This time, Jehad told me, there was a new settlement opposite the old one, pincering the village from directly above the path we traversed. This walk we took ten years ago was very recently becoming dangerous; in fact, just the last week, a local shepherd was shot in the knee for the crime of grazing his sheep nearby. Still, we continued. And it wasn’t even the fear that made me most uncomfortable, but the dissonance. In a way, I was putting Jehad at risk by taking this walk1, and yet he did not seem to harbor the same anxiety I had of dangers looming, whether settlers or the IDF. I even got the sense that he was happy to have a reason to steward the land.

We made our way through tree and stone towards a quarry in the distance which had also recently become the target of settler violence.2 I recalled my first visit, Jehad showing me the plant that zaatar comes from, figs, cacti fruit, olive trees. I was barely twenty at the time and visiting the West Bank was a kind of novelty, albeit one that changed the trajectory of my life. But this time, I struggled to even register the name of the beans he showed me. Fava? I was stuck in my own head, unable to stop grappling with the gravity of the situation, all its ramifications, the stories he told me about settler violence, the fight for control of the quarry, IDF raids, paychecks cut due to Israel withholding tax revenue—and, under it or over it, my place alongside all of this. What was I doing here? Was I a tourist? An observer? Jehad’s family and friends welcomed me, and my Arabic crossed some of the bridge, but my country was behind the struggles that they spoke of. And no matter how close I was to them now, or how well I milked this trip on social media, I was to go back to America after all of this; I even looked forward to it. Hell, even my complicity seemed like a fake problem, a complex that ironically created more distance from the people I spoke to in the West Bank. None of the Palestinians I met seemed to care about how guilty or not guilty I felt about my country. They had bigger fish to fry.

Suddenly, Jehad stopped me. Across the valley a black military truck descended the hill. It looked like IDF. Before I could process what was happening, he had hopped off our path into the trees. “Follow me, now,” he said.

What ensued was fifteen minutes of scrambling through thorny shrub and overgrowth to lose the IDF truck. Most likely they hadn’t spotted us, but we weren’t taking any chances. At the drop-offs, I hesitated, looking for a clear place to land. “You have to hurry,” Jehad said, his voice firm, sympathetic, and impatient at once. It was clear he’d done this before. I tried my best to keep up.

Once we got far enough from the road we took refuge under a large tree surrounded by dense thicket, my nervous system still fully out of control. Though we spoke, I was not fully there. My attention was stolen by a blade of grass on which the shedded exoskeleton of an insect hung, beckoning. It looked alive, somehow.

The immediacy of violence, while bringing me closer to my friend, also heightened the dissonance I had already been feeling that day. The entire time we were running there was one feeling I couldn’t shake: that I wanted to go home. I longed for its comforts, the familiarity. This feeling kept returning, despite my best attempts to evict it, and with it came shame (for wanting to retreat into the privilege of living in empire), alienation (that those living here may not understand this feeling as they had no other place to go), and anger (at the world for forcing someone I cared for to have to live his life in this way, and furthermore for distancing me from him). Ultimately, the contradictions morphed what was once an instinct for self-preservation into its direct opposite: a deep disdain for myself and the life I lead alongside all the world’s suffering, and a desire to destroy it.3

Self Annihilation

In his essay Reflections on Exile, Edward Said touches on this self-destructive bent among those in the diaspora, from Pakistan to Palestine.

Rashid Hussein was a Palestinian. He translated Bialik, one of the great modern Hebrew poets, into Arabic, and Hussein’s eloquence established him in the post-1948 period as an orator and nationalist without peer. He first worked as a Hebrew language journalist in Tel Aviv, and succeeded in establishing a dialogue between Jewish and Arab writers, even as he espoused the cause of Nasserism and Arab nationalism. In time, he could no longer endure the pressure, and he left for New York. He married a Jewish woman, and began working in the PLO office at the United Nations, but regularly outraged his superiors with unconventional ideas and utopian rhetoric. In 1972 he left for the Arab world, but a few months later he was back in the United States: he had felt out of place in Syria and Lebanon, unhappy in Cairo. New York sheltered him anew, but so did endless bouts of drinking and idleness. His life was in ruins, but he remained the most hospitable of men. He died after a night of heavy drinking when, smoking in bed, his cigarette started a fire that spread to a small library of audio cassettes, consisting mostly of poets reading their verse. The fumes from the tapes asphyxiated him. His body was repatriated for burial in Musmus, the small village in Israel where his family still resided.

- Edward Said, Reflections on Exile

The image of Hussein’s death is symbolic, perhaps even romantic, to someone like me. Like others, I engage with the literary traditions and histories of my home countries as a proxy for a relationship more embodied. Arabic is another degree of separation—an alternative to my mother-tongues of Urdu and Malay, which were not offered at my college—and it was during my study abroad in Jordan (and brief visit to Palestine) when this abstraction came fully into focus: I began to see West Asia as one of the battlefronts between sovereignty and neocolonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Islamic World, with Arabic my key to navigating it.4

The issue is I still didn’t know what my role in all this was, as someone born in the US and likely meant to die here. Even after developing an interest in translation, even after taking classes post-grad to get to a level where I could engage in literature—even after physically going to Palestine myself—I still felt a gap. In fact the deeper I engaged with the cultures and traditions of “The Global South”, the more acute such contradictions became. Put simply, once you really see what is happening in the world, you can’t look away anymore. But you also can’t exactly change things, at least not without consequence. You do a lot of watching. Watching people, watching the news, waiting for some kind of solution to appear that will allow you to fight for the causes you believe in without sacrificing what is dear to you: family, friends, comfort, agency. Deep down, though, you know this solution doesn’t exist, because your security in the West is premised upon the very oppression you now oppose so vehemently. With nowhere else to go, your soul is crushed between these competing pressures, and just as Sufis seek to annihilate the self to attain unity with God,5 you seek self-destruction as a means of creating harmony from the dissonance of the world, somehow. In the body, this manifests primarily as guilt.

Unlike the Sufis, though, this act is not a grasp towards divinity, but a collapse from the weight of our own egos. Many of us see our guilt as virtuous because we think it is directed at our lifestyle in the imperial core—as an extension of our desire for solidarity—when really, the guilt comes from our desire to preserve it. We want to live as we do in the West. We may even enjoy it. And though this fact on its own is not catastrophic,6 the problem is that we seek to hide it. We understand the moral implications of self-preservation in a country premised upon the repression of the Global South, but instead of directing this frustration at the political forces that create such a dynamic, we direct it inwards, in yet another act of self-preservation, this time protecting our moral conception of ourselves: through remorse, shame, guilt.

When I first comprehended this I did not have the language for it. The battle was physical, a flurry of emotions fighting in my nervous system as I lay alone in the kid’s room that night. Little did I know, this was a blessing. My experience in Palestine was sharpening the contradictions, to use the Marxist term. And though at first it was paralyzing—to admit that ending the American imperial empire, however much I promoted such a project, could cause some kind of grief in me—I soon realized that these overlapping desires for self-preservation, and all the guilt that came with it, was actually destroying my own agency too.

Ghassan Kanafani analogizes this process beautifully in his most famous book, Men in the Sun, albeit with disdain. The story takes place shortly after the Nakba, as three Palestinian men attempt to escape to Kuwait for work. They manage to smuggle themselves inside a cargo truck, hiding in its empty water tank at Israeli checkpoints. But two checkpoints in, the driver gets held up by bureaucracy. The men suffocate slowly in the heat. The novella ends with the lines, “Why didn’t they knock on the walls of the tank? Why don’t you bang on the walls of the tank? Why? Why? Why?”7

Famous in the Arab canon as an analogy for Palestinian resistance as well as an indictment of the diaspora, Kanafani’s book exposes the problem with self-preservation under colonial rule. Once you allow yourself to lose agency in the face of the world’s structures, you allow it to—literally—asphyxiate you. This is how self-preservation becomes self-destruction, how guilt becomes avoidance: through passivity. The problem is not that we are more privileged than those who live under occupation, but that we see our fates as divergent. We think we can avoid the rise of fascism simply by keeping our heads down and being good subjects, as if it is only their climate which is collapsing, as if capitalism is only extracting their lifeblood. Our water tanks may be larger and more comfortable, but we, too, are suffocating.

Resistance

Once Jehad was certain the IDF truck was gone,8 we made our way back to the village proper. We had been talking about resistance the entire afternoon: its obstacles, its necessity. But that experience had forced me back inside my body where the true problem lay. I knew I had to externalize the contradictions inside of me, but there remained the logistical question of how. What was my relationship to resistance? Was there any way to close the distance besides simply joining it?9

To my surprise, Jehad empathized. He has also struggled with complacency as someone who’s taught or studied in many other countries: the US, UK, and Spain, to name a few. It’s clear that the opportunities in Palestine are lacking, and given the chance, he would not hesitate to move to America for his career.

“But you feel guilty at the thought of leaving the West Bank?” I asked,10 thinking of the parable in Men in the Sun.

“That is a part of it, but I feel this way here as well.” Jehad has a family now, plus a career he cares about, and though living in Palestine has already jeopardized both of those things, he still feels held back by his unwillingness to sacrifice them further. “The settlers attack us because they know if we fight back we will be taken away, or killed. But at the same time, fighting back is the only thing that would make them stop.” His tone oscillated between anger for being unable to fight for his land and fear of leaving his family fatherless if he did. This is the daily burden Palestinians face, stuck between impotence and captivity.

We were interrupted by the sighting of hyraxes near one of the quarry sites, an animal Jehad called “wabar”.11 I started taking pictures, but he stopped me. Photographing could be trouble here, he said. So we went off-road behind a patch of trees where I could take them more discreetly.

We continued down the road, passing another Palestinian village. “It’s different, though,” I said. “Here, your very existence is resistance. You are supporting a family, too.”

He shook his head. To him, it wasn’t enough, which somehow was how I felt too. I told him how dissatisfied I felt with Palestine advocacy in the US, but that I knew I was part of the problem: I, like many others, was unwilling to risk more for liberation than a potential misdemeanor. It was pathetic. But Jehad understood, just like for him, that this self-preservation was coming from my community too. I’m lucky to have family and friends I care deeply for, whose well-being is intertwined with mine, but it makes it difficult to even go to Jordan without scrutiny, let alone joining an insurrection. Not to mention my desire to have kids, which added a whole other layer of complexity we didn’t get into. Though I would never dare to compare my dilemma to someone’s in Palestine, it started to seem like the roots were identical.

“My friend once told me something that I hold with me to this day,” Jehad said, finally. “He said you will never feel truly free unless you take up arms and fight for it. Until then, it will never feel like it’s enough.”

Freedom. Was that what this was about all along? I realized my rant had framed the struggle as moral, not existential, about fighting “for” something, because I “should”—an imperative, not a need. Furthermore, I was operating under the assumption that I in America was free while others weren’t, a binary myth fed to us by American exceptionalism. Privilege is not liberation. Yet again, it seemed I had fallen into that trap of separating my fate from those most vulnerable. My billionaire overlords were pleased.

Fanon diagnoses a similar internal conflict among his oft-mentioned “colonized intellectuals”, those who are not directly colonizers but are educated or trained inside their system and hence alienated from their own people.

And first among them is individualism. The colonized intellectual learned from his masters that the individual must assert himself. The colonialist bourgeoisie hammered into the colonized mind the notion of a society of individuals where each is locked in his subjectivity, where wealth lies in thought. But the colonized intellectual who is lucky enough to bunker down with the people during the liberation struggle, will soon discover the falsity of this theory. Involvement in the organization of the struggle will already introduce him to a different vocabulary. “Brother,” “sister,” “comrade” are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie because in their thinking my brother is my wallet and my comrade, my scheming. In a kind of auto-da-fé, the colonized intellectual witnesses the destruction of all his idols: egoism, arrogant recrimination, and the idiotic, childish need to have the last word. This colonized intellectual, pulverized by colonialist culture, will also discover the strength of the village assemblies, the power of the people’s commissions and the extraordinary productiveness of neighborhood and section committee meetings. Personal interests are now the collective interest because in reality everyone will be discovered by the French legionnaires and consequently massacred or else everyone will be saved. In such a context, the “every man for himself” concept, the atheist’s form of salvation, is prohibited.

- Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p.11

Fanon, of course, had the fortune of partaking in the Algerian Revolution, where these dynamics were assumed. But his writing illustrates the exact posture we should be striving for: collective destiny.

This is not a liberal notion of unity to be plastered on lawn signs and signaled to those less fortunate than us. It is a spiritual commitment to collective struggle, and a diagnosis of our ennui within the West. Palestine is not just a “moral litmus test”, as we often hear it referred to in the US, but an existential battle over our future as a species. It also isn’t the only one. The same fight is occurring around the world: Sudan, Congo, Kashmir, Korea, Cuba, and even our own backyards as well. Because the root of our anxiety about the state of the world is not guilt, but oppression, and it cannot be evicted except through the barrel of a gun.12 Otherwise, the contradictions will remain until the very fabric of our society is uprooted, until we experience a true rupture from which we can’t return.

So as the olive trees burn, our skies fill with smoke. Though the war may erupt from elsewhere, the fire is coming for us all. It is ultimately up to us which side we will find ourselves on.

A week into my stay in Amman I was sitting in my apartment doing homework when some ancient being howled its last breath, or so it sounded. I took the bait. Head out the window, I spotted a black cat on what one could call the fire escape: face blank, mouth wide open, a little white contrail on its bib that would have aged him if his meow was not so infantile. Genuinely it was the ugliest meow I’d ever heard in my life, and he would have been so cute if not for the havoc his pleas wreaked on my nervous system. My response was evolutionary. It was impossible to do anything but try to get him to stop.

Of course, being the self-proclaimed animal lover I am, and giddy at the opportunity to prove to myself my goodness, I fed him some tuna I bought the previous day. In my defense, I genuinely thought he was in crisis (perhaps he was injured, or his mom abandoned him), and he ate like it, inhaling the entire can before retreating to the city. Satisfied with myself, I went back to my homework.

The next day I posted an Instagram story for advice. He had appeared again, begging for food, which for some reason had surprised me. It became clear that the meow was learned behavior, the most grating thing he could produce with his mouth so humans would (have to) notice him. And I realized I was in over my head. Should I keep feeding him, potentially fostering a relationship of dependency before abandoning him at the end of my semester? Or should I ignore him so he retains whatever autonomy he still had as an urban cat begging for food? There was also the secret third option, capturing him for a shelter, which I’ll get to later. The point is taking care of animals no longer seemed as simple as “give them what they want”.

Most people told me I was fine just feeding him, though one of my friends with a background in animal psychology told me I had made a grave mistake in enabling this feedback loop (Meow Loudly For Free Dinner). But I had already made the bed. It was time to lie in it.

I Am Neurotic

Over the next few months, I went on to create an unnecessarily elaborate feeding system for this cat I never even felt the authority to name. First, no food for howling. I only put out food when he was quiet—in other words, absent—hoping to discourage him from yelling at my window night and day. (He never learned.) Second, he was given half a large can of cat food a day, so as to suggest that he should still be seeking food elsewhere. Third, if I was going away temporarily, I’d peter the food out to every other day so it wasn’t too much of a shock when I left.

If any of these tactics actually reached this feral cat, God was watching over me, but probably my neuroticism was just a way to feel in control. It wasn’t just him. On my walks around Amman, I noticed an almost infinite supply of stray cats, generally congregating around cafes and dumpsters. Some were healthy; most seemed at least mildly uncomfortable. The cat world is ruthless. There were constant fights over trash and food scraps. Though many business owners left water or kibble out, such behavior was concentrated to a few neighborhoods. Most felt content to ignore them. Just like in the States.

Stray animals are a “problem” in most parts of the world, and like most other problems, it’s largely our fault. This one has to do with ambiguous boundaries around domestication. Most stray cats are feral, meaning they are generally not appropriate targets for adoption, but they’re still indirectly dependent on humans, having evolved with us and out of the wild. This makes overpopulation a real problem as there is little in the way of ecosystem equilibrium, despite most strays going hungry. In America, we tend to use TNR (trap-neuter-return) for population control. TNR exists in Amman, but it isn’t popular or well-funded, so the responsibility for trapping still falls onto the individual (including the bill for consequent vet services). Unsure what to do, I asked a multitude of people, including ex-rescue volunteers: an opportunity, if nothing else, to practice my Arabic and talk to people in Amman. I was told that there was one active adoption center in Amman, but that it was a kill shelter, which unfortunately is a standard for shelters that reach capacity often and have trouble getting their animals adopted. The morality of euthanasia is a topic I will defer to those working in the field, but I ruled out the option for my context. The cat outside my window did not seem likely to be adopted, and though it was struggling, I was skeptical that shelter life would be any better for it.

It seemed the more I looked into this issue, the deeper it went, the more ambiguous any answers became. Many neighborhoods struggled to control their stray population whose constant begging and scavenging elicited NIMBY attitudes in the locals, and the blocks which provided for their pawed neighbors attracted everyone else’s to the point that people would dump strays on their front doors until they got overwhelmed. And it’s not like Jordanians are particularly cruel to animals; in fact, Jordan, like many Arab countries, holds great respect for cats in particular. But these problems require not just goodwill but urban planning, funding, and infrastructure, which is unfortunately scarce. Hence, the ones bearing the brunt of this problem are those everyday Jordanians who care, as well as—of course—the animals themselves suffering.

I Am American

This isn’t to say I, as a foreigner, possess any authority to evaluate Jordanian society. But it is precisely my foreignness that exposes all these invisible systems to me. In America, my “nativity” blinds me from what an outsider may see as everyday problems. Despite believing (ideologically) that America is an artificial settler state, that none of this is normal, that we need a fundamental overhaul of even the most mundane of our social and political structures; in practice, I have developed a sense of “normality” growing up here, and in a way, I am used to a life that I claim to seek to abolish, that despite the occasional kind word, words, dollar, or dollars, I still eventually walk past an unhoused person, and don’t let it anger me enough to impede my semblance of a routine, ergo, what is “normal” to me.1

It’s the same in Jordan. Most of my understanding of Jordan came from migrants, not native Jordanians2, the former intimate with the Kingdom’s realities due to a constant struggle to find their place in it, the latter, naturalized, and prone to suffering from the same sort of “relativism” I notice in myself. Migrants didn’t just teach me about cats, but about the affordable housing shortage, the inequities of the job market, and, most acutely, the impossible immigration system: despite the majority of migrants coming from other Arab countries—Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, Syria—Jordan, like its neighbors, effectively provides no path to naturalization except through investment or marriage (to a male Jordanian national), resulting in a migrant population doomed to remain in refugee camps or to navigate the country undocumented.3

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Again, the more I looked into these issues, the more unsurmountable they seemed, doubly so because as a foreigner I had no right or ability to fix them myself, doubly doubly so because as an American the way I processed them was different. In the US, the most popular coping mechanism for systemic injustice tends to be, in one form or another, speech. Complaining, reading, arguing, protesting, it largely comes down to an exchange of opinions or information. Most of us are content to channel our anger at the system into slogans on an ANSWER march followed by the occasional passive-aggressive discussion with your coworker, eldest cousin, or the lib you once thought was your friend. This behavior flows downstream from an old American philosophy, safety valve theory, which originally referred to the contingency of “settling” land outside of urban areas as an escape from political tension, but turned into a more general justification of expression as a necessary outlet for the unrest of the masses. Under safety valve theory, free speech and nonviolent protest is necessary not because it benefits society but because the suppression of it leads to more violent escalation or even (one could hope!) revolution. As Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote in Whitney v. California (1927), “fear breeds repression… repression breeds hate… hate menaces stable government… the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies… and the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.”

This is less the case in places like Jordan. Though criticism of policy is common, speech is heavily bound by laws around national security, “cybercrimes”, and defamation—again, not unlike the US, though freedom of speech4 is less a political benchmark of the country and more an aspiration. Anecdotally, I noticed that Jordanians just aren’t as outspoken about their problems, both politically and otherwise, but especially if it has to do with the government. And while part of it has to do with repression and the absolute power of the royal family, it’s also about culture, and theories of change. For example, the boycott in Jordan is far stronger than the US’s, to the extent that alternatives to McDonald’s and Starbucks are flourishing.5 One could argue it is compensation for powerlessness elsewhere, which is reductive but not untrue; the political situation in Jordan is, to say the least, tricky. Even more so than its neighbors, Jordan is almost entirely dependent on the US for its “stability”, receiving a billion dollars a year in economic aid and eight hundred million a year in military aid in exchange for cooperation with the US’s geopolitical ambitions in the region. Even their currency is directly pegged to the US dollar at a fixed 1$:0.71JD. Furthermore, the country is in a constant water shortage with its surface water being controlled by Syria and Israel, the latter of which loves to remind them of this vulnerability. And of course the majority of the country has some sort of generational trauma from the Nakba, the Naksa, or the constant onslaught of wars in and around them. In any case, regardless of who gets to win the woke wars (hint: it’s never the Americans), the reality is that I had little political agency in this foreign country. I don’t know how immigrants do it.

I Am An Animal

At the cafe I’ve frequented most often in Jordan, there is a newly born batch of kittens slowly taking over the space. On any given day they will walk up to you, smelling your belongings, licking at your drink, and you will have no choice but to pause your work to indulge in a little infantile curiosity.

But it’s hard not to notice that they’re struggling. The cafe graciously provides the cats with shelter, water, and occasional food, but they’re still strays. They aren’t cleaned or given checkups. In fact, the last batch of kittens—by the same mother, I was told—sadly passed away. Cafe management has considered spaying her, but opening the door to medical care is not just expensive, but risky. One vet visit could lead to multiple. And their reputation for taking in animals has already led to neighbors leaving more strays at their door.

Still, I don’t stop the little dudes from eating my leftover shawarma when they’re desperate enough to go digging in my bags. I give them attention when they demand it, and carry the least mobile of them up the ledges and chairs mom cat goes sleeping on. I’m reminded of how I felt with my cat back home, Cornbread, who I adopted two years ago. He was a stray for seven years before I adopted him, and though I love him, I often think that my efforts aren’t enough. Adopting can feel like putting your pet in a retirement home. It’s not that the absolute dependence fostered by domestication is uncomfortable, but that it’s structurally unstable. Koyaanisqatsi. Because if the Earth were truly inhabitable—if humans didn’t play God—then animals would simply be free.

This feeling of subtle alienation is not just limited to the realm of feral animals. It pierces the fabric of modern life. I feel it in a train sitting parallel to strangers as we commute to wage labor, I feel it looking out the window of my plane as we leave the ground, I feel it in the forks we eat with, the screens we stare at, the clothes we wear on ourselves. Supply chains rule everything. Life is not natural anymore. And everywhere I go, I see people and animals alike searching for balance, some sort of divine equilibrium, and instead finding a relentless abundance of commodities crashing onto our shores.

Yet when I encounter animals, they do not seem to harbor this existential dread, despite living on the same wretched earth I live on, despite being more connected to “nature” than I ever was. Dog, camel, bird, deer, goat: they reserve no space for contempt in their daily grind for food. Cornbread in particular seems happy to live out his days sleeping and pooping in his absurd two bedroom apartment. Perhaps he’s retired from the existentialism of his youth. Perhaps he’s just a cat. Or perhaps animals learn early that we are subject to these structures much more than we are in control of them, that the world is something to be experienced, not solved. That our problems are much larger than us, but also, they are small. Physically small. And it is precisely in these moments, sitting with those most vulnerable, that somehow the systems which govern us most immediately begin to fade away.

1. You don’t need to know where something is leading when you start it.

I originally majored in Arabic for no real reason at all. It mostly spurred from a desire not to bullshit my college’s foreign language requirement; if I was going to spend three semesters learning something, I wanted something challenging, and, ideally, beautiful. I renounced the Romance languages. Duke didn’t offer Urdu, so it came down to Chinese or Arabic, of which I chose Arabic simply because I liked grammar and read the Quran growing up. But three semesters later, I wasn’t satisfied. The language still eluded me. I grew frustrated with the lack of rigor in my classes, so I went abroad.

Virtually all my understanding of the language came from those four months in Jordan. I did a Middlebury program with the University of Jordan where we signed a language pledge to exclusively speak Arabic. I stuck to it. And I was good at it. By the end of 2016, I could make small talk with locals, read articles, and write essays only slightly simpler than this one. But having satisfied my curiosity, there was no next step. Only a few classes away from the major, I took some culture classes then never touched the language again.

Until five years later: 2021. The MFA I had started offered a literary translation track, which intrigued me. I only translated once before (Mahmoud Darwish’s In Jerusalem, done mostly out of curiosity), but I’d read dozens of translations by other people. I loved Arabic and Farsi poetry, especially of the Sufi variant, and I found that the best way to connect to each work on a spiritual level was to read multiple translations of it. The difference in voice, style, content between each translation was fascinating. With my MFA dangling the opportunity in front of me, I thought, why not try doing that myself?

Suddenly, the language I picked up on a whim seven years ago came knocking on my door again. And this time it came with purpose. Of course, I regretted losing touch with the language in the first place. But it was like an old high school friend moving into the city: the rush—and confusion—of rewriting what was once an intimate relationship into a completely different time and place. I missed Arabic! Translation didn’t just reignite the language but gave me a context with which I could grow deeper with it.

But let’s say I tried to DTR with it too early: asked what I wanted out of the language after a semester or two. I would not have found an answer! For someone like me who always needs a goal, this realization would have spelled disaster. But in some crazy stroke of wisdom, or naiveté, I kept taking Arabic classes just for fun. Crazy, right? Turns out, sometimes you start doing things before finding out what they’re “for”. Ironically, my Computer Science classes also took this route (derogatory). I majored in CS because it was interesting to me. Compared to Arabic, though, this field pushed me into a clear, well-trodden path: the tech world, which I soon discovered was vapid at best, soul-sucking at worst. Luckily, it padded my savings. It also provided a cushion that which helped me withstand my early 20s. Perhaps in a better world I would have found an application of CS that energized me. But after eight years in corporate, I finally decided to put the thing to rest.

2. At some point, though, you need to decide if you’re going to listen to it or not.

In 2024, I got into the Arabic translation workshop under the British Centre for Literary Translation. I had recently graduated with my MFA, receiving positive comments on my translation thesis; things felt good… until the workshop started. It was immediately clear that my Arabic level compared to the other translators was abysmal. I was able to keep up, barely, but left the experience with a devastating realization. If I truly was to translate Arabic literature, I had to commit more than a few hours a week to it. In fact, I probably had to take at least another year of classes, as well as go abroad again.

First, I got a weekly speaking partner through Natakallam to reorient myself in the language and refresh my vocabulary. The following December, I enrolled in rigorous online Arabic classes to reach an adequate level before going abroad—rigorous, meaning one university year of Arabic in three months. The time commitment totaled twenty hours a week. I was pulling all-nighters that literally no one asked of me, with grades that would not impact my life in the slightest, all to meet a goal I made up just a year ago.

The week before I quit my job, I was getting lunch with some ex-teammates, telling them about these new ambitions of mine. One of them responded with a question: “Won’t AI make translation obsolete eventually?” I knew she meant well by the remark (however hard that is to believe), so I improvised a response about literary translation being about more than just utility, but also curation, amplification, and voice as well—which, in my opinion, will always require a human involved. But realistically, her question exposed a fundamental difference between the life I was leaving and the one I was choosing, which lacks any “answer”. I am not doing this because there is a demand for it, I’m doing it to create one. It’s not that I believe this is the right decision for my life, or that I want to uproot myself for a far less comfortable, more demanding environment. It’s a calling, and a calling doesn’t come from you. I simply felt strongly that this work is important, and it was asking more from me. I could only ignore it for so long before I had to respond.

It is a privilege to have passions which “pull” you to them, that demand better of you every day. It is also a privilege (financially, mostly) to be able to accommodate them. But more than anything, dreams are humbling. They decenter you. Keeping up is stressful. You may have to move mountains just to follow through.

I realized, more than a hobby, that this was a relationship: what I wanted from Arabic translation, naturally, asked for something in return. If that was too much, I could have simply broken up with it, translating a short poem every so often just to feel something (call it a relapse, lol). This is the route most people take with crafts they pick up. It is the decision I myself made with competitive chess, music, game development, etc. There is nothing wrong with it. The complexity of modern life often takes precedence over your muse.

For me, it’s more about managing expectations. Oftentimes, we start things expecting to be experts immediately. We’re disappointed when our first fifty poems suck, when our stitching is inconsistent, when the anatomy in our drawings is a little off. But maybe, instead of projecting onto our crafts, we can just listen to them. Sometimes a little shitty keepsake is perfect. Other times the vision asks more from you. And this picture changes with the stars, if only we turned our gaze away from ourselves, towards them. It isn’t about us. It never is.

3. And once you listen, all sorts of scary and beautiful things may unfold.

So here I am in Jordan again, nine years later, but with completely different aims. I’m also much more independent. The first time, my program did all the work: established academic rigor, took us on a trip every month, and provided an all-encompassing social life, complete with a language pledge to keep us practicing Arabic. (Being foreigners, though, we developed our own dialect blending Jordanian slang, standard university-taught Arabic, and our own ignorant mistakes—never before seen in the Arab world!)

This time, my program is a lot smaller, partially due to the war, and my goals are both more specific and more opaque. I want to improve my Arabic enough to read literature, then find a niche in the canon I can situation myself in. I want to meet living Arabic writers, and ideally, translate them. I want to make friends. I want finish my first real-world translation project on a Palestinian prisoner’s story from the 1950s, ideally with support from a native Arabic speaker. These goals involve a combination of doing tons of homework, reading independently, and, much to my discomfort, leaving the comfort of my solitude to go out and meet strangers.

But the beauty of this ambiguity is that every week I meet a new surprise. For two whole weeks I was dipping my toes in a new cafe or community center every other night, hoping to tap into some artist community, maybe find someone to help me with my translation. I’d make small talk with the person working there, ask if they knew anyone who might be interested in my goals, then sit down and introduce myself to the person sitting next to me. I met the kindest people. I met some weird ones. Others were, let’s say, appropriately superficial for my basic Arabic. Then, one day, I explained my circumstances to a worker at a community center called Jadal, and he introduced me to his friend, also a writer and translator, and she thought my translation project was so fascinating that she offered to help work on it for free. For free! I was fully ready to pay a reader out of my own pocket, but she insisted.

Well, we agreed to meet every few days at Jadal to translate, and each time I met other regulars at the space until I was integrated into the community. Last night, my new friend and I were coworking, and every so often someone we knew would come start a conversation, ask about the project, try to read the source, check my work. Eventually a two-person silent translation session became a six-person group discussion. People started smoking. Someone brought falafel sandwiches. The cat and dog nearby started fighting. It was completely unproductive. It was so fun. It was beautiful.

On the way home, my Uber driver—a sixty year old retired Jordanian man—complimented my piercings. It took me so off guard that I originally suspected he was flirting with me. (People here just tend to stare silently, which I understand, considering how uncommon it is.)

“It’s normal in New York,” I said in Arabic, a little embarrassed.

“No, it is good,” he said, “You must feel free to express yourself.”

We talked about my background. I asked about his family. He said his son recently decided to quit his job at Amazon Amman, which piqued my interest as someone who also just left tech. I asked him what he thought of that.

“Of course, I always tell my children they must do what is right for them,” he said. “That it is their responsibility to discover how to navigate this life, and my job only to support them, and guide them when they wish. I asked him if he had another job lined up. He said, no, Baba, but I don’t think this career is right for me, what do you think I should do?”

“What did you say?”

“I said, if you feel this is true, then you must leave, and not even hesitate. So he did.”

I was startled by the simplicity of his responses. Genuinely, there was not a shred of doubt in his voice. I then told him I was making a very similar decision a month ago, to try and pivot out of tech, if I was so capable.

“Yes. You must,” he said firmly.

“Well, that’s why I’m here now,” I responded, happy to meet his expectations. “My interest is in translating Arabic. But I don’t know if it is realistic. The last few months have been very difficult, and I may not succeed in this transition.”

“You must follow your heart,” he said, as if none of my anxieties even registered to him. “Life is so short, you must do what is good for you. It will all be for the best, Inshallah.”

Affirmed by his complete absence of misgivings, and invigorated by the five hour ‘translation’ session I’d just come back from, I let myself bask in the joy of this new life chapter, perhaps for the first time. “Inshallah,” I whispered, smiling. “Inshallah, indeed.”

At the time I was new to fiction. I had always been a poetry guy, I remember writing poems for my cousins’ birthdays in middle school, and I maintained a blog in high school and college which I wrote terrible essays on. But fiction was enticing to me then because it was new and impersonal. I had undergone some level of trauma in 2018 and 2019 (shout-out to those who know) and perhaps the remove of fiction helped me process what I was going through.

But letting go had never been my strong suit. I knew the book was bad—it was my first attempt at fiction—yet I kept editing it, hoping to salvage it into something I could share with people. (Visibility was my end goal.) Soon, I started my MFA program. I workshopped a sample from it, and rewrote it over the summer after my first year. I rewrote that over my second year for my thesis workshop, then rewrote it again after the program, once and for all.

Three full rewrites, countless waves of edits. The last draft took two years and totaled over four hundred pages (125,000 words), yet it still needed more work! I was depleted. By 2025 I had fully grown out of a book only kept alive out of a sense of duty: to honor the depressed twenty-three year old who first wrote it and see his crises through. To let people know what he had gone through and give him the eyes and ears he was so desperate for. But the person I was doing this for wasn’t the person I was anymore.

Desperate for closure, I pitched the thing to agents. That took another year. Surprisingly, I got interest, but no commitment past R&Rs (“Revise & Resubmit”—when an agent asks you to make edits without any promise to represent you). What I hoped would give me answers just reflected the same question back at me: how much more could I give to this project? The answer had not changed since 2023. Nothing, except everything I had left.

The terrifying thing about novels is they will gladly eat up your soul if you let them, and the sobering thing is that there are times in your life where you really do need to die.

So I can’t act like it wasn’t consensual. I just hoped it would all amount to something. Better to die and have a book to show for it: a pretty cover, an elusive writer headshot, a couple blurbs from your best friends. I have a friend who hates that, the way a binding could legitimize anything into a book. It’s complete artifice, she’d say. But that’s what I wanted. I wanted a graduation gown for the kid I spent my 20s raising. I wanted a little ceremony where I could cry and forget how fucked up the little rascal made me. I wanted (it) to be seen.

Of course, I could have self-published or pitched to small presses without an agent, and even acted like I was rejecting the system in doing so. But querying agents was so excruciating that it forced me to confront the truth: my motivations had changed. See, when I started the book, I didn’t know what a book was, or rather, what it was like to write one. It was a projection—as was my MFA—of the desire to be (seen as) a writer, not to write.

Ultimately, what I wanted from the book and what I got were miles apart. That desire to be seen became a relationship with the medium I was using to do so. And the choreography I once scripted from the act of writing got absorbed into the relationship. Anxieties about my legitimacy as a writer turned into hours rewriting sentences. The purpose I sought from my life adapted into plot structure. I was projecting onto the page itself. It was beautiful and confusing, because there was no longer a “why” to write, but just a “when” and “what”.

I wish this development came with some profound wisdom you could put onto a fortune cookie (or a Substack note), but that’s the thing: process is a relationship; it isn’t sexy, or condensible. And its value was not in what it made but what its making put me through. The book actually purged the romance I felt for writing, but left in its place the thousands of hours I spent with it.

If you think this is starting to sound like a breakup letter, that’s because it is one. The bells and whistles of publishing no longer served the true purpose of the project but rather was just something I sought closure from. I wanted to move on. And though people have published out of less (I’m sure some whites would publish their dog’s piss stains if they could), no amount of artifice would protect me from the grief I was faced with. In my heart I knew the novel was what my professor would call “apprentice work”. A part of me wishes five years of writing could be chalked up to more than “practice”, but really I already received everything I needed from it, which was the process of writing it. It wasn’t my book that was due for graduation. It was me.

The product of this book was a deeper, more informed desire to write a new one. Which sucks, because I can’t show someone a feeling. I can’t explain why I feel no desire to externalize the novel anymore, except that I’ve absorbed it, and it’s now a part of me. It’s only once I looked at this “occupation” on the scale of decades that it started to make sense to me. In a way, this novel was the first draft of my writer life. It’s time for me to move onto draft number two.

In a little over a month I will be quitting my cushy job at Duolingo. I have worked there for almost six years. After moving out of my apartment in Brooklyn, I will spend the next few months in Amman, Jordan, where I will pursue an intensive Arabic program under Qasid Institute.

I have been translating poetry from Arabic to English since 2017—when I studied Arabic in Jordan—and I pursued a “Joint Course of Study in Translation” during my MFA at Columbia, but I have yet to publish anything. The reason is that I know my Arabic is not good enough yet, and as such it’s remained a hobby. I hope to change that this year.

This Substack will serve as my primary means of reflecting on my experience in and after Jordan, and, as per the new namesake, conceptualizing it (largely through my own reading). Some of you may have noticed that the title of this blog changed from This Dysfunctional Book Club, and it’s because after experimenting with a few different types of posts and registers, I have landed on a vision for this blog that is centered on the essay and hence more personal, while still retaining the freedom to oscillate between being research-first or thesis-first. I know that’s abstract, but this is called Abstractions, so get used to it.

My new About Page talks about this more:

So practically this site will be a combination of notes-and-quotes on the things I’m reading alongside broader writings on my life. For example, I might write about my experience teaching undergrad but cite Pedagogy of the Oppressed for help with framing. Or I’ll share some WIP translations of Sufi poetry while reflecting on the practice of devotion in a spiritually bankrupt time. Hopefully you get the point. The things I put here will be generally more introspective than what you’d see on my Tiktok, though the formula will largely be the same: locate something I’m obsessing over, make a research project around it, and try to explain it imperfectly.

After Jordan, I will dive headfirst into content creation, expanding into YouTube video essays and Substack. I will also begin writing my second novel (more on that soon!) and—hopefully—start on a promising translation manuscript. I imagine such a dramatic career transition from tech to education/content/writing/translation will expose me to plenty of new ideas and reflections, which I hope to capture here.

As always, I will not stop reading and sharing my own research and ideation with you all. I am on a lifelong quest to Understand The World Around Me, and I hope you’ll come along with me for the ride.

Bismillah.

1: The origins of the hostage exchange

If you were anywhere near activist circles in 2023, you have heard of Orisanmi Burton’s book Tip of the Spear. And it’s because it reframed the narrative around prison abolition, primarily through studying the Attica Prison Revolt in 1971. While the “riot” itself lasted not for more than five days, Burton writes of “The Long Attica Revolt”, made up of other rebellions in Attica before and after, and he connects it to broader prison revolts and political movements nationwide. His argument is compelling: prison rebellion does not occur in a vacuum; in fact, they are symptoms of broader power struggles within and without the prison. And social movements through organizations like The Black Panthers seep into them, both directly—through the systematic incarceration of revolutionaries in the 60s and 70s—and indirectly—through the political atmosphere of the country and leading thinkers which make their way into prison libraries.

One such thinker was Carlos Marighella, a Brazilian writer and politician whose claim to fame was defining and developing tactics of resistance to the (US-backed) military dictatorship in Brazil. In his Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, he mentions prisoner exchanges: performing raids where revolutionaries may capture “enemy agents” to exchange for the freedom of political prisoners.

This document was widely circulated in the charged political atmosphere of the late 60s and 70s. It made its way into the hands of revolutionaries worldwide, including the Black Liberation Army and the PLO. The tactic became one of the primary ways to retrieve political prisoners in what Burton describes as “asymmetrical warfare”—a straightforward way to achieve leverage against a more powerful system of incarceration. It was used in the hijacking of Sabena Flight 571 in 1972, the Attica Prison Revolt, and, recently, October 7th as well.

2: Fine, let’s talk about October 7th

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, known more broadly in the West as “October 7th”, is understandably a touchy subject. The movement in the U.S. intentionally avoided it, one could argue, for good reason: any attempts to contextualize the attacks would be seen as justifying terrorism, which is a surefire way to get your cause sidelined by the media (and the FBI).

At the same time, avoiding the very real political dynamics of Israel and Palestine made the pro-Palestine movement in the US disconnected from the conditions on the ground. Our focus was on the humanitarian crisis, but most of us refused to zoom out, always pivoting the national conversation back to the death toll, the starvation, the bombing of hospitals, the killing of children—I can keep listing Israel’s war crimes but it’s besides the point. The point is that dressing up the movement in solely humanitarian language neglected political solutions in favor of humanitarian ones. For example, calls to “End the Occupation” were heard in protests, but without a clear politic, many liberals interpreted it as a demand for withdrawal of IDF forces from Gaza—and perhaps settlers from the West Bank—rather than a complete dissolution of an apartheid state.

Again, this ambiguity was convenient. It allowed the movement to scale, and include camps which had radically different ideal solutions for Palestine; we could each interpret the movement through our own politics. This was both the benefit and the cost. It was a classic American anti-war movement with protests led by non-profits like ANSWER who would have lobbied to pull out of Vietnam without mentioning the Vietcong once. And by glossing over the decisions and intentions of the Palestinian resistance, it institutionalized itself into a two-state politic of peace over justice.

The issue is that we’re still funding Israel. “Ending the war” in Gaza is an unambiguously positive milestone, but Israel has not lost the ability to bomb and starve Palestinians in the slightest; in fact, they still are. Hence this “ceasefire” is less about ending a war and more about continuing it more quietly. The power dynamics have not changed.

All it takes to understand this is asking: why did October 7th happen in the first place? Naively put, if they were not facing a genocide yet, why would Hamas undergo attacks that would escalate into one? Of course, there are many reasons. Some would mention the creeping diplomatic normalization between Arab states and Israel (the Abraham Accords). Others would chalk it up to Gaza being an open air prison full of disease, malnourishment, and a complete lack of sovereignty. But this essay takes one specific angle (out of many), and that’s the logistical one: specifically, hostage exchange. Hamas took hostages to free Palestinian political prisoners.

3: You can’t have an occupation without prisons

In order to place the Attica Prison Rebellion in its full context, Orisanmi Burton presented a plethora of research into the conditions leading up to (and coming after) it. He uncovered conditions of squalor, botched sentencing leading from indefinitely delayed pre-trial detention to completely fabricated charges, and a long history of prison organizing against such injustices. This led him to make one of the book’s most definitive claims: that the American prison system is already a form of low-intensity warfare that only really pretends to prevent crime.

In his interview on Turbulence, he cites Black Power activist George Jackson who called for the “abolition of the function of prison as a concentration camp”. We owe the very definition of prison abolition to these revolutionaries of the 60s and 70s, and it’s no surprise that when the state was jailing vast swaths of Black revolutionaries, their prison organizing centered political prisoners.

Burton takes this framing of prisons even further, linking the Black radical critique of prisons with the Palestinian one. Both conceptualize the actual site of incarceration as “an intensification of an already existing condition of captivity”. For Black people, this originates from a legacy of chattel slavery, leading into Jim Crow and mass incarceration (the 13th). For Palestinians, this originates from a settler colonial state with roots in British colonialism, leading into a system of apartheid, and after 1967, military occupation. Both see themselves as captive. Both see incarceration as an “intensification of that site of struggle”, as Burton puts it.

As the podcast puts it: one third of Palestinian men in the West Bank are incarcerated at some point in their life. A quarter of Black men in the U.S. face the same. The condition of mass incarceration is an expression of war, not of peace. And the uncomfortable truth is that Palestine has been in a state of war since 1948. Once we internalize this, all the events we’ve witnessed from the past few decades finally start to make sense. Occupation and the creep of illegal settlements. Mass incarceration, hunger strikes, and prison rebellions. Starvation, mass unemployment, disease, and lack of infrastructure. October 7th was not even remotely a departure from the bloody history of modern Palestine. It only shocked this country because we did not know what preceded it.

For decades, revolutionaries and anti-war activists in this country have been drawing these connections. Those who knew were not surprised by October 7th, or even the genocide, despite its horrors. Again we are left with the question: will we face the uncomfortable realities of global geopolitical conflict, at which the United States is at the center, and build a cohesive, proactive politic on top of it? Or will we continue to be passive consumers of politics, willfully ignorant as beneficiaries of empire, our heads in the sand until the next outbreak of violence jolts us out of our consumerist wet dreams?

Palestine is still at war. It always has been. And that is not to say we are capable of stopping it as individuals, but to say that the necessity of being politically organized remains. Don’t let them lull you into complicity. America hates those who act, and loves those who react. But it’s up to you which truth you wish to seek!

I know what you’re thinking: I played Danya and lost. Well, half of that is correct. I did lose, but it was against my friend Yian Liou, and it was because I played so hard for a draw that I never attacked; instead, I dilly-dallied into a gradual loss. No, I never played Danya in that tournament, because he wasn’t playing in my section, despite us being the same age. He was busy winning the ninth to twelfth grade section.

This memory is significant to me because it was the beginning of the end of my chess career. It encapsulated the three reasons I’d informally quit a few years later, none of which I could articulate until recently. One, I was so desperate for the validation of state titles that I was willing to compromise the one thing all chess champions share: the desire to win every game they play. (In essence, my motivations were wrong.) Two, my chess career was concentrated to the glamour and conviviality of the scholastic scene in California, which I’d soon become too old for. Lastly, I felt constantly overshadowed by prodigies like Yian Liou (a year my junior, but better), Tanuj Vasudeva (five years younger than me, and quickly approaching my level), and Danya Naroditsky (my age, competing against adults already, and roughly thrice my strength). In fact, while I was fighting my way into an elementary school title, this was Danya’s second time winning high school. It was his last time too. Once he entered junior high, he wouldn’t bother with states at all; instead, Yian Liou would inherit the high school section’s title the next year—in sixth grade.

But at the time, I was still in it. I was rated in the top 100 nationally of my age group until I entered high school. Danya and I shared a coach, Michael Aigner, who I like to describe as the Phil Jackson of California scholastic chess coaches. I was too far out of Danya’s league to compete against him, but I saw him at state and national chess tournaments, where he served as a constant reminder of what a world class chess player was like. It was an honor to be in close proximity to people of that caliber. It was deflating too.

Because the scholastic chess world was stressful, filled with drama, and littered with competitive parents projecting onto their children. I couldn’t handle it. Not many children could. We had the misfortune of being good enough to see chess from a birds’ eye view, to be able to compare ourselves to the Danyas of the world who found—or forged—a path through all the disorder. Unsurprisingly, most of my peers chose to soft retire in high school instead of pursue a professional adult chess career, which was far more cutthroat and toxic, despite its marked absence of helicopter parents. Not Danya, though.

In 2010, as I left the chess world to focus on high school, he became the youngest published chess author with his first book, Mastering Positional Chess, then earned two IM norms. The next year, he secured the IM title and earned his first GM norm at the Benasque Open just six months later. 2012 saw the release of his second book—Mastering Complex Endgames—and 2013 saw him win his final two GM norms. Danya was a chess grandmaster before he was a senior in high school.

The unbelievable part is this was only the beginning of his prestigious chess career. He coached the BayAreaChess Elite team while pursuing a degree in History at Stanford, then worked as Resident Grandmaster of the Charlotte Chess Center after graduation. He then began his formal streaming and coaching career, which was catapulted by the pandemic as well as his win against #2 ranked Fabiano Caruana at the 2021 U.S. Championship. By 2023, he had become the chess columnist for The New York Times and amassed more than 200,000 followers on YouTube and Twitch.

Danya’s full resume would fill much more than two paragraphs, but his legacy encompasses much more than his competitive record, and even his streaming career. He understood, unlike most of us, that chess, more than its games and books and streaming, is made up of the people playing it. It’s the way you shake your opponent’s hand after an intense game. It’s the vulnerability in watching someone react to their own blunder, in losing a winning endgame on time, in the eye contact you make when offering a draw. Chess is how players share their love—and hate—of the game through memes, analysis, and strongly worded tweets. Chess is universal. It is territory that is as firmly neutral as it is contested. And in an age where everyone is trying to stake the game as their own, Danya never did. His play was one of craft, not ego. He elevated not just the game with his presence, but the culture around it too. That’s why people liked to watch him, because he made the game fun and accessible, and taught with the same diligence that he played with. For the stunted chess kids like me, he was a beacon of what we all could be, as players, and as people too.

Chess, sometimes, can convince us that life is quantifiable. Each move is subject to analysis, each game condensed into one of three results; its certainty is part of its appeal. But we lost something immeasurable with Danya’s passing. What’s left is the example that he set.

Rest in peace, Danya. The chess world is better because of you.

Introduction: Is beauty “useful”?

Richard Prum is an evolutionary biologist with a bit of a chip on his shoulder. His speciality was birds before he even knew what the word “speciality” meant, and he’s always had an eye for the qualitative.

What got him into evolutionary biology is the lens it provided into the diversity of birds, how they came to be so distinct as they are now. And while he was as much of a generalist as one could be for something so specific (going from tropical birds to duck sexuality to dinosaurs), eventually, he began to make connections between all these different threads.

That connection was beauty. And naturally, beauty leads to sex, sex to genetics, genetics to evolution. A classic topic, but there was one problem. The dominant view on evolutionary beauty is what Prum calls adaptationist. They view beauty as a proxy for an animal’s utility, sexual selection as just another way species survive in the wild. Prum disagrees. “Most evolutionary biologists,” he argues,

think that sexual ornaments and displays . . . evolve because such ornaments provide specific, honest information about the quality and condition of potential mates. According to this “honest signaling” paradigm, the extraordinary electric-blue smiley face display on the erectable breast feathers of a male Superb Bird of Paradise functions like a birdie Internet dating profile, providing multiple pieces of information that a discerning female bird of paradise needs to know. Who are his “people”? Does he come from a good egg? Was he raised in a good nest? Does he have a good diet? Does he take care of himself? Does he have sexually transmitted diseases?

Prum calls this a “BioMatch.com theory of ornament”, where beauty is utility, even for the bird above. In this view,

beauty is only desirable because it brings other, real-world benefits, like vigor, health, or good genes. Although sexual beauty may indeed be sensually pleasing, according to this view, sexual selection is just another form of natural selection; there is no fundamental difference between the evolutionary forces acting on the beaks of Galápagos Finches and those shaping the courtship displays of the birds of paradise. Beauty is merely the handmaiden of natural selection.

But Prum’s view is the opposite. He believes that “evolution is frequently far quirkier, stranger, more historically contingent, individualized, and less predictable and generalizable than adaptation can explain.”

Evolution can even be “decadent,” in the sense of its resulting in sexual ornaments that not only fail to signal anything about objective mate quality but actually lower the survival and fecundity of the signaler and the chooser. In short, in pursuit of their subjective preferences, individuals can make mating choices that are maladaptive—resulting in a worse fit between the organism and its environment. This is something that quite a few evolutionary biologists would argue is impossible, but I beg to differ, and this book is my explanation of why. In the larger sense, I hope to communicate to my readers that natural selection alone cannot possibly explain the diversity, complexity, and extremity of the sexual ornaments we see in nature. Natural selection is not the only source of design in nature.

Prum, pp. 18-20, Ebook.

A radical premise, indeed, though I wonder if the evolutionary biologist community sees it as pseudoscience. As for me, I was convinced before I even got to chapter one.

Chapter one: The feminist politics of it all

The first chapter goes deep into the history of evolutionary biology, of which I will spare you all the details. The interesting thing is how sexual selection is positioned within Darwin’s legacy; Prum argues that when adaptationist biologists reduce beauty to utility, they distort Darwin’s work. Of course, the adaptationists would argue Prum is the real one deviating from Darwinism. The whole debate is religious in a sense.

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This dissonance is explained in the gap between Darwin’s first and second major works of evolutionary theory: On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871).

In Origin, Darwin saw sexual selection as simply the handmaiden of natural selection, another means of guaranteeing the perpetuation of the most vigorous and best-adapted mates. This view still prevails today. By the time he wrote Descent, however, Darwin had embraced a much broader concept of sexual selection that may have nothing to do with a potential mate’s being more vigorous or better adapted per se, but only with being aesthetically appealing, as he stated clearly for the mesmerizing example of the Argus Pheasant: “The case of the male Argus pheasant is eminently interesting, because it affords good evidence that the most refined beauty may serve as a sexual charm, and for no other purpose [emphasis added].”

Prum, p. 34, Ebook.

Origin was Darwin’s most seminal work, and became part of the scientific canon almost immediately. But Descent had mixed reception. According to Prum, Darwin’s law of battle—male-male competition over female sexuality—was accepted unequivocally, while the concept of mate choice—female mate choice—was rejected outright.

If this sounds, spicy, it’s because it is. Biologist St. George Mivart critiqued it using Origin’s theory of natural selection, the argument most commonly used today. And Alfred Russel Wallace, who Prum describes as the “co-discoverer of natural selection”, took so much issue with it that he attacked it publicly—and privately—for decades. But Darwin stood his ground up until his death in 1882, before which he addressed it one last time.

Once Darwin was dead, Wallace inherited ownership over the debate. He slammed Darwin’s theory of sexual selection until it was completely erased from the canon of evolutionary biology for the next century. Though his career was overshadowed by Darwin, he proved he could still make a mark by shaping his legacy itself.

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Prum does not shy away from the feminist implications of this history. To him, the rejection of the law of sexual selection had everything to do with the patriarchal norms of the Victorian Era, and it is no surprise it reappeared in the 70s, the decade that second wave of feminism came to a head.

The most notable and revolutionary feature of Darwin’s theory of mate choice is that it was explicitly aesthetic. He described the evolutionary origin of beauty in nature as a consequence of the fact that animals had evolved to be beautiful to themselves. What was so radical about this idea was that it positioned organisms—especially female organisms—as active agents in the evolution of their own species. Unlike natural selection, which emerges from external forces in nature, such as competition, predation, climate, and geography, acting on the organism, sexual selection is a potentially independent, self-directed process in which the organisms themselves (mostly female) were in charge. Darwin described females as having a “taste for the beautiful” and an “aesthetic faculty.”

Prum, pp. 31-32, Ebook.

All roads lead back towards religion

Prum, in his positioning of sexual selection, is not trying to debunk natural selection, but rather position it as its equal. Some biological traits may be reinforced because they are attractive and nothing else (sexual selection). Others may help the species survive in the wild (natural selection). In certain instances, the two can work against each other. Prum uses the long-studied example of bird tail length to illustrate this.

A male may have the optimal tail length for survival (that is, favored by natural selection), but if he is not sexy enough to attract even a single mate (that is, disfavored by sexual selection), he will fail to pass on his genes to the next generation. Likewise, a male may have the perfect tail size for attracting mates (that is, favored by sexual selection), but if he is so sexually extravagant that he cannot survive long enough to attract a single mate (that is, disfavored by natural selection), he will also fail to pass on his genes.

Prum, p. 54, Ebook.

Darwin intuited that there was a natural balance between these two forces, and mathematical biologists Lande and Kirkpatrick confirmed it in 1982. Here it is applied to bird tail length again.

You can see why Prum blames patriarchy for the marginalization of sexual selection in biology; the concept gives females of a species the agency to change the course of evolution itself. But it also has to do with religion, he argues. Natural selection, to this day, is heralded as the one true answer to evolution. The popular conception of it is intelligent, and deterministic, despite its built-in randomness. I still get annoyed when people say things like “if it was advantageous for us to have four arms, we’d have evolved it,” as if mutations appear out of thin air! But all of these biases are disrupted once you bring sexual selection into the picture.

By claiming that evolution by mate choice was a special process with its own, distinctive internal logic, Darwin fought against the powerful scientific and intellectual bias toward simplicity and unification. Of course, many of Darwin’s Victorian antagonists were recent converts from religious monotheism to materialist evolutionism. Their historic monotheism might have predisposed them to adopt a powerful new monoideism; they replaced a single omnipotent God with a single omnipotent idea—natural selection. Indeed, contemporary adaptationists should question why they feel it is necessary to explain all of nature with a single powerful theory or process. Is the desire for scientific unification simply the ghost of monotheism lurking within contemporary scientific explanation? This is another implication of Darwin’s really dangerous idea.

Prum, p. 68, Ebook.

Prum, in this book, has picked fights with evolutionary biology, patriarchy, and now religion too. The book is as illuminating as it is accessible. It is a niche topic made interesting solely because the writer is passionate about it. And though I would highly recommend it, I unfortunately can’t post more updates of this book, because I have to research another topic for an upcoming YouTube video (!!). But if you do pick it up, let me know what you think!

And I hope this essay proved useful, even if it was dense. A hundred pages is a lot to condense into one post.

My vision for this blog is for it to be equal parts educational and personal. I want to write in-depth digests on the books I’m reading (for my own remembering, if nothing else), as well as broader reflections on my life. So if you liked this post, or have any feedback, please share. I want to know if this is working or not! <3