On Recalibrating

I wish I was writing this at a time that was different to how this time feels. As I move through the world, I find it difficult to acknowledge in full, how uniquely challenging this journey is for most around me, and farther from me. But I am trying, as so many of us are. The past few days for me have been instrumental in catalysing a shift from being unsure, to sure. It has allowed me to internally assess my character in light of what I hold dear to life. Where I stand, is a bit clearer to me than it has previously been. What is it that guides me when I have nothing around to see? What is it that makes me believe when I find there is nothing left to trust? It has been a transformation of subtleties and one of noise. Humbling me greatly, I wake up to acknowledging that:

the distance we allow ourselves from knowing better is a choice we make.

For this one:

Just indulge yourselves in the words of those who made a difference by thinking deeply. Below are some windows of admiration that I have allowed myself, and I am grateful to share with you.

The cover page for this newsletter is by artist Issam Al Haj Ibrahim, see the original here

This is one of the most profound ways I have ever heard a member of an oppressed peoples confront a member of a historically oppressor group. “James Baldwin is a walking Masterclass in how to stay regulated and present in a challenging and polarizing conversation.”

The last 3 minutes are 🔥

The above interview holds value not for its content, but its performance. Throughout the 30 minutes, I couldn’t help myself feeling a sense of restraint and restlessness, observing eagerly how the white interviewer asked the questions and how they landed on the non-white people who were to answer them. I felt myself almost at the edge of my seat as “50 years of Indian Independence” were awkwardly discussed, celebrated and analysed. I was sharply sensitive to Roy’s body language and maybe it’s because I have considered her my teacher, felt a bit defensive about her too. Internally I was screaming one question only: how would you answer these questions now?

The leverage of watching something like this decades after its release means that you can draw parallels with the outcomes of these hypotheses and assess your original foresights with evidence— but you also run the risk of deep nostalgia for a time when the possibility of things turning out better than they did, was available. I would recommend watching this interview for the theatrics, for the subtleties and for some romantic loss of innocence.

This obituary written by Edward Said for Eqbal Ahmad. My favourite bits:

Eqbal Ahmad, perhaps the shrewdest and most original anti-imperialist analyst of Asia and Africa, has died, aged 66, in Islamabad following an operation for colon cancer. A man of enormous charisma and incorruptible ideals, he was a prodigious talker and lecturer.

He had an almost instinctive attraction to movements of the oppressed and the persecuted, whether in Europe, America, Bosnia, Chechnya, South Lebanon, Vietnam, Iraq or the Indian sub-continent. He had a formidable knowledge of history, always measuring the promise of religion and nationalism against their depredations and abuse as their proponents descended into fundamentalism, chauvinism and provincialism.

Ahmad was a fierce, often angry, combatant against what he perceived as human cruelty and perversity. During his last years, he dedicated himself – quixotically it would sometimes appear – to the creation of an alternative university in Pakistan, named Khalduniyah after the great Arab polymath and historian whose comprehensive view of the human adventure Ahmad sought to embody in a curriculum solidly based in the modern humanities, social and natural sciences.

…

No one who saw him sitting bare-foot and cross-legged on a living-room floor, conversing genially until the early hours, with a glass in his hand, will ever forget the sight or the sound of his voice as he announced ‘four major points’ – but never got past two or three. He loved literature, especially poetry, and the sensitive and precise use of language, whether it was Urdu, English, French, Arabic or Farsi.