[This is the final installment of M. Neelika Jayawardane's three-part essay on Mahvish Khan's memoir. A longer version will appear in an edited collection. Previously: I, II ] III Khan’s My Guantánamo Diary: A Memoir in the Interstices Americans love personal confession and public testimony — whether on the Oprah Winfrey show, in a church or in a [...]
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[This is the second installment of M. Neelika Jayawardane's three-part essay on Mahvish Khan's memoir. A longer version will appear in an edited collection. Previously: I] II. Translating the Other, Transforming the Self Most Americans cannot forget the iconic images of orange-clad, black-hooded prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Ironically, however, these highly publicized images served only to [...]
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[This is the first part of M. Neelika Jayawardane's three-part essay on Mahvish Khan's memoir. A longer version will appear in an edited collection.] Mahvish Rukhsana Khan‘s memoir My Guantánamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me chronicles her experiences as an Afghani-American law student who volunteered to be a Pashto translator for a law firm representing [...]
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[This guest post by our friend M. Neelika Jayawardane is cross-posted from AIC. Previously by MNJ: “Everyone’s Got Their Indian” I & II] Ah, greasy, beak-nosed men with unsavoury, five-o-clock shadows darkening swarthy jawlines, proffering gifts and currying favours. Good to see that the illustrious history that connects the stereotyping of Jewish people and Indians (particularly Indians in [...]
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[Guest post by Hannah Green. Green is a writer and student learning Urdu (and Hindi) in Lucknow, India. She got her Bachelor's from Northwestern University in June 2012. Her writings have appeared on ThinkProgress, 3 Quarks Daily, and Racialicious. Here is a link to some of her other work, and to a very unfinished website.] Whose 21st century? I didn’t know whether [...]
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[We thank Professor Jyotsna Singh for contributing her Kurdistan Diary to CM, along with photos and captions. ] A Musafir in Iraqi Kurdistan, May 2012 The murmuring mass of an unknown language constitutes a delicious protection, envelops the foreigner (provided the country is not hostile to him) in an auditory film which halts at his ears all the [...]
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Last year it was Sepoy’s essays that were collected in a book, and this year, a collection of Lapata’s essays and art, the second CM book, The Little Book of Terror, was published by Farangi’s Foxhead Books. You can read some reviews of TLBT at the new CM page, CM Books. We had some terrific [...]
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[A shorter version of this essay appeared in Dawn.] Empires carve out and sustain their political and economic privilege with unrelenting violence, but, without a hint of irony, deem their mission moral and ethical, verging on the altruistic. A necessary counterpart to this blindness, is a paranoid fear of a dark, hostile world. Islamophobia serves [...]
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[Editor's note: We thank Hussein Omar for contributing this essay. This review was commissioned by Bidoun for issue #27. We especially thank Bidoun for allowing us to run it. ] by Hussein Omar On the 15th of June, 1914, an obscure Egyptian newspaper based in Geneva printed a rousing call-to-arms: To you, my fellow men and fellow [...]
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A snippet from my review of Irfan Husain’s Fatal Faultlines: Pakistan, Islam and the West: The Global War on Terror has spawned a cottage industry of commentators and “experts,” who simply repackage the American public’s commonly held beliefs and serve it back to them: The Muslims are crazy, they hate America (and each other), and America is [...]
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I reviewed Alia Malek’s Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice for Dawn. You can read the full review here. On March 21, 2012, Shaima Alawadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi woman, was fatally beaten with a tire iron in Southern California. A note found near her said, “This is my country. Go back to yours, terrorist.” The investigators asserted that [...]
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[A version of this essay was published in Counterpunch.] During the run up to the invasion of Afghanistan, three burly American classmates jeered at me. They said, “We’re gonna kill Osama.” Presumably, I would be especially aggrieved at Osama’s death, since I am a Muslim, and therefore, an Osama sympathizer if not also a bomb-carrying [...]
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[Editor's note: This is the first part of M. Neelika Jayawardane's two-part essay on South African Desis. A longer version of this essay appeared in Transition 107] In my return to Southern Africa as an adult, I was delighted to find a space in which “Indianness” was engaged in a different conversation. It was only then, almost [...]
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[editor's note: This is the first part of M. Neelika Jayawardane's two-part essay on South African Desis. A longer version of this essay appeared in Transition 107. Our sincere thanks to her for allowing CM to host it.] As a child growing up within Southern Africa’s socio-political landscape, I found no easy, seamless fitting in. South Asians [...]
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CM friend, Neelika Jayawardane, reviewed Lapata’s The Little Book of Terror for Africa is a Country. Rather than fall into the sort of pop-psychology that claims to sort out why the children of the well-off (Osama bin-Laden included) may find “radicalism” attractive, Daisy Rockwell’s “cheeky little volume” of paintings and minimalist essays, The Little Book of Terror, offers a [...]
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[Part 6 of 6 -- A short version of this series was published at DAWN - Books & Authors] That three million perished in the 1971 conflict is widely stated around the world. Salil Tripathi points out that “Killing three million people over 267 days amounts to nearly 11,000 deaths a day. That would make it one [...]
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[Part 5 of 6] [...] men see the abuse of “their” women as a degradation of their masculinity. What counts is not the suffering of the women, but the effect it has on men. Ruth Seifert, “War and Rape: Analytical Approaches” All facets of the 1971 conflict and the subsequent nation-making processes had a devastating [...]
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[Part 4 of 6] Marshaling colonial legacies, the post-colonial state seeks to consolidate the nation as a new form of empire, demanding hyper-masculine militarization and territorial and extra-territorial control. This requires the manufacture of internal and external enemies to constitute a national identity, constructed in opposition to the anti-national and non-native enemies of the nation. [...]
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[Part 3 of 6] I hate all armies. Yours, mine—all armies. -Muhammad Zinnatul Alam, the lone survivor of the Thanpara massacre.1 The main focus of Sarmila Bose’s much talked about book, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War is the civil war in East Pakistan, and not the international war between India and [...]
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[Part 2 of 6] Translation: The Ideology of Pakistan: Every nation has a specific civilization and culture. The civilizational and cultural capital of the Muslims of the Subcontinent comes from Islam. This capital, their beliefs and religious rituals, mannerisms, religious and historical literature, literary and technological research, is preserved in their literature and philosophy. On this [...]
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