I insured my grief and the inherited hatchets. 

I want them buried for a century, at least. 

I jiggled beads around a gourd that couldn’t hold wine,

to remind everyone of my oaths to love this country. 

Sometimes, love comes in a parcel of rice straws

or takes the shape of a gourd, fractured beyond shape. 

Ṣẹ̀kẹ̀rẹ̀ kíì ròde ìbànújé, no one brings a Ṣẹ̀kẹ̀rẹ̀

to a room where its walls have pictures covered in dust.

When I sleep, my mind clones itself and wanders

beyond every boundary. The songs I memorized

nurture my dream, so I remember the origin of my scars.  

In an altitude where the clouds are visibly the shape of drums, 

I think of trees that resist floods and storms, 

I think of the celebrations where the gourd is left to rest. 

It’s a simple scene. The man

and woman sit across from each other

in silence. He’s already reached for the peach,

weighed the summer soft skin in his

palm. The woman has turned her head

towards the window, exposing

that part of her neck she knows

will keep him long enough

for her to breathe. He isn’t

looking. He’s digging his finger

deep into the flesh, fishing

to find its center. She fights

the febrile urge to squirm

as he carves his fat thumb

through the core. Silent

as the scene may seem, we see her shift

focus to the sky—maybe the thunder yawns, maybe

the wind throws through the panes, maybe

she hears a sadness that sounds like her

childhood and reminds herself not to think

about flying. Finally, finds what he is

looking for. He drops the sweet pit

on his tongue and rolls it

cheek to cheek. She stifles herself

on the chair, wishing she could

ask the seed how it feels

to begin again.

In him, another dialectic appears, trying to find expression; the contradiction of the terms yields in his eyes by the discovery of a third term, which is not a synthesis but a translation; everything comes back, but it comes back as Fiction, i.e., at another turn of the spiral.

Roland Barthes 

Spring in Lingnan, cold. My mother gave me two hours to return from the market with at least three wén in change, not to come back with less. I drifted out, hungry but happy, collecting loose pine and bamboo branches from the woods by our house, and meandered slowly to the market. After a long winter, it was a perfect day for robe and sandals.

A group of monks, having arrived from the north, gathered in a circle at the market. I walked past them with my giant bundle of sticks, to the stalls. Bao, the old man, bought them all for four wén, and I was free to wander back to the monks’ circle. They were shouting—competing, it sounded like—and I couldn’t hear, so I edged in closer. I finally made my way to the clearing. A man in a bright red robe, shaved bald, with a giant nose like a bird of prey, shouted at the people around him theatrically: 

All conditioned phenomena! 
Are like a dream! An illusion! A bubble! A shadow!
Like dew or a flash of lightning! Thus we shall perceive them!

I sat down, dizzy. I remembered my father’s face, who died when I was a kid. The face was like the face of the moon. No different. But it was his face.

The monk was still yelling, but I was sitting and wasn’t sure who I was. I didn’t even recognize my body. My hemp robe, my belt, my sandals, were like the dirt and the wood poles and cloth of the stalls. I was no different; I was part of it.

When the men stopped shouting, the circle cleared. I still sat in the dirt. “Hey kid,” said the monk with the nose like a bird of prey, “are you ok?” “I feel like a bag of sand fell on my head,” I said. “What,” I asked him, “ were those lines you read?” “The Diamond Sutra,” he said. “And where,” I asked, “are you from?” “From the Gunin Daiman monastery in the North of China.”

So I walked there. My mother hardly looked at me when I left. I picked wood and sold it as I went. I shouted the lines I’d heard at the top of my lungs. And after thirty days I arrived, kneeling in front of a monk with a lavish embroidered cone on his head. 

“You,” he said, “are from the barbarian south. How can you become a Buddha?” In response, I yelled the lines I’d heard.

They accepted me, but put me to work in the rice shed. It was hard for me to operate the hulling machine. I had to step on the treadle to lift the pestle: step off and the pestle drops and pounds the rice. But I was skinny, much too skinny. So I tied a stone from the river to my waist to make me heavy enough to operate the machine. It was not an easy life, but something in me had changed and was content. All day, alone or with others, rain or sun, I shouted the same exact lines: 

切有為法，如夢幻泡影，如露亦如電，應作如是觀

*

That’s the legend of Huineng (638-713), the sixth great patriarch of Zen, who seems to have been hit with the lightning bolt of nondualistic understanding as a young man.

Zen—and, to some extent, poetry—sees the world as nondualistic. Nonduality, from the Sanskrit Advaita (“not two”), points beyond divisions. It’s tricky to define because language itself is dualistic. The nondual can only be perceived by what it’s not: not personal, not time-bound, not separate, but impersonal, timeless, indivisible. “Non-duality,” Jane Hirshfield says, “is not the negation of multiplicity in favour of some idea of the absolute; it is also not the nihilism so many Westerners think Buddhism to be.” 

Poetry describes unlanguageable space. Take the shortest poem ever written in Italian: “Mattina” by Giuseppe Ungaretti: 

M’illumino d’immenso.

“I illuminate myself with immensity.” This poem presents no “self” as narrator in time and space—but self as an unlimited field of experience.

Assuming that the world is nondualistic, as I think it is, then using nondualism as a lens allows us to let the world be what it is. 

But if I’m not writing about my false “self,” then what will my subject matter be? 

In this famous Zen koan—

A monk once asked Master Joshu, “Has a dog the Buddha Nature or not?” Joshu said, “Mu!” 

—“Mu” means  “no” or “not” (in Japanese), but more importantly, it’s a kind of non-answer, rejecting the question itself. If we pause to consider “Mu,” we are working against all the prepared answers of our dualistic minds. Keats’ notion of Negative Capability works in a similar way, embracing uncertainty rather than knowledge. Keats applauded people “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This sense of not-knowing—“being in uncertainties”—is an embrace of the nondualistic world.

Poetry, like Zen koans, can interrupt our dualistic minds. When Lorca begins a poem—“Woodcutter. / Cut my shadow from me”—we as readers are unable to process this with our usual literal way of thinking. We’re forced instead to shift our perception from one kind of psychic space to another.

The poet Chase Twichell says that neither Zen nor poetry can be paraphrased because the literal-focused mind can’t process them:

Zen is said to be a “mind-to-mind transmission.” The best poems are exactly that: they leap from one mind to another without stopping to explain exactly how they did it. Poetry cannot be paraphrased because it can’t be apprehended by a purely literal mind. I think this is why so many people are afraid of it, or think they dislike it. In our culture, out of necessity, we’re used to living in a mostly-literal mind, and poetry demands that we enter it with another kind of mind.

There is nevertheless transmission because we can and do understand the nondualistic world beyond the literal. In fact, the literal—which we cling to for support—limits our perception. Dualism is the figure in the cave staring at the shadows on the wall; nondualism is the figure stepping out of the cave and looking at forms directly. 

Poems disrupt the literal, pointing like a finger toward nondualistic perception. Language, poets know, can never convey what it wants to convey. So poems, as literal signifiers, must always fail. But when poems—such as Twichell’s “Makeshifts,” below—point to the end of language, they urge the reader toward the nondualistic.

Nothing has a name it can’t

slip out of. The waterfall is solid ice

by late November; the white pines

vanish under snow that’s

blue in the morning, pink in the dust.

Here’s a little bouquet—ice

and evergreen and sun, three moments

arranged for human looking,

though it’s only the husks of their names

that I’ve gathered and paralyzed. 

The waterfall of solid ice refers, I think, to a literal thing in the world, which perhaps the poet came across on a walk. And I believe that she saw that blue-pink color of the snow. In the second stanza comes a shift and an admission: that the three moments of the first stanza—ice, evergreen, sun—are not actually real but “husks . . . gathered and paralyzed” by the poet. So Twichell disturbs what we thought was a simple nature poem, meant perhaps to ground us in a landscape. The poem is more like a spider wrapping up the “husks” of words: a trail that leads to the unknowable. 

The poem convulsively interrupts our reverie of white pines in the snow by reminding us of the poetry-making process: a fabricated construct. This interruption, like a koan, wakes us up out of our dualistic slumber.

As Twichell says, “Poetry’s not window cleaning. / It breaks the glass.”

*

Film, too, can break the glass.

Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960) urgently pushes against a dualistic thinking. Like Twichell, Antonioni is fascinated by what happens when we run out of language. Film traditionally relies on plot, narrative, and dialogue—dualistic tethers to our literal lives—to carry the spectator along. Antonioni rejects these, following, in discursive slow-cinema mode, Anna, her boyfriend Sandro, and her friend Claudia. Anna disappears, and Sandro and Claudia fall for each other.

Sandro and Claudia seem like amnesiacs: they love each other, they change their mind, they run away. Dancing with delight, then falling into despair. Antonioni achieves this sense of amnesia through a framing device. He simulates a kind of doorway effect—the psychological phenomenon in which one suffers short-term memory loss when passing through a doorway—by showing Claudia continually passing through archways, doorways, thresholds. 

Watching Claudia and Sandro—passing through doorways, changing their minds, forgetting who they are—has a koan-like effect on us as spectators, disrupting our notion of what is real. Huineng seems to have experienced something like the doorway effect when he heard the lines shouted at the market. And we, as spectators/readers, can experience a doorway-effect feeling while experiencing transformative art.

L’avventura leaves room for not knowing, for Negative Capability. Like an Ashbery poem or a Pollock painting, the film will not commit to be one thing or another. By not privileging one side of the binary over the other, the film embraces nondualism. The characters are not exactly psychological, so it’s hard to know if their not knowing is because they are wealthy and bored, or “modern” people trammeled by old modes of thinking. It almost doesn’t matter; the filmmaker isn’t interested in providing answers, but only in providing us a mystery with no way out.

The last five minutes take place in Taormina, Sicily. Claudia, discovering that Sandro has cheated on her, runs off onto the empty streets in the early morning. She stops in a piazza, surrounded by an apocalyptic bombed out tower, a tree, and Mount Etna in the distance. 

Claudia stares at a tree for twelve seconds; the tree rustling in the wind, reflecting her turbulent inner space. She cries convulsively, and then stops as if she’s learned something. Sandro arrives, sits on a bench. A long static shot: Sandro weeping on the bench. Claudia approaches. Diegetic sounds from the hills: train whistle, wind, dogs barking. And—impossibly—ocean waves, as on the island where they lost their friend Anna. Claudia puts her hand on Sandro’s head: an act which Antonioni called “pity,” not forgiveness. The camera pulls back to an establishing shot: the characters small and Mount Etna, an active volcano, in the distance. 

Antonioni’s characters are ephemeral, all of them—not just Anna—“missing” or in the act of disappearing. They resemble, more than psychological characters, “husks” that Antonioni “gathered and paralyzed.”

Critics begged Antonioni for exposition in his next film. He replied, Mu! 

Young Lad yawns under a cobwebbed bulb that may well have come from Noah’s Ark itself. As he runs water into two large bottles, screws on their caps, the old and jaundiced kitchen clock slogs towards midnight.

He cradles the bottles under an arm. Pauses in the doorway. Birds outside have finally stopped singing. Oxygen hisses gently from the downstairs bedroom.

He heads up to his own room then, windows open for weeks in a futile effort to disperse the gelatinous and unrelenting heat. Young Lad can’t remember the last time he felt a breeze.

He lies on the bed. Places bottled water either side of his body, jerking against the initial cool, before easing both arms down against them. This is the way to sleep in the furnace of July, in an emerald country that isn’t built for hot weather.

The following morning, he wakes to birds already in song.

Light sweat.

Slither of sun creeping the curtain-gap.

Bottles no longer cool.

He carries them downstairs then, pausing in the kitchen doorway. His spot. From the nearby bedroom, gentle snores break against whispering oxygen like sea lapping beach.

It used to be, he couldn’t smell anything untoward here in the doorway, but illness has a way of spreading its odours and accompanying clinical smells, to the point where he feels like he’s living in a hospital.

He sets his bottles of water by the sink then.

Stares into an almost empty fridge, and same, for an almost empty larder.

Opens a tin of beans.

Slugs them into a bowl.

Places a small plate over the top to keep flies out.

Pulls a drawer and sifts through pieces of paper for the one he wants. Sets it beside the beans.

Microwave. Two Mins.

Runs water into a glass.

Downs it.

Refills and leaves it next to the beans.

From the high cupboard, he takes down a compartmentalized plastic container labelled with days of the week. Thumbs open Wednesday. Fingertips the kaleidoscope of tablets onto the counter, puts the container away and heads out into a muggy morning, easing the door back into its latch.

Young Lad walks along Heath Avenue where the lampposts cast long shadows.

Gardens mostly nondescript, except one, necklaced with white stones. The adjacent house has no garden at all, just concrete. A shitty red car. Bumper-sticker:

If she’s not red, keep ‘er in the shed.

He slows at number eighteen. The weird house. Centre-piece hedge, shaped like a large bird. Garden cluttered with outdoor ornaments – gnomes, rabbits, bird houses, sundials. Greek-looking nudist statues – an affront to the entire street.

Young Lad quietly shakes his head. They might as well burn the money.

At the end of the street, he takes right, follows a road for a mile-and-a-half and counts the chestnut trees. This is where the voice used to take him as a child, to gather conkers, back when it was normal and spoke without torment and had a name.

He reaches the sign for Hodgson Concrete. Gates already open.

Clouds of dust lingering in the yard like inverted sky. A water sprinkler jettisons in starts. 

Sprays. Adjusts.

Turns.

Sprays again.

To his right, two stacked metal containers form some kind of office.

A door bursts open, man in jeans and tatty vest striding across the yard.

Before Young Lad can decide whether to approach, the man is up into the cab of a cement mixer, engine thundering, giant cylinder turning, crunch of gears, then the lorry growls past, brakes squealing at the gates.

Smoke sputters from a vertical silver pipe, then the entire beast roars and spurts out onto the road in a wake of dust.

Young Lad danders further into the yard of shouting machinery and hard-hatted men in plastic goggles. A forklift loaded with bags of sand whirrs by. He briefly watches the stacking of slabs, a dangling pipe pouring concrete across moulds, then approaches a bristle-faced auld fellow with bushed eyebrows, sagged worn jeans and legs so bowed he must have ridden horses all of his life.

‘Have ye any jabs goin’?

The auld fella steps away from his machine. Leans an ear. ‘What’d you say?’

‘Have ye any jabs goin’?’

‘Jabs?’

‘Aye!’

The auld fella narrows his eyes. Hawks phlegm into his throat. Spits like a bullet into the dust. Scowls then at the poor young lad, as though he’s never before, in his entire hardened life, saw someone so stupid.

‘What in the holy blue dung-shit are you on about – what’s a jab?’

‘Ye know – a jab? Work!’

‘Ohhh! A JOB!’ He laughs his way into a fit of coughing. Hawks up more phlegm. Spits. ‘You’ll not get a jab if you can’t bloody talk right.’

Young Lad glares into the auld fella’s cursed green eyes.

Briefly clenches one fist.

Turns.

Heads for the gates.

The morning is thick and warm as a quilt.

He walks half a mile, maybe three quarters. Sun pooling the road, cutting into his eyes.

Tarmac will melt again today.

He stops at an opening. Cows lounge in the field to his right. Rattle of a distant tractor.

As he danders up the hedge-lined lane, sparks of yellow gorse drink in the sun.

A cottage. Low-roofed. Cowering.

He knocks.

Waits for an answer that doesn’t arrive.

Continues into a mucky yard. Huge sheds on both sides. Cavernous moos bounce the metal roofs.

A woman plods around the far corner pushing a wheelbarrow.

Welly boots. Checkered shirt. Rolled up sleeves.

‘Excuse me, have ye any jabs goin’?’

‘Talk to the boss.’ She nods towards a shed.

As he steps inside, the smell assaults him in waves of dung, animals, straw, damp and mud, and he immediately doesn’t want a jab here. But his mind returns home, the haggard voice from the downstairs bedroom, calling through to the kitchen – that’s ye finished with school. Uhhhhh…no more summers aff…uhhhh-huh…ye need a jab! Must is a great master!

He finds himself before a horizontally-barred pen, with the biggest goddamned bull he’s ever seen, lying in straw with his two curling horns, massive metal ring clasped into his wet nose. Brown. Suede-like. Skits of manure pebble-dashing his legs and belly.

Young Lad glances the long row of pens. Spots an auld fellow leaning on a stick. Heads on down.

‘Excuse me, are ye the boss?’

‘Depends. Are you the taxman?’

‘Nope.’

‘TV Licence Inspector?’

‘Nope’

‘Are you sellin’ arms for Colonel Gaddafi?’

‘Kernel Ga-Who?’

‘I’m only windin’ you, lad!’ He chuckles. One perfect white tooth among the yellows.

‘Do ye have any jabs goin’?’

The boss nods. ‘You’re after a jab? Uh-huh.’ He studies the dirty ground, as though an answer might be found there. Cheeks swirled crimson from a lifetime outdoors.

‘Aye.’

‘I’ve nothin’ at the minute now, but sure, leave your number and I’ll give you a buzz if somethin’ comes up. We’ll be pullin’ apples come September and –’

‘Never mind.’ Young Lad tightens one hand into a fist. Shakes his head.

Stops to drink from a hose on his way out. Doesn’t have a telephone number and can’t wait until September.

As he heads for town then, sweat trickles his spine and it’s a shitter of a day to be turning sixteen and out hunting for a jab.

He passes the off-licence, a place he hadn’t considered.

Stops. Illuminated Harp Lager sign in the window.

Enters to an electronic beep-boop.

Stands in the cool room. Fridges. Bottles. Cans. Fridges with bottles and cans. A smiling man with a short-sleeved shirt, blue tie and a combover, appears from a doorway.

‘Some day! Wha! Ye could fry bacon on the very pavement.’

Young Lad glances around. Knows nothing about alcohol.

‘What’s good fer thirst?’

‘Water.’ Smiles the man.

‘No, I mean, what drink’s good fer thirst?’

‘Water.’

‘No! I mean…’

‘Have ye any ID, son?’

‘Nope.’

‘Well, ye’ll be gettin’ nothin’ in here then without ID.’

‘Is that right?’ Young Lad takes a step toward the counter. Squares his shoulders. Fists clenched.

‘Alright Billy Big Balls, settle yerself.’ The man raises a stern finger. ‘And don’t let the door hit ye on the way out.’ He turns and disappears back through the doorway.

Young Lad finds himself back outside. Breathing in air that is thick like gravy. Squinting.

It was lovely and cool in there.

He returns inside.

Beep-boop.

As the smiling man emerges once again from the doorway, his smile slides off and pools on the counter like melted tar. He sighs. ‘Are ye gonna make me get the bat?’

‘Listen, have ye any jabs goin’?’

‘What age are ye?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘Yer no more twenty-five than I’m Clint Eastwood!’ His face fills with pity then. ‘What age are ye right enough?’

‘Sixteen.’

The man shakes his head. Eyes soften at their corners.

Young Lad looks to the floor tiles. ‘Sixteen the day.’

‘Listen, ye have to be eighteen to work around drink, son. Come back and see me in two years’ time.’

Young Lad clenches his jaw.

‘Here, son,’ the man sets a bag of Salt n Vinegar crisps on the counter. ‘Happy Birthday.’

Young Lad stares at them. This cool place. This gift. Could be heaven. Could be what life was like before his only parent became ill, then cranky, then a monster. And the only way to deal with it would be distance, first by the kitchen doorway, then by rendering them nameless, a non-person. Merely a voice.

‘Thanks.’ He takes the crisps. Pauses by the door. ‘Yer sign in the window is still lit. Waste of electric.’

He walks on up past the butchers. Hairdressers. Mulberry café.

‘Hello.’ Someone touches his shoulder.

He turns to find a kind smiling face, edges of her brown hair aglow. ‘Sure, there’s school finished only yesterday and I’m bumping into you already!’

Young Lad doesn’t really know how to respond. Gives a polite nod. Squints a little.

‘What are you up to today? Enjoying the wonderful sunshine?’

‘Oh, just out and about Mrs. Kincaid.’

‘Well, lovely to see you and if I don’t bump into you again over the summer, I’ll see you in September!’

He doesn’t know where she gets this joy from. Always with the joy. Maybe it’s because she has a jab…

He heads for the doctors then. Didn’t tell her he wouldn’t be back in September, that he needed a jab, that there was a voice in his house that called out and called out and called out.

Young Lad walks up the alley to the doctors.

Pushes the door.

Doesn’t budge.

Stands with his hands out, what-the-hell style.

Spots the sign on the door: Closed Wed Afternoons.

Clenches both fists.

Continues down the alley towards the back of the grey building.

He shimmies a streetlight to reach the top of the wall, which for some reason is cemented with shards of glass.

Carefully climbs over.

Drops into a small yard.

Hunts among the bottles for O2 Oxygen.

Lifts one. No real way to determine empty or full, other than by weight.

Empty.

Tries another.

Empty.

Another.

Full.

He has to set the bottle up onto a metal cage, then climb it himself in order to reach the top of the jagged wall again.

Manoeuvres best he can.

Sits carefully onto the broken glass.

O2 tank across his lap.

Leaps.

Feels the rip into his hamstring.

Strikes the ground. Hammer against anvil. Impact reverberating both shins.

Carries the tank with him then for the rest of the day.

Tries the supermarket for a jab, where they ask for a CV, which he doesn’t have.

The hardware shop, where he has to wait for five minutes while two men discuss how to kill a weed. One weed!

Chinese restaurant.

Even the swimming pool and he doesn’t know how to swim.

Finally, he heads for home.

Enters the house quietly. Sets the oxygen tank on the hall carpet. Moves through to the kitchen, microwave door open, flies zip-circling inside at the light. Beans spilled on the counter, sauce drooling the cupboard. More beans on the floor. Empty, stained bowl in the sink.

‘Who’s that?’ The crackled voice drifts across from the bedroom.

‘It’s me. Who do ye think it is?’ Young Lad moves to the kitchen doorway, his spot, reaches up, fingertips hooking the architrave. Low hiss of oxygen. The bedroom door ajar.

‘Oh, it’s ye. Did ye get a jab or wha?’

‘Nope.’

‘No? Did ye say no?’

‘I did.’

‘In the name of God, how are we supposed to live!’ Coughing. Hiss of oxygen. The voice like a rusted guitar string. ‘I’ve taught ye everythin’ I know and ye know NOTHIN’!’

‘I’ll try again tomorrow.’

‘Yer a fuckin’ idiot!’ Wheezing. Grunts. Something gets knocked over and crackles to the floor. Sounds like spilled sweets. Or tablets.

Young Lad drops his arms. Clenches both fists.

Feels pain in the back of his thigh then. Pulls down his trousers. Small gash. Dried blood.

‘I got yer oxygen.’

‘Oxygen? Huh. Oxygen’s no good til me. I’m done. Another clean shirt will do me.’

‘Do ye need anythin?’ Young Lad is unsure what to even do with the cut on his leg. Pulls his trousers back up again.

‘I need ye…’ Coughing, deep and rattling and deathlike. ‘I need ye to get a fuckin’ jab!’ The coughing explodes. Volcanic. Rasping.

Settles then.

Young Lad listens. Focuses on the oxygen.

Steady would be someone dead.

Undulating, a person alive.

He remembers the Salt n Vinegar crisps in his pocket.

Sets them on the counter. They’ll do the voice tomorrow.

Hears the suck and hiss of lungs drawing containerized breath.

Sighs.

Washes the bowl in the sink.

Cleans the counters.

Empties his two sleeping bottles down the plughole and starts filling them again from the tap, ready for another hot night.

We’ve had plenty of arguments throughout our marriage—five years of it—but then there was the one about the cottage cheese.

I found the container in the fridge and maybe went too far when I held it up to Suzanna’s face.

“Here—smell it,” I said. “Did you buy this just to let it spoil?”

“Stop it,” she said, pushing me away. There was a tightness in her voice I’d heard before—half irritation, half worry. She shoved me so hard that I lost my balance and knocked into the kitchen table where Zenith was napping, causing her to leap off, and claw into my thigh, sending the cottage cheese flying, before darting out of the kitchen.

“Now look what happened,” I groaned, rubbing my thigh. “And I just mopped the floor.”

“Is it my fault?”

“Well, you’re the one who buys this strange cat-tage cheese and then lets it spoil.”

“It’s cot-tage. When are you going to learn English? First of all, it’s not strange. And second, for your information, it’s very healthy.”

“Oh, yeah? What was it the cheese guy said in that French movie? In the history of cheeses, cottage cheese is only a footnote.”

“So what? Who made you the refrigerator police anyway?”

She was right. I had started checking the fridge regularly, making sure no food went bad. Suzanna wouldn’t touch leftovers, and coming from a place where throwing away food was a no-no if not a sin, I ended up eating them, reminding myself that many people in the world didn’t have enough to eat.

The other side of this was saving money. My worry about money—and being able to pay the mortgage—started after the dot-com crash, when I lost my software engineering job. It wasn’t long before the daycare center where Suzanna worked closed as well.

“Suzanna,” I said with a note of desperation, “how many times have I told you that we need to save money? You should buy less of this weird cheese.”

“Oh, yeah? Do you think Dunkin’ Donuts is any better? Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately?”

She hit a sore spot. But she didn’t stop there. She went on saying she was the one saving money. I almost laughed. This was from a woman who once rented a chicken. The cottage cheese, the waste, her tone, made it all come back and I said, “Sure . . . like your egg project.”

As soon as the words left my lips, I knew I’d gone too far. The egg project was something we hadn’t gotten over completely.

I still remember the sound of that van, brakes squeaking as it pulled into our driveway a couple of months after we lost our jobs. A yellow van with a chicken and a basket full of eggs emblazoned on the side. A thought-bubble above the chicken’s head said, “Yes, I came first.”

Two bulky men in white T-shirts with the same chicken-and-egg logo got out. Suzanna waved and rushed out to meet them. They took a large box out of the van and followed Suzanna to the backyard. 

I was used to her buying things online. Mostly odd household or kitchen items that never worked as advertised or went bad quickly. One I remembered well was the tiny, solar-powered mosquito-repelling device that was supposed to emit low-frequency sound waves that mosquitoes hated but seemed instead to attract them.

But this box and whatever was inside was bigger than anything she’d ever ordered. 

I stepped out into the backyard and watched the men open the box and pull out a wooden chicken coop with a live hen inside. My eyes traveled back and forth between the hen, Suzanna, and the men until Suzanna explained that for a hundred dollars we could keep the chicken and the coop for a month, with the option of owning it for two hundred dollars more.

“What?” I wanted to yell out, “three hundred dollars.” But I held my tongue. 

The hen was a puffed-up ball of red-orange feathers squatting in the corner of the coop. I had to admit that the coop was tastefully built, with a gable roof, windows on either side, and a perch in front with a sloped platform leading to the ground so the hen could move in and out. One of the men reached in for the hen, patted her head, and held her out to Suzanna. To my surprise, Suzanna—a city woman who I was sure had never touched a chicken—held it as if she’d known about chickens all her life. She stroked the hen’s head and murmured to her in a low voice.

“Welcome, little one. I hope you’ll be happy in your new home.” There was a softness in her face, something I missed seeing since we lost our jobs.

Then she turned to me. “We need to find a name for her.” And right away she added, “I know, we’ll call her Joo Joo.”

Joo Joo means “bird” in Persian, and I wasn’t surprised since Suzanna was good at picking up words that she liked. 

The hen, cocking her neck right and left and blinking her bitty yellow eyes as if approving the name, let out, “buck, buck, buck.”

“She’s really cute,” I said to the men. “There’s no denying that. But for three hundred dollars, she’d better be the hen that lays the golden egg.”

Suzanna rolled her eyes, but the men grinned politely.

The coop came with a booklet and DVD explaining how to take care of the hen and clean the coop, plus two bags of chicken feed, which they pointed out was organic, and an arsenal of sprays for disinfecting and deodorizing it—all at an extra cost. I wanted to say, “Of course—what’s another hundred dollars,” but held my tongue again.

It turned out that Joo Joo didn’t lay an egg a day as promised. At first it was one egg every two or three days, then one a week, and finally none. By my calculation, the dozen or so eggs she laid cost us roughly ten dollars each. Suzanna, who worried about Joo Joo day and night, thought she was depressed, and kept calling the company, and in the end they came and took away the hen and her coop.

Now, the moment I mentioned the egg project—saying that instead of saving money, Joo Joo had eaten better than both of us and produced nothing—Suzanna let out a loud groan, ran upstairs to the bedroom, and shut the door.

I knew that tone of hers—part worry, part pride. As I scraped up the cottage cheese from the floor, I realized how often a little thing pushed us into arguing about something silly. I went upstairs and stood outside the bedroom door. It was quiet. I cautiously knocked and said I was sorry. After a moment, I said that I loved her and it was my fault things got out of hand. Usually after an apology and a show of affection, things would calm down and we’d make up, but this time, after bringing up the chicken story, I wasn’t sure and decided to leave her alone, hoping that she would read one of her murder mysteries and before long everything would return to normal.

I grabbed a Rolling Rock from the fridge and headed down to the basement to busy myself with the collection of used computers, printers, and scanners I’d dragged home from the swap shop at the local recycling place or bought at yard sales. Cleaning and fixing them was a way of passing time with the hope of selling them and making a bit of money.

I dusted off one of the computers, laid it screen-side down, and was loosening the screws in the back when I heard the doorbell. I started upstairs, but Suzanna was already there. I was relieved to see her, thinking that the bad moment between us had passed. Then I saw them at the door, a police officer and another man, both in dark suits and sunglasses, standing on the front steps. Over their shoulders I could see the police car parked the wrong way in front of our house, blocking the driveway. My first thought was that Suzanna had called the police. Assault by cottage cheese—I could see it coming.

The notion of needing to be wary of the law, from the old country, was still with me, and here living in America, it had intensified during our honeymoon in Hawaiʻi. Suzanna hadn’t wanted to hang around Waikiki Beach sipping exotic drinks like Blue Hawaiʻians or Piña Coladas from glasses decorated with little paper umbrellas. Instead, she’d wanted to go hiking in the mountains behind Honolulu. The day before the end of the trip we went up Wilhelmina Rise to an obscure trail she had somehow found out about. We hiked more than a mile on the knife-edge path to a place where Kaneohe Bay on the opposite side of the island came into view. Suzanna opened her arms to the fragrant breeze and sighed.

“Heavenly,” she said. “What a place, what a paradise. Perfect for the Sun Salutation.” Then she took off her shoes and stood up straight in Mountain Pose, saying we might never be on this spot again and asking me to follow her, because she was dedicating her practice to our marriage. 

I was moved by her gesture and tried to copy her through the vinyasa, but soon gave up. Yoga had never been my thing. Thin and beautiful, she faced the sunset, bending and curving gracefully while breathing in a rhythmic pattern. My eyes and heart filled with desire, I watched, losing track of time, until I realized we’d stayed too long. The day was coming to an end and the sun would soon sink into the sea. We’d have to hurry to get back before darkness descended, and one misstep on the narrow path knotted with rocks and roots would send us crashing down the valley.

Suzanna put on her shoes. We started to walk in single file and had gone only a few steps when she stopped and turned her green eyes on me.

“Do you know what I just thought?” she asked with a smile.

“No, what?” I said, thinking that she’d decided to take her clothes off, lie down beside a bird of paradise bush, and suggest we make love to add to the memory of our honeymoon.

“I’ll bet,” she said, still smiling, “that if I accidentally fell off this cliff, the police would think that you’d pushed me, but if I pushed you off, they’d think that you’d fallen on your own.”

I just smiled, but as time went by, I began to think that maybe she was right and that she had the upper hand. And now there were two police officers at the door.

The man in the black suit said he was an FBI agent and showed Suzanna his badge. Then he opened a manila folder and pointed to a twenty dollar bill clipped inside.

“Ma’am, we’re here about this.”

“Oh, it’s my husband you want then,” she said in a cheerful voice. “Please come in.”

So she hadn’t called the police after all—it was that damned twenty dollar bill. My thigh started smarting again, and I scratched my leg nervously, moving out of the way to let them in. The officers walked into the living room and stood with their shiny black shoes on the blue-and-red Persian carpet that had been a wedding gift from my family to my wife.

“Are you a US citizen, Sir?” It was the officer in the black suit. His tone was calm, but his eyes were obscured behind his dark glasses.

“Yes, I am . . . What’s this all about?” I tried not to look nervous, even though I knew very well the reason they were there. It was the incident at Dunkin’ Donuts two weeks earlier.

The Dunkin’ Donuts in our small town was a hub for retirees who enjoyed the cheap coffee and pastries and, more recently, jobless parents who brought their children there. It had become my habit to go a few times a week, get a cup of coffee and a chocolate glazed donut—my favorite—and sit at a table near the retirees, listening to their conversation, talking about sports,  music, old films, or how in the old days, life was simpler, town wasn’t so crowded and the policemen said, “good morning.”

That morning, unlike other days, I didn’t go inside, since I needed to get a bag of litter for Zenith at Walmart and then go to the library to pick up the mystery novel Suzanna had put on hold. So I went to the drive-through and ordered my usual. At the pick-up window, I handed a twenty dollar bill to a puffy-faced young woman who looked like she’d had a long night. After a moment she pulled the window shut and disappeared. Soon a young man pulled open the window and stuck his head out.

“Sir,” he said in accented English that I couldn’t place, “we accept no counterfeit bills here.”

It took me a moment to realize what he was talking about. My first thought was that he was pulling my leg.

“Oh, really?” I asked.

“Is not joke, sir,” he said firmly.

I was astonished, and to tell the truth a bit excited. I’d never seen a counterfeit, and asked to have it back.

“Why you want it back?” he said. “Is no good.”

My idea was that I would take it to my bank and ask for a good one, but he said the bank wouldn’t exchange it. They would take it away. It was the law.

“Really?” 

“Yes, sir. And if I give it back to you, I need your name, your plate number, and a copy of your driver’s license so I can inform the authorities.”

That was the last thing I wanted. I paid with a $5 bill, which luckily turned out to be genuine, then drove home and told Suzanna all about it.

“Good,” she said firmly. “That should keep you away from that place for a while.”

The events of that day were running through my head. I was realizing that the guy at the window must have taken down my license plate and reported it to the police, when the FBI agent waved the bill in front of me.

“Where did you get this?” he asked. The other officer stayed quiet but vigilant, his hand on his gun.

“I don’t know,” I said and turned to Suzanna. “Honey, didn’t you give it to me?” 

“I don’t think so,” she said coldly.

The officer surveyed the living room, taking in the large flat-screen TV, the art on the wall, and the Persian carpet under our feet.

“Sir,” he said, “What do you do for a living?”

“I used to work for an IT company.”

“You mean you’re out of work?”

“Yes.”

“How do you spend your time, then? How do you earn any money?”

“Well . . . I’m trying to write a book.”

I surprised myself by saying that. Suzanna gave me a look. I couldn’t blame her. I’d been talking about writing a book for more than a year, but every time I went to my desk in the basement, I couldn’t get started. Maybe because Suzanna repeatedly warned me not to write a word about her or her family.

“Hmmm,” I heard from the officer.

“Sir,” he said, “I want you to tell me where you got this bill. We know you were trying to buy donuts with this.”

“Officer,” Suzanna cut in, “I’m sure it came from the bank’s ATM. It must have, because we always get cash from there.”

One thing I loved about Suzanna was her cleverness and confidence. Shifting her gaze between the two officers, she explained that in order to have a twenty-dollar bill, you’d have to sell something—which we hadn’t done. Or you’d have to buy something with a fifty or hundred-dollar bill—and we never had large bills like that—in order to get back a twenty in change.

I was amazed by how she calmly explained this as if she had rehearsed it the night before. By the slight smile on the officers faces as they glanced at each other, I could see that they were impressed by her reasoning.

But the FBI agent wasn’t giving up.

“Sir,” he said, “are you counterfeiting money in the basement?” The serious note in his voice had gone up a notch.

“No, officer,” I said nervously and started to rub my thigh again, the degree of itching seeming to increase with the seriousness of the officer’s tone.

“He wouldn’t know how, sir,” Suzanna said, all smiles. “He wouldn’t recognize a counterfeit bill if you handed it to him.”

She was trying to impress him at my expense. It was working.

“Well––it’s very easy.” The officer put the folder under his arm, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet, and handed it to me.

“Here—feel the texture between your fingers.”

Then he gave me the bill from the folder. “Can you feel the difference?”

I shook my head, and Suzanna grabbed the bills from my hand. 

“Oh, yes,” she nodded. “This one is smoother.”

“Exactly. And not just that,” the officer said, “Look at the edges and the lines. They’re not as sharp and clear as on the real bill.”

“I see,” Suzanna said, handing the bills back to me. “Here, honey, look. It’s so obvious.”

I again tried to compare the bills, but wasn’t sure I could actually tell the difference.

“They even smell different,” the officer said.

I took a sniff of each bill.

“Sweet,” I said. I could see that other officer, his hand still on his gun, listening with amusement.

“How was it made?” Suzanna asked airily, as if chatting with a long-time acquaintance.

“It was probably scanned and printed on a color printer.”

I thought about the collection of printers and scanners I had in the basement.

“Oh, really?” Suzanna said. “I had no idea. That simple!” Then she turned to me with a questioning look. “Did you know that, dear?”

 I shook my head and wanted badly to tell her to stop talking. But she went on as if she were part of the investigation team.

“I always thought that it was done outside the country, and that it was hundred-dollar bills that were counterfeited.”

“No ma’am,” the officer said. “It happens here as well. People try twenties and sometimes fives—they’re the easiest to pass off.” 

I was looking for a chance to signal to Suzanna that she’d said enough, but she kept on talking.

“That’s interesting,” she said. “I really had no idea.” Then she asked several more questions that they seemed happy to answer.

Finally the officers moved toward the door, and I started to relax a bit, thinking they must have concluded we weren’t the type of people to be counterfeiters and they were wasting their time.

At the door, the FBI agent turned around.

“Let me give you a piece of advice. You should check every bill you receive, even the ones from the bank.”

I nodded, and Suzanna said we would certainly make sure to do that. 

We watched them get into their car. As soon as they drove away, Suzanna narrowed her eyes.

“Good going,” she said. “That’s all we needed—to have the FBI show up at our door.”

There was no point in saying a word. I grabbed another Rolling Rock from the fridge and took refuge in the basement, collapsing in exhaustion on the old couch where I usually sat ruminating or watching TV until I fell asleep.

I didn’t know how much time had passed before I woke up and found Zenith, who had crawled out from wherever she’d been hiding, lying on my chest, purring.

“Oh, it’s you,” I said, “the unfaithful. You take her side and scratch me and then run off?” She meowed and rubbed her cheek against my unshaven face.

“Ok,” I said, “you’re forgiven this time, but you better be careful.” She looked at me with sleepy eyes and meowed again. 

The house seemed strangely quiet, and in the semi-darkness of the basement I felt as if I were waking from a monstrous dream. It took a few minutes for the events of the afternoon to come back to me. I was thankful that it was over, but not exactly relieved, thinking that the police might return.

After a moment I pushed Zenith off my chest, stood up, and went over to the desk. I wanted to write down what had happened, thinking it might be a good opening for the book I’d been trying to start. All the gestures and conversation were alive in my head, but when I tried to write things down, it wasn’t the same. I gave up and sat there, thinking. Above me, I could hear Suzanna moving around the kitchen, and it made me think perhaps she was right when she read a few pages of my writing and said I was trying to describe a simple situation using fancy words, and the characters seem wooden.

I got up and went back to the couch. I felt the bulk of my wallet in my back pocket, and as I took it out to lie more comfortably, a thought flashed through my mind. I took the only money I had, a five-dollar bill, looked at it, turned it over, and checked the other side. I smelled it–it smelled of paper with maybe a faint trace of Suzanna’s hand lotion–and then stared at Lincoln’s wrinkled face and sober cast-down look. I couldn’t tell if it was genuine or a fake. Examining the bill, I started to wonder whether I could scan and print it. Just to see how it would go, I got up and plugged in one of the scanners and was about to put the bill down on the glass when I heard Suzanna at the top of the basement stairs. In a panic, I crumpled up the bill and pushed it into my pocket.

“I’m going to the grocery store,” she shouted down. “Do you need anything?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said quickly. I wanted to add, “How about some cottage cheese?” but stopped myself.

“Alright then,” she said, “I thought I’d get chicken for dinner. Maybe you can get the barbecue ready.”

“Okay,” I said. Then I felt something by my feet. It was Zenith playing with the five dollar bill that hadn’t gone into my pocket after all, but had fallen on the floor. She was batting the bill between her paws, stopping and staring, then jumping on it as if it were alive. I bent down to snatch it from her grasp, but she outmaneuvered me a couple of times. I finally got it back, put it down on the scanner, and smoothed out the wrinkles with the palm of my hand. Then I closed the lid and pushed the button. The scanner clicked and sent a blue whoosh of light along its length. I checked the result—Lincoln’s face was barely recognizable.

Alright, I thought, so I need a crisp new bill. And a better scanner. And a good printer. I’d only print a few bills. Just a handful. Enough to pay off the mortgage. Maybe get a new car. My mind was racing. Or maybe just enough to take Suzanna on another trip to Hawaiʻi. I’d get to have a Piña Colada on Waikiki Beach and maybe we’d even climb up Wilhelmina Rise again. 

This sweet winding thread was broken by Zenith meowing and pressing her head against my feet. I rubbed the stomach of my furry accomplice, then decided I’d better hurry and get the grill going before Suzanna came home. 

–George Armwood, lynched

in Princess Anne, 1933

Someone had to see the beautiful darkness

of night passing in silence overhead and still 

reach for the rope. Someone had to find him, 

scared and shivering, barely beyond

boyhood, beneath the bed and see nothing 

but weakness. Someone had to wrench him free

as his fingers fought to hold the bed frame. Someone had to

place the noose around his neck before dragging him 

to face the crowd. Someone had to tie that noose. Someone 

had to bloody his body in the autumn-dead 

corn stalks, had to pull his ears from his head 

to scream sour their hatred. Someone had to 

cut both his ears off, had to point his head 

towards the tree they would be hanging him from, as if bringing

his body to prayer. Someone had to draw him up, feeling the rope

burn in their fingers, had to watch him 

jerk through the violent air as if treading

water in an absence of water. Someone had to bring his body 

to flame, making him, for that moment, the brightest star

in the October sky. Someone had to extinguish him

so they could give him another

piece of their mind. Someone had to hear the rope snap

as they cut him from the branches,

had to feel the melted skin loosen as they pulled 

him loose from the noose. Someone had to sleep soundly 

in their bed that night. Someone had to sleep 

in the trees. Someone had to wash his blood

from their stained palms, watching the last of him 

drain, whispering 

the only lie

that would let them

shut their eyes. Someone
                            had to. Someone had to.

You tell me it began with the word mine. Once

you give a name to something it starts

to be. After we’d made

mine it was easy for words like us and

them to follow. This separated us, so we tried

the word want in our mouths

until it tasted like need, until our tongues turned

it to take. Now, water is soft on the road. Little air

bubbles make a world of it and the sky is eaten

up. You breathe light

and quick. You watch. The miles

of roads. The fields. The ditches of rotting

and regrowth, of cycles all alone. Corn

in rows, a faceless army. We tell ourselves

they are all like this: enemy is not a word

with a name or a family. At home, the live

oak dips its branches back in the earth, a child

playing soldier, arms pulled inside shirt

as though blown off. When you speak

the ground waits for your words

like rain. The world teaches

us about lying and I am lying

in the grass, skin against the sharp,

beheaded blades, wondering how

and when hurt became

another type of language.

It almost always started with women. It was about

covering, something like forming

a home out of dirt, an ash-body. Maybe it was a mask

or medicine, or just desire tucked into ritual. We’d never

even felt permanence against our tongues,

and an infant could tell you that’s the only real way

to know, so we took our only always

and made a mouth of it, tried to taste

god. There was needle pricking, and soot, since it all begins

there, and there was bleeding, of course, like everyone was trying

to make a woman out of themselves, but really womanhood is nothing

like needles, it eats needles, how do I explain pain bigger

than the body bearing it? It wasn’t

needles at first, it was anything that could make

an opening, and the smaller the opening the finer

the details, and the smaller the opening the more

one body could open, and maybe that was the point, to try

to open, or to try and hold more than hands can. It was about nourishing

the deep inside-hunger, mixing ashes into breast milk to feed

each made mouth. It wasn’t always a solution,

sometimes it was just charcoal smeared into the wound. You have to

fill yourself up with something if you don’t want

the bad to come back, and if the hurt gets bigger

than you, you start making a door for it.

I was recently invited to the Sydney Writers’ Festival where I had the chance to speak with many writers from around the world, some of them Guernica friends and contributors. Most of our conversations — around language, literature, and the state of the world — circled back to a communal sense of incredulity: how did things get so bad? 

At Guernica, we often find ourselves looking beyond the news cycles emerging from our imperiled world, but this month we are especially drawn to the moments before the world spiraled into the brutal shape it now wears. In that spirit, the pieces gathered in our June issue examine the slow accumulation of pressures that make collapse, when it arrives, seem inevitable. The works selected here dust away the scrim of the aftermath to look at the before: the compounding assaults that exhaust a mind, a people, a world; the histories that reveal how aftermath is often only the before, accumulated and made visible.

In the latest installment of our Interviews series, Posthumanitarian, After Hunger: In Conversation with Sean Sherman, Russell Reed speaks with Sherman about Indigenous foodways, survival, and (r)evolution. The conversation is an in-depth look toward a precolonial world as a living force that continues to shape our present. Here, the before takes on the many forms of knowledge, relation, and nourishment that colonial rupture tried, and failed, to erase.

In fiction, Ali Hosseini’s The Sweet Smell of Money, begins with a comic irritation that slowly reveals the many pressures bubbling just beneath the surface of a domestic life — anxiety about money, immigrant wariness before authority, and the humiliations of trying to keep a household intact in the wake of financial collapse. By the story’s end, through the quiet accumulation of need, the line between innocence and transgression has already begun to blur. In Young Lad, by Jamie Guiney, pressures gather in a single brutal summer day: heat bearing down on a house, the oxygen hissing from a sickroom, the empty fridge, the boy, just turned sixteen, sent out to look for work. What first reads like a story of adolescent frustration slowly reveals the long layering of poverty, illness, and care that has made the home almost unlivable.

In Kulsoom Ijaz’s nonfiction piece On Loving Birds, the sediment of before gathers in wings, feathers, scripture, illness, and the small practices of care and kinship that teach the narrator how to live again. John Wall Barger’s The Gateless Gateless Gate of the Poem, moves through Zen, Huineng, Keats, Twichell, Lorca, and Antonioni, and asks what art can teach us by unsettling the stubbornness of literal understanding. Here, the prior becomes perceptual, a liminal space where certainty falls away, and what returns does so, as Barthes writes, “at another turn of the spiral.”

This month’s Spotlights, Intentionally Left Blank (Sin Título), by Joonhee Myung, progresses through a sensory archive of hair salons, earthquakes, cacerolazos, kimchi and marraqueta, and the long shadow of migration that stretches across Seoul’s asphalt veins and the Andes’ high altitudes. Originally published in the Indonesia-based magazine Culterate, the hybrid piece culminates in the impossible image of a rootless tree that captures the paradox at the heart of diasporic life: to be uprooted and still be growing.

Finally, in poetry, Origin Story for Tattoos and Origin Story for War, by Sarah Brockhaus, trace a double archaeology of violence and survival, and explore how the body, even when marked by ash, blood, and war, keeps trying to find an exit for the release of amassed griefs. In “Ṣẹ̀kẹ̀rẹ̀” by Hussain Ahmed, grief is not performed but insured, buried, and returned to in dreams, where song remembers what the waking world has tried to cover in dust. In Old Darkness / Under a New Moon and Still Life with Peach, by Ben Cooper, there is a painstaking sifting through of the moments leading up to violation. The two poems refuse to let violence appear as abstraction. Against that brutality, the poems hold open the smallest counterforce: the wish to begin again, even from inside the seed of what has been broken.

Featuring, courtesy of the artists, striking original artwork by: Ayesha Gamiet, Jérémie Guiguen, Joe Oswald, Erik Hadife, Joonhee Myung (JUNOS), and Emilia Rinaldini.

Raaza Jamshed, Editor-in-Chief

An estimated 29 percent of the global population experiences moderate to severe food insecurity. The liberal aid apparatus has responded to this crisis in full force: the second Sustainable Development Goal is “Zero Hunger,” and the World Food Programme has an annual budget of over $8 billion, making it the largest humanitarian organization in the world by expenditure. But when did people become so hungry in the first place?

I spent one undergraduate summer in rural Uganda leading an impact evaluation for an initiative led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), headquartered in Washington, D.C. Across eight remote agrarian regions, I saw varying degrees of malnutrition and food scarcity, witnessing the paradox of the modern food system firsthand: even farming communities often struggle to achieve adequate nutrition. I found IFPRI’s approach to be effective: after a four-day innovation workshop, farmers were gainfully addressing their greatest production challenges through handmade tools of their own creation, many still operating years later with no further intervention.  

For millennia, human societies around the world have managed to feed themselves in a diverse range of environments, some fertile but many considerably hostile. They have done so through an equally diverse range of cultivation practices, building diets responsive to the flora, fauna, and carrying capacities of their respective biospheres. But Western agricultural practices severed this delicate balance with the land, flattening complex food systems into commodities and complex food traditions into obsolescence. This dysregulation, globalized through colonization, made hunger the intractable challenge it is today. No amount of landscape-scale monoculture, geo-engineered crops, nor aid money has been able to address this rupture. And this flawed global food system now contends with a number of new challenges in the face of the climate crisis, while contributing more than one third of greenhouse gas emissions. To the global aid apparatus, ours is a world of hungry bodies waiting to be fed.

Sean Sherman, best known as The Sioux Chef, sees a different challenge. One of the most celebrated names in the culinary world, he has amassed three James Beards Awards and the Julia Child Award across a multi-faceted career spanning a catering business, a restaurant, a nonprofit, and several cookbooks. Unlike other faces of the slow food movement, his practice is not learned but remembered; as a member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe, he works exclusively with ingredients indigenous to the Great Plains region. Beyond its culinary provocation, this approach also channels millions of dollars into Indigenous food production. While his food is intentionally local, his approach is highly replicable; his newest cookbook, Turtle Island, is a guide to localized eating practices spanning the entirety of so-called North America.

Having grown up on government-sponsored meals in one of the poorest reservations on the continent, Sherman sees his work as “(r)evolutionary.” By positioning ancestral food knowledge as a contemporary solution to the climate crisis, he refuses to allow Indigenous peoples and lifeworlds to be left in the distant past. With each bite he serves, Sherman strives to provoke a sense of humility in his customers, revealing through forgotten notes that the world may not be quite as it seems. In this way, he heralds an Indigenous futurism, knowing that change does not begin with empty stomachs but with curious tongues.

— Russell Reed for Guernica

Russell Reed: You grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. What did you eat as a child?

Sean Sherman: We grew up in a segregated reservation system, so there was very little nutritional food access. Pine Ridge is approximately the size of Connecticut, and yet we only had a single grocery store. So I grew up largely with the commodity food program—the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR) foods coming from the USDA, which is just a lot of government-supplied food. Our pantry was filled with canned vegetables swimming in sodium water, canned fruits swimming in corn syrup, gallons of corn syrup used as sweetener, powdered milk, American cheese blocks, tins of peanut butter, tins of government meats like beef with juices and pork with juices, and so forth. 

I grew up out in the country. Pine Ridge Reservation is pretty wide open; it’s on the Great Plains, bordering the Badlands of South Dakota. It’s pretty sparse. There’s not a lot of growing space there. The little bit of growing space that we did have on the reservation was grandfathered to outside growers, so there were a lot of alfalfa and things growing on the reservation that didn’t support the food system there. My grandparents raised cattle, so we had access to beef—but that wasn’t the norm on the reservation. We hunted a little bit, gathered some wild foods, but only a tiny little bit. I grew up in this segregated postcolonial state—if you can even call it postcolonial, because colonization never ended. 

Russell Reed: What did the Indigenous food system in North America look like before European colonization?

Sean Sherman: Indigenous people were living in every region of what is now known as North America, from Mexico all the way up into the Arctic, and people figured out many ways to survive in that vast area. Agriculture and corn culture were central to many people, from Mexico into the Mississippi and Missouri River Valleys, all the way to the East Coast and the Caribbean. There are a lot of heirloom seeds still there today, and a lot of farming tribes still cultivating that land. But it wasn’t just agriculture, as people also held a strong sense of the wild plants where they lived, utilizing nature’s botanical components—trees, roots, flowers, fruits, seaweeds. And the animals, of course, and the birds and insects. 

I like to look at what ancestral diets were, knowing that humans always figure out how to have a balanced diet because scientifically, we’re animals, and we need a balanced diet to survive. We need a way to gain energy, so we typically seek carbohydrates or fats to keep moving. In the coastal tribes of Alaska, British Columbia, and the Pacific Northwest, you see diets coming from pure seafood fats like seal, whale, fatty fish, and birds. When you move further, you see a lot more carbs: acorn across California, corn culture throughout the inland regions. But we had a massive knowledge of plants no matter where we were, and a resourcefulness to know what to do with things—not just selecting prime cuts of an animal, but actually utilizing the entire piece, because we had countless generations of this knowledge. That is true of any Indigenous person on a global scale, and therefore of Indigenous food systems at a macro scale.

Russell Reed: How were these systems fractured through colonial intervention? What relationships were severed, and what was lost?

Sean Sherman: There were plenty of advanced Indigenous societies that had been living across the Americas with abundant wealth for countless generations before colonization. The Nahua, in what is now Mexico City, had massive civilization, architecture, mathematics, sciences, and agriculture, feeding hundreds of thousands of people without polluting their own water and soil. The same was true of the Maya, and there are still over a million Mayan speakers today. The Incan Empire was massively vast and highly organized; every time they absorbed land spaces, they plugged it into their system of agriculture, animal husbandry, and fishing to feed massive amounts of people while attending to the land and holding onto a great deal of ancestral plant knowledge.

Colonialism brought in the mentality of land access, and securing land access for wealth. Colonialism looks at the land as profit, exploiting whatever natural resources can be turned into cash. There was so much diversity that it’s hard to know exactly what was lost. California is reported to have over 200 precolonial languages. It was such a beautiful growing space, so temperate, that you could find food there throughout the year. During the mid-19th century, about 99 percent of the Indigenous population of the Americas was wiped off the face of the earth through active genocide. We will never fully know what we lost with that destruction, and this is by design; part of colonialism is the dehumanization of the colonized, as justification for taking over their land in pursuit of wealth for a small population.

Russell Reed: Through all this exploitation and loss of life, Indigenous communities remain. What challenges do they face securing nutrition today? 

Sean Sherman: There are a lot of challenges to getting healthy, nutritious food among Indigenous communities today. Many reservations have been pushed into very rural areas, often hours away from urban centers. There may be a small town with a Walmart nearby, and that’s where a lot of the money flows. People still rely on the FDPIR programs I grew up with. Not every reservation is the same; some have had more wealth and opportunity, while others are very destitute. Pine Ridge has always been one of the poorest in the country, possibly the poorest. And a lot of the Navajo Nation communities still don’t have access to running water or electricity today. People are surviving off of gas stations and corporate grocery stores with cheap, overprocessed foods. We have become addicted to a lot of unhealthy diet choices just because of what’s available to us. You can’t be healthy off of gas station food. Not in America.

Russell Reed: What prevents these communities from rebuilding their own food systems?

Sean Sherman: We lost so much information so quickly because of how the U.S. government treated Indigenous peoples—forcing us through reservation systems, assimilation programs, and boarding schools, banning the practice of our religion outright until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act finally passed in 1978. They took away everything it meant to be who we were. All of these things wiped away our knowledge bases, which are our own education systems. To achieve food sovereignty, we must achieve educational sovereignty. We don’t need this colonial, Eurocentric educational system that’s only been keeping us back. Plant knowledge, food, and cooking should be really high up there—that’s something we need on a daily basis. We need to completely reframe what we teach our next generation.

Russell Reed: The humanitarian regime has aimed to “end hunger” for decades, pushing destructive monocultures and GMO crops in the process. Yet 29 percent of the global population experiences food insecurity today. What is the alternative?

Sean Sherman: Land access is a massive hurdle. But consider what you could do with even three or four acres—that’s not much land. If a progressive city turned that over, you could build a food forest with Indigenous knowledge guiding the design. Following the principles of permaculture, you could have an extraordinarily diverse range of trees, garden plots, and seasonal harvesting. You could use a volunteer system that helps tend the land, utilizing that educational system to keep things growing. You could bring the fruits of your harvest to a commercial kitchen where you can train people in preservation—in canning, in jarring, in drying. You can create a massive pantry off four acres within five years, which would be a huge subsidy toward the food demands of unhoused and low-income people, anyone who needs nutritional support.

And within those same four acres, you have a living educational system—seasonal, hands-on, for all ages. None of this is in our educational system at all. That knowledge stays in the community, and it grows. Now imagine turning over a golf course. Palm Springs has 120 of them, and they’re in a water crisis. We have a lot of waking up to do.

Russell Reed: After working as a chef for many years, you began to put these alternatives into practice through NATIFS and the Indigenous Food Lab. What has this looked like in practice?

Sean Sherman: I first formed a catering company called the Sioux Chef to implement my vision of modern Indigenous food—removing colonial ingredients and showcasing what was here first. From there, I realized the power of nonprofits to build a team and push things faster. So I’ve built a hybrid—a nonprofit that seeds projects and graduates them into sustainable for-profit LLCs, approaching impact from both the private and nonprofit sectors. We have a program called Meals for Native Institutions, creating healthy Indigenous recipes in heat-and-serve formats for schools and hospitals, because they are typically just getting bags of overprocessed food from Aramark and Sysco. We have an online market finding homes for Indigenous retail products. Our criteria across all of it is always the same: no matter what you’re purchasing, you’re pushing food dollars toward Indigenous producers.

There’s a lot of power in food service that gets overlooked.  I don’t trust what I’m seeing in philanthropy now, with people fighting over scraps. By working across these modes, we’re not reliant on philanthropic dollars.

Russell Reed: Do you consider the revitalization of these pre-colonial food systems a return or a renaissance?

Sean Sherman: I’ve always used the term “(r)evolution” because we have to evolve as humans—we should never be stuck in the past. Indigenous peoples are always treated like something from so long ago that we are no longer of concern. But that’s obviously not the truth, because we’re still here, still facing these modern challenges. So we need to evolve. Boarding schools and segregation came to us not that long ago; for us as Lakota, we were still fighting the U.S. government into the turn of the century. This isn’t ancient history. But we have to break free from those chains of colonialism and that mindset. We need to consider what we want our future to be, what we want our kids to have access to, what knowledge we want to pass down. We see a path through food.

Russell Reed: That brings us to your restaurant, Owamni, which sources ingredients exclusively Indigenous to the Great Plains. Do you consider it a culinary intervention or an economic one?

Sean Sherman: A little bit of both. I use the restaurant almost as an art piece—a place to test out what would happen if we only served Indigenous foods of North America and purchased from Indigenous producers. We have a menu with a massive amount of plant diversity and protein diversity. We’re challenging norms by not having sodas, no decaf coffee, no black pepper on the table, no ranch dressing or ketchup bottles. We’ve been able to build a really strong following off of that—and a lot of curiosity, which I think is a big part of it, because we need to be more curious as humans. We need to want to learn more about people instead of just being content with what we know—popularizing eating healthy without saying, “we’re only serving healthy food.”

But in a restaurant setting, the typical clientele is going to roughly mirror what the population of the city looks like, so most of our visitors are non-Indigenous. And we know that restaurants will never act as a place for food relief, because it’s a privilege to go to a restaurant. To reach the target audience we’re really trying to serve—people on reservations with very little nutritional access—we need to think differently about the impact of normalizing Indigenous food. How much economy and demand can we create around that? Right now, Owamni directs $800,000 a year to Indigenous producers. 

Russell Reed: How does that money promote Indigenous food production?

Sean Sherman: We’re really trying to push resources toward, and create demand around, Indigenous foods—just by starting to bring it into the mainstream. It’s also worth noting that there are a lot of ceremonial foods that people keep very close and very sacred, and we try not to mess with that. Some things can be really sacred to one group and not at all to another, and we try to be respectful of everybody’s independent situations.

But overall, we’re looking at who’s got large production. We’re working with tribes growing a massive amount of corn products, bean products, chilis—so we’re able to utilize those as base staples. And we’re able to utilize a lot of natural wild rice coming out of the Great Lakes, specifically from tribal communities. Minnesota produces up to 20 million pounds of wild rice—quite a bit comes out of this region naturally. The tribal operations we purchase from are paying community members to go out in canoes and hand-harvest, and it’s really special. That’s a unique food to this particular region. So we’re looking at all these regions and showcasing: what would a menu look like if it were primarily using foods from the Great Plains and Great Lakes areas? We’re utilizing as many producers as we can—corn products, rice products, bison, maple—to build enough of a base to show what’s possible.

Russell Reed: When customers dine with you—often having their first truly Indigenous meal—what is the impact?

Sean Sherman: We’ve gotten so many responses, and it’s been really touching. When people have come to Owamni, they’re often pleasantly surprised because it’s so different. But there’s also a level of comfort in all of it, because it’s just clean, good food. There are flavors that surprise them, because we’re using things from the forest. They might catch a hint of cedar in something, and it changes the way they think about food. That was the purpose of it, on the best scale. Some people don’t get it, and that’s fine—everybody has their choices and their palates. But overall, I feel like we’ve really brought a lot of change to people who have come in the doors.

It’s unfortunate that we don’t have more Native American restaurants. We’re working toward that normalization, because we just want to see more outlets for Indigenous foods. We try to support other Native chefs that are up and coming—not just here in the States, but all over the world.

Russell Reed: Of course, there are countless Indigenous cultures, traditions, and food cultures, each existing within unique biospheres and holding unique relationships to the environment. How can a decentralized system like this scale up to disrupt a top-down, globalized food system?

Sean Sherman: That’s what I try to highlight in my new cookbook, Turtle Island. We showcase the massive Indigenous diversity that exists across every region of North America. And we can barely scratch the surface in a book that size, because every region could really be its own book. Which is why I created the Regional Indigenous Nutritional Guide (RING), which looks at every region’s unique ancestral diets. Water is always at the center. Then you have your ancestral guides of what was there before, what people utilized to build those diets, and then what’s available today. You can build this guide for any region, any culture—throughout the Caribbean, Central America, South America, Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand. There’s a massive amount of Indigenous diversity and Indigenous knowledge out there that we haven’t tapped into yet.

Russell Reed: Potawatomi philosopher Kyle Whyte has written that the climate crisis is a scaling up of original colonial violence, and therefore argues that Indigenous people already live in their ancestors’ dystopia today. The end of the world isn’t a future threat—it’s already here. What knowledge do you feel that grants you, as one such survivor, as more and more people face the end of their world?

Sean Sherman: These reservation systems are a dystopian state for us. We might not recognize it, but that’s exactly what it is, because we are stripped of everything it once meant to be who we were. We were fed a different education and a different food system that just made us sick.

As we’re going through these massive challenges of the climate crisis, those of us tuned into Indigenous food production are very aware of the threat—because we’re in tune with nature. We’re in tune with the plants, and we’re seeing things change. Here in Minnesota, the maple season used to happen with snow on the ground. People would have maple camps, they’d boil down the sap, they’d throw maple syrup into the snow and it would freeze on a stick for the kids to eat. It used to happen in late March, even early April. Now maple season is hitting us in early or mid-February. We’re seeing our wild rice beds changing because of warming waters. If you’re connected to nature, you’re seeing it constantly, both locally and globally. We’re seeing it everywhere.

We must understand where we’ve been to understand where we need to go. The more we can do to get people to question these norms, the better. The people in charge of our food systems are in charge of continuing the colonial project—more mining, more logging, more devastation to our water resources. They’re giving all our resources to GMO companies spraying glyphosate all over our forests. Nothing is safe. So we have to completely change the way we think about our relationship with the environment. And really, to do that, we go back to the knowledge bases of the people who have lived in these environments for countless generations, who still hold some semblance of this knowledge. From there, we can grow and evolve again. That’s why to me it’s not just resistance, but also evolution. We have to push back so we can evolve.

Russell Reed: You’ve received every major award the American culinary establishment offers. It seems the institution you critique has embraced you with open arms. Does that mean rehabilitation is possible?

Sean Sherman: I get a lot of attention as a chef, I get these awards—which is great. But that’s just kicking open more doors to make more awareness, because this work has never been about me personally. I want to disappear from all this at some point—my exit plan is a two-person taco stand somewhere remote with palm trees. But right now I see it as a really powerful tool, because it gives me platforms to shake things up. I get invited to speak—”there’s this Native chef, we’re going to hear about Native American foods”—and then I just lay into colonialism and talk about the genocide of Indigenous peoples and talk about how we need to wake up.

Russell Reed: How do you engage with the humanitarian infrastructures that still prevail, even in ruin? Do they transform, or do you build something entirely new?

Sean Sherman: Looking to the future, I see a different way of peeling back those layers of enduring colonialism: looking at how we learn from Indigenous peoples globally who’ve held the key to working with nature, to maintaining an abundance of plant diversity, to understanding how to tend to the earth. We must understand that we’re in a different world—there are probably more invasive and non-Indigenous plants around us than what was there before—but we must still understand how to utilize the world around us. Not just trying to remove invasive plants, but learning how to use them for what they are, and how they might help end our complete reliance on the industrial food system. There’s a lot of work to do policy-wise, a lot of reframing. 

I am a futurist. When we talk about decolonization, some people think we want to go backward. I don’t want to go backward—I want to move forward. The board is set for what things look like right now, and there are some things we just aren’t going to be able to change. Therefore, this is an evolution. We have to think in future terms, not in nostalgia for the past. Whatever is in the past has gone. We have to imagine the future we want to design, and then we have to use what’s in front of us. We have to understand the challenges and the hurdles, and then ask: How do we get a people’s movement out of this? We must go back to the knowledge bases of the people who have lived in these environments for countless generations, those who still hold this knowledge. In imagining this future, we refuse to be left in the past. We refuse to sit at the back of the bus.

“Intentionally Left Blank (Sin Título)” reads as part memoir, part mythography, and part political echo as it explores a life lived across Chile, Korea, Russia, and the in-between spaces that have created a unique diasporic identity. 

Written by Joonhee Myung, and appearing first in Culterate, the work braids the intimate with the historical: the ghosts of political systems and diasporas; the archaeology of teeth and stones carried across continents; and the language of companion species, who act as guides through grief, displacement, and fear. The writing finds its propulsion through a sensory archive of hair salons, earthquakes, cacerolazos, kimchi and marraqueta, culminating in an impossible image that captures the paradox at the heart of diasporic life: to be uprooted and still be growing.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

I Am Not My Hair

At dusk, a shadow dissolves into the dimness at precisely 6:58 PM. Time swells and slips, elastic and insubstantial. When night falls, the cries of tigers, wolves, and crows vibrate through mountains, fields, skies, and winds. Those who left were replaced by companion species. A lone wolf scaling the mountain, a tiger prowling the streets, a crow floating beneath moonlight. Darkness became my friend, eternal and intimate.

When my body quietly decays, forgotten by all, the wolf promises to carry me to a tree in the valleys of Inwangsan, where it will lay me down gently. I will return to the clouds, the winds, the stars. I never swung the wheel of fate, only circled endlessly, longing for those I loved. Time, infinite, finally halts with my last, quiet sigh of longing.

Dusk’s violet haze settles heavily, thick with dust. Somewhere in the sullen downpour, a fleeting rainbow reveals the silhouettes of the ones I miss. As a tree’s shadow, I embroider the path you tread, believing this binds us forever.

I wake in a room filled with the suffocating brightness of midday. 12:22 PM. A dream, a mere dream. In the mirror across from my bed, Mamita dozes under curling irons at the market salon. A local hairdresser, trusted and familiar, someone warm toward foreigners. “She’s kind, and the price is a fraction of Korean salons,” Mamita used to say. “They can’t manage Korean hair, but what can you do?” The stylist and Mamita talk with gestures, hands bridging the gaps in language. “Mi hija, my daughter,” Mamita beams through the mirror, motioning for me to greet the stylist. Groggy, I drag myself forward to kiss her cheek. “Thank you for taking care of Mamita’s hair.”

Salons have always felt foreign to me. The polished hair, tailored to perfection, seemed like a costume for other people. At home, I’d wash away their precision, letting my hair fall wild and natural. A comfort in disarray. These days, I call it “French” chic, others call it undone. I still wonder what the difference is.

On TV, floods and blackouts have swallowed a town. The stylist shakes her head in pity. Mamita, devoted to progress and diligence, grows somber over those robbed of basic rights. If beauty were a fundamental right, I’d gift Mama salon vouchers, her joy as essential as clean water and electricity.

Her freshly curled hair is too tight, too dark, too new for her. Once, short hair for women was scandalous. Cutting mine felt like rebellion, a plea for psychic relief. I failed often. My shaggy cuts and botched trims led me, desperate, to salons in university districts where fashion’s disciples gathered. “Why ruin perfectly good hair?” they’d ask. Walking into a salon meant exhaustion: resistance, persuasion, fatigue.

Now, it’s Mamita urging me. “Long hair makes you look older. Cut it, daughter.” My hair has always been a battleground. I fall back into dreams, clawing at peeling walls.

A wolf’s black eyes meet mine. A vibration shatters the silence: veins coursing, blood surging, the core of darkness pierced by radiant light. “Your blood reeks of histories: empires that devoured, nomads that wandered. Your stammering tongue, your wordlessness, are chains—ours to bear. You will live forever in this cave.” The hammer in my hand strikes, but the walls hold firm.

Asian Flâneuse

To walk unseen, to glide through streets like a ghost, that is the flâneur’s luxury. But I am no shadow here; my presence is like spilled ink on a white page, I disrupt the stillness. I am watched, weighed, measured. Fear coils at the base of my spine. What if I misstep? What if I invite danger by simply being?

Some days, though, something shatters the distance. A vendor selling mote con huesillo grins and asks, “Do you know BTS?” Her eyes sparkle when I say, “Yes, RM and Jimin.” She smiles. “J-Hope and V for me.” A small moment, a miracle, a bridge of laughter spanning the unknown.

Even so, I tread the margins, my feet pricking invisible lines, barriers that exist but cannot be seen. At 40, my strangeness still lingers, a whisper of otherness in every step. Yet, isn’t it always about fear? The fear of rejection, of exile, of never quite belonging? Or maybe, just maybe, it is about love, the kind that holds steady in the face of uncertainty.

I hope for more small incidents, small miracles that show us how we’re not so different after all. A love for Christmas, a childlike joy at the sight of snow, happiness in music, love for peace, the yearning to avoid war.

Teeth, Skeletons, and Archaeology

When a person dies, even if all that’s left are bones, those bones preserve stories. Thin, elongated bones whisper histories of migration, conquest, survival. A single fragment contains universes of possibility.

South America, with its rare minerals and ancient treasures, is a land beloved by archaeologists, anthropologists, and astronomers. My mother, a collector of stones, carefully brought them back to Korea, despite my father’s objections. In the 1980s, transporting such items from Chile to Korea, then to a small, remote town was no simple feat. She carried them across oceans by boat, packed among our belongings in heavy suitcases. I was too young and uninterested to grasp the weight of what my mother carried. The history she cherished, the memories she preserved in each stone.

Now, they are scattered, dispersed with each move. Someone else might treasure these artifacts while I dismissed them too easily. And regret lingers.

As a child, I lived in a village so small the bus came once a day, the grocery store was nothing more than a shack. I call this place my heart’s hometown. The elementary school, a single tiny building, felt vast.

One day, in a moment of carelessness, I used my baby teeth to cut the plastic tip of an ice pop. My front teeth shattered. Blood trailed all the way home. Thus began my painful entanglement with dentistry.

By the time we moved to Chile, then back to Korea, then to Russia, my teeth became records of fragmented healthcare systems. As an adult, financial independence brought its own constraints: I often skipped dental visits, relying on free clinics in emergencies.

Recently, a kind dentist told me, “Your teeth are strong, but they’re not what they used to be. Take care if you want them to last fifty more years.”

What will archaeologists say about my teeth? Worn down by sugar-laden foods, cracked from ice-chewing, uneven from years of neglect. They will study the stress fractures, note how chemical-laden civilizations affected me.

This inability to belong has shadowed my path.

Protests fill my dreams. I wake to the clatter of pots and pans—cacerolazos breaking the night’s silence, voices echoing against the walls of dictatorship. Women dance in defiance. Un Violador en Tu Camino goes viral. I want to join, to raise a spoon, a pan, but my body sinks heavier into bed.

Kimchi and Marraqueta

Childhood mornings demanded rice, soup, and kimchi, even if the kimchi was lettuce masquerading as napa cabbage. These days, with money, Korean food in Chile is no longer a fantasy, though napa cabbage remains rare and tiny. My mother complains, “Tell them to grow bigger ones next time.”

“You look so Korean,” a Korean-American friend once told me in Seoul. Yet, my childhood palate craves not just kimchi but empanadas, puré, marraqueta, and soup.

Memory tastes like these things.

A sudden sandstorm erupts, swirling the world into a single, raging vortex. What remains is only the glow of constellations—

the bed, the window frame, even the moon itself consumed into the storm’s great spiral.

The whirlwind, having devoured all the waters of the earth, drenches the land, gently releasing a single leaf to the ground.

I cling to its brittle edges, transparent, weightless, drifting through the streets. Past the asphalt veins of Seoul, across the endless plains of Mongolia, gliding over St. Petersburg’s Neva River, the towering Andes of Peru,

and at last, the solemn gaze of a Moai on Easter Island.

The vortex, the wind, the sky—it all returns me to a single fragile leaf. The leaf takes root in my body.

I become a tree.

A tree without roots.

“Intentionally Left Blank (Sin Título),” written by Joonhee Myung, and originally published in Culterate which describes itself as “a global digital art and literature publication based in Indonesia … committed to providing an inclusive platform for authors and artists worldwide regardless of age, nationality, or experience.”

The Wild Bird Fund is nestled in the 80s on the west side of Central Park. It is cramped, chaotic, and coops up its volunteers—some disillusioned, many bright-eyed—who are eager to tend to their injured avian neighbors. Notes of public pools, Brighton Beach, and the various fluids that frequent subway platforms waft through the air. Each shift begins with the thud-thud of feet down the stairs to the basement, where we play housekeeper to pigeons: visiting each kettle, replenishing grain and water, swapping out soiled, floor-lining headlines for fresh bad news they can shit on for posterity’s sake. Birds have always been smarter than us—symbols of liberation, teaching us for centuries that we can do better. Defiling updates on deportations and other forms of abject government cruelty, they teach us still.

The pigeons live in rows of “hotel rooms,” stacked floor to ceiling, purring and cooing their days away in captivity, interrupted only by a few indulgent hours of free-range wandering and pampering. We roll them up in towels like burritos to administer DMSA to bring down their lead count, and dress their wounds with gauze and manuka honey. Those further along in recovery get physical therapy—wing extensions, bicycle kicks, and “fly practice”—before eventually returning to their metal-walled suites. I say “eventually” because pigeons are clever. They will taunt volunteers, deploy decoys, and exhaust our every instinct before letting us win.

Upstairs at the facility, there’s an even bigger circus. Ducks and loons splat-splat across their fiefdom, splashing water on us during swim practice in a bathtub that takes up a fifth of the floor. In the back corner is our break area: one round table, just big enough to hold a single cup and bowl. There, I drink my boba, eat my dumplings for dinner, and kick it with the swans resting near my feet—bobbing for greens and cereal in their bowl, pressing into the ground with technicolor bandaged feet that give the Happy Feet Sock Company a run for its money. Occasionally, a quail might escape from its cage and rocket past me, as if it needed to be somewhere urgently. Entirely unbothered, these feathered menaces run the show at the aptly-named Wild Bird Fund. It’s kind of like the scene from Snow White where the birds sing sweetly and make themselves useful, only in this iteration Snow White drops a whole lot of acid and tends to them instead. 

I love birds, man. I love birds so much that my hardwired fear of rodents is eclipsed by my love for them. Now, that’s deep, faithful, and abiding love—because rodents have snouts and tails that make me want to freeze mid-jump until they’ve scurried several zip codes away. You may wonder how I came to this realization. I’ll tell you. One time, a barred owl came into the Wild Bird Fund with head trauma. I was tasked with feeding the poor guy. So, I cut up three baby mice, thinking the entire time, “Hantavirus, hantavirus; dear God, not me in close proximity to hantavirus!” Blame my father for my neuroses. He’s a microbiologist. And I? I hang on every word (although, for the record, I’ve never once worried about influenza while tending to waterfowl, despite being told by him that they’re major carriers). I listened to the bones crack as I clamped the scissors down through their listless murine bodies. I wiggled the blades back and forth until they ripped through flesh and fur, pieces finally falling into a bowl where I mixed them with vitamins and gabapentin. Ordinarily, I would’ve died on sight. But it was for the birds. And so I lived, so I could feed them. 

I love birds more than I hate my least favorite chore. In that basement of loud patrons, I spend hours washing bowls for songbirds, pigeons, and waterbirds—small, medium, and large, always in that order. During this task—a task I end my shifts with—pigeons flutter my way, wings sounding like Windexed rags on windows. They land on my head and cock and bob while I, their dutiful subordinate, complete a task I shamelessly avoid in my own home. 

Before Rita McMahon founded the Wild Bird Fund, there was a point where she housed sixty concussed and wounded birds in her apartment. Love can make you do almost anything.

I love birds because otherwise, I wouldn’t know what else to do with myself. Birds are  utterly astounding and totally ridiculous, all at once. Like this one time in Prospect Park, when I saw a squirrel run up on a red-tailed hawk perched in a tree. The hawk panicked, flapping its wings, fighting for its life to maintain balance. I looked at it genuinely concerned, like: Sir, did you forget that you’re a hawk?! That same day, over by the feeders, a blue jay decided to cosplay as a red-tailed hawk. It let out one scream, and the warblers and chickadees dropped their food and bailed in terror. The jay surveyed the now-deserted feeding station, landed on the tallest feeder, did a smug little du-du-du, and bounced. I don’t think it even wanted food, just the sweet thrill of disruption. Like a petty tyrant in blue—a chaos muppet, through and through.

 I love birds more than I love method-acting the stompy New Yorker. When I’m out weaving through a barrage of tourists in the glass, concrete, and steel of Manhattan, muttering impatiently under my breath, I might spot a song sparrow—0.06 pounds, three inches tall—hopping, twitching, and clanking out a song hundreds of feet big. Then I stop in my tracks. And I become the very imposition I was hating on, people shoving past me as I shout back to the sparrow, “Ya, I love you! You are my whole heart. You know that?” in the same high-pitched chirp.

I love birds the way zealots preaching in the streets love the gospel. I tell fellow Muslims that we learned how to ritualize grief when God sent a crow to show a haunted, bloody-handed, and bereaved Cain how to bury his brother, by scratching at the earth beside him before he knew he was worthy of redemption. Later, when a tyrannical king threw Prophet Abraham into a fiery pit, a little bird zipped over in a frenzy, spilling drops of water from her beak to try to put it out—teaching us that we must do our best to love and protect one another.

I make everything about birds the way people who really love Jesus make everything about liberation theology. I tell people that greater anis live in communes, building and laying eggs in one big, shared nest. No one knows whose baby is whose, and it seems like no one really cares. When the eggs hatch, it’s all hands on deck. If there was a word for reverse-anthropomorphism, I wish Congress could embody it—in the spirit of the greater anis. Because a nation that won’t fund pre- and post-natal care at home but will bankroll the bombing of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iranian maternity wards, schools, and homes abroad has a long way to go in loving humanity.

Birds steadied the hearts of my favorite writers in times of deep deprivation. James Baldwin, living in exile, found solace in them. In “Munich, Winter 1973,” he calls to a lover and makes a bid for connection as he watches birds circling—birds that “have wings and voices / are making choices,” and birds that “are aware / that, on long journeys, / each bears the other, / whirring, / stirring / love occurring / in the middle of the terrifying air.” Toni Morrison, living in a boathouse along the Hudson, loved it best when birds visited her. The journalist Sandra Guzmán, who spent time with her, wrote that birds became a “spiritual wonder” and “darling beings—friends, even” to her—proof that when you watch a beloved love something beside you long enough, their eyes become your eyes. Many people don’t know this, but even bell hooks, best known for her incisive, scathing takedowns of intersecting -isms, wrote ten poems about birds in Appalachian Elegy. All of them are about the great lessons these “small yet mighty” creatures teach us. 

And if I were to stop hiding behind trivia, I would tell you that I love birds because they saved me too. On one of the hottest days of the pandemic in 2020, I spent a couple of hours walking the misty marshes of Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, immersed in birdsong. Then I came home and slept for three days, waking only for a few hours, my mind awash with fog. Drifting in and out of consciousness, my vision blurry, I stumbled through the hallways of my apartment, my hands and shoulders hitting the walls to keep me from falling, drank cups of coffee to no avail. That spell of severe sun fatigue—a hallmark symptom of lupus—finally led to my getting a diagnosis after years of bouncing around from specialist to specialist, trying to piece together what was wrong with me. But I got worse before I got better. Bedridden, I waited months for the Plaquenil to build up in my body so I could get my life back. From the corner of my room, lonely and afraid, I watched birds perch on the branches that brushed my window. Sometimes, they featured as shadows on the drawn curtains that shielded me from the sun. Days passed like that. I listened and watched as their silhouettes shifted throughout the day—mourning doves, blue jays, and cardinals quieting my heart.

When I regained mobility, I immediately applied to volunteer at the Wild Bird Fund. My father campaigned against it, fretting that I might catch Covid from the enclosed air. He painted the birds as villains that would give me a host of infections to my great peril. But I was eager to make up for lost time, for all the experiences I could’ve had, had I never fallen sick. My mom, a psychiatrist, agreed with me, talking all heart as she sometimes does, saying how nice it would be for me to heal another living being after my loved ones and medical team had worked so hard to heal me. 

Have you ever felt adamant about doing something in the moment, only to be struck by an understanding of why, much later? A couple of years after I began volunteering, I realized I was hell-bent on healing birds because they, too, had healed me, in more ways than one. My lupus flares are stress-induced, and hummingbirds gave me the antidote when a friend gifted me a small book about them, when I lost most of my mobility. They are known for being the zippiest, zaniest birds—did you know they spend half their lives resting? Small but mighty, they’ve even been known to step to hawks. Imagine. They are also relentless chasers, drinking half their weight in nectar daily, and rejecting any flower that doesn’t sustain them. During the moments of my illness when I  just about felt like giving up, the hummingbirds nursed me back to health by example. They taught me to be relentless in my pursuit of sweetness, wherever it might be hiding.

Birds are sage, y’all. While we’ve bumbled around on the ground for ages, they’ve ditched organs like bladders (frivolous, if you ask me) to propel themselves beyond the reach of all the things that hold us back from our dreams. That’s probably why we turn them into emblems for our most cherished ideals. And we could stand to be more like them, too. When winds flurry with great force birds have a way of giving in to them instead of fighting them. This act of relinquishing control lets them gain total freedom of the skies, to get to where they need to go. This paradoxical wisdom—that letting go can liberate us, if only we let it—is a perspective I hope to spend the rest of my life learning from.

In my mid-thirties, standing at the precipice of what feels like the halfway mark of my life, I feel more palpably than ever before that time is slipping away. My loved ones are changing. My parents, though dogged in their belief that they can do everything themselves, aren’t as invincible as they once were. And I’m not either. But loving birds has been a grounding practice, a reminder that some things do prevail. Ever since I became the weird bird nerd who evangelizes about them loudly, weaving them into conversations of depth and levity, my loved ones have been loving me back through them, too. My parents wrapped me in a Kashmiri shawl that was hand-embroidered over years with nightingales, peacocks, and cranes; they said it was my fortieth birthday present, given early because they can’t keep secrets, and it’s too nice for an upcoming non-milestone birthday. My best friend got me a soap dispenser shaped like a pigeon that poops suds to commemorate my decade as a New Yorker. Loved ones send me photos of hoopoes, macaws, and flycatchers from their travels, letting me tag along from afar. 

Squawking, chirping, lilting their way through the history of humankind and into the contemporary world, birds spill across the sky in swoops and sweeps, and somehow manage to still my heart. Birds are my way out of isolation. Their noise yanks me out of the closed, spinning loop of my mind’s nervous imagination and back into the world around me, reminding me that I’m not the only one stumbling through the day. There are other small, frazzled creatures just like me, trying to survive in the same unthinkably vast cosmos. Once I’m out of my head, the world feels less like a private catastrophe and more like a brimming, ongoing joke I get to be in on. I exist among other lives I’m meant to notice and commune with, the way birds do. 

It’ll never cease to amaze me that the same beings who walk this earth beside us can lift into the heavens and know the secrets under the sea, teleporting through and between realms only to find their way back to us again. So, while we still have time on our side—fleeting as it may be—let’s love birds, love them madly, take that love as instruction, and extend it to loving one another, too.

I. Volcanoes

On Saturday July 6, 2019, I was working a cash register at Häagen-Dazs in West Yellowstone, Montana when some tourists from India approached to order ice cream. The tourists were speaking Telugu, a Dravidian language from southeast India that I had partially picked up while living in Andhra Pradesh for two years as a missionary. 

I’d just finished my first year of college. I was working more than sixty hours a week, with a second job waiting tables at the Three Bear Lodge and Restaurant. On weekends, I drove an hour and fifteen minutes back to my hometown in southeast Idaho. 

“Bogu nara!” I said as they approached the window. 

They weren’t the first Telugu-speaking tourists I’d met that summer, nor would they be the last, but for some reason they were particularly surprised to be greeted in their native language by a Caucasian American on the other side of the world. No one expects a short, blond-haired, blue-eyed graduate student with a mousey nose and large Adam’s apple from middle-of-nowhere Idaho to speak Telugu, a language that is often referred to by both native speakers and foreigners as “the Italian of the East” (a term first coined by Venetian explorer Niccolò de’ Conti who noticed that, like Italian ones, Telugu words tend to end with vowels). As I greeted them, their mouths widened in shock and surprise. 

They laughed. We talked. They took videos with their phones. One posted to Facebook. 

Unbeknownst to me, sleeping peacefully in the western hemisphere, the video erupted overnight in India. Within sixteen hours, it had 48,000 views. The next day, 150,000. By the time I could post a reply, 600,000. My journal entry reports: “that’s more views than the ESPN highlights of Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic in the Wimbledon final from yesterday.” 

Perhaps because I was a declared pre-communications major, I saw that viral video as a window of opportunity. The headlines weren’t helping my ego either. “American guy wins the internet with his flawless Telugu,” wrote India Today. “American youth speaks fluent Telugu, wows all,” read The Times of India. And in The News Minute: “This American garu is slaying it in Telugu and the internet loves him.” 

Once you’re in the news, you realize how inaccurate it can be. The earliest articles reported that I worked in a coffee shop in New Zealand or a cafeteria in Britain rather than an ice cream parlor in Montana. So, for the first time in my life, I created a personal YouTube channel and posted a two-minute reply to greet my adoring fans and correct a few facts. But let’s be clear: I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. I didn’t have a concrete goal beyond taking advantage of this apparent opportunity and maybe making money somehow. I certainly didn’t know what was going to happen next. All I knew was that I was living my best life. A photo from that summer captures it best: I’m posing at the bar in Three Bear, a slot machine and wall-mounted deer antlers behind me, hundred-dollar bills fanned out on the counter in front of me, and a virgin strawberry daiquiri in my hand. 

Meanwhile, the Yellowstone Caldera in Yellowstone National Park—the largest super volcano on the continent—continued to boil. Hot pots bubbled. Geyser basins steamed. Old Faithful exploded every ninety-two minutes on schedule. And beneath the gorgeous pine trees and canyons of the internet, a geothermal chain reaction was about to blow. 

*

I grew up on top of a dormant shield volcano known today as Rexburg. Founded by Mormon pioneer Thomas E. Ricks in 1883, the town Rexburg, Idaho (population 29,409) boasts a drive-in theater, access to the Teton mountain range, and a small university that has been named and renamed as the Bannock Stake Academy, Ricks College, and, most recently, Brigham Young University-Idaho. If Rexburg has a biggest perk, it might be its week-long October break from school called “spud harvest.” 

About five million years ago, as the North American Tectonic Plate cut southwest to form the eastern Idaho Snake River Valley, an underground pillar of molten rock called the Yellowstone Hotspot seethed beneath what would become my hometown. Rexburg’s last eruptions were about two thousand years ago; the next ones are predicted to occur around the year three thousand. My childhood field trips were to Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, which protects more than 50,000 acres of hardened lava fields and volcanic formations. Roughly the size of Rhode Island, Craters of the Moon encompasses the entire Great Rift volcanic zone and is clearly visible from space, where it looks like an inky black stain spreading across a parchment-colored desert. As a kid, I spent hours wandering those lava flows—cold, windswept badlands of wavy black stone, sparse sagebrush, sloping cinder cones. 

Every March, I shoveled three-foot snowdrifts off our high school tennis courts. In June, I carried twenty-foot steel sprinkler pipes through wet, armpit-high barley fields. I drove a tractor before I had a driver’s license. I watched cellars longer than football fields fill from dirt floor to cavernous ceiling with potatoes. My first kiss was at college. 

Like the volcano my town was built on, that sheltered innocence was bound to explode.

II. Prisons 

Three years before going viral, I knew nothing about India except Gandhi and elephants. I was still a senior in high school when a large white envelope arrived for me from Church Headquarters in Salt Lake City. 

“You’ve been assigned to labor in the India, Bengaluru Mission,” it read. That night, my parents drove me thirty minutes down a highway to eat my first Indian food at Tandoori Oven in Idaho Falls. 

In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, two-year proselytizing missions are strongly encouraged for most young men between eighteen and twenty-five years old. The Church decides where these missionaries serve. I had no idea where I would be spending the next two years of my life until I read my call letter aloud to a living room full of family and high school friends. In a video recording of that moment, I’m standing in front of our fireplace unfolding the letter in eager silence. As soon as I say the word, “India,” the volume explodes with screams, gasps, cheers, applause, and laughter. The camera shakes and chaotically pans the crowd. 

I now recognize that Latter-day Saint mission call-opening custom as akin to the college acceptance letter genre. If you viewed that video without audio, you’d think I just got a scholarship to my dream school. When I watch it now, I can still feel my excitement, thrill, and wonder. I can see the skin on my face, white and dry from Accutane, flush red. But with hindsight, I’m also confused, anxious, and mystified all at once. Just as I can see my former self in the video, I can see my own naivete now, in a way that I couldn’t as an eighteen-year-old caught up in a social ritual. Looking back, I probably should have been both more worried and more informed about India’s missionary history. 

Between my call letter and my departure, I played tennis, worked at an essential oils warehouse, and read Nothing More Heroic: The Compelling Story of the First Latter-day Saint Missionaries in India (who served from 1852 to 1856) by R. Lanier Britsch (Deseret Book, 1999). Written by a Latter-day Saint to Latter-day Saints for inspirational and devotional purposes, Britsch’s work of popular, first-person narrative adventure history did little to challenge my worldview. Then, a few months before I left for India, we got the news. Two Latter-day Saint missionaries had been arrested in Coimbatore—a city within my assigned mission boundaries. 

India’s status as a backsliding democracy is well known. Major news outlets in the United States publish frequently on its rising authoritarianism, censorship, and discriminatory policies, but the centrality of religious freedom to these developments often receives less attention. The state has declared itself secular since gaining its independence from Britain in 1947 and per its 1950 constitution. But from what I experienced as a missionary and read as a PhD student in Communication Arts and Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University, its religious realities are much more turbulent. India is home to Hinduism, often considered the world’s oldest religion, and is a veritable fountainhead for many other influential spiritual traditions like Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. In this context, Muslims and Christians—who belong to majority religions elsewhere around the world—can be particularly marginalized. While once known as the world’s largest democracy, recent evidence suggests that India has since become a violent hotspot for routine and institutionalized religious intolerance. 

In 2023, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom reported India to be a “country of particular concern”—the most severe category—for the fourth year in a row. “The Indian government at the national, state, and local levels,” continues to promote and enforce “religiously discriminatory policies,” the USCIRF report writes, “including laws targeting religious conversion, interfaith relationships, the wearing of hijabs, and cow slaughter, which negatively impact Muslims, Christians, Sikhs,” and other marginalized groups in India’s complex caste system. This assessment has a history of declining religious tolerance behind it. After Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984, anti-Sikh massacres killed thousands of Sikhs nationwide. Almost a thousand Muslims were murdered in both the 1992-1993 Bombay Riots and the 2002 Gujarat Riots. In 2008, anti-Christian rampages in Orissa resulted in nearly 400 churches burnt down or destroyed, more than 5,000 ransacked homes, and the displacement of more than 50,000 people—many of whom lived in government relief camps for months where they suffered continued harassment. While the government’s official death count was 39, most estimates are much higher. Dozens were raped, and approximately 2,000 Christians were forcibly converted to Hinduism. After acquiescing to convert-or-die threats, some of these Christians were fed a “purifying” paste of cow dung before bindis were painted on their foreheads. 

Beyond these severe instances of violence, mundane religious skirmishes also hit the press frequently, and perpetrators (often government officials) are rarely tried or convicted. For example, in 1992, a mob demolished the Babri Masjid mosque. Investigations afterward found several prominent politicians culpable for inciting the mosque’s destruction. Among those who had delivered incendiary speeches at the political rally immediately preceding the incident were Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani and Minister of Human Resource Development Murli Manohar Joshi—two figures closely associated with Hindu nationalist organizations. Scholars and writers in my field often point to politicians like Advani and Joshi as being among the most problematic perpetrators of democratic backsliding and religious intolerance in India. Through their fiery rhetoric and prejudiced policies, they seem to encourage, normalize, and even incentivize widespread religious hostility. 

This was the immediate context for yet another banal instance of Christian hostility, but this time involving two Latter-day Saint missionaries. In early March of 2016, roughly two weeks before I received my mission call to India, Travis Barlow from the United States and Anil Kollipara* from Bangalore parked their bicycles outside a corner market bakery in Coimbatore. They had stopped to get a snack before an appointment with a church member.  

“This random person showed up,” Anil said, when I called to ask him about his experience almost a decade later. “A guy named Immanuel approached us and asked to learn more about what we were teaching,” Travis said. “He asked for a pamphlet, which we gave to him.” I only had a vague memory of this Coimbatore conflict, but eventually I was able to track Anil and Travis down through a series of WhatsApp messages, Facebook friends, and mutual connections to ask them about it. We hadn’t talked in more than seven years, but they both remembered me from my YouTube videos. 

Their incident happened several months before I ever met them. During my years of service from 2016 to 2018, there were roughly 120 missionaries in the India Bengaluru Mission, divided into zones, districts, and companionships across the southern half of the country and bordered by the New Delhi Mission to the north. I only interacted closely with missionaries who served in the same cities and geographic areas as me. By the time I was a new missionary, Travis and Anil were almost finished. We only overlapped for a few months: Travis and I served in the same zone for a few weeks, and I met Anil at an occasional mission-wide conference. I’m not even sure I put together that they were the ones involved in the incident I’d heard about earlier. It was all very hush hush in the mission at the time, mainly just rumors. 

“Soon we were surrounded by at least sixty people,” Anil said. They tried to leave but the mob grabbed their bikes. Someone ripped Anil’s nametag out of his chest pocket. Another held him by the shirt collar. They drilled them with questions, some in English but mostly in Tamil. “Which church do you belong to? What exactly are you doing here? Are you trying to convert people?” 

In the one-minute video that Anil and Travis sent me, the crowd’s voices are harsh, bold, and angry. I can hear traffic intermixed with men shouting. One waves a finger inches from Travis’s nose. Another takes close-up photos of their faces. They circle the missionaries, pressing in around them. 

They’re trapped. 

I ask a friend to translate the video’s dialogue. Someone suggests they search their bags. Another threatens to deport them as early as tomorrow. Travis’s face is drained; he stares forward blankly as if watching a horror movie. Anil, looking young and nervous, tries to stay calm and respond to their accusations. The scene is claustrophobic, blurry, and dark. As I watch it, I can feel my heartbeat accelerate as if someone is adjusting the tempo settings on a metronome to tick faster and faster: beat beat beat beat beat.

Someone called the police, who detained both Anil and Travis at the station for five hours. Travis’s passport was confiscated. A high-ranking official “with a lot of stars on his collar” conducted an aggressive interview. 

“He told us that distributing unsolicited pamphlets during an election season was a crime,” Travis said. “We explained that [Immanuel] had asked for the pamphlet.” 

Turns out that 2016 was an election year for the Tamil Nadu legislative assembly, and Coimbatore is a favorite turf holdout for the Bharatiya Janata Party—the ruling political party under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The BJP (as it’s known) is a right-wing faction committed to Hindutva, a Hindu nationalist philosophy, with close ideological and organizational ties to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS (literally translated as “National Volunteer Corps”), a far-right paramilitary establishment. Travis says he believes the mob were BJP members, affiliates, or voters “looking to make a stand against Christian proselyting in the country.” Anil, on the other hand, thinks they were RSS volunteers. 

This BJP/RSS distinction, however, is thin at best. Religious mob violence in India often has a political-paramilitary component. For me, what Travis and Anil experienced is in many ways representative. Their account parallels what the French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot has closely documented as India’s broader trend toward a kind of quasi-state-sanctioned brutality bent on restricting religious diversity and political dissent. The RSS often acts as a sort of shadow version of the BJP, but the former is rarely held to the same standards of scrutiny or accountability because it’s seen as a grassroots volunteer organization rather than a legitimate political party (like the latter). As a result, government officials can sometimes carry out suspicious or illegal acts under the guise of the RSS and get away with them. But even these phenomena are not entirely unique to India. When I research religion and democracy around the world, I find similar patterns in several authoritarian regimes. They seem to occur whenever leaders seek to suppress genuine pluralism—both religious and otherwise. 

In other words, whether the antagonists were members of the BJP, the RSS, or both is beside the point. What Travis and Anil both agree on is that the so-called “Immanuel” character was “definitely not interested” in learning about Jesus Christ. 

“He intentionally faked it,” Anil said. “It was more like a planned trap.” 

“At one point he said, ‘let me call some friends,’” said Travis. “I struggle to see how they could’ve coordinated between fifty to one hundred people to all show up on such short notice otherwise.” 

Eventually, a local church leader was able to come pick them up from the police station. Travis returned a few days later to retrieve his passport. The mission president emergency-transferred all missionaries out of that area, which remained closed to further missionary work until long after I arrived seven months later. Somehow, through emails and blog posts, I learned about this event before I left for India. I wasn’t too worried about the news, though my mother was. Like many teenagers, I felt invincible. I also never experienced anything even close to that sort of incident during my own missionary service in India. But this Coimbatore confrontation can help explain why I was terrified by the next development of my YouTube stardom. 

*

Shortly after I posted my reply video, which corrected the errant facts with my actual name, someone found my missionary blog. Images of me in a white shirt, tie, and black nametag exploded over the internet. Much to St. Paul’s chagrin (“I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ”) I frantically adjusted my privacy settings, unpublished several posts, and deleted photos. The comments on my videos, which had previously been a gushing fountain of adulation, were now interspersed with lava-hot rage. 

“His mission was to spread [the] gospel of that Abrahamic cult. Obviously he has to learn native language to spread that shit,” commented @harinathvelu84271.* “SAVE HINDUS… STOP CHRISTIAN CONVERSIONS IN INDIA!” @naveenmadiraju66308 wrote. And finally, 

I really admired you when the first time I saw you speaking in Telugu. But I realized your real dark face when I got to know that you are a paid agent for those Christian missionaries. This is actually a good trick to convert people. No matter how hard you try it’s not going work. Go back to history countless attempts were made after all the massacres you did to Hindu people still you did not manage to convert us and this should make you realize that Hinduism is something that you cannot destroy. I hate u.

– @MadhavCheruku79231 

I was surprised how the burst of anti-Christian sentiment affected me. My neck veins pulsed, and my palms sweat as I read through the comments. Still, this appeared to be a minority view, at least among my 50,000 subscribers. More often, I was getting comments like: “your Telugu is very cute sir,” “you almost sound like a native,” “this is the wholesome content I didn’t know I needed in my life!” and “marry a Telugu girl!” Or even: “whenever I hear Telugu from his videos, I forget all my sorrows!” At least a half a dozen people dubbed me the unofficial Telugu “brand ambassador” to the world. “I really love to hear Telugu from people whose mother tongue isn’t Telugu,”@tejasvemuri58144 wrote. 

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my channel had quickly become another microcosmic battleground for democratic religious pluralism in India. Christians commented things like: “I remember that you used to visit the Arilova Colony & Dwaraka Nagar areas visiting God’s people. I am residing in Arilova colony and seeing Latter-day Saint believers. May God bless you & use you mightily,” from @arvindkesava41726. To one of the aforementioned anti-Christian comments, another user replied: 

Christianity preaches ‘love’ and ‘forgiveness.’ Do you think preaching these things India gets spoiled?!? Does your religious priests preach you to ‘hate’ someone and ‘kick off’ someone ruthlessly without a reason? My God! Are you serious! Though I am not in a support of any religion… I don’t find any reason why do some people hate Christianity and bring it to limelight by themselves. Learn to respect every religion and faith, imbibe the values taught by any religious holy book, instead of hating the worthy! NOTE: *Article no. 25 to 28*: Every citizen of India has a right to practice and promote their religion. 

After about a week of this, TV5 News in India offered to interview me on live primetime television. I accepted on the condition that they not ask any questions about religion. They complied and streamed the interview to their six million viewers. By this point, Telugu tourists in Yellowstone were showing up at the Three Bear Restaurant and Häagen-Dazs just to take selfies with me and post them online. One day, I sat down in the West Yellowstone Public Library and spent hours copy-and-pasting a generic reply to every single Facebook direct message I had received. Lakshmi Manchu, a Telugu movie star with 1.8 million followers on Instagram, posted about me: “his Telugu is better than mine.” Before I knew it, I had been offered an all-expenses-paid trip to Dallas for the North American Telugu Association Convention. They wanted me to help welcome Jagan Mohan Reddy, then Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, to the stage. 

During my sheltered childhood in the shield volcano of Rexburg, I’d had little exposure to politics. I attended a town council meeting as a Boy Scout once. In fact, I’m not sure I was even thinking about “politics” when I got invited to the convention. Like any starry-eyed first-year college student, I was just thinking, cool. Free trip to Dallas? Cool. Big Telugu convention? Cool. Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh? Cool. Sign me up! So they did. 

Prior to the convention, they sent me a script that I recited for a promotional video advertising the event. I knew nothing about CM Jagan, nor did I think twice about the potential repercussions of declaring “Jai Jagan!” on YouTube. I’d seen his face plastered over the cities where I served. I’d even happened to be at an airport at the same time as him once, and I remember watching him break free from swarms of fans to catch his flight. I posted the convention’s video, but my lungs caught in my ribs as soon as I saw the first comments. Surprise: Jagan has a controversial backstory. His father was also a former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh who died in a mysterious helicopter crash in 2009. In 2012, Jagan was imprisoned for embezzlement. While in jail, he went on a hunger strike protesting the creation of a separate Telangana state. He was eventually hospitalized for low blood sugar and, seven years later, went on to serve a five-year term as CM from 2019 to 2024. And he’s a Christian. 

“Y.S. Jagan is not good and he was in prison 16 months. If something happens in the future, you will also get arrested.” 

“Isaac what is your hidden agenda? Are you planning to spread Christianity? Jagan is a robber and highly corrupted person.”

“I am staying in Memphis Tennessee if you came for any vacation I will meet you here. So sweet and proud of you.”

“Isaac Richard the guy who fooled us all with his Telugu skills and later turned out to be a missionary agent meets Jagan in Dallas. Very cleverly planted by Jagan & Co.” 

“Oh my God oh my God oh my God I’m your biggest fan.” 

“Isaac just ask google who is the most corrupted politician in AP.” 

“I don’t know whether it is right or wrong to say this… but I have to say this. I love you.”

“With YS Jagan at the helm of affairs in Andhra Pradesh these missionaries will rapidly try to make AP another Kerala!”

“One missionary meets another missionary!” 

“I am disgusted that you are promoting corrupt politicians on your channel. You lost a subscription today :)”

“Even though I am BJP supporter YS Jagan is our CM for 5 years we should respect him.”

Scrolling back through my WhatsApp messages now, I find a thumbnail for a video that is no longer available. The caption in Telugu reads: “Conspiracy things that foreign Christians do in our country to convert people’s faith.” My friend’s message below says, “He wants to shut down our church in Vijayawada and arrest you.”  

III. Missions

The academic research on missionaries and democracy is mixed. Several studies have argued that missionaries are good for democracy because they promote religious liberty and mass literacy. Among these is Robert D. Woodberry’s article, “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy,” published in a 2012 issue of American Political Science Review. “This article demonstrates historically and statistically that conversionary Protestants (CPs) heavily influenced the rise and spread of stable democracy around the world,” it reads. But a follow-up article in the British Journal of Political Science by Elena Nikolova and Jakub Polanski attempted to replicate Woodberry’s analysis with different measures and over a longer timespan; it showed a statistically insignificant relationship between missionaries and democracy and was published with an equally provocative title: “Conversionary Protestants Do Not Cause Democracy” (2020). Empirically, the relationship between missionaries and democracy appears to be at an impasse. 

I think, however, that there’s an obvious reason for this discrepancy. The relationship needs to be inverted. It’s not that missionaries are good for democracy per se, but that democracies are the only countries that continue to allow missionaries. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Whether missionaries promote, encourage, or facilitate democracy is a moot point—democracy enables missionaries in the first place by protecting religious freedom and supporting tolerant pluralism. In that sense, the presence of missionaries in a country can be an index of the country’s democratic nature, but not enough to prove causality. Missionaries and democracy are two sides of the same coin. Missionaries can be a litmus test, so to speak, for the strength of a democracy, or an indicator of its shift toward authoritarianism. The fact that India permits missionary visas today should be a cause for hope. 

To be sure, the question of historical missionaries and contemporary missionaries already boggles comparison. Early missionaries were veritable engines of colonialism, and the territories they entered were not democracies in their eyes. Think of William Carey, one of the first missionaries to India, who wrote An Inquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen (1792). But perhaps that’s why the vectors in the two studies (Woodberry versus Nikolava and Polanski) push in different directions once they are differentiated by a longer time span. Receptivity to missionaries several centuries ago probably did make a region more likely to adopt a liberal democratic political structure after it gained independence from its colonizers, but today, countries that resisted or evaded European colonization are less likely to receive missionaries or be democracies. Perhaps the only thing that scholars of missiology agree on is this: missionaries were good for language and literature. Missionaries were among the earliest translators to acquire remote languages, and many texts exist only in missionary records. 

When I set out for southeast India as an eighteen-year-old Latter-day Saint missionary in the twenty-first century, which vision was I living? Was I, by preaching Christianity as part of a religious and ethnic minority in Modi’s India, a champion of tolerance, pluralism, and freedom? Or was I just a contemporary incarnation of British imperialism, another white savior blinded by orientalism and socially conditioned to force Western, Judeo-Christian norms onto a vulnerable indigenous population? 

I’ve only been home for seven years, but it’s hard to describe the chasm of cognitive dissonance between how I feel about my mission and how higher education has taught me to view it. As a missionary, I saw myself as a force for good. I helped people overcome harmful addictions, reconnect with estranged family members, nurture their commitment to moral values, find a religious community, and discover renewed spiritual meaning in life. Only later, in college, would I acquire vocabulary I didn’t have at the time—terms such as cultural appropriation or whiteness—that would help me better recognize my place in India’s postcolonial history. 

I now understand that some people, perhaps including most readers of essays like this one, find missiology to be intolerant and problematic rather than positive and pluralist. That’s a view I completely respect. There are plenty of valid things to critique about missions. I’m certain that I caused some harm as well as good, just like any humanitarian or service effort. But even still, no amount of critical theory seems to change the special place that those two years hold in my heart. I’m still connected to many of the friends I made in India. We call and message each other for life updates. One family that I baptized was absolutely thrilled to tell me that their son had received his own mission call to New Delhi. He’ll be sharing in his home country the same message I shared as a foreigner. What I dream of, then, when I think about what Jürgen Habermas called “the postsecular society,” is a foggy middle path. I’m not willing to fall for the false choice between religion and democracy simply because either feels like more solid footing than walking the tightrope between them. 

*

My friends in India often tell me that YouTube views don’t do justice to my popularity; I really went viral in Facebook groups and WhatsApp channels, where my videos were downloaded, circulated, and shared. Dozens of Telugu content creators capitalized on my fame. In the early days of my channel, I submitted privacy complaints and copyright claims so others couldn’t steal and repost my videos. Still, I’ve been meme-ed, parodied, remixed, and more. I still get hundreds of strangers wishing me happy birthday on my Facebook timeline every year. I get emails and messages almost every week asking me to post videos again. At the time of this writing, I have posted twenty-five original filmed and edited videos for a total of more than 40,000 watch hours, 1.4 million views, and 15.5 million impressions. By monetizing my YouTube channel and running ads, I also earned around $400 total over a two-year period. Pay-per-click in India is roughly 0.20 rupees, or less than a penny. 

In my recap video from that 2019 trip to the North American Telugu Association convention in Dallas, I shake hands with children and pose for group photos like a natural media personality. Still, there’s something slightly uncomfortable about watching myself being greeted by hundreds of adoring fans after my speech. As a current PhD student taking seminars on rhetoric and communication, I’m more aware than ever that part of my viral appeal was my race, gender, and nationality, which resonated with a hegemony of mass media and commercial products bent on exporting American ideals to other countries. My YouTube channel, named “Telugu Marchipokudadhu” (“Don’t Forget Telugu”), not only exemplified the tensions of religious pluralism and democracy in India, but also embodied the paradoxes of globalism. Somehow, the internet has both made other cultures closer than ever before, while also collapsing and reinscribing them within one larger, increasingly homogenized culture.

These days, most Indians grow up learning and speaking English. Scholars have predicted that more than half of India’s 780 languages will die out within the next fifty years—that’s 400 dead languages. When I promoted pro-Telugu content within a larger system of language assimilation in India, perhaps my embrace of a local dialect hit a special nerve in a country beset by language loss and largely run by Hindu nationalists in a period of cultural retrenchment. Viewers who watched my videos saw a foreigner not only speaking, but appreciating and valuing their mother tongue. To see my videos was to see a message contrary to mainstream propaganda—to see one’s culture celebrated by an American “other.”  

My experience wasn’t even really that new. In 2014, a group of four Latter-day Saint return missionaries who served in the Philippines noticed a lack of family-friendly content in the Filipino language Bisaya and posted their first YouTube video. Their channel, The Hey Joe Show, named after the Filipino nickname for Americans, ended up garnering some fifty million views. They wrote a song, “My Morena Girl,” that reached number three on the Filipino national chart. As international heartthrobs, they returned to tour and perform in the Philippines, where young girls chased their van and kissed its windows. But the question remains: does The Hey Joe Show contribute to diversity and intersectionality by filling a void of Bisaya content and connecting white and Filipino audiences, or does it simply reinforce cultural hegemony?

I first encountered the Hey Joe Show in my Communications 101 class the spring semester before I went viral. I later learned that my professor replaced her Hey Joe Show clip with my first Telugu video the following semester. Our textbook was titled Converging Media: A New Introduction to Mass Media by John V. Pavlik and Shawn McIntosh. Convergence, the word they use to describe our global media landscape, is the same word for the phenomenon that forms volcanos. Convergent boundaries are where two tectonic plates collide. This, I think, is one thing that globalization and the internet have done: placed “the self” and “the other” in a subduction zone. That subduction zone is also where the messy realities of religious freedom and democracy play out. 

Personally, I found my mission experience to be neither as vicious nor as glamorous as the YouTube comments on my videos made it sound. At the time, I certainly didn’t see myself as a liberator of Christian minorities or a villain of cultural imperialism. In many ways, it was rather mundane—not that this ordinariness made it any less mired in ethical quandaries. Every day, I got up at 6:30 a.m., studied the scriptures for two or three hours, and then spent the rest of the day knocking on doors; teaching thirty-minute lessons to church members, their interested friends, or relatives; or teaching free English and piano classes. Other hours were spent attending church or other missionary meetings. Every night I went to bed at 10:30 p.m. only to repeat my schedule the next day. I observed strict missionary rules (no television or swimming) and spent a lot of time praying, fasting, and looking forward to my weekly “preparation day” when I could email my family from an internet café for a maximum of one hour. 

To talk legally rather than ethically, proselyting in India is certainly not illegal unless it involves bribery or coercion (laws leftover from British rule). I chatted with anyone who seemed eager or at least willing to talk to me, usually learning a bit about their beliefs before asking if I could share a message with them. I didn’t push it if they weren’t interested. Conversion is still the goal of Latter-day Saint missionary work, but the barriers to entry are so high that people rarely get baptized unless they are seriously committed to the church, typically after conducting sustained periods of investigation by attending weekly services and reading church publications. In my experience, few people are willing to give up coffee, tea, alcohol, tobacco, pornography, pre- or extra-marital sex, and ten percent of their annual income, not to mention Sundays every week, simply in order to join a new religion. Informed consent wasn’t really an issue. 

But I also cringe when I think about some of the attitudes I held as a missionary. I wish I would’ve listened more. I wish that eighteen-year-old me, posing to imitate a Buddha statue in a photograph, would’ve thought about how he wanted his own religious tradition to be treated. I wish I would’ve realized sooner that perhaps I needed India much more than India needed me. How else does one learn tolerance, cross-cultural connection, and respectful communication across difference without directly encountering radical others? And isn’t that the essence of democracy? 

I’d like to think that my time in India changed me, and not just in the ways my church may have hoped or expected. I’d like to think that, somehow, I was soaking up the ancient wisdom in the air, that spiritual confluence of global religions shimmering on the street—from the Sanskrit Vedas to the rishis. I came back with a yoga-like flexibility from sitting on the floor every day, and I developed at least some of the meditative calm necessary to enjoy the view inching by me while I sat on a bus in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I hope I learned the essence of namaste: to salute the divine in others. To respect, and even embrace, difference. 

I’ve shed many naïve beliefs I held as a missionary, but some of my commitments to other principles—like pluralism and religious freedom—have matured and only grown stronger. These days, I’m trying to advance those causes through my PhD studies. Isn’t that the deepest sense of the word mission? Discovering a sense of purpose, ambition, or calling in life? At eighteen, I was called on a mission to India by my church, but ever since then I’ve still been trying to figure out what it might mean to truly answer that call. 

Several sources indicate that Telugu is one of the fastest growing languages in the United States. Emory University now has an endowed chair for Telugu Studies. I recently received a grant from Penn State to hire a tutor and continue learning Telugu. At the end of one of my interviews with a potential tutor, she asked if she could take a selfie with me because she recognized me from my videos. I’ve stopped posting videos for several years, though I’m not entirely sure why. I still might post again someday, but what happened to the Hey Joe Show happened to me. I grew up, grew out of my shenanigans, and moved on. I got married, prioritized my new family, got busy, and focused on school. My viral YouTube fame faded into memory. 

From my vantage point as a graduate student in the United States, religion clearly appears to be having a moment. The 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Survey revealed that 92% of U.S. adults believe in either a spirit or soul, a God or higher power, a spiritual reality, or an afterlife. Last year, the New York Times officially launched its “Believing” Project—a landmark subscription column giving voice to the myriad ways that people experience religion and spirituality today. The fall of the Twin Towers represented a watershed in what literary studies scholars like Lori Branch, Mark Knight, and Amy Hungerford have been calling “the postsecular” for a quarter century now. Many other scholars, like Talal Asad in Formations of the Secular and Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, have argued that the secularization thesis—the gradual death of religion and triumph of rational science—hasn’t proven to be true, at least in the West. The United States was founded by pilgrims seeking religious freedom, and the language of Christianity pervades its founding documents. As a nation, it has been grappling with the stubborn persistence of religion ever since. 

As a missionary, I found myself smack in the middle of this historical moment even though I was completely unaware of it at the time. I’m also convinced that postsecularity isn’t unique to the U.S. context. What I have come to call “contentious religious democracies” demonstrate the challenges of pluralism in a postsecular age, and they appear in several places around the world. Authoritarian-minded leaders often leverage these national origin myths for populist and rhetorical purposes. Still today, religion and democracy keep colliding with one another in ways that I couldn’t see when I was flying from Idaho to India in the summer of 2016. 

The volcano, the prison, and the mission—even these three metaphors are not enough to do justice to the geopolitical complexities introduced by late modernity and the internet. But each metaphor is true. Like a volcano, no one chooses where or what tradition they are born into. The flow of time and history shapes all—erupts, cools, crusts, collides, and carves our world. The prison can represent the impulse to resort to force or violence, rather than speech, when navigating human differences. But I’m convinced that a personal and collective sense of mission against that instinct can help protect democratic ideals like pluralism and religious freedom. A commitment to accepting diverse others, to tolerating the preachy and the intolerant, is one hard doctrine that such political systems demand. And while missionaries may not cause or create democracy, a democracy that denies missionaries fails its own test. 

When I want to remind myself of the messy complexities that constitute the everyday, lived realities of globalization, I pull my box of missionary keepsakes from a shelf in my closet. There are two traditional Indian lungis in there, one checkered and one with a floral pattern. I’m always unsure whether wearing them constitutes cultural appropriation, or how many years one must spend in a place to internalize its culture ethically. Next, there’s a mug that two of my friends gave me after they chose to be baptized, screen-printed with images of us together and embossed with words like “memories” and “love you” next to my name. For me, that mug, and the fact that most of my Indian friends never did join the church, represents the way individual human relationships transcend intellectual categories—not missionary or Hindu nationalist, not radical or fundamentalist—but the friendship that results when two people treat each other as equals, whether they have cultural or ideological differences, or not. Then there are my scriptures coated in ink, highlights, and notes, representing my own Christian background and my teenage ethnocentricism (in hindsight, I wish I would’ve spent some of that time reading the Bhagavad Gita, as I’ve done since and been changed by). Finally, a notebook titled “White Handbook Principles” attempts to distill the copious mission rules into ethical generalizations rather than categorical dos or don’ts. Perhaps that’s early evidence of the tensions I faced while trying and failing to live my own moral values perfectly. So much of the complexity that accompanies missiology, religious freedom, and the paradoxes of liberal democratic tolerance—from globalism to nationalism to patriotism to multiculturalism to pluralism—can be found in that single cardboard box: handwritten thank-you notes, an Indian flag, and a veshti woven of white and gold.

* Pseudonyms have been used. 

In “Cupid’s Bow,” a husband’s altered touch unfolds into a journey through folklore and myth, where a woman confronts the logic that has bound her to a life she no longer recognizes as her own. Written by Pingali Chaitanya and translated from Telugu by P. Samata, the story draws on the Vikramarka–Betala cycle, a classical corpus of South Asian tales in which a king carries a wily spirit who poses riddles about morality, identity, and justice.

Appearing first in The Bombay Literary Magazine, the very cadences of the Telugu language – its intimacy with the body, its textures of domestic life, its easy movement between the sensual and the philosophical – work to unsettle the story from within. Against the authority of inherited narrative, the woman refuses both riddle and answer, rejecting the primacy of reason and insisting instead on the knowledge of the body, desire, and lived intimacy. In choosing to write her own ending, the woman steps beyond the script itself, and in the recognition of that choice rests the story’s quiet revolution.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

Lost in reverie, she did not notice the fire in the stove sink into ash. Startled, she thrust in a bundle of dry palm leaves, riddled with white ants. The flames sprang up, hissing. Tapa dubu chita pata — the leaves crackled, as though a riddle was being whispered between Vikramarka and Betala, the legendary king and the wily spirit from the old folktale.

‘What am I to do?’ The question circled in her mind, stubborn as smoke.

She sat in her chuttillu — the open courtyard kitchen — watching the pot. A few yards away, at the well, her husband was bathing. He called out to her, asking her to scrub his back. A hot wave of irritation rose in her chest. Still, she left the stove.

From the lintel of the chuttillu, she took the small packet of almond leaves she had tucked away the night before. With a sudden gesture, she tossed it into the fire. The edges curled, the green turned black, and soon the veins of the leaves and the withered kanakambaram flowers inside were swallowed by the flames.

She caught the edge of her sari pallu in her mouth and folded to the ground before the stove, eyes fixed on the fire devouring the flowers.

Those kanakambarams had been picked by him.

Every evening, once her mother-in-law had strutted off to the village square, hungry to gossip, eager to boast, her husband would dart into the courtyard, gather the flowers, strip plantain fibres, and braid them into a garland. When she lay down at night, he would place it in her hands, a gift wrought in secrecy.

She never wore the garland in her hair. Instead, she stretched it long and wound it around his neck. On his dark, glistening skin, the blossoms glowed like a string of coral beads. By dawn, those same coral beads left tender imprints across the pale skin of her throat.

But last night, his fingers faltered. The stalks were broken, the garland was loose, hurried, careless. It was not the flowers — it was the lost craftsmanship, the fading laghavam, the lightness that once played in his touch, that unsettled her. Morning came, and her neck bore no coral traces.

Her hand moved absently to her throat as she stared at the burning garland. From the well came his voice again, sharper now: ‘How long?’

Her anger flared. She did not answer. Rising swiftly, she turned her back on the kitchen, the courtyard, the well, and walked towards the forest.

It was the nineteenth day after the new moon. Clouds stretched across the sky, and shallow rain-pits on the ground marked where showers had fallen earlier. She walked on, stepping across them. As dusk thickened, a chill began to set in, but she did not slow her pace.

Suddenly, lightning tore through the heavens. For an instant, the darkened path was revealed in a burst of white, then vanished again into shadow. She paused briefly, then pressed on. A drizzle began to fall. She had set out without a rug or an umbrella, yet she did not turn back. The rain grew colder, the air sharper. This was a journey out of one story and into another, and though its path was strange, the cold was still cold.

The drizzle thickened, turned to rain, and she moved through it as though inside a dream. But in truth, the entire escapade had begun with rain.

It was midnight on that day too. Her husband was already asleep when the rain first tapped on the roof. She felt the moment was enough—garland or no garland. Drawing close, she embraced him from behind, her fingers gently stroking his curly hair, thick as clustered black clouds. He stirred, turned towards her. She slipped her palm into his.

But at once she recoiled. These were not the fingers she knew. Once, her hand had cradled into his so completely that their entwined fingers looked like the stripes on a squirrel’s back. Now, she could not hold his hand at all.

She rose, lifted the wick of the lamp, and carried its glow to the bedside. He looked at her questioningly. ‘What is it?’ The same familiar eyes smiled back. Yes, it was her husband. The flame faltered, trembled. She lay down again, but sleep did not come. He, however, drifted easily into slumber.

Once more she rose, raised the wick, and examined his fingers. In the dim light, they seemed unchanged. Weren’t these the same deft hands that picked kanakambaram blossoms at lightning speed, never once breaking a stalk? Were these not the same rough hands that scrubbed laundry against stone, softened by some secret grace?

Still holding the lamp, she let her gaze wander to his legs. On other nights he would sleep curled around her, his body a sheltering arc, her legs nestled against his. Now, even as she sought them, she felt no contact.

She brought the lamp close to his face. Yes, it was her husband. Even in sleep, he smiled. How handsome he looked. She set down the lamp and lay beside him once more.

But sleep refused her all night.

At dawn, when he called her to scrub his back at the well, her unrest overflowed. She could bear it no longer. And so she set out to seek Betala, who had entangled her in this riddle, and Vikramarka, who had deepened her wound, sprinkling chilli on an open sore. She resolved she would not leave them until she had her answer.

By the second night, she found Vikramarka in the forest. At first, the king could not fathom who she was or why she had come. Alone, seething, at that hour of night. He suspected she might be kin to Betala. He asked her to confirm his doubt.

She hesitated. Should she confront him now? Or should she draw them both — Betala and Vikramarka — into her snare at once? She chose the latter. Steeling herself, she said, ‘Raja Vikramarka, I am a married woman. I have come for your help. You must take me to Betala.’

Vikramarka did not know whether to laugh or to sigh. For eighteen nights he had been burdened with a single task: carrying Betala down from the tree, listening to the ghost’s endless riddles, answering each one correctly, only to see Betala climb back to his perch. He himself had not succeeded; what help could he offer her? Yet he remembered his duty. A king must never deny a woman’s plea. And besides, he was tired of Betala’s nightly games, and the thought of walking in a woman’s company, even for a change, appealed to him. So he agreed.

They walked a few miles in silence. She did not utter a single word along the way. Vikramarka tried to start a conversation, but it was of no use. At last, they reached the tree.

As always, Betala dangled upside down, his tail knotted to a branch. Vikramarka climbed up, lifted him onto his shoulder. But tonight, Betala’s gaze caught on the woman waiting below. Raising himself halfway up from the king’s shoulder, he hissed, ‘Raja, who is she?’

Before Vikramarka could answer, she cut in. ‘Ask me, I will tell you. What does Vikramarka know?’

Vikramarka stiffened at her tone. Such blunt irreverence! Even Betala was startled. ‘All these nights I’ve called him “Raja, Rajan!” with respect, and here comes this woman tossing his name out so casually. Have I been too deferential all along?’ he muttered to himself.

But she was not finished. Facing Betala directly, she declared, ‘Betala, answer my question. If you know the answer and remain silent, I will thrash you by your tail. If you do not know the answer, I will still curl your tail around your neck and thrash you.’

Betala blinked, confused. ‘Who are you, woman? What is your question? And why should I answer it?’

Exasperated, she turned her burning eyes on Vikramarka. He, however, kept silent.

‘Listen, Betala,’ she said, ‘I will fit your lower body, tail included, to Vikramarka, and attach his lower body to you. Will you both agree?’

Vikramarka’s heart jolted. What would become of him if he returned to his kingdom with his noble head on a ghost’s body? Would his people prostrate at his feet, or at his tail? Would his queen faint in terror at such a sight? Betala too was rattled. If his own head were set upon Vikramarka’s torso, his powers would vanish, and besides, how would he relieve himself? How would he hang from trees with only two legs? His anger rose, but he did not lose his composure.

‘How is that possible, woman?’ he asked.

‘Why not?’ she replied. ‘The head is untouched. The body with Vikramarka’s head will still rule the kingdom. The body with Betala’s head will still hang from the tree. The head defines identity, does it not? Or so you claim.’

Her words pricked Betala. He remembered something, though he pretended not to.

‘What, Betala?’ she pressed. ‘Have you forgotten your own sixth tale? Raja Vikramarka, have you forgotten the answer you gave?’

Vikramarka and Betala could not help recalling the story.

A washerman and his friend, under certain circumstances, offered their heads to the goddess in a temple. The washerman’s wife was terrified; she burst into tears, and in her grief, was on the verge of taking her own life. At that moment, the Goddess appeared, assured her that she would restore them to life, and instructed her to place the severed heads near their bodies.

But in her confusion, she placed the friend’s head near her husband’s body, and her husband’s head near the friend’s body. The Goddess restored life to them, and both men rose—only to begin arguing at once: ‘She is my wife!’ each insisted.

After telling him this story, Betala had asked Vikramarka, ‘Whose wife is she?’

Vikramarka had replied, ‘The sciences proclaim that among rivers the Ganga is supreme, among mountains Sumeru, among trees the Kalpavriksha, and in the human body, the head is the foremost and incomparable. Therefore, the woman belongs to the man whose head is attached to the body.’

Pleased with the correctness of the answer and admiring Vikramarka’s wisdom, Betala had climbed back on to his tree. Thus ended the sixth story.

‘Yes,’ said Betala now. ‘I remember. And what of it?’

The woman’s voice quivered with fury. ‘I am that woman in the story.’

Vikramarka and Betala stared at her, baffled.

She sat on a stone, leaning back against a mound. The stone was cool.  ‘I love my husband’s hands,’ she murmured. ‘Washerman’s hands, yet not rough. Long fingers, knuckles rounded like tender drumsticks—I would joke that they could be cut and added to sambhar. And his back! When I embraced him, his chest-hair firm beneath my cheek, it was as if I pressed against the clouds themselves.’

Vikramarka flushed, uneasy. What must his queen be doing at this hour? Betala shifted heavily on his shoulder.

The woman went on. ‘His legs—long, dark, strong. The cracked soles of his feet pressed against me at night, and those very cracks would tickle me. And how many times have I taken the kajal from my eyes and softly touched it to the soles of his feet? His calves, firm yet soft, would cradle mine as we slept, locked together till dawn. But now? Now he pushes me away after a quarter hour and turns to the other side.’

Her voice broke. She let out a cry, raw as a bull’s bellow. Vikramarka shuddered beneath it, the tremor passing into Betala, who stiffened on his shoulder.

‘So what?’ Betala snapped.

She rounded on him. ‘You sages, you shastris, decided the head was everything. You bound me to a head and left me bereft of my husband’s body. Tell me, can a head give children? Is it only eyes that make a wife known? What do you ghosts know of marriage?’ She seized Betala’s neck, choking him.

Vikramarka begged her to loosen her grip. ‘He will slip back to his tree if you anger him. Please, restrain yourself.’ She let go, but her fury did not abate.

Betala straightened, indignant. ‘It is I who pose questions! And you dare question me? You are a character in my tale, just as I am a character in another. If characters rebel, how will the rice cook? You would throw away the head for the fragile body, which holds no thought, no mind?’

Her laughter was sharp. ‘If characters rebel, rice may not cook, but the lentils will not soften either! What folly is this, that all of you, with your heads, declared the body worthless? My husband’s head may nod in agreement, but it is his body that I seek. Whichever head owns his body, that man alone is mine.’

Betala fell silent. He whispered into Vikramarka’s ear. The king nodded. Then Betala cleared his throat.

‘Woman, I did not decree your fate. You are not mine to define. You are my character, yes, but I myself belong to another’s tale.’

‘Spare me these pot-and-vessel tales,’ she cut him off. ‘I have spoken my will. You refuse it. Then I shall write my own destiny. I choose the man who bears my husband’s body. That is the end of it.’

She turned and strode away.

‘Stop! Stop!’ Betala cried. Vikramarka ran after her, clutching Betala tightly on his shoulder. But when she reached the turning—where one story slips into another—she looked back and saw them far behind.

She quickened her pace, almost flying.

And she smiled.

“The Cupid’s Bow” written by Pingali Chaitanya (trans. by P. Samata) and originally published in The Bombay Literary Magazine, which describes itself as “publish(ing) stories, poems, essays, reviews, visual narratives and graphic fiction.”

I visited the Indian-administered region of Kashmir dozens of times over almost a five-year period, photographing its passage through winter in three distinct phases: Chillai Kalan (harsh cold), Chillai Khurd (small cold), and Chillai Bachha (baby cold). As the winter progressed, ravens kept watch over the ongoings of the world below, bearing witness to the snow revealing itself to be an illusion.

Kashmir has always been promoted as a tourist destination, a paradise for Indian nationals to experience snow, even as it remains one of the most militarised areas in the world. It has been at the centre of disputes between India, Pakistan, and China since the dissolution of the British Raj in 1947. Each country has laid claim to the land as their own, while its people struggle for self-determination.

My last visit to Kashmir, for a friend’s wedding in August 2019, was cut short when the Indian government removed the region’s semi-autonomous status through Article 370, and a siege ensued. Snow remains an incomplete body of work.

Sohrab Hura for Guernica.

Snow (2026) by Sohrab Hura is published by MACK. 

The DMV camera flashes;

for a second I am immortal —

blinking, crooked-smiled, a citizen of nowhere.

They tell me to wait.

The plastic seat sweats against my thighs;

a boy beside me eats Flamin’ Hot Cheetos,

his fingerprints bloodying every page of his workbook.

In my wallet:

a torn movie ticket,

my father’s faded voter ID from a country that voted him out,

an expired green card.

My face younger, fuller,

a woman who still believed in applying twice, appealing once.

I watch the numbers light up over the counter —

B198. B199.

The woman at B200 asks about “home address” and “legal name,”

like those are simple things,

like you don’t lose them the way you lose teeth,

one at a time, without noticing.

Outside, teenagers skateboard across the lot,

their wheels scraping up sparks from the concrete.

An old man feeds pigeons the ends of his sandwich,

talking to them in a language

even they don’t understand anymore.

When they call my number,

I stand too quickly.

My knees crack like bad translations.

The Arco off Figueroa always smelled

like scorched rubber and too-sweet coffee.

Midnights there were slow parades

of busted Pontiacs and primer-gray Hondas,

some with plates, some without.

I was fifteen when I started filling tanks,

wiping dead moths off the windows,

watching the Chevron across the street

blink its blue fire into the broken sidewalks.

On slow nights, I bought Cherry Coke

and Hostess pies from the cooler,

sat on the curb by the air pump,

listening to the low hum of the ice machine

pretending it was a river.

Everyone said to stay inside after eleven,

but no one meant it.

Not when rent was due,

not when Mom’s Chrysler had two bald tires,

not when the last bus rolled past empty

at 10:17 exactly,

headed downtown, headed anywhere but here.

Sometimes a guy would pull up in a ‘92 Cutlass,

windows down, bass rattling the change in my pockets.

He’d hand me a five and say,

“Don’t look inside,”

and I wouldn’t.

We all learned young

how not to see things.

How to make small-talk about the Dodgers,

about gas prices,

about anything but the boy from Tenth Street

who didn’t come home after the cops stopped him

outside the liquor store.

Even now, when the smell of unleaded

gets trapped in my throat,

I can still hear it—

the cheap buzz of the Chevron lights,

breaking open the dark

in uneven, endless flickers.

“This I do vow, and this shall ever be:”

–William Shakespeare, sonnet cxxiii

it was for tradition and it was for

extradition and it was for excess

and it was for nothingness and it

was for hazing and it was for haze

and it was for days when they’d tie

us to the fence and this was when

we were in the military and this

was when we weren’t in the military,

because when you get out you never

get out, because the fence is in us

and I never tied anyone to the fence

and the VES counselor jots this

down and I’m glad she jots this

down, because I am glad I never

tied anyone to the fence, no, I am

alive because I never tied anyone

to the fence, meaning I would have

killed myself if I’d have tied anyone

to the fence and I fought from being

tied to the fence and my disability

rating was just upped to seventy

percent because of the fight from

being tied to the fence, but either

way they have to take something

from you, whether or not they tie

you to the fence, and I spoke with

a survivor of torture who told me

the worst part wasn’t the torture

but was seeing others being tortured

and I think of seeing others tied

to the fence and the V.A. doctor

tells me one word, saying, torture,

after I told him what they did to us

or did to me or tried to do to me

or tried to try me or the one who

died during the hazing, just one,

and I think of him and he was

the same age as me, a teen, how

we were children then, really,

and a V.A. counselor told me

that when she deals with vets,

she treats it as child abuse, and

she said it’s because of how

young we were, and I think

of ‘we’ and I think of ‘fence’

and I think of ‘walls’ and I

think of ‘borders’ and I think

of ‘order’ and I think of ‘gas

masks’ and I think of ‘tied’

and I think of there being no

winner, and this was done

during desert winter, and was

done by people on our side

and I was more afraid of our

side than I was of the ‘other’

side and I was more afraid

of our side and when you

were tied to the fence, you

had all of these hours to just

think of how you volunteered

for this and you had all of these

flies on you to think of how

hot the sun is and you had all

of these sunburns to thank of

all of these erasers and you

have all of these tremors now

in your insomnia where you lie

on your bed and you think of

lying on fence and you think of

jungle or tropical or tundra of skin

and you think of their hands all

on your body and you think of

how kidnapping, legally, you

heard was taking a person more

than twenty-three feet against

their will and you don’t know

if this is true, but you know

the bodies were taken a half

of a football field at least out

to the fence and they’d duct

tape you to your chair, come

up from behind you, and this

was done for fun and this was

done for punishment and this

was done for boredom and this

was done for bonding and this

was done for bondage and this

was done forever and this was

done for everyone who was

stationed on the night shift,

because they only came at night,

or just before night, or on the week-

ends, or on holidays, when there

were less people there, when you

felt there was more safety, but

there wasn’t, because the fence

was there on Christmas and, yes,

the fence was there on Easter,

and, yes, it actually was called

‘crucifixion,’ what was done

to us, and this is all I have to say,

except to add that I could not speak

for years, except to add that I could

not feel fence for decades, except I

take ten showers per day, trying

to clean off the old rotten food

they poured on us, that I watched

poured on others, because they’d

make you watch, because skin

is inconvenience and my harsh

voice comes from the yelling for

help that makes me wake me, partners

leaving, the ghosts boring, the sky

wearing its belt, the darkness boring,

the E-4s hovering, the shadows bring

the inability to have laws on the other

side of the earth, how we were doing

bombings at the same time, and we

were doing bombings at the same time,

now we were doing bombings at the same

time as our wrists were kissing metal

with the passions of the dead.  

Mine eye and heart are

–William Shakespeare, sonnet xlvi

I don’t know how to write

a poem about being Karelian.

There is no history.  When I was

near the Russian border, I tried

to do a search about Karelia

and got hacked.  I think of axes

and mass graves and history.

I think of absence, which is

hard to picture: nothingness.

I want to tell you about Karelia,

but there are no poems about

Karelia.  There are no Karelians

in those lack of poems.  I’ll look

at photos of the mass graves

online sometimes and find

they’re so hard to find.  They tell

me there are less than a thousand

people in the world with my last

name.  In the U.S., there are almost

three million people named Smith.

I have no children.  The V.A.

counselor told me my life expectancy

would only be about one more year,

but that’s only if I wasn’t going to

counseling.  She told me I have

nearly the same life expectancy

as everyone else with the counseling.

Why? I ask.  Guns, she says.  We

are quiet in the closet-y V.A. room.

I think of our two-word interaction.

Nothing makes sense in this world.

There are more than 5,000 buried

at Sandarmokh.  There are no poems

anywhere in the world about anything.

Introductory Note:
Crow Language / Crow Testament / Crow Gospel is a three-part contemporary poem that reimagines the crow—not as omen or superstition—but as a bearer of memory, resistance, and witness. Drawing from Indian geographies, ancestral lore, and urban decay, the poem gives voice to what society often silences: scavengers, lost languages, buried histories. The crow, in this context, becomes more than bird—it is metaphor, ancestor, prophet, and co-survivor. Blending spirituality, protest, and lyrical memory, this poem listens deeply to the dark feathered intelligence that hovers at the edge of civilization.

1

Crow Language

I learn to see the crow differently now— not as omen, aftermath or dark prophet, just a misread glyph in the city’s broken script. In Kochi, on Marine Drive, a crow lands between two lovers. The girl crosses herself, spits three times.My mother’s village built bitter words around them: kaakka—hissed through teeth like history’s complaint.They forget this is also a child’s first noise, language born where shadow meets throat. Everyone wants cleaner metaphors.Black as what? Coal before fire, ink before alphabet, secrets hoarded in a madman’s coat. The kind of black that doesn’t apologize.They say: too dark, too loud, too hungry. They mean: wrong feather, wrong sky, wrong kind of intelligence watching them back.In school, a child draws a crow. The nun says draw a nicer bird. What the child learns has nothing to do with drawing.When you attach -less to love, you get the sound wind makes through an empty cinema, the echo haunting demolished neighborhoods.Crowless, they call it peace. I call it the kind of silence that comes after forgetting your own name.They want their gods clean as hospital corridors, but mine have always preferred the company of scavengers.A crow lands on my windowsill each morning. I’ve begun to think of it as punctuation, the necessary pause between dreaming and waking.

2

Crow Testament

The city worships what it cannot break. I’ve seen men pray to ATM machines, women burn incense before locked hospital doors.Meanwhile, crows conduct their parliament on telephone wires, speaking in dialects older than concrete, older than borders.What did the crow teach Shiva that made him turn blue with revelation? The mathematics of scarcity, the democracy of garbage.At a random Temple, pilgrims feed the sacred pond while crows watch from mango branches, calculating trajectories, practicing patience. They know what gods forget— hunger is the only honest prayer.In Valiyangadi market, a man sells caged birds. Mynahs, bulbuls, finches arranged by price. No crows. You cannot sell what refuses to acknowledge ownership.My grandfather said: notice how a crow never flies in a straight line. The shortest distance between two points is not always the wisest path.Some nights I dream in crow-tongue, wake with my mouth full of sharp sounds, the taste of metal and monsoon. My neighbors hear me cawing on the balcony and cross to the other side of the street.Somewhere between Palayam and Sweet Meat Street, the bus stops without explanation. Through the window, I watch three crows dismantle something unidentifiable. Their beaks like black scissors cutting reality.The woman beside me touches her mangalsutra, whispers a prayer against bad luck. I almost tell her: it’s too late. We’ve already been claimed by what we fear. Last week, a crow dropped a coin at my feet. I’ve been carrying it in my pocket, running my thumb over its worn face. Not currency anymore, just metal remembering a different shape. The priests say crows carry the dead. I say they carry the parts of us we’re too civilized to claim— the midnight ravenous mouth, the eye that sees in darkness, the voice that refuses to sing what others have written.

3

Crow Gospel

What the priests won’t tell you: when Adam named the creatures, the crow refused its given name.Instead, it swallowed a piece of night. Instead, it carried away a splinter of god’s voice.In Kuttichira mosque, men wash their feet before prayer. Crows drink from the same water— their ablutions equally sincere.My mother feared them. Said: they come back as everything we try to bury.She wasn’t wrong.I’ve seen how they gather after riots, patient witnesses to what we pretend didn’t happen. Their black tribunals assembled on charred rooftops, passing judgment we can’t bear to hear.At Mishkal Palli, an old imam tells me: the crow was the first creature to teach humans about burial. When Cain stood paralyzed before Abel’s body, a crow scratched earth with its beak— showed death’s proper punctuation.This is why we fear them. Not for their darkness but for what they remember that we choose to forget.During the floods, when the sea reclaimed what never truly belonged to us, crows remained. Perched on floating debris, making maps of the drowned world.The truth splits open like a ripe jack fruit: we were never the protagonist of this story.Behind Ansari Park, a madman feeds crows each morning, collecting their fallen feathers in a tin box. When I ask why, he says: to remember the texture of difficult knowledge. to keep something that chose to fall.Half-histories, demolished neighborhoods, banned books, forbidden love— the crow knows how to find them all.It flies crooked because straight lines are a human invention, a failed geometry.Last night I dreamed my spine grew feathers, my fingers stretched to wings.I rose over Calicut, saw how the sea is slowly taking back the shore, how temples and mosques and churches all cast the same shadow, how markets ignite at dawn with temporary hungers.From above, the divisions we kill for disappear.Every morning now, I leave rice on my windowsill. Not as offering, not as superstition, but as acknowledgment.We share this broken century— the crow and I— scavenging for what remains after the fires of progress, after the floods of forgetfulness.When they come, they bring fragments of themselves. A feather. A harsh call. A dark eye.Each piece a verse in this gospel of survival, this testament to what persists when everything else has been washed away.

Notes: Marine Drive is a famous seafront promenade in Mumbai, India; kaakka is the Malayalam word for ‘crow,’ often used in colloquial speech; mangalsutra is a sacred necklace worn by married Hindu women; Valiyangadi is a historic marketplace in Calicut, Kerala; Palayam is a locality in Calicut often associated with commerce and history; Sweet Meat Street, also known as Mittai Theruvu, is a prominent shopping street in Calicut; Kuttichira is a historic Muslim neighborhood in Calicut; Mishkal Palli is a centuries-old mosque in Calicut known for its architecture; Ansari Park is a public area in Calicut, featured here for local grounding; monsoon is the seasonal heavy rainfall typical of South Asia; ablutions are ritual washing or cleansing, especially before prayers.