Sughra Raza. After The Last Trees. January, 2020.

Digital photograph.

by Varun Gauri

An autocratic president, whom the opposition blames for thousands of deaths, faces a referendum on his rule. The majority rejects him in the election, but around 45% vote for him to remain in office. The would-be permanent dictator begrudgingly departs, yet he retains a fanatically loyal following, especially among the religious right, some business leaders, the security establishment, and voters scared of socialism. Conservative politicians and radical rightists fear his influence, permitting him and his acolytes to remain powerful voices in national politics for many years. That hold on the political right, alongside structural impediments in the national constitution, the opinions of the judges he appointed, and the continuity in office of his regime functionaries make it is impossible for the country to address social and economic inequality and consolidate democratic reform.

A forecast of the United States post-Trump? Perhaps.

A description of Chile post-Pinochet? Definitely.

This year, thirty-one years after Pinochet left office, fifteen years after he died, Chile will hold elections for a constitutional convention to replace the military Constitution of 1980, even though the government is led by a president whose rightist party once supported Pinochet. Following the latest in a series of student-led protests, the country may at last have moved on from “moving on,” now aiming to redress inequality and entrench democracy more deeply in its political institutions.

What took so long? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Adele A Wilby

The presence of covid-19 running amok amongst us has momentarily disrupted the perimeters of our lives. That two, three, or possibly four generations are not always able to gather together under one roof has given rise to greater appreciation of the family.

Those four generations that meet or live together frequently span the scope of living memory; anything beyond is found in fading photos, objects that have become family heirlooms, or indeed the tradition of oral family history. But while the existence of three generations gathered under one roof might seem normal today, it is however an extremely limited understanding of the ‘family’ when we consider the generations that have made up the existence of related hominins on the planet; they literally amount to thousands. Learning about these past generations of kindred has been for me therefore, a refreshing read over the holiday period. Rebecca Wragg Sykes has to be applauded for realising one of the purposes of writing her book Kindred, Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art which she says, is for ‘those who’ve heard of Neanderthals or not…’

As a curious amateur eager to learn more about out kindred and indeed the work of archaeologists, any hesitation that jargon and too much information might be overwhelming and a turn off as I read the book, was quickly dispelled. Her obvious literary talent manifests so patently in the opening paragraph of the book. ‘Time is devious’, she tells us, ‘…as we exist in a continuously flowing stream of “now”’ How right she is, and so is her view that ‘comprehending the scale of time on an evolutionary, planetary, cosmic level remains almost impossible…’ Despite the profound complexity of the human brain, it would seem at this period in human history, or human evolution, its potential remains limited. Indeed, for Sykes  ‘comprehending the gobsmacking hugeness of deep archaeological time…’ is equally as challenging. Nevertheless, her opening paragraph highlights our ‘now’ within the grand scheme of the existence of hominins on the planet and such a prospect is not only exciting but generates in the reader an appetite for what lies ahead in the pages to come, and for me she delivers a fascinating account about other hominins who came before us: the Neanderthals. Read more »

by Sabyn Javeri Jillani

In April 2020, Arundhati Roy wrote in the Financial Times, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine the world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

Her words reminded me of the state of Barzakh, the transitory stage between this world and the next. Separating the living from the hereafter, it’s often described as a veil or a bridge between death and resurrection. The Sufi philosopher Al Ghazali described it as a place where souls are suspended in time, neither in hell nor heaven, resembling the Catholic theological state of limbo. It is a similar state that I find myself in as I write this, despite the fact that the new year started off on a hopeful note.

But can a change of date really shake off the turmoil and confusion of last year? 2020 was an year of loss for so many of us. The world events around me seemed to reflect my inner state as I too experienced a deep sense of personal loss. There was a kind of implausible horror that encircled most of us as streets became empty and touch disappeared from our vocabulary. The withdrawal of the world reflected the inertia we felt inside as life came to a grinding halt. I mourned with the rest of the world, the loss of an era. Although the optimists amongst us reminded us that, ‘endings are new beginnings’, it was hard not to think of the pandemic as the ‘beginning of the end’. Read more »

Text by David Oates
Artwork by Alex Hirsch

1. “A more perfect union.” The Founders expressed a breezy confidence, didn’t they? As if such a thing were possible – the distant states cohered into a nation; the various occupants working it all out. Loyal. Collaborative. Taking part in the common welfare. While remaining, of course, individual and autonomous and free, free, free. (Certain restrictions applied.)

I’m a child of the sixties but have kept a wary distance from virtually all forms of organized groupiness, togetherness, or even (alas) belonging. I’m a curious observer, though.

2. Planetary Ecology. The modern environmental movement based itself on the analogy of the organism: we were really one big animal. “We” meaning all of nature (Gaia), or an ecosystem, or a human community. It worked on various levels! Lewis Thomas, one of our gurus, held up the example of a critter that was disunified cells, squiggling around individualistically (“voting straight Republican” he quipped). . . until something signalled them and they joined together as one, “solid as a trout”! That this exemplary organism was slime mold did not strike us, in the sixties, as funny. Decades later, our sliminess seems way less promising.

Now our planetary health teeters on a terrifying brink and the message of connectedness seems more compelling than ever. Biologically, we are interwoven in increasingly obvious ways we still can’t seem to accept. Read more »

Photo taken from a train window going from Brixen to Franzensfeste in the South Tyrol in January of 2020, back when the prospect of traveling by rail did not make one nervous.

by Claire Chambers

I recently edited an anthology about food from Muslim South Asia. Published by Pan Macmillan in India as Desi Delicacies, the book’s first half is made up of life writing essays, while the second half comprises short stories. To give a taste of the volume, it opens with Bina Shah’s virtuosic Foreword: Appetizer. In it, the author of Before She Sleeps reflects on food’s alchemical ability ‘to prolong life and […] turn base materials into noble ones’. This book, as Shah intimates, abounds with orphans, widows, and divorcees, and memories of the departed make particular repasts taste all the sweeter.

My own love for South Asian Muslim culture, literature, and food was ignited by my year off before university. This is something I touch on in my Introduction: Food in the Time of Corona, which started life as a 3QD blog post. I spent that year in the mid-1990s teaching in Mardan and Peshawar, in the northwestern Pakistani region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. I celebrated my eighteenth birthday there, and it genuinely was a coming of age. The year set me on a course of reading and writing on the topic of South Asian Muslim literature which I have pursued with hardly any interruptions ever since. Along the way, I’ve been lucky enough to get to know some astounding authors, many of whom were gracious enough to contribute to this anthology.

The first piece in Part One: Essays is The Homesick Restaurant, an autobiographical fragment by Nadeem Aslam, one of the best-known Pakistani writers. The piece features a kachnar flower and a long-lost relative, and packs the punch of deggi mirch chilli powder in fewer than a thousand words. Really, it just has to be savoured. Read more »