The Charm of Thrift Shopping Pt. 1

I never leave a thrift store without buying something, no matter how senseless it is. Late last year, I found a set of four cheaply made coasters in the shape of Tasmanian Devils. Two days ago, I bought a collection of dried twigs bunched up like a witch broom. It’s leaning on a window right [...]

The World is not a Home. It is a Market.

“Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known” is my favorite piece in Soyinka’s most recent book of poems, published in 2004. The poem is dedicated to the Egyptian writer, Naguib Mafouz and begins with two epigraphs. The first one, “The world is a market place” comes from a Yoruba song. And the second, taken from James [...]

The Apocalyptus

When the scrambling for Truth is over
And God, suffering from the munchies,
Is eating travelers off the narrow road

Black Swan

I needed something to jar me out of the stupor of a suburban Christmas eve. So I went to see Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. With all the trash that has come out of Hollywood this year, Black Swan is indeed a case of saving the best for last. Natalie Portman plays the role of Nina [...]

Frames of Suffering

Abu Graib photos, like other photographs that represent suffering, are unsettling not because they are shocking but because they make demands on us. The act of looking at photographs like that is never quite simple because you come out of it thinking about the need for an ethical response. This tendency to link photography and [...]

But the present? That’s another story

We live in the past. We imagine the future. But the present? That’s another story. Of course, people can understand why regret, for example, is a retrospective attitude and why wishful thinking is tied to the future. What might be a bit more difficult to grasp is the fact that we live most of our [...]

Disposable, Unremembered Lives

In the otherwise uneventful North Carolinian town where I live, something happened at about midday last sunday. A motor bike and a power cord got entangled in a ghastly encounter. The bike man landed on the ground, limp and ungracefully sprawled on the side of the tarmac, looking quite dead. But he wasn’t. All this [...]

Of Wives and Gurgles

I feel a power rising In the dark corners of my kitchen. It’s the neighbor’s wife. The crash and the thud, Of pestle and of mortar, Threshing and thrashing The dry flaky hardness Of millet into paste. She came in yesterday Chuckling like a barbarian. Like an old kettle Boiling and blustering Around the starchy [...]

Home Sweet Fantasy!

I don’t know what to call this piece of writing. Is it a cross between a review and a summary–two of the most boring genres? If that is what you make of it, I apologize. On the brighter side, let’s just say that it’s my immediate response–written months ago– to a book I read this [...]

Sebald’s Austerlitz

Apart from the fact that the entire novel is one long paragraph, Austerlitz is also a novel that does not want to be a novel. Is it a mock-biography? A picture book of sorts? A reflection on architecture, time, and memory? It’s really hard to say. One thing that is certain however is that whatever [...]

Brittle Paper

"And they conspire to silence us" — Rainer Maria Rilke