across displacement.

Our Global Spotlights selection of the month returns us to Beirut on the edge of violence. Mazen Maarouf’s uncanny story The Lion Cub, translated from Arabic by Lina Mounzer and originally published in Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal, reminds us that war rarely begins with the first explosion, but in the slow reshaping of the self.

Poetry in this issue confronts disappearance directly. In The Emperor Jones, British-born Black Caribbean choreopoet Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa transforms a life shadowed by violence into legend, tracing how bravado, memory, and imagination remake a figure otherwise destined to vanish, and in Siren of the Tropics, Kinshasa turns to a mythic register, retelling the story from the perspective of a hitherto ‘subhuman’ heroine, in which the spectators of the original become the spectacle. Three poems by the Spanish poet David Cruz, presented here in translation by Anthony L. Geist, move through shipwreck, nightmare, and wandering spirits. Ships sink, poets choke on their own language, and souls step briefly outside their bodies. Yet even as defeat threatens to swallow the speaker, something continues speaking—the stubborn self that refuses silence.

With our March issue, we at Guernica hope that from landscapes under siege individual selves continue to emerge, recognizing one another and rising in solidarity against the violence that seeks to break our communities apart.

Featuring, courtesy of the artists, striking original artwork by Jean-Robert Alcindor, Dave Bowers, Javier Iniesta, Samar Hejazi, Ray Hwang, Fahed Shehab, and Camilla Skye.

Raaza Jamshed, Editor-in-Chief