I am funnier in Somali, the language where I can best express passion and revulsion. In Arabic, I am unabashedly corny and poetic. I swear like a trooper in Italian, as it was a language of admonishment in my household.

I struggled with English as a child, a fact people are often surprised by. It’s a language I picked up as a toddler and retained in fragments when my family moved to the Gulf. My formal education began in Arabic at local state schools. English soon became a phantom limb, kept alive by satellite television and chattering older siblings. I lost my ability to read fluently. From Dickens to Robert Louis Stevenson, I first read the abridged editions of the Western canon in Arabic. When I returned to London, my English was faltering. While I waited to be enrolled in an oversubscribed borough, my mother attacked the gaps in my education, poring over workbooks with me. She raided charity shops for children’s literature. I was left in front of the telly to absorb conversational English. This was where I developed an appreciation for the Peckham wide boys of Only Fools and Horses, as well as the aspirational absurdity of Keeping Up Appearances. You could say Hyacinth Bucket taught me English.

At school, I was the stuttering ESOL kid, a vulnerability I stamped out with a crash course in popular culture. I lapped up magazines, latched onto the tastes of cousins, and read like a fiend. Always, I listened, attentive to conversations, both public and private, that were beyond my years. Music was another gateway, polishing up my rusty pronunciation. There are songs I deeply associate with that time of linguistic vertigo, when I was fumbling around behind the sofa for a language I had misplaced, one I would grow up to master and mine. On the page, English is my critical scalpel, a weapon of precision. My accent, however, sometimes betrays a disjointed biography. Slightly elongated vowels, a lilt where there should be a dip, all markers of stopping and starting all over again, of leaving and losing. In that spirit of retrieval, here’s a brief list of Y2K songs which doubled as learning and emotional tools.

“Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)” — Spiller ft. Sophie Ellis Bextor

This Brit-Italian banger is sticky with the giddy melancholy that clings to the skin in late summer. Released 26 Augusts ago, it marks Sophie Ellis Bextor’s transition out of the indie ghetto and into chart-topping pop ascendancy. The groove of 1977’s “Love is You”, as sung by Carol Williams, was lifted to make what has become my personal anthem for backpacking across South East Asia. (And I’m not just saying that because of the Bangkok-set video, with Bextor warbling from the back of a tuk-tuk). I write this list enveloped in the humidity of another Asian metropolis, my face aglow with sweat and neon lights. That’s the feeling this song gives me. Wandering the lurid side streets of a megacity during a profoundly transitional stage in your life. Fogging up the windows of a taxi with your breath. A 2am brew of Ceylon tea at a late-night haunt. I have a memory of dancing to this song in a bar in Jakarta with a bunch of Verso editors and a literary translator or two. For some reason, the bar was adorned with Union Jack flags. Incidentally, “Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)” was the very first song ever played on the original iPod prototype. Steve Jobs apparently loved it.

“Die Another Day” — Madonna

I love Madonna the way only a Gen X white post-feminist theorist can. Meaning, a lot. Much has been written about her capacity for reinvention, which is just another way of saying she’s never been afraid to risk failure or ridicule. 2002’s “Die Another Day” has to be the strangest Bond song ever, a glitchy electroclash experiment produced by longtime collaborator Mirwais Ahmadzaï. Each generation has its formative Madge era, and mine was the long noughties, a time when Madonna was temporarily possessed by the spirit of a soft-spoken British woman from Wiltshire. (I love the idea of marrying someone and simply borrowing their accent, as Madonna did with Guy Ritchie). Madge is the only pop icon who could churn out a franchise theme song with the ad-lib “Sigmund Freud / Analyse this”, in a music video that stages the conflict between the id and superego as a fencing match. Over four decades, there’s something aggravating in how freely she has transformed, pilfered, appropriated, butchered, and delivered, swinging from critical acclaim to caricature and back again. Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister? bell hooks posed the question in 1992, in an essay that isn’t quite as juicy as the title would suggest. hooks was no Madonna fan, likening her to the white colonial adventurer moving into the wilderness of black culture. Alongside the critique, hooks admits to envying Madonna’s freedom, the “cultural space” she has to provoke and grow. I wish contemporary critics admitted their envy more freely.

“Lazy” — X-Press 2 ft. David Byrne

The English electronic dance music duo X-Press 2 released this song in 2002 to critical success. Despite hearing it everywhere back then, it was the kind of earworm that frustratingly slipped from my mind. A few years ago during a Lisbon cab ride, this was on the radio. I asked the driver to turn it up, enjoying the rush of pure recognition. David Byrne’s blank spoken word delivery cresting over deep house in an ode to being a lazy layabout. Who could ask for more? No wonder this won an Ivor Novello. “Lazy” was a hit across Europe, reportedly reaching Number 1 in Syria. As someone who spent childhood holidays in Damascus, it’s poignant to think I might have heard it there too.

“Freak Like Me” — Sugababes

I’m hardly the first to say this, but this song is a stroke of genius. It started its life as an underground bootleg, when producer Richard X melded together the melody of Adina Howard’s 1995 R&B hit “Freak Like Me” with the synth riff from Tubeway Army’s 1979 genre game-changer “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”. Sugababes, who sit at the top of the girl group pantheon for me, transformed this mash-up into a scuzzy classic. I rinsed out Angels with Dirty Faces as a youngster, an album with instant replayability. Like many, I lean towards the definitive lineup of Mutya, Keisha, and Siobhan, all hailing from my painfully beloved North-West LDN, emanating all its sweetness and sting. “Overload” still lands on my shuffle, and it’s astonishing that they were capable of a song like that as 15-year-olds.

“Satisfaction” — Eve

I loved Ruff Ryders Eve, the self-proclaimed “pitbull in a skirt”. I wasn’t just learning English at this stage, but veering into hood fabulous territory, a register of bravado and hyperbole. Like millions across the globe, I was attracted to it all, playing my part in a globalised world enthralled with working-class Black America’s most enduring and immaterial export: the currency of cool. Eve-Olution was all Philly swagger and boom-bap percussion. Paw prints fluttering across a breastbone. Popped bubblegum. A brashness that wasn’t exactly child-friendly, but hadn’t yet descended into nihilistic squalor. Rappers were evolving into moguls. Diddy was running rampant. It was a time of demonstrative excess. But this album was bouncy, upbeat hip-hop you could skip to during a game of double dutch.

“Feel” — Robbie Williams

I stand by this being one of the best pop songs of the 2000’s. Decades after it helped me relearn English, it takes a spiritual crisis or three to reckon with its lyrics. In Rastafari fashion, it’s a song I now overstand.

“Hey Ma” — Cam’ron ft. Juelz Santana

I shouldn’t have been listening to this, but I had older bothers. A call-and-response classic.

*Honourable mention to Shakira’s early English-language albums, where she clearly wrote her lyrics with the instincts of a Spanish speaker, resulting in beautifully clunky lines about seven-legged cats.

“In a man’s house every monster is repeated.”

— Derek Walcott, The Odyssey: A Stage Version

1. British soft power continues to wither away. Even Christopher Nolan, Hollywood’s favourite record-shattering Centrist Dad, seems to think so. Five minutes into The Odyssey, and I’m unsettled by the American drawl emanating from man and nymph alike. RP was the gold standard for the sword-and-sandal genre, with that particular accent lending a kind of transhistorical gravitas. Can we have anything left?

2. The sound design is a triumph. It groans and rattles, like a waterlogged dirge. It’s an assault, evoking the ghastliness of being stuck on a battered ship with people you know you have failed. Nolan’s sea surges, as it does in Homer’s epic. This is the shuttle of the sea moving back and forth, as imagined in Derek Walcott’s staged version of the poem. Walcott’s Homer is a blind blues singer, crooning from the sidelines, always returning to the sea in tribute and terror. Even after reuniting with Odysseus, Penelope can still hear the sea shaking in his body.

3. I loved all the parts where the ship’s sails resemble bloody blots against a cloudless sky.

4. Odysseus is one of the earliest portrayals of an absentee father in Western literature. He is the OG deadbeat.

5. Charlize Theron’s Calypso is dressed like the boho-chic Slavic women I meet at Red Sea resorts whose income is derived from candle-making and beachside vinyasa classes. They are easy to satirise until they tell you about fleeing Putin’s Russia, which technically makes them political exiles.

6. The less said about Pallas Athena, the better. It’s easier to suspend disbelief when all I can see of a famous actor is the back of their head. Benny Safdie, of all people, received this treatment as hulking Agamemnon, whose face we never see. More of this please, Hollywood.

7. Simone Weil wrote her essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” in 1940, as the Nazis swarmed France. Like Troy, her country had fallen. In The Illiad, she saw the force that animates violence as pitiless and essentially untameable. Force exists outside even those who wield it. It crushes some and intoxicates others, but in the end, can’t be entirely possessed by anyone. Weil saw this in the despair of the soldier, as well as the obliteration of the slave and the conquered man, all swept away in tides of blood and glory. Nolan’s Odysseus is similarly adrift, hanging on to a wooden raft. Force, not moral injury, should be the driving thrust of any worthwhile Homeric adaptation.

8. Unlike my siblings, I didn’t formally study the classics, which weren’t taught at the terrible schools I attended. My fascination with Odysseus was cultivated through my own reading habits. Odysseus exemplifies metis, the practical intelligence and cunning so admired by the ancient Greeks. He is the man of many ways, as one translation puts it. Polytropos, Homer calls him, the “much-travelled” drifter, the changeable survivor, he of wandering eyes and hands. Turning this way and that, like a fish wriggling free from the hook. Matt Damon is gruff and rigid, a drab vision of an irresistibly slippery hero. After tricking and maiming the cave-dwelling giant Polyphemus, Odysseus can’t help but rub it in, revealing himself in the process. He wants his name etched in legend. Omitting this part from the film is one thing, but this moment of reckless hubris is reduced to Damon wordlessly shooting an arrow at the giant, to the horror of his escaping men. In Nolan’s version, wiliness falls by the wayside. I prefer the Odysseus who pretends to be insane in order to avoid the Trojan War.

9. Scylla is the most underwhelming monster by a country mile. There is a frightening dignity to Polyphemus, a 60-foot animatronic puppet towering above the bite-sized perspective of Odysseus and his crewmates. I appreciate Nolan’s dedication to CGI-averse naturalism, apparently inspired by Guillermo del Toro’s monsters, but the Scylla encounter deserved no more than the bare minimum screentime it got. Nolan’s Scylla looked like Onix, the first generation Pokémon. Blink and you’ll miss it. Relatedly, The Police’s 1983 new wave earworm “Wrapped Around Your Finger” might be the only hit single that name-drops Scylla and Charybdis. There are more graceful ways to fold these things in.

10. The Odyssey is rooted in the pathologies of our time. It gives us therapeutic culture by way of Thrace, in 70mm IMAX film. Guilt is a coveted burden, fetishised in a script that wrestles with wartime trauma and prolonged displacement. Odysseus is the scarred Bronze Age veteran, the hero denied a homecoming, a leader whose final act of gallantry is distancing himself from the barbarity of his victories. As a king, he can pardon himself. As a man, he hallucinates savage episodes from the Trojan conquest, locked in the inevitability of his crimes. Ours is a culture of emotional greed. We want it all. The prize and the pity, adoration and absolution pouring from the same tap, the monkey without its paw. Nolan’s Odyssey emerges from that infantilised and infantilising tendency. This is the war film narrated by the PTSD-riddled soldier standing on the ashes of a Vietnamese village. The colour of the sky as described by the drone pilot. Nolan’s Odysseus stutters to these familiar beats, attuned to the soothing charms of self-flagellation in an age clamoring with enthusiastic victims. Shame can understand guilt, but guilt cannot understand itself. Bernard Williams was considering the ethical framework of ancient Greeks when he wrote this, but you could take this much further. They had no direct equivalent for the word “guilt”, a concept tied to the internal and individual. Nolan’s Odysseus gives Antinous back his shame, an act which feels more violent than killing him. Shame is something to carry, a branded forehead everyone can see. It is the threat of exposure.

11. Zeus’ Law is like the rules-based international order, creaking under the weight of its contradictions. It protected travellers in an insecure Mediterranean world with few formal institutions. (I have a faint and apt memory of feeling light-headed in Cyprus and resting in a bar named after Odysseus some summers ago). In wary and mocking tones, Nolan’s characters reference this Law throughout the film. With their treacherous gift of the Trojan horse, the Greeks tore apart the governing principle of a “civilised” world. They were blatant with their disobedience. Odysseus turns xenia, the sacred code of hospitality, into a pillar of dust, ushering in Total Moral Collapse, which eventually reaches the shores of his beloved Ithaca. The old rules are simple enough. Treat the stranger as the god he might potentially be. Feed the hungry and welcome the wayfarer. Long-suffering Telemachus and Penelope are held hostage by their own belief in this Law. They are little worker bees at a bloated NGO, waving about their impact reports. Their belief makes the world go round, ensuring that even after 20 years, there’s still food and wine to fill the bellies of grubby suitors. This code now lies stripped on the beach like Odysseus’ dying comrades. We’re in uncharted waters, as Nolan keeps reminding us.

12. Fans of HBO’s historical drama Rome will recall legionary soldier Lucius Vorenus returning home after years on the battlefield. Finding his wife Niobe with a baby in her arms, he is immediately enraged. The show makes it clear that, according to Roman values, he is well within his right to kill her. Their reunion is strained with suspicion. The Penelopes of this world are loyal under the threat of the knife. Demanding the unmovable secret of their marriage bed, Penelope frustrates a disguised Odysseus. In Homer’s poem, he laments Penelope’s hardened heart, though we see none of this in Nolan’s adaptation, where Odysseus never doubts or falters. There it is again, that uninspired rigidity, which after almost three hours, feels like savouring an ice cream cone only to find the deliciously gooey middle scooped out.

13. In Margaret Atwood’s novella The Penelopiad, twelve maids testify against their master Odysseus and his complicit wife. They were hanged for supposed treason, their short lives cut with Penelope as witness. Atwood stages this confrontation in a 21st-century court, overseen by an unsympathetic judge. The maids belonged to Odysseus, and he could freely punish them as he wished. Still, they beg the Fates for a justice that will not come. In The Iliad, Achilles sacrifices twelve Trojan youths in the flames of Patroclus’ funeral pyre, as summarily as he slaughters sheep and cattle. Nolan is concerned only with the most simplistic interpretations of betrayal. Considering what they’re working with, you can’t fault the cast for their adequate performances.

14. Having pulled an all-nighter, I was nodding off when we watched 1995’s Ulysses’ Gaze during a grad school seminar. I remember peeling my eyes awake to the sight of Harvey Keitel’s bare bum, which was certainly a jolt. Since then, I’ve grown to appreciate Theo Angelopoulos’ foggy ordeal of a movie. A Greek filmmaker searches for the lost reels made by Balkan pioneers Milton and Yanaki Manaki, journeying across a fractured region. Returning from self-imposed exile, Keitel’s lonesome Odysseus places his faith in images. When everything else fails, they can concretely point towards another world, one uncorrupted by war and genocide. They are both loot and inheritance. In Sarajevo, he dances with locals for a brief moment. Snipers interrupt their brief joy. The present is always intruding. A budget of $375 million and Nolan still couldn’t be this self-indulgent. What a shame.

15. Speaking of self-indulgence, I’m enjoying Richard E. Grant’s Very Modern Odyssey, as the actor gabs and gobbles his way through Odysseus’ 10-year Mediterranean detour, from Sicily to Tunisia.

The disaster takes care of everything. So riffed the philosopher and faithless mystic Maurice Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster (L’Écriture du désastre), a book I pore over in wobbly moments. Blanchot spent the late 1970s writing this fragmentary masterpiece, secluding himself in a provincial suburb southwest of Paris. In recent summers, I have been returning to Blanchot again and again, drawn to his dauntless sensitivity, his obsessive need to muddle the boundaries between life and death, presence and absence, solitude and belonging. Blanchot is a writer of limits, those of language, sacrifice, forgiveness itself. I turn to him to make better sense of mine. If Lewis Michaux, the Pan-African pantheon, and teenage immersion into hotepery taught me anything, it was that knowledge is power. Blanchot reminds me that it’s also a kind of horror.

“It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence.”

Number 48. I have a faint memory of walking past this door on Rue Madame, along the left shank of Paris. Following his mother’s death, Blanchot lived at this address. Preferring invisibility, he was a reclusive figure in a neighbourhood swarming with intellectuals. Camus spent the last years of his life on Rue Madame. (Number 29, to be exact). Sartre and de Beauvoir frequented local haunts. The plaque at number 46 marks the former home of artist and resistance fighter Sabine Zlatin, who struggled desperately to save Jewish children from the death camps of Europe. Tree-lined and hushed, the street is a post-Haussmannian reverie, all limestone façades, tucked-away courtyards, ornate doors and lion-headed chasse-roues. Paris can be oppressively beautiful, even more so when you’re somewhat lost and in a state of twentysomething unease. My memories are non-committal, but I still circle similar questions.

How do you write through states of emergency and exception? Beyond the doomscroll and the din of the commentariat, how can we, as writers and people, confront crisis as a political and emotional fact? There’s a mundane regularity to it, this thing we describe as the crisis, the epoch-ending catastrophe, the disaster. It arrives every morning. It greets us with the rapport of a friend. It leaves us no other choice but to write. One disaster supplants another, feeds what is ongoing. Some measure in years, regimes, and administrations, others in centuries. I think of another Parisian stroll by way of a Frank O’Hara poem, a brief leafless moment, this time from Saint Germain to the Pont Mirabeau. (God, I love a good bridge). O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency becomes a place to begin. He was, after all, the bard of urban anxiety. The knob turns, and enjoyment is there to be found in a blade of grass. Our veins are clogged with a nostalgia for a future that was always unevenly promised. The emergency is already here. For many of us, it’s a point of emergence, an ecstasy “always bursting forth”, the original wound/s we compulsively pick at. I can point to mine, but I’m curious about yours.

I will be leading a three-day workshop in Paris this summer. Meditations in an Emergency will take place on July 3-5. You can sign up now. Come join me at Atelier Rose, a warm and welcoming arts space and creative community for Anglophones in Paris. The focus? How to maintain an independence of vision during urgent, unpredictable times. How to develop a writing practice that can adequately and disruptively speak to our moment without being swallowed up by it. No pressure. Really, this is a chance to experiment across form and genre, writing against and through our contemporary reality of live-streamed, algorithm-mediated crises.

Nitty-gritty aside, this will also be a chance to natter, argue, lob bad jokes, ask questions that aren’t really questions, lean on intuition and inquiry, and generally make curious fools out of ourselves in the pursuit of courage. We can also share a plate of yassa from a nearby spot, catch a game of footie, and yes, soak up the 20th arrondissement. Show me the disaster-shaped hole in your thinking, and let’s get some drinks after.

If you can’t make it in the flesh, please share this with Parisian friends who may be interested. This could also be a brain-massaging pit stop for those of you planning yet another Euro summer. I would love to see you there.

Ta till then.

Living in Birmingham is like micro-dosing Pakistan. For a few years growing up, I learnt this the hard way. Having studied Urdu for a year, I can recall some phrases. I’ve forgotten how to read the language, though. Once, I fought a rabble of lads, real kasme bros, and was head-butted so hard I saw nujoom. At school, we used to Bluetooth Atif Aslam bangers back and forth. Our teacher, a long-suffering Kiwi, was entirely sick of us. On more than one occasion, we made her cry. (In this version of English teacher trying to manage a classroom of inner-city kids, there is no happy ending). I can cook a Somalified version of nihari, which is a blasphemous act when you consider how perfect the original dish is. My friends were die-hard Mirpuris, and though I can’t pinpoint the region on a map, I know the reputation travels. I had a Karachi-raised bestie, whose mother erratically moved from place to place so much so that each sibling was born in a different country. Her mother was a savvy businesswoman, running an import-export venture while single-handedly raising a family. She would depart for various Chinese cities in the middle of the night, leaving her daughters to fend for themselves while she toured factories and met suppliers. I never quite know how to explain this particular brand of Somali maternal neglect to those unfamiliar with its beats. A part of me admires these women for their absolute refusal to let motherhood get in the way of their chaotic pursuits. They were Choosing Themselves™, I guess.

By the time we parted, my friend had lived in the Netherlands, Canada, Pakistan, England, Egypt, and the UAE. She used to tell me about her childhood in Pakistan, the sticky heat, the blooming lilacs, nights spent sleeping flat on the rooftop. Walking in on her older sister and the neighbour’s son. All kinds of stories, good and gnarly. In England, speaking Urdu meant she could get a discount at the halal butcher’s or disarm youngsters flinging racial slurs. It was a useful party trick.

I’m currently in the smoggy heart of the Punjab. As usual, I go where the poems lead. Pakistan has been kind to me. My cousin used to study here, and our family paid his university fees. I would have visited him back then but, like so many other times and with so many other people, guilt and rage kept me away. The past few years have felt like orbiting the people and places I have kept at arm’s length, unable or unwilling to let go, resisting my inevitable arrival. I don’t even bother anymore. Keeping away has never lessened the angst.

Lahore is a dusky love bite. The sky splits open in the afternoon and it feels like a revelation each time. The locals have been uncommonly generous. I whispered a few prayers for Allama Iqbal at his tomb. Elsewhere, I bumped into his grandson. I was invited here by Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s daughters. I don’t take these moments lightly, especially these connections to the poetic universes which have left trampling imprints all over my thoughts and words. Faiz believed in the universality of “restless hearts”, which rings as true to me now as it did when I first read his poems, filtered through the deficient beauty of translation. During his exile, Faiz lived in a tiny seafront Beirut apartment, overlooking the Raouché rock formations. I like to think of him as another writer ensnared by the Mediterranean, letting it flood his work. I like to think of all the ways we know a place before we know it.

Yet another friend calls me in the throes of a manic episode, Instinctively, I’m afraid of the sinkhole of her need. Like many of the people around me, she is being swallowed whole by her circumstances. The women I know are deeply unprotected, and have mostly experienced community as a rod of silence and shame. One by one, I watch them mutate into statistics, into self-fulfilling prophecies shaped by the lack and abandonment they were born into. I’m terrified of getting too close. I’m terrified of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Friendship has to mean more than shared damage. I repeat this to myself, ashamed of how repelled I am by my counterparts, these reflections I can’t evade. Increasingly, I’m afraid my survival instincts will trump my capacity to sit with the kind of pain that’s so sickeningly familiar, it might as well be yours. (And it is yours, no matter how far or fast you run away from its clutches).

I’m writing a book that scares me. This is a personal problem. I’ve long accepted that my personality is energised by alienation, in the sense that my best thinking comes from being backed into a corner. A part of me enjoys unnerving the very readers I want to connect with, though that drive is sometimes listless and vague, aimed at an assorted patchwork of villains. (Institutional and interpersonal pressures, various forms of coercion and social control, leaders, followers, traditionalists and radicals, depending on which side of the bed I get out of). In my bones, I think this oppositional nature is a visceral rejection of likeability, an albatross hanging around the necks of women everywhere. I’ve always found the regime of false niceness and enforced sincerity intolerable. It’s not something I can theorise my way out of, considering I’ve been like this since childhood. (My school behavioral record speaks for itself). I’m fond of a good fight, and am very good at defending myself. The fear is becoming stuck in this clenched state, this wary posture that expects to be misunderstood, misrepresented, misled. Letting go means trusting in my ability to survive these external interpretations. It’s an acceptance that there’s no limit to how distorted your image can be in the eyes of others, and that there can even be a little truth to that distortion. You don’t recognise me for who I am but that fact won’t kill me. I’m not afraid of your conclusions.

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were thrown into the fire. They had no fear, no fear at all. In 1976, The Abyssinians gave riddim to this biblical story, singing of the Hebrew captives, a courageous trio who refused King Nebuchadnezzar’s golden idol. They did not bow, and were flung into the furnace seven times, over and over again. Abraham, the ultimate patriarch, was also touched by fire, rejecting the gods his people served. Quranic scripture describes an inferno cooled by the Divine, and a young man willing to be destroyed in the name of a singular truth. Fear is a threshold that once crossed, births a new self. It has both function and form, activating the limbic system and flooding the body with adrenaline and cortisol. This heightened sensitivity to danger is paradoxically euphoric, experienced as a rush. Dopamine surges, and fear leaves a thrill in its wake. I imagine this as akin to the pleasures of righteousness, the delicious feeling of being vindicated in your sacrifice.

Everybody is afraid, almost giddily so. Afraid of cracking up or going under, of losing the safety nets and creaky protections that buffer against tides of financial and social precarity. The hostilities of the world encroach, and the ranks of the vulnerable continue to expand. The circle gets bigger and bigger. Conspiracies which once frothed from the mouths of paranoid uncles are confirmed. Dossiers reveal the extent of wealth-enabled rot, as a transnational cabal of elites trade deals and children. The climate can best be described as feartropic, with all impulses directing you to smash the nearest panic button.

Paul Virilio wrote about the acceleration of daily life leading to fear becoming an environment, not just a mass emotion. Instantaneousness, simultaneity, interactivity; the “accident of the globe” as he called it, had ushered in an age of collective anxiety. Fear as synchronised helplessness, the governing mode of contemporary politics. Is it possible to opt out? To sit with what fear reveals without being led by it? Recently, I got lost near a coastal road and decided to accept a ride from a Bedouin man in a pickup truck. The TikTok algorithm insists on maintaining a constant state of feminine hyper-vigilance. It tells me to expect the worst. The man standing behind you in the coffee shop queue could be part of a human trafficking ring. Carry keys between your knuckles. Anticipate disaster. Something is out to get you, and you’d better be ready when it comes. Some fears I can live with, others I find harder to adopt. They are often justified, which makes them more dangerously capable of ruling your mind. The man dropped me off outside my door, and I thanked him for his generosity. I am afraid of a shrunken life.

Patience isn’t always a virtue. Once a weight falls off your shoulders, you can’t sit still. You have to straighten your back and get moving again. Indulge me. 2025 demanded the overwrought language of healing. (Ironic for someone with a distaste for therapeutic culture and its platitudes). I have a feeling my own metaphors will get more and more laboured in the future, my analogies stretched to the brink. But if you don’t self-mythologise your own journey, who else will?

Here are some sights, sounds, works, and encounters that left an impression on me this year. A groove in the brain or a grazed heart. I look to art to shake me up or steady my focus, and this was especially necessary this year. This isn’t a “Best of 2025” list, more of a record of shifts and jolts, stimulants and incitements to keep creating, trying, agitating.

Words

Kathy Burke’s A Mind of My Own, a memoir crackling with wit. Discovering the work of Adriano Spatola. Reading and revisiting as much Alice Notley as possible. Stumbling across Gboyega Odubanjo’s pamphlet Two Stops Short Of Barking, featuring a conversation with veteran filmmaker John Smith, an intergenerational dialogue between two unselfconscious East Londoners. Mónica de la Torre’s Pause the Document. The poetry of Miyó Vestrini because I wanted to intensify the year-long feeling of vertigo. Dog Heart, Breyten Breytenbach’s groggy memoir of reluctant returns. Miral al-Tahawy’s The Tent, published in 1996, found on a friend’s bookshelf in 2025. Tony Harrison’s sinewy poems about Fulani washerwomen, the writings inspired by his years teaching in Nigeria. (I learnt, this year, that Harrison was good friends with Wole Soyinka). These poems are splattered with first rains and drums. This poem, written in response to a Gulf War atrocity, that’s so insane, it could only have been written by Harrison.

Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, a book so compulsively hideous I couldn’t help but finish it in a day. A stretch of months where I kept reading Amitava Kumar. Passport Photos, described as an “act of artistic and intellectual forgery”, is a personal favourite, put into my hands by the wonderful bookseller and bibliophile Siddhartha Lokanandi, who recommended this book after hours of lively conversation in Berlin. (Loved this recent Wasafiri conversation with Lokanandi). I’ve also picked up Kumar’s Husband of a Fanatic, an exploration of communal violence, the Kargil War, and the “hatreds and intimacies joining Indians and Pakistanis” through the lens of his marriage. I enjoyed this 1994 interview with Anita Brookner, a writer I find so enigmatic. In the midst of this summer’s Oasis-mania and the general suffocating grip the long nineties has on the British psyche, I revisited Neil Kulkarni interviewing Disco Inferno, a reflection brimming with warmth and bile. One of my favourite music critics sitting with one of my favourite bands, a group who, in Kulkarni’s words, exemplified the battle between “a shaky, scary, thrilling, possible future and a definite, drab, permanent past.”

Scenes, Images

Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother (1969). Working through my knowledge gaps RE the canon of 90’s Black America and appreciating 1997’s Soul Food. Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s shivering rage in Hard Truths. Christopher Eccleston’s furious performance in Jude, Michael Winterbottom’s 1996 adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s last novel. How to Build a Library, a documentary filmed over eight years, tracking a duo’s struggle to save and transform Nairobi’s oldest library, an institution that was once off limits to ordinary Kenyans. I have met these two women, Angela Wachuka and Wanjiku Koinange, and it was so satisfying to see their commitment bear fruit onscreen. This film made me reflect on the community spaces which made me, and what it means to rewrite an institution’s story.

I love cinematic depictions of buoyant friendship, the kind that graces and galvanises. Amel Guellaty’s Where the Wind Comes From fizzes with sweetness, a road trip movie capturing the frustrated dreams of post-revolution Tunisian youth. The island of Djerba shimmers palpably.

RIP to Peter Watkins and his unforgettable, unbroadcastable films. Watching 1971’s Punishment Park is still a shot to the arm. Watkins had a slog of a career, facing bans and blacklists every step of the way. A natural risk-taker, he made The War Game at the age of 30, a docudrama so incendiary and terrifying in its depiction of nuclear war that it was buried by the BBC, to be aired two decades later. Watkins challenged what he called the “monoform”, our numbing, standardised media landscape, its role in diminishing the public’s capacity to imagine anew, planting itself in the subconscious as a kind of inevitable common sense. I keep thinking about the audiences Watkins was denied. How can one work within an unworkable system? How do you reach the people who most need to hear you? In Dakar, I learned about Ousmane Sembène’s unrealised mission to make a biopic about Samori Touré, a 19th century Malinke spiritual leader and military mind who resisted French colonial expansion. Sembène struggled to make this film for forty years, nursing his obsession, raising funds and support, envisioning a picture as epic as the life Touré led. “If I die without having made Samori, you have my permission to write that Ousmane Sembène has failed in life”, he would reiterate. The film was never made. The obstacles in our way are sometimes immovable. The climb too steep and the climate too hostile to our imaginations. What do you do with a record of impassioned failures, of in-spite-ofs and might-have-beens?

Sounds

This gorgeous version of “Lady” by D’Angelo, featuring Raphael Saadiq, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and Questlove. Klein’s sleep with a cane. Pa Salieu’s album Afrikan Alien (“Round & Round” is a love song that keeps on giving). Kokoroko’s Tuff Times Never Last. Horsegirl’s Phonetics On and On. Hearing that Joé Dwèt Filé and Burna Boy collab everywhere (kompa just does something for/to me). PinkPantheress on Victory Lap. Dur-Dur Band’s “Gorof/Elixir” going viral, dripping with heartbreaking, scuzzy nostalgia.

Encounters

• MANZAR: Art and Architecture from Pakistan 1940s to Today, an exhibition presented in collaboration with the National Museum of Qatar. Eighty years of Pakistani art and architecture. 200 works, including paintings, installations, drawings, plans, videos, and installations. A stand-out of the year for me.

• Designer’s Note at Istanbul’s Salt Beyoğlu, exploring the evolution of Turkish graphic design during the 20th century. An embarrassment of riches for publishing and book design enthusiasts. I discovered the “multi-medium, multi-form, multi-environment and multi-timeline” work of İsmail Saray, an artist who bounced around between Istanbul, Kutahya, London, and Paris.

• Writing and Reading: Yesterday, Today, And Tomorrow at The Museum of Black Civilisations, a dive into notebooks written between 1933 and 1958 by students of the École normale William-Ponty. A testament to the colonial school’s failures to keep the outside world at bay, intruded upon by the political and spiritual fortitude of its students.

• What Lies Between, with Photo España, at Madrid’s Casa Árabe, featuring the work of Taysir Batniji, Tamara Kalo, and Tanya Traboulsi.

• Hamad Butt: Apprehensions at Whitechapel Gallery. He really was special.

• Emergency Exits at London’s Imperial War Museum, revealing the human and political costs of three independence wars in the 1950s: in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus, characterised as “emergencies” by the British. Londoners, you can still catch this.

And of course, the ground-breaking exhibition Ideas of Africa, opening this December at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Curated by the inimitable Oluremi Onabanjo, with Chiara M. Mannarino, this exhibition features the likes of Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta, James Barnor, and Kwame Brathwaite. Portraiture as a portal into the hopes and dreams of mid-20th century Africa. I spent last year thinking and working with the team behind this, so believe me when I say it’s not to be missed. On until July 2026.

Hoping some of this recommendations can stick with you, as they have stuck with me.

Here’s some sounds, words, images, and echos I’ve been sitting with. As usual, these finds have caused stirrings, reflections, and pinpricks of recognition.

• Awaiting CMAT’s new album Euro-Country, out later this month. As a songwriter, CMAT captures anguish in a deliciously subtle way. The title single taps into the psyche of a generation defined by the fallout of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger era, an economic boom which saw one of Western Europe’s poorest countries transform into a beacon of prosperity. Post-2008, these hopes and ambitions were reduced to the desolation of an empty shopping centre. All you can do is dance around in the ashes of a dream, preferably wading in the ground floor fountain. “I think we're gonna die trying / I wish we weren't this way.”

• Darat al Funun’s video archive consistently offers up gems. Launched in 1988 by the artist Suha Shoman, the Amman-based artistic hub has been a leading incubator of research, criticality, and experimentation in the region. (On more than one occasion, I’ve found a book in its library stacks that has transformed the direction of a project). Here’s Mourid Barghouti reading poems in the summer of 1994. I also appreciated Jacob Ross discussing the weight of Caribbean literary legacies in 2001.

• I’ve been spending a lot of time in Oxford. Richard, a charismatic busker, is a local fixture, belting a truly unpredictable array of songs on Cornmarket Street almost daily. He has an incredibly droll sense of humour, and I’m glad someone interviewed him. He’s such a gas.

• I love when an artist milks the living daylights out of a song. Benin City-raised Shallipopi’s “Laho” is my earworm of the summer, though it feels like a new version drops on a biweekly basis. The latest, a collaboration with Puerto Rican idol Rauw Alejandro, is a testament to the culturally unstoppable forces of Afrobeats and Reggaeton, arguably the two most globally dominant musical genres of our times.

• The Deep South Books and Archive. South African poetry press Deep South hosts a free-to-access digital archive of interviews, performance videos, articles, reviews, and newspaper clippings relating to their authors. This includes writers like Taban Lo Liyong, Ari Sitas, and Lesego Rampolokeng (a favourite of mine). It’s a real treasure trove. Here’s an excerpt that’s stayed with me, from an interview with Rampolokeng and Ike Mboneni Muila.

  “There is also this moral point that's always being poked in our faces, that you have to write for the masses. But those masses are not defined, you just have to write for the masses, and there is this standard that's being placed on just how high the word should jump or not for it to be celebrated. I've always believed that if you say this is the level the masses are, and pitch the word at that level, what you're actually doing is contributing to keeping those masses at that level. I don't go with that at all.”

• I loved this essay on Bolaño, the “perfect outsider” and friend. It’s about the kind of imbalance in status and success that often unravels cherished friendships. In this case, it doesn’t. Friendship can force you to confront your own patterns of self-denial. Sincere friends recognise in you the gifts you refuse to accept. They are the best of mirrors.

• What does it mean to give something back without being subservient? What does it mean to leave something behind, regardless of citizenry? Some questions posed in this conversation between anthropologist Laure Assaf and writer Deepak Unnikrishnan on guest editing Wasafiri’s UAE Issue. I’ve been a fan of Unnikrishnan’s work for years, and so many of the writers and thinkers featured in this issue have deepened and complicated how I see the Gulf, in all its entangled hyperreality. The region’s emerging literatures reflect the relentless and disorienting pace of change in Gulf society. Paradoxically, so much opens up when the pageantry of belonging is off the table. The foundations are shakier, and more interesting questions can be asked. A highlight from this exchange:

  “I think speaking about belonging is a done deal for some of us. Call us second or third generation, long-term transplants; just don’t call us third culture. Talking about belonging, claiming shit, felt edgy even close to a decade ago. Not anymore. Partly because the country has recognised the need to push/urge some people (and their children) to stay, which explains schemes like the Golden Visa, or pushing adverts celebrating everyone’s place in the country. And once the state has begun to participate in conversations about belonging, it is time, in my opinion, to recalibrate and think about other things. This doesn’t mean transience goes away, but transience is felt differently by different parts/classes of UAE society. There is also more to the transient experience than thoughts about the homeland. Frankly, some of us have been transient for so long, we need to be called by other names; and we have other interests besides pining for home.”

  That’s all for now. A languid summer awaits, but I’ll keep sharing what excites me here and elsewhere.

For now, I want to share some of what I’ve been reading, listening, and thinking with recently. Recommendations that have moved something in me, or helped me move towards a place I’m trying to reach. Hoping they are of interest!

• I’ve been immersed in Alice Notley’s poetry since her passing in May. I wrote my own tribute to her life and legacy here. Notley lived a poet’s life, which is no mean feat in a society designed to mercilessly beat that impulse out of you. Celebrating those who stuck it out, maintaining their hard-won independence, is worthwhile. This is from one of my favourite Notley poems.

• Another poet I’ve been enjoying has been Calvin Hernton, who has been receiving long overdue recognition. (A recently published Selected Poems, heightened critical and academic interest, the usual flurry of positive appraisal). Hernton was unrepentantly incendiary, confronting the social and political schisms of his era. A co-founder of the pioneering Umbra Poets Workshop, he was a figure both central to and hovering on the outskirts of the Black Arts Movement. (He also brushed up against the Caribbean Artists Movement and its luminaries during his time in 60’s London). I first came across Hernton’s work in the pages of Black Fire, the landmark, multi-genre anthology of Afro-American writing published in 1968 (edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal). “Jitterbugging in the Streets” is a brawl of a poem, but Hernton’s essay “Dynamite Growing out of their Skulls” is what made me seek him out as a thinker. It’s doggedly honest. Hernton is concerned with the existential crises plaguing the streets, with the kind of radicalism-for-hire that is so blatant, “even little children can see what is going on.” He quotes one of his peers, a young poet disillusioned with an anti-poverty government programme.

In 1987’s The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers, Hernton proved himself as one of the rare critics capable of writing about the literatures produced by Black women with sensitivity and unflinching rigour. Here is Ishmael Reed at a 1977 reading, introducing Hernton and K. Curtis Lyle in his habitually bolshy way. (The Poetry Centre’s digital archive is a treasure trove).

• Under African Skies is a 1989 BBC series exploring the varied musical styles emerging from the continent. It’s one of those insightful documentaries that justify the license fee. This episode on Ethiopia’s musical lineage is a banger. Funnily enough, the journey begins in Washington D.C., a diasporic hotspot. Last year, I was able to access community archives in the city, and was startled by how deeply embedded the Ethiopian presence was in D.C. Amharic phrases are scrawled across murals at the encampments of 1968’s Resurrection City. Histories interact haphazardly. I love this documentary’s shots of a heaving Mercato, the evocative cassette tape economy, Mahmoud Ahmed performing with gusto.

• Something I’m glad to have found in video form. Micheal Smith chit-chatting with CLR James and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Are they in a bedsit? Where was this aired? Where is this conversation going? Not a clue. Grateful it exists.

• Arthur Russell was a genius, in the sense that he was crushingly swept up in the vision of a future only he could see. This is my song of the month.

• I was at Photo London this May and was reminded of how much I appreciate Mitra Tabrizian‘s work. Her first film Gholam (2017) is touching, flood-lit, real. The symbology of the London cab driver, whose past invades the frame.

• I’m not sure but I think this YouTube channel belongs to Mahmood Jamal, the late writer, producer, and founding member of the Retake Film and Video Collective. Jamal was a pioneer in those feverish days of “multicultural” television, when you’d switch on Channel 4 and see programmes on everything from Jamaican ska to South Africa's Dirty War fronted by the likes of Tariq Ali and Ziauddin Sardar. (Open University-core, as I like to call it). Jamal was also a lead writer on Family Pride, Britain's first Asian soap opera, which aired in the early 90’s. This channel is full of gems in the shape of poems, documentaries, qawwali deep cuts, performances, and conversations. Enjoy.

The diaspora poet is back on the chopping block. Recently, a series of reviews concerning Ocean Vuong’s latest novel The Emperor of Gladness resuscitated a conversation that’s been going on for as long as I can remember. A conversation that, as of late, has adopted a more openly hostile, sardonic tone. Clichés leave a sour taste in the mouth. The reaction against a well-worn cliché arrives like bankruptcy: slowly, and then at all once. The diaspora poet is, however, a resilient cliché. We persist, endure, survive these increasingly frequent bashings. The tides may turn, but come morning, we’ll build our sandcastles again. We have no other way.

I’ve never been a fan of Ocean Vuong’s writing. I don’t think he’s a terrible writer, and his brand of watery sentimentalism isn’t a crime. To be fair, people can’t seem to decide whether we need less or more sincerity these days. Yet, the backlash he’s been receiving in the chaotically democratised space that is social media reveals a lot more about the state of contemporary criticism than it does about him. A sudden critical blitz is often a sign that readers are irritatingly bored by a widespread sensibility, not just the work of one writer. It’s a vent of air released from a pressure valve. (I wonder who will be next though). It’s easy to welcome these moments, but let’s be real, snarky netizens shouldn’t be taking on the job actual critics should have been doing years ago.

We know capital wreaks havoc on the imagination. To protect yourself, to provide for yourself, you seek shelter, professionalise, credentialise, become indebted to institutions, networks, scenes, counterpublics, communities. The message is clear. There’s little room for outliers, mavericks, eccentrics, or the kind of disheveled egomaniacs needed to invigorate literary culture. There’s little room for risk. These moribund conditions produce a glut of mediocrities, an eerily homogeneous climate where writers from disparate backgrounds all write, think, react, dream alike. When the “diaspora poet” epithet can be directed at a hyphenated writer hailing from East Africa just as easily as one from South Asia, you know something’s gone very wrong. Still, moving targets are harder to hit. Critical pushback is more painful when you’re standing still.

Our period of critical stagnation has been especially harmful for the diasporic writer. At least one generation and a half of English-language writers at the intersection of Buzzfeed and Barthes have reached a creative dead end. Consider the mutated offspring of the poetry slam and the poetry workshop. The margin and the centre. Writers trapped in a web of dogmas and disavowals, unable to let go, unable to see through their personal mythologies, or move beyond the coordinates of their identities, unwilling to relinquish their affiliations (if only for a little while). Their friendships, fealties, and professional relationships demand the kind of conformity that suffocates thinking. Their communities demand even more. Conformity is a kind of perverse loyalty. Diasporic writers become fearfully loyal. They don’t want to betray themselves. A nervous ecosystem of agents, editors, and publishers doesn't encourage the growth of these writers. If critics don’t step in, no one will.

But hey, if you can’t win, at least game the system. Here’s a corrective you can use as a writing prompt. Alternatively, think of it as a business plan.

A Series of Bulletproof Strategies for the Appropriately Naive, Cynical, or Desperate Diasporic Writer

• You own your country. It’s a loving squint in the distance. An unchanging flatness. A landscape of stilted memory.

• The 20th century happened to your parents. It didn’t happen to you. Before that time is a stretch of memory, a murky universe where wise ancestors reside.

• Authority is an inheritance. You’ve been denied so much already, it’s only right to take what’s yours.

• Write as if culpability has a geographical address.

• The mother is the world and the world is the mother. You will run out of things to say to your mother quicker than you run out of things to write about her.

• The institution is the patriarch we all love to hate and hate to love. Prepare for a lifetime of pretending not to need his approval.

• Subvert those pesky stereotypes. Reinforce them when it suits you. Grief has no internal consistency.

• The children of the wretched and the affluent all sit around the same lunch table. They compare wounds, laugh at the same jokes. Write like a bulldozer. Your job is to demolish these distinctions.

• Attack every infraction whiteness commits against your language, especially when you don’t speak it yourself. Chai tea is an intolerable atrocity. Your postcolonial idols may have had to eventually humble themselves in middle age, like Edward Said rolling up his sleeves and studying Arabic philology in his forties under the stern gaze of a retired Lebanese scholar. That might be a step too far. Remember, Duolingo doesn’t exist.

• You are a border guard. Police the boundaries of your culture, its expressions, tastes, sounds, pleasures, boredoms, frivolities.

• The East burns a hole in your pocket. You are not part of the West. Repeat this until you convince yourself.

• Difference is both your currency and the truth you try to evade. Strike a balance.

• Your people are strong, worthy, righteous, hardworking, long-suffering, possessed with a deeply intuitive spirituality and ancestral wisdom. They simply feel more than those colonizers. They are never difficult, ungraspable, churlish, bigoted, embittered, ungrateful, lazy, misanthropic. Conveniently, you share the best of their qualities and none of the worst.

• You are owed the very notion of “a people.”

• All forms of conflict in your community that complicate this picture are unwelcome. Your narrative must stay neat. The audience wants pathos. They want to see the blood on your hands. No one cares if it’s not yours.

• Your country of origin, in whose fractured image you have crafted a practice of survival, has no contemporary writers, translators, public intellectuals, potential collaborators, starving poets, overfed propagandists, or really any lively intercultural dialogue of its own. Luckily, it has you.

• Choose the right peers. Take great care to ignore writers stalking the peripheries, those writing from within the old country. Avoid those who remind you of yourself. They are mirrors to your inadequacy.

• If you’re going to spend the rest of your life in a beartrap of the mind, you should be paid handsomely for it.

• Your gluttony is a kind of love too. Don’t let them tell you any different.

There’s been a resurgent interest in the histories and legacies of militant and third cinema, as well as the infrastructures which sustained the filmmakers at the forefront of these movements. This interest manifests in the ecosystem of restorations, film festivals, retrospectives, and anniversary screenings. Of course, there’s also the circulation of moody, decontextualised screencaps on social media. (All hail the microblogging site as a portal of discovery).

At its best, militant cinema propagandises unashamedly, in formally ambitious ways, against the vagaries of capital and militarism. Naturally, such films become lodestars for a generation reckoning with contemporary political and social upheavals. The 20th century looms over the shoulder, resonant in its promises and betrayals. Militant cinema is a monument to creative self-determination. The canon is crowded with filmmakers who have faced hardship, funding woes, relentless censorship, intimidation, and political repression. Their legacy is a testament to resolve and resourcefulness.

Heiny Srour is one of these pioneers. You might have heard of 1974’s The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, her directorial debut chronicling the guerrilla movement which erupted in Dhofar in the 1960’s. The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived remains the only documentary attesting to that rebellion, flaring up against the reign of “oil and opportunism” in the Arabian Gulf. The film is a heady conflagration of image and sound, a landmark testimony to the hopes and dreams of the rebels it follows. (It was also banned in Srour’s home country of Lebanon for forty-five years. Too incendiary to be shown in various Arab countries, the notable exception being its distribution by the Algerian Cinémathèque). Srour’s other films, from 1984’s Leila and the Wolves to 1995’s Rising Above: Women of Vietnam, confront muzzled archives, liberating women from their roles as symbols for nations and revolutions.

I spent some time in Paris with Srour, reflecting on her legacy for Bidoun. Srour is a gutsy subject. She’s been through a lot, and is still, aged 80, raring to throw herself into the fray. Admittedly, I was a bit emotionally frazzled when we met, having recently spoken to some of Srour’s contemporaries, as well as other artists who had battled similar struggles and constraints. I was also dipping in and out of a copy of Muthaffar al-Nawab’s anthologised poetry, plucked from the shelves of Librairie de l'Orient, one of my favourite bookstores in the 5th arrondissement. “I have accepted all things except humiliation”, the late Iraqi poet had once written, hounded out of one Arab capital after another, even as he continued to publicly oppose despots and censors. Endurance unsettles me. It inspires both awe and dread. How far can you be pushed? How far are you willing to go? What are you willing to lose in the pursuit of creative and political freedom?

One thing’s for sure, you can’t make these kinds of gambles alone. Srour’s network of accomplices, advisors, collaborators, and influences provided a Tricontinental web of support. Freshly released from Bourguiba’s jails, Tahar Cheriaa, the influential titan of Pan-African cinema, risked his job and safety to champion The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived. Fellow Lebanese director Borhane Alaouié suggested shooting locations for Leila and the Wolves. Omar Amiralay and Mohammad Malas, two giants of twentieth-century Syrian cinema, offered assistance and advice. In this sense, Srour’s oeuvre bears the evidence of riotous love.

The rebels depicted in The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived were isolated. Lacking regional support, they were weakened by the Sultan’s army and its firepower, British bombs, and the Shah of Iran’s brigades. Their final defeat came in 1976, though it took a few years for the resistance to peter out. One quintessentially Srourian anecdote that struck me during our time together occurs decades later, in the new millennium. An ex-guerilla connected Srour with his son who had arrived in Paris as a student. Srour showed the young man around as he described his father’s severe depression after the revolution’s demise. In a cruel twist of irony, he had only been able to find work in the Sultan’s army. Yet, he still sent his son as a messenger; he wanted Srour to know that he had been one of the last rebels to surrender.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a habit of returning to his origins. A Gen X child of post-Civil Rights Act gains, he was moulded by a generation of Panthers and autodidacts, organic intellectuals and socially engaged artists. This is a legacy defined by both militancy and ambivalent integrationism. Like many, Coates inherited these contradictions, his father’s life serving as an embodiment of broken and unfulfilled promises. Coates paints a portrait of the man, a Vietnam veteran and stalwart publisher and purveyor of Afrocentric literature, sitting sideways in a chair, his legs crossed, always with a book in his hand. His father belonged to an upwardly mobile strata of Black society which thought very seriously about their obligations to the wider community, even as they shakily rose in social or economic status. In many cases, the issues that plagued the “wider community” were never so far removed that they could be ignored. There was always a cousin languishing in prison, a down-and-out childhood friend, a struggling elder. Precarity never became a distant abstraction. The hood was everywhere, its breath tickling the back of your neck. In “The Message”, the latest prophetic offering from Coates and his first nonfiction book in a decade, he has to go abroad to revisit this lesson. The result is three essays, stretching across Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine. 

Black intellectuals born, raised in, and tethered to the Global North are practiced in the art of self-deception. Many know, on an elemental level, the limits imposed on their avowed radicalism. The leash is tight, and it’s easier to stick to sloganeering and selling revolution. In too many hands, blackness is a brand identity, one conveniently wedded to all that is oppositional, revolutionary, subversive. Why stretch your critical capacities when you can be rewarded for your ignorance? When you can ride the coattails of a radical tradition that predates you, distorting it as you please? Meanwhile, Africa remains a continent under siege, economically and politically held hostage by the very order which celebrates the market-friendly fluff we peddle as thought. (I would argue that the reluctance to name a thing a thing, to see what is happening in Palestine for what it is, begins with the disappearing of Africa from our imaginaries). I’m uninterested in halcyon glorifications of bygone eras, but it sometimes seems that Black thinkers and writers of the past were more compelled to abandon their home comforts and explore their ties to a world beyond the US and Europe than their present-day counterparts. (Coates writes about his travels with gravitas, an embarrassingly rare approach in the mainstream. But then again, we are plodding through the muddled aftermath of Afropolitanism and Travel Noire). Throughout the 20th century, whether you were motivated by the spirit or social pressures of the times, packing up your whole life on a gamble and seeking an elsewhere was like a rite of passage for a certain cultural milieu. Relocating to Africa and/or the Caribbean was a headlong dive into doubt. Your assumptions and underdeveloped theories would be shattered. For once, the American would be on the back foot. Yes, many were searching for an idealised vision of Africa, the emotional catharsis of return. But just as many others wanted to blast apart their own apathy. Ted Joans, the surrealist and “tri-continental poet” springs to mind. In a 1975 interview, Joans spoke of the necessity of seeing ourselves as “overseas Africans.” His work commitments across Europe subsidised the life he had created for himself in Tangier and Timbuktu. Even back then, his disillusionment with his compatriots treating Africa as an intellectual pit stop was evident. (“We can’t continue to get on a plane in New York, land in Dakar, stay at the Hilton, visit a market, buy some cloth, pose for a few pictures with some African sisters, then go home again, thinking we’ve been in Africa.”) Extraction knows no colour. Joans knew that, and he was forceful about the need to “distinguish between illusion–often our own– and reality.” Encounters with elsewheres have a way of disrupting our insulated realities. Joans recalled the scholar, publisher, and free-jazz pioneer Haki Madhubuti being struck by the poverty in Algeria, newly sensitized to his place and portion in the world (“The Man sure has spoiled me, and I’m from the ghetto.”) Perspective opens the doors to humility. It illuminates the dark nooks of disregard. 

Consider a blind spot the size of Africa. A blank space where Palestine should be. Stand at the edge of the Atlantic and gawp, while you miss the bodies dotting other waters. Prominent Black intellectuals submerge themselves in histories of racial domination in the Global North, divorcing Africa from their analyses, even as it permeates the iconography they deploy. They crowd out the rest of the Black world with their pain. More bombs were dropped on poor Africans during the presidency of Obama, a Kenyan American born in Hawaii, than during the preceding Bush administration. Coates, like many high-profile stateside interlocutors, has shown a reluctance, or inability, to confront the suffering of Africans at the hands of American power, a gap in his thinking which Palestine unsurprisingly also fell through. Pablum is circulated. The War on Terror rages on. AFRICOM consolidates imperialism across the continent. Watts. Cobbs Creek. Gorée. Dadaab. Rafah. Everywhere, violence reduces entire lifeworlds into catch-all bywords for generational suffering. Black writers survey the scene. Theirs is a path of incentives and coercions, the carrot and the stick. They make their choices. 

In “The Message”, Coates stretches a central analogy, casting black people as victims of the West, “a people held just outside its liberal declarations, but kept close enough to be enchanted with its promises.” We are the disinherited builders and inhabitants of a beautiful, crumbling house. Coates admits to knowing that the house is haunted, that “there is blood in the bricks and ghosts in the attic.” Such judgment, however, rests on the assumption that we all share similar conditions under the same roof. The contemporary African subject surviving below the breadline isn’t even inside the house. Their absence is unremarked upon. Other Black people, by way of their affiliations and the breadth of their political horizons, are unwelcome. The halls of power aren’t open to all. Throughout the book, Coates shifts between two poles, at turns picking apart specious myths of consensus, and at others reverently attributing a kind of in-built oppositionality to blackness, invoking the black radical tradition and basking in the warmth of its shade. It’s hard to discern where he lands, but he’s  ultimately awed by our “collective power” and spiritual endowment, the bonds uniting a “family divided from each other by centuries.” Complacency is to be expected when we assume that we want the same things, crave the same freedoms, or that even being trapped in the same house makes us co-conspirators. If only it were that easy. 

Travel doesn’t necessarily broaden one’s horizons. The traveller is fascinated by the crushing mundanity the local endures. In my early twenties, I visited the city-state of Singapore, and was awed by South Asian poets writing against their linguistic and cultural exclusion from a Chinese-dominated society. It was an entirely unfamiliar context, one that made me feel like an idiot. I haven’t exactly become attuned to Singaporean politics since then, but such experiences have a way of restraining your ego. Though Coates dedicates chapters to his transformative trips to Senegal and Palestine, he doesn’t suspend his skepticism of travel as a gateway into a heightened sense of wisdom or morality. “As it happens”, he writes, “you can see the world and still never see the people in it.” James Baldwin, whose influence haunts Coates, left New York for Paris in 1948 when he was only 24 years old. With few possessions and only $40 in his pocket, Baldwin lived among “les misérables”, mainly the impoverished Algerians rug-sellers and peanut vendors of Paris. Their lot was grim, and Baldwin followed them into teeming cafes where they gathered, licking their wounds. Baldwin was quick to spot patterns. “The Arabs were together in Paris, but the American blacks were alone.” Despite their dire circumstances, Baldwin admired the bloody coherence of the Algerians, the way they clustered together even in their alienation. Baldwin’s thorny kinship with the Algerian underclass triggered strange reactions in the Frenchmen he spoke to. With generous smiles, they would insist that he, as an African American, was different. Unlike the Arabs, he was “civilised”, a long-coveted accolade that, as Baldwin dryly reflected, was a surprise to him, a gift that had been “delivered too late.” More than half a century later, Coates moved his family to Paris, that shining city on the hill for Black America’s traumatised literati. He fumbled towards similar conclusions. Coates had only received his first passport as he was writing his seminal 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations”. France would be a different landscape, one where he was not a problem, nor a walking embodiment of national guilt. In his 2015 book “Between the World and Me”, Coates distinguishes himself from the Roma children he sees begging in the streets, from the embittered Algerian cab driver who hates the very Paris that has so ensnared Coates. He knows he is uniquely shielded. Still, overcompensation riddles the advice he pens to his son. There’s a reflexive need to redeem one’s self. He desperately needs to align himself with the struggle, even as it recedes in the rear-view mirror. “Remember your name”, he urges. “Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that.” The world is full of people who aren't allowed to forget. They don’t need reminders. 

“Harlem, I am not an outsider. I know your contempt, I know its wholesome bread. Famine strikes in sudden thunder. Prisons ignite in storms of violence. I see your fierce encroaching under the asphalt in pipes and masks, in the piles of trash held in the cold air’s embrace, in banished steps shod in the history of the wind.” 

— A Grave for New York, Adonis

Do we need to visit a place to be convinced of its pain? Must we observe the subjugation of a people to stand with them? Do their greatest minds and spirits have to spend lifetimes attempting to convince us of what is plainly obvious? On the last day of his trip, Coates visits Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center and Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. He reflects on what happens when “murder turns to wide seemingly unending mass”, when human lives are churned into numbers and ashes. He is overwhelmed by the darkness before him, grappling with its size, its shape, its weight. An account of the Struma disaster is particularly harrowing. 769 Jewish refugees on a creaking ship escaping persecution in Romania sought safety in Turkey. They were denied entry into Mandatory Palestine, then under British control. The Turkish authorities allowed only nine passengers to disembark, eventually towing the ship out to the Black Sea. There, they were abandoned, until a patrolling Soviet submarine torpedoed the ship. There would be only one survivor. Images of death camp survivors dragged off ships by British soldiers leap from the archive. Many would be returned to the charnel houses of Europe, the very countries they had fled from.

I’m reminded of an article I read years ago on the exclusion of German Muslims from the country’s Holocaust memory culture. When some German Muslims took part in government funded programmes and trips to former concentration camps, Holocaust educators were disturbed by their “inappropriate” reactions. The participants, some of whom were recent refugees, were overcome by a sense of distress and horror. They were visibly shaken by what they saw and heard. Some directly voiced their fears of how quickly a society could turn fanatical, and how this kind of hatred could resurface in the present. One mediator even quoted Primo Levi: it happened once, so it can happen again. These reactions enraged the guides, who preferred a calcified, routinized approach to memorializing the Holocaust. One even admitted to the root cause of her irritation at the Muslim visitors. “There was a feeling that they did not belong there and that they should not be engaging with the German past. Somehow their presence at the camp did not fit.” To these guides, empathy was a bordered terrain, and they alone decided upon its limits. Never mind that some of the participants had personal experiences of refugeehood, ethnic persecution, and exile. 

Some processes of identification are actively discouraged. How is our empathy disciplined? Our intuition blunted? Compassion is yet another regulated zone. In the wrong hands, it becomes a weapon. We are curtailed in who we are allowed to identify with, a lesson Coates is steadily learning at the hands of his industry colleagues. Pick apart the bones of history, but don’t let it alert you to the present. Denounce fascism, but only up to a point. Decry atrocities only when they are committed by your ideological opponents. Excuse them when they’re perpetrated by your own. Rattle against the cage of your cognitive dissonance. Cling to your people, and carve out an ethics from that desolate isolation. In “The Message”, Coates tests the boundaries of sanctioned empathy, unable to resist the tug of familiarity he feels upon witnessing a segregated, power-drunk society. 

“I wanted to see for myself what was happening. I wanted to face the violence reported by the newspapers and supported by my taxes: to make my witness to this First World dream before it buckled into yet another nightmare colony, another "vacation paradise," another "vital" outpost of the big guys. I wanted to get real: to put my life, as well as my words, on the line.” 

— NICARAGUA: Why I Had to Go There, June Jordan

As a youth, Coates describes vaguely hearing about the “issue” of Palestine. Reels on World News Tonight served as early introductions to the “conflict”, but that was only background noise. The young Coates dreamed of becoming a poet, and his father handed him a copy of “Born Palestinian, Born Black”, a 1996 collection by the Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad. June Jordan was an influential figure for Hammad, who was drawn to Jordan’s poems dedicated to the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the kind of poems which earned Jordan death threats. Saturated with the rhymes and rhythms of hip-hop, Hammad’s poetry circles the ghetto, barrio, haara, refugee camp. Brooklyn-raised in a neighborhood ravaged by crack and Reaganomics, Hammad grew up with teachers telling her that Palestine didn’t exist. This was a denial of not only her selfhood, but of the story of her family, of a pregnant grandmother who had carried her father out of their hometown of Lydd. I often think of Hammad’s poem “Daddy’s Song” and how deftly it traces a tortured thread from Sam Cooke’s Mississippi to a Palestinian refugee camp. She dedicates her poem to a father born by a river, in a little tent. A man who’s been running ever since. More than a tribute to her community, this poem captures cycles and reverberations of displacement across shores. It’s an ode to those who have never had the luxury of staying still. Hammad saw herself, Cooke, Malcolm X, June Jordan, and all the other hip-hop laureates, artists, and dreamers who had shaped her, as part of this light-footed lineage. Even post-Gulf War and post-Oslo Accords, these connections came so naturally to her, and in her writings they thrummed with sensitivity. Her debut was published by Harlem River Press under the auspices of Ishmael Reed, another writer who understood the meaningfulness of these connections. (Years later, Reed would recount his own daughter being called a “dirty Arab” in the wake of 9/11). Like Coates, I first encountered Hammad’s poems as a teenager. They had the feel of the truth washing over the body, bathing it in a necessary kind of clarity. “Born Palestinian, Born Black” was published when Hammad was 23 years old, and even at that age, she was confronting life in the occupied territories, both at home and abroad, in dialects that had been “silenced too long”. Here was inseparable from Over There. To erect walls between these realities would be an act of self-rejection. I’m convinced that it’s easier to recognize these connections when you are torn apart by them, when you are indebted to those dispersed, scattered, and targeted by the tentacled reach of empire. June Jordan didn’t need to visit Palestine to realise how pivotal Palestinian dehumanization, and our tolerance of it, was to the project of ethno-fascism everywhere. Coates also name-checks The Last Poets as formative influences, which I find striking. I have no idea how you can listen to trenchant works like Black Soldier and have a spotty outlook on militarism. I guess listening doesn’t actually mean receiving the intended message. 

“Since it is clear that a given sum of government money could go either for a poetry magazine or a napalm canister—and only chance bookkeeping decides between them—there could be no pride in such an award or in such editing.

I refuse to participate and I don’t want the money.”  

— From Robert Bly’s 1967 letter to the chairman of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities

In the summer of 1960, Amiri Baraka, then still known as LeRoi Jones, visited Cuba as part of a trip organized by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an activist group in support of the nascent Cuban revolution. (Incidentally, Baldwin was also an active member of the FPCC). Like Coates, Baraka was skeptical, intending to travel independently, stray from the beaten path, and absorb more than the official tour itinerary. He also wanted to maintain his position as a neutral “observer”, but found himself profoundly changed by the trip. Meeting soldiers, campesinos, students, and artists, Baraka was confronted by how little he knew. The practiced cynicism he arrived with was dismantled by the force of this realization. Havana’s poets nearly left him in tears. They ambushed him with questions he couldn’t adequately answer. He stuttered that he wasn’t interested in politics, only to be called a “cowardly bourgeois individualist” by an irate Mexican student. I doubt Coates ever faced a confrontation that hostile in Palestine, but Baraka’s encounters do prove that, sometimes, we need the truth of ourselves spat back in our faces. Baraka would go on to liken the art produced by his ilk to “bright flowers growing up through a rotting carcass”, deformed and celebrated by a “free world” of bankers, political pawns, and grasping industrialists. The residue of lies, “that thin crust we cannot even detect in our own thinking”, began to lift in Cuba, and Baraka, ever the poet, found this to be both an ecstatic and frightening experience. 

“Pray that we are not part of the Western Empire, in soul.

In Our Terribleness

We know exactly 

Who we are.”

— In Our Terribleness, Amiri Baraka

In Palestine, Coates sees it all. Six days in, and he felt like he'd been there for months. Checkpoints, pointed guns, bureaucratized sadism, segregated streets, segregated water supplies, differently coloured license plates, drones, observation towers, destroyed villages, sprawling settlements. The levers of the occupation in full function. A rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others, as he describes it. Coates observes that Palestinians living in Israel have shorter lives, are poorer, and live in more violent neighbourhoods. One could also add that Palestinian and African American men have a similar life expectancy. Or that, in Britain, the manufacturing firm Arconic responsible for the highly flammable cladding which led to the Grenfell Tower fire also produces materials for Israeli fighter jets. The sky may be thick with smoke, but it’s still possible to read the signs. 

Coates speaks to writers, scholars, journalists, and activists. Back home in the US, he sits with an elderly survivor of the Deir Yassin massacre. He wants to know as much as possible, listen to as many people as he can, to make up for all the time he has lost to lies. An admirable sense of shame flows through these essays. Coates admits to failing, to faltering where he should have prodded and questioned. Writing, for him, has the power to “expand the brackets of humanity”, and he now recognizes that the void of silence around Palestine has contributed towards a decades-long campaign of mass dehumanization. In his final essay, he admits to seeing Palestine and its people through “a kind of translation”, filtered through analogy. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Guilt-soaked acknowledgements and Damascene conversions shouldn't be the only things we have to offer. Contrast this need to keep a respectful distance, to centre and amplify Palestinian narratives, with the visceral recognition that a world that doesn’t see value in Palestinian life inevitably doesn’t see any in African life too. Dispossession is a shared fate. We just take turns on either side of the screen. I won’t be the first or last to note this, but one characteristic defining this era of political defeat is how feebly solidarity is imagined. The identity documents of countless volunteers tell another story. Sift through the archive of the Palestinian struggle and you will find them. Japanese, French, Norwegians. Bangladeshis, Sudanese. Fighters from all over the world, who made their way to Palestine, to a besieged Beirut, and defended the inhabitants of refugee camps. People don’t brave perilous routes for hundreds of miles or risk their lives for a goal as ambiguous and vacuous as ‘uplifting’ the voices of the oppressed. They do so because they recognise, as Ghassan Kanafani wrote, that striking one arm of imperialism anywhere is a blow to its collective body. “The corpus resists my analogies”, Coates writes, in deference. To me, he is resisting the implications of his own conclusions. 

We have to reckon with how our dreams, desires, anxieties, and aspirations stand in the way of Palestinians and their freedom. This is a terrifying proposition. Like anyone else, I nurse my own ambitions. I can see the barbed wire around the discourse, the net of red lines. Coates doesn’t say as much, but you can feel him trying to land. When he recounts the professional marginalization a Palestinian American journalist has faced throughout her career, it’s an opportunity to consider the reverse: the many careers and livelihoods preserved by remaining silent in the face of genocidal terror whilst performing all other expected liberal pieties. Compliance and complacency pays. Coates laments his lapses in judgement, but they reveal who, by their very presence, represents an existential threat in these elite spaces. The collective is rewarded for not noticing who is excluded. That’s been the modus operandi for Black writers and intellectuals for longer than I or anyone reading this has been alive. You get rewarded for your polished indifference, for not making connections.  

Are we willing to disentangle ourselves, at least in spirit, from the institutions which have condemned Palestinians to continued devastation? Many Black intellectuals won’t even do that for their own, so my expectations are subterranean. Black writers are indispensable, especially when you need someone to make an example out of. As a renowned defector from the establishment, Coates is treading a rocky path. You can’t deny that he could have chosen a less troublesome one. I suspect many of us are also trying to make sense of the way ahead. 

I don’t really think too much about my responsibility as a writer. I’m responsible for the pain I carry and where I put it. I’m responsible for my small patch of seedlings at the local community garden. I’m responsible for where my heart lies, for the nourishment of my own curiosity. In some capacity, I’ve been mentoring young people for most of my adult life. I tell them to trust their instincts, to sit with what their gut tells them. To be relentlessly inquisitive, but understand that, sometimes, you were right the first time around. Violence has punctured the lives of many youngsters. It’s too late to coddle them, but one thing you can do is listen to them. You don’t have to travel to the West Bank to meet a young person who has witnessed a friend die in front of them. You can find that right here in London. Young people can recognise how empire has ripped apart their homelands, they can hardly bear the carnage they see on television screens. They struggle to reconcile their guilt with their rage, finding it impossible to separate themselves from their elsewheres. They see right through the craven hypocrisy of the adult world. Some of these young people have relatives from Palestine, family and friends who breathed life into imposed silences. Some of these young people are poets in Palestine, like nineteen-year-old Batool Abu Akleen, writing from her tent in Gaza, furiously editing and translating even after being repeatedly made homeless by Israeli bombs. The kind of institutions Coates teaches at are increasingly producing some of these keen-eyed young people, a source of panic for their funders. I trust in the youth and their alive hearts. I have faith in them because they are deserving, and because I was once one of them. They may not be writing students at Howard. Maybe they won’t get to be writers, or ever be published, but we can always meet off the page.

A lot of stupidity is celebrated at the altar of lived experience. Coates stresses the need to “walk the land”, instead of intuiting from the edge. But experience can be a conundrum out of which you and everything you know has emerged. It takes a problem to recognise one. Intuition loiters throughout “The Message”, a signal Coates alternately heeds and rejects. I would argue that what is called intuition is theoretical fortification. Sparks fly when personal cosmologies meet the rigours of research and study. Intuition, though, might just save your life. Intuition is armour, instinct, street smarts, weltschmerz, discernment, clocking and checking, peeping game. We can’t afford to dismiss it. 

Returning to the epistolary mode, Coates urges his students and young writers everywhere to fulfil their role in saving the world. Various obstacles will make that a difficult feat, including but not limited to: censorship, underemployment, market demands, industry arm-twisting, collegial loyalties, popular taste, mortgages and KPIs, dependents, simmering resentments, and, of course, their own tightly-held delusions. “The Message” won’t delve into all that. It’s not that kind of book. And anyway, the road ahead of the precocious young writer begins open-ended, with as little baggage as possible. Coates, however, like many of us, would do well to remember that it took the child to reveal the emperor’s nudity, his threadbare morality.

In the process of thinking and dreaming up a collection, these songs nudged me, staining my consciousness. Here’s a playlist I compiled last year to listen and feel through. Book anniversaries may feel gauche, but a song, remembered and recalled, has a way of exhausting the inexpressible. When it comes to poetry and thinking through poetry, there’s so much that still feels profoundly, ecstatically inexpressible. It feels good to hold on to some things, to exist in hushed tones, to still have some secrets. 

Some songs that informed the sway and sensibility of Bad Diaspora Poems. 

Aïcha, Cheb Khaled

I listened to a lot of Raï while editing. For me, this genre exists in the same soundscape as the qaraami songs of the Somali tradition. Both genres explore the latitudes of interminable, popularised longing. Qaraami is a coastal echo, grappling with ruin in both form and feeling. Raï is a smoke-drenched Parisian cafe, a dive bar in Marseille, a woman choked by debt and disillusionment standing on a stage and eating the audience alive. Raï is the ecstasy of the port, the feeling of standing on the edge and knowing that, across the water, in another language, someone else is planning to blow up their life in exactly the same way. Someone else wants to escape. Oran is irrecoverable. It stinks like a sailor. I love this song because it stays on me. 

Tonton du Bled, 113

The summer trip to the motherland is an early reckoning with form. The child, growingly familiar with the contours of their life in diaspora, is flung into relation with what could have been. They meet a gaggle of cousins, their fuzzy doubles, their mirrored image. Comparison and pattern recognition become the order of the day, a collective bonding exercise taking place over plastic tabletops and ice-cold bottles of Hamoud Boualem. “Tonton du Bled” details the disorientation of summer returns. The journey begins by car, cramped shoulder to shoulder, siblings fogging up the windows with their restlessness. Necessities vie for space with luxuries in bulging suitcases. The troublemakers adopt a veneer of respectability, practicing the greetings they will offer to a parade of near and distant family members. They prepare for the inevitable faux pax. A few weeks and it’ll be back to the cocoon of the ghetto, as Rim’K raps wryly. But for now, he swaps a battered leather jacket for a dusty thobe. “Tonton Du Bled” is a classic, a staple of the janky Euro music channels I flicked through on satellite television as a child, my grandmother offering commentary from the sofa. (These channels provided insight into the former Eastern bloc’s musical tastes and the surprising crossover appeal of all my favorite British girl bands). The trio of Rim’K, AP, and Mokobé hop on a ferry, leaving their PlayStations behind and making their way to the village, armed only with cheeky irreverence. The result is an anthem for all the uncles from all the bleds everywhere. RIP DJ Mehdi. 

Ostia (The Death Of Pasolini), Coil

This song invokes the angularity of suffering, the sounds of a body being compressed and contorted. It traces a line from Ostia’s resorts to the White Cliffs of Dover. Pasolini is a spectre, haunting the beach where he was murdered, a coastline now frequented by Romans on a budget. Pasolini the idol and iconoclast, the perennial wounded son, the awkward translator, the embattled celebrity. The Pasolini I am fascinated by is the one who transcended the horizons of his birth, who was always seeking to be untethered, letting this impulse lead him to unlikely conclusions. I think of his 1964 poem L’uomo di Bandung, or Bandung Man. Bloody bougainvilleas and intertwined fates. The coarse and the delicate. He writes from Mombasa, Cape Town, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Marseilles, the periphery of Rome. In the realms of hunger – alongside the trust of the loving – there’s also the hatred of those who will not understand.

 I return to these lines often. I was in that space for a long, long time.

John Balance, Coil’s co-founder, was another poet searching for the honey in the hollows. 1986’s Horse Rotorvator is one of my favourite albums. Regent Park is captured on its cover. The park’s bandstand, targeted by an IRA bombing in the summer of 1982, takes central position. Another connected explosion at Hyde Park left a scene of carnage. Seven dead horses lying motionless, surrounded by damaged cars. The photographs are hard to forget. You think of your own family photos taken at Hyde Park, bundled in your mother’s arms, wearing a flower-splattered hat. Later, older, licking ice cream by the water. Surreptitiously feeding the ducks. Spotting strange men behind the bushes. The horses lie on the floor like expensive rugs. In 2024, I see an image of two blood-streaked horses running loose through London’s streets, and I am closer to understanding a song as a kind of premonition. 

My Dark Star, Suede 

Teenage angst is a warm bath you don’t want to slip out of. After some time, your fingertips wrinkle. Your toes prune up. But you don’t care. You luxuriate in being misunderstood, in the delicious agony of a pain that has visited you at much too young an age with too brief an introduction. I listen to Suede in the same way I did as a teenager, divided by years of knowing but not necessarily doing better. The residual obsessions remain. The savage poetry of the council estate. An imagistic understanding of the world. A memorable b-side. Brett Anderson is a slinky voyeur, curling his lip, jerking his hips, surrounded by velvet curtains and condemned lives. He sings of a woman that has come to England from the sea. In writing, I revisit points of departure and arrival, preoccupied with waiting rooms, with the act of waiting for your life to begin, to finally start making some kind of sense. 

Nebki Ala Dnoubi, Kamel Belkhirat

Malhun originated in Morocco, a poetic vernacular set to song. Malhun is the throat’s manifestation of the kind of need that colours everything in its wake. It’s a story that begins somewhere and is forced to end elsewhere. My sins are like gravel. Countless, the poet admits. The musician follows. They commiserate over regrets, their negligible virtues.

كثرات سِيّْتي ونْقلَّت حسناتي / وسْجننِّي فَسلاسل الغْدر

The words are borrowed from Muhammad Bin Suleiman, a poet and sheikh from Fes. Malhun can be unforgivingly exposed. Like faith, it wobbles on its legs. Kamel Belkhirat’s voice is a controlled tremor. I listen to this song, pressing against the hollow of its neck. I practice indecision, get so good at it that I frighten myself. I write the book I’m capable of writing to avoid all the books I can’t stop thinking about but won’t allow myself to write. I curse my culpability. I curse my sins. The word tawbah is derived from the root taba, meaning return, recurrence, a turning back. I am trying to write in the spirit of repentance. 

Malaika, Miriam Makeba   

I’m writing this post from Johannesburg, where I listened to a musician perform a beautiful cover of this Swahili love song in a busy jazz bar. It reminded me of how much I love Miriam Makeba’s version. What more can be said of a woman who made a practice out of endurance? Eighties New York. The cast members of Sarafina!, Mbongeni Ngema and Hugh Masekela’s Soweto-based musical, are met with a surprise. Makeba has come to visit. Their faces drop, then crumple into a haze of tears. They rush to embrace Makeba, an artist who has spent three decades in exile. The youngsters had never seen Makeba, never had the chance to watch her perform. She was a distant icon, like a star you could barely make out with your eyes. A hug bridged what had been so violently uprooted for so long. After his release from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela convinced Makeba to finally return to her country. In the spring of 1992, she performed in Johannesburg, her first time doing so since 1960, when her passport was cancelled and her life disrupted. Makeba died near Naples, another city of scatterings and reconciliations I wanted to confront in Bad Diaspora Poems.

The half-life of this song persists.

I began writing this essay in 2018, and I read it in its final form to a public audience sometime in the following year. A thought-provoking debate ensued. I’m not a fan of re-sharing old writing (urgh), and if this piece retains a sense of timeliness, well, that says more about our critically sluggish era than it does about the sharpness of my insights. Upon the release of Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé’s latest album, I floated around the idea of re-sharing this essay, so I’ve republished it here, for curious eyes and minds.

A velvet-voiced woman serenades a couple under the flash of cameras and the gaze of millions. The shimmer of her crystal teardrop earrings is matched only by the wetness already collecting in her eyes. The swaying couple are effervescently joyous. With every step, they herald the birth of a revitalised nation, ushering in its latest and most desperately anticipated chapter. This must be true because everyone says so. The man is the Hawaiian-born son of a white American anthropologist mother and a Kenyan economist father who met in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii. The woman is the Gullah-descended daughter of a Chicago water plant employee father and a secretary mother. Both are held captive by the crooning backdrop of Beyoncé Giselle Carter-Knowles. It’s the evening of January 20th, 2009. On the night of Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th President of the United States, the Obamas enjoy their first dance as President and First Lady at the Neighbourhood Inaugural Ball. Beyoncé has been hand-picked to provide a rendition of the Glenn Miller classic At Last, a song most famously covered by a heart-wringing Etta James. In her post-performance interview, Beyoncé is endearingly overwhelmed. She’s tearful and teetering, displaying a rare moment of uncharacteristic abandon. She tells news reporters that singing at this historic moment has been the most important day of her life. “At last he is here”, she sighs. Her smile is watery, but her belief is absolute. “It was all worth it.” 

Ten years on, the hazy afterglow of Obama fever has arguably dissipated into the collective fog of contested myth-making. Was it all worth it? For many of us, Beyonce’s statement has acquired a question mark. Our own era presents us with the thorny gift of hind-sight as well as more democratised, and often digital, avenues for black people outside the commentariat and celebrity classes to voice their unfiltered assessments of the Obama Years. Grand narratives have been incessantly destabilised, unclogged from their watertight assurances. Nostalgia-drenched paeans to the Obamas continue to service and unify critics of the Trump administration. These interpretations jockey for dominance against the disillusionment experienced and vocalised by black communities both within and outside the US. To remember things differently is to rain on someone else’s meticulously orchestrated parade. 

Much has been said and written about the Obama presidency; a tumultuous eight years where the regime of police violence reached its zenith of hypervisibility and a mass, transnational movement for the right to black life erupted under a black president. Economic disparities between white and black Americans swelled alongside AFRICOM’s military expansion, increased deportations (particularly of Haitian asylum seekers), extrajudicial assassinations, and indiscriminate drone campaigns across the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. For those that cared to look, or cared to even care, the Obama dream sagged under the weight of its nightmarish contradictions. Legacies haunt as much as they inspire. In many ways, we remain anchored to that moment, fossilized in the amber of its promise. Like dancing lovers, we are mesmerized by the reflected image of ourselves. Was it all worth it? How do we measure worthiness? To decipher the worth of a thing is to put it into relation with other things. Worth, like power, is a capricious and slippery web of value judgements given the fleshiness of communal endorsement. In looking away, what do we endorse? 

Whose worth is amplified, exaggerated and celebrated at the expense of a larger collective or community? Worth is hoarded by the few and socially reproduced by the rest of us. Its adjudication is the throbbing heart of neoliberal logic. Sell yourself until there is nothing left to sell. Flog liberation on the market. Repackage it accordingly. Haggle over the lives of others. Within global systems that stratify human life, worthiness is rarely earned or deserved. Worthiness is a metric which prioritises individual achievement over collective enfranchisement. When you’ve been conditioned to see yourself as unworthy, it’s understandable to seek comfort in the glorious, billboard-adorning worthiness of others, especially when they look like you. When self-image vies with self-worth, a popstar becomes the perfect stand-in for unrealised dreams. 

Black womanhood can be overwrought with this particular kind of one-directional mirroring. It’s a way of looking at the world that is born out of our estrangement from it. Our struggle as black women, to quote the philosopher-critic Sylvia Wynter, concerns the “displacement of the genre of the human, of ‘’Man’’, of which the black population group—men, women and children must function as the negation.” This displacement can enrich our ability to think outside the confines of category, but it’s also a source of profound loneliness. Negation is a terrible prospect to bear. Still, we bear it, with grit, humour, savvy, and skepticism. Vulnerability is imposed upon us before we can choose it. Even then, there are no genteel fainting rooms built for black women with sensitive dispositions. No distressed damsels awaiting rescue. We maneuver, sometimes outwitting the curtailed visions others have for us. At other times, we fall into their traps, our imaginations wilting in sunless rooms. Through it all, we try to nourish our own gardens. Hold on to an inner world blooming beyond the diminished horizons of the one we are forced to creatively negotiate.  

For many black women, contemporary intersectional discourse serves as an entry point into the arena of recognition. Recognition, after all, is a lifeblood. Even in superficial doses, it whets the appetite. In an imaginatively impoverished climate, having one’s pain acknowledged remains the surest way to be counted. The political demands of black women are only heard if they are made within the register of disempowered victimhood. If we are loud about being excluded, we may be listened to. Black feminisms are then collapsed into cohesive, totalising projects with a single aim; to function as a corrective for the bumbling missteps of liberal, white, middle class feminism. This is Intersectionality™ as championed by carceral feminists, self-aggrandising politicians, cynical military recruitment campaigns and slick corporations. If there’s a murderous, exploitative institution you wish to revamp, throw a black woman at it. Interrogating the costs of our inclusion into the halls of power is not as easily embraced as the black feminisms concerned with the business—and it is a business—of window-dressing and diversification. Yet, whether others want to listen or not, black women are having conversations about our differences. 

Recognition is a profoundly human desire. Black women, like anyone else on this planet, can’t be blamed for seeking it. We too want to be seen. We want to witness our likeness celebrated and revered. To see people like us being unreservedly loved. We delight in the surrogate successes of other black women. That this natural desire is so routinely denied is a cruelty which permeates our psychic health. Worse yet, such desires can be easily perverted and used to appease us in collective rituals of emotional manipulation. (Representational gains conveniently tug on heartstrings and wallets). In surrendering to these anodyne pleasures, we are robbed of the clarity we deserve, the kind of clarity which demystifies the lives we lead and the responsibilities we share. 

There’s little to celebrate in our exclusion from various genres, categories, ideals, and canons. Yet, if our inclusion relies upon abandoning a life-saving sense of criticality then perhaps it isn’t worth the admission price. Yes, we aren’t protected. But we aren’t infantile in thought either, or at least we shouldn’t strive to be. In her 1992 essay collection Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell hooks defined what she called ‘the oppositional gaze”, a gaze of critical intimacy where black people can “look back, and at one another, naming what we see.” Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is utilised by hooks as an examination of the black woman as spectator. In Morrison’s novel, Miss Pauline Breedlove is a movie-obsessed poor maid who is at her happiest attending the “picture show”, wistfully drowning in images of “white men taking such good care of they women, and they all dressed in big clean houses with bathtubs right in the same room with the toilet.” The trouble with even the best films is that they ultimately end. Miss Pauline is left sitting in the dark. The spell has ended. “But it made coming home hard”, she laments at home, a stinging realisation at the end of another day’s hard toil. As hooks writes, such identification fosters a blissful state of regression. The black female spectator sinks into masochism. Criticality recedes into the rear view. The heart wants what it wants, though the hands remain empty. At the end of it all, hooks reminds us, we can only come home to ourselves. If, in Morrison’s literary landscape, it’s possible to identify with glittering filmic representations of white power, then it’s little wonder why the real thing—the living, breathing vision of powerful black women—can so transfix us. 

The Trinidadian-born journalist and activist Claudia Jones spoke to the potential of black women’s oppositionality in her 1949 essay “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women!”. The bourgeoisie, she argued, was fearful of the militancy of black women. “The capitalists know, far better than many progressives seem to know, that once women undertake action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti-imperialist coalition, is greatly enhanced”, she wrote. Jones considered the role of black women in trade unions which largely failed to organise black domestic workers unprotected by union standards and labor legislation. Despite their substantial numbers, black women were rarely given prominent roles within trade unions. Her analysis was explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, linking the Scotsboro case to the struggle of Ethiopians against Italian fascism. 

Jones led an oppositional life. After migrating with her family to Harlem in 1922, she joined the Young Communist League at eighteen. By the age of 25, she was chairing its national council. Charged with violating the anti-communist Smith Act in 1951, Jones was imprisoned and later deported to London where she became the editor of the West Indian Gazette, founding the first Notting Hill Carnival in 1959. Hounded out of the United States, Britain’s Caribbean population offered her the kind of community she would never find in the parochial Communist Party of Great Britain (whose members had branded her “difficult”). Surveilled throughout her life, her “un-American activities” were recorded by the FBI in a 300-plus page dossier. Long after her premature death, there were efforts to erase her legacy from public memory. Yet, her life remains an example of what it means to theorise from below. She saw herself in the working class black communities which nurtured her, and they saw themselves in her. 

Oppositionality offers alternatives. It draws from the deep wells of knowledge we sometimes mistake for burdens. It is, like responsibility, demanding. It’s grown. It’s not easy to sell. Unlike low-hanging platitudes favoured by liberals of all stripes, it doesn’t deny black women agency by sanctifying them. Listen to black women!, our allies cry, even as they deprive us of our differences, contradictions, and varied allegiances. Last November gave us a textbook example of such flattening, with the near-universal mainstream praise for Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming. By March, Becoming had sold over ten million copies. Michelle Obama embarked on a national, sold-out book tour. Its success, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s review detailed, indicates how well it echoed our thoroughly conservative times as well the long-burning potency of the Obama brand. Becoming is riddled with the discredited politics of racial uplift. It views racism as an obstacle, not a pervasive and often fatal reality. We are told that racism can be overcome through education, hard work and a reverential belief in meritocracy. Suspicion and stereotyping, Obama writes, can run both ways. As Taylor contends, Becoming anecdotally equates black people’s distrust of white America with the racial fears white Americans have used to justify everything from lynchings and mob violence to economic redlining. “I’ve been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an “angry black woman”, Obama writes, pulling us into her clucking Mother Hen knowingness. “I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most—is it “angry” or “black” or “woman”?” Clearly, she is intimately aware of the tropes plaguing black womanhood. Angry, Black and Woman are categories she is willing to interrogatively put on the table. Power, however, is resolutely kept off it.

While it’s true that right-wing vitriol marred Obama’s entry into public life, the bigotry she has faced doesn’t discount how she chooses to wield the power she still holds. Responding to conservative media’s depictions of her as a militant and unladylike ball-breaker, Obama has worked hard to soften her image. As FLOTUS, she tackled child literacy and obesity. Marriage and motherhood were her focus, as she often reminded the public. Becoming is the natural culmination of this largely successful effort to soften the image of a woman who was once advised to diminish herself so that her husband could win the presidential nomination.   

Ascribing to such bootstrap black feminisms lends credibility to the idea that all making it entails is some elbow grease and a dose of aspiration. Or, as Obama puts it: “If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.” In a historical period where upward mobility is no longer guaranteed (if it ever was for most), stagnant wages and mercilessly gutted public services, this is brutish indifference couched in the language of resilience. Most of us are externally defined by our material conditions, and we shouldn’t be blamed for it. What do such feminisms say about black working class women who work the hardest and have the least to show for it?  It was these very black women who filled out arenas for a chance to hear Michelle Obama speak, spending their hard-earned money attending her tour dates. When Michelle Obama’s South Side journey finally came to London’s Southbank, black British women did the same. On social media, some voiced their reservations about ticket prices and the general inaccessibility of an event live-streamed on BBC News. Others decried how the event’s unaffordability and the prioritisation of the Southbank Centre’s exclusive members would ensure an audience composed of mostly middle class white women. What remained unspoken was perhaps too painful to consider. Maybe all this pomp and circumstance wasn’t really for us? Had we personally over-identified with a woman who was as much a brand and purveyor of US interests as a fellow sister of the struggle? Do the people we see ourselves in see themselves in us? 

bell hooks courted this provocation in “Moving Beyond Pain”, her essay on Beyoncé’s 2016 Lemonade album. “Viewers who like to suggest Lemonade was created solely or primarily for black female audiences are missing the point,” hooks asserted. “Commodities, irrespective of their subject matter, are made, produced, and marketed to entice any and all consumers. Beyoncé’s audience is the world and that world of business and money-making has no color.” There’s a bare-boned truthfulness to this argument, as hooks attempts to parse out critique from the thicket of adulation and fandom fervour. It forces us to stop preening at refracted images, and actually stare reality in its dogged face. Years on, there’s much in that essay I don’t agree with. In her desire for resolution, hooks is heavy-handed, even dogmatic. Lemonade is rife with contradictions, but I think this messiness is what made it so emotionally resonant for its fans. I do, however, agree with hooks’s identification of “a conventional stereotypical framework, where the black woman is always a victim.” This is the primary lens through which even the most vocal supporters of black women operate, one that is embraced by Brand Beyoncé and its insistence on saluting the megastar as both a peerless idol and an eternal underdog who needs our cheerleading against the forces of the white cultural establishment. You can’t be as rich as Croesus and as beleaguered as Miss Celie. Pick a struggle. Are we in communion or standing at command? Postures of victimisation may be stunting, but there are black women who shrewdly adopt them for their own gain. There’s serious money to be made in superficially rehashing Lena Dunham’s latest racial gaffes, desirability politics, dating woes, and hair debates for an audience that will pat you on the back for bravely sharing your pain but will not actively work to undermine the structures which cause it. 

As early as 2014, hooks had infamously lambasted Beyoncé, or at least elements of the Beyoncé machine, for its “terrorist” and “anti-feminist” qualities, referring to the global icon’s washed-out TIME cover as part of the mainstream’s visual assaults on feminism and young black girls. Her comments were made during a panel conversation at The New School entitled “Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the black Female Body.” If you watch the recording of the event on YouTube, you can pinpoint the exact moment when the air is sucked out of the room. Audible gasps rise and fall like punctured balloons. There is nervous laughter. Outside the gathering, a wider debate raged on in black feminist circles. Op-eds were hastily typed up. Essays were published. Prominent writers and academics conducted emergency roundtables, such as the 11-person discussion featured in Feministing. (Why you need eleven adults to litigate a pop album remains beyond me). Though hooks’ comments betrayed a suspicion of feminine presentation, harking back to the throwback boogymen of glossy magazines and video games, the reaction they inspired was equally telling. To some, it was inconceivable that a black feminist would, if hyperbolically, critique the constructed image of a black cultural juggernaut. Both women are respected and admired pioneers within their respective fields. Both enjoy varying forms of power and influence. It shouldn’t matter whether one agrees with hooks or not, the knee-jerk urge to avoid divergence of opinion was predictably stifling. To defend one figure was to be beholden to another. A zero-sum game with no winners. It was almost as if, having reduced bell hooks to tote-bag motivationals and reblogged aphorisms, commentators were now unfamiliar with the version of bell hooks standing before them. The complex and often frustrating version that had been there all along, having spent decades critiquing our “deeply anti-intellectual society.”

”People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves.” The strategist and grassroots organiser Ella Baker spoke to what happens when individuals, and our identification with them, eclipse movements. Baker looked towards the community of women who had raised her, from a grandmother who had been whipped for refusing to marry the man chosen for her by her enslaver, to a mother who provided food and shelter to vulnerable neighbours. She described her upbringing as one which stressed that “your relationship to human beings was far more important than your relationship to the amount of money that you made.” From the 1920s to her death in 1986, Baker mobilised working class black people through organisations such as the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She warned young activists of succumbing to the seductive pull of individualism, remaining critical of the “charismatic” leadership model. She was clear-sighted about the dangers of such models. “There is also the danger in our culture that, because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing he is the movement.” Baker was adamant that no one could singularly represent or reflect the hopes and desires of a mass movement. A strong people would not need strong leaders. Baker keenly understood power as an accumulated resource within an organisation. If it was too weighted towards an individual activist or celebrity, the movement would suffer. She understood why the underrepresented looked outwards for affirmation, but did not excuse this impulse.

What should be apparent at our current political juncture is how varied and antagonistic our freedom dreams can be. We tip-toe around these cracks, unwilling to pit black women against each other, unable to reckon with persisting conflicts of interest. We don’t agree upon or even desire the same paths to liberation. Some of us don’t even seek liberation at all. As more and more of us attain greater access to power, our ability to legitimise and bolster the systems which disempower other black women increases. Over-identification can be a source of pleasure, but it can also blunt our necessary criticality. You can’t spend your life trapped in a hall of mirrors. 

In her essay “The Idea of Black Culture”, the scholar and critic Hortense Spillers poses her own questions. What happens when the last bastions of critique fall away? “When the imagined moral credibility of black now translates into an enablement of the most repressive practices among the world democracies today?” Resonating daily in our implicated and indivisible lives, these are questions worth contemplating. 

For Spillers, the gift of black culture—a gift she worries we are in danger of losing—lies in the “reclamation of the critical edge”, a horizon which has yet to come. This is a culture of dissidence and intellectual friction, invented with our backs up against the wall. That’s what has always been at stake. Spillers is anticipating, not uncritically celebrating, an unrealized black culture. Arguably, we are still waiting for the arrival of a black critical culture which more readily identifies with the disenfranchsied than with monied starlets, charismatic leaders and pandering politicians. We may be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, but it increasingly seems like we aren't very good at it. What kind of conversations could we have if our creative energies were not bound up in defending the already powerful from the exclusions and elisions of the white mainstream? Would we continue to ask the same questions or even seek the same, neat answers? In our cultural debates and coalitions, it’s clear who and what we prioritise. Time and time again, our inclination to foreground the already powerful blunts our ability to rally for our own needs. Over-identification then becomes a substitute for action, a numbing agent that encourages complacency and adolescent fantasy. 

Publicly and privately, black women are demanding more in how we envision liberation. We are refusing narratives that flatten us into cheerleaders, accessories and accomplices. We are dictating the terms of our identification with or against power. In demanding more from the politicians and representatives who weaponise our alienation, we assert our own independence, chipping away at the cult of celebrity.

Our pleasures are inflected with responsibility. Can we confront what they reveal? This may mean a recommitment to our own reflections, a groundedness in the reality we share with the people we love and live alongside with. It may require us to look again, anew, at who stands at our shoulders. To refuse to avert our gaze, even from the terror of our longings. We deserve an abundance of alternatives. There, flickering over the horizon, we might just find the power we crave, self-sustaining and shared, diffused among each and every one of us. 

For many of us, the long 2010s were a theatre of dissonance. The cultural landscape was pummeled by wave after wave of surfacing shocks. Democratisation. Diversification. Devaluation. Decentralisation. Each swelling trend fed the other, jerkily reacting to market expansions and contractions. Distribution models were seismically transf…

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