The poem

Yo, como tú,
amo el amor, la vida, el dulce encanto
de las cosas, el paisaje
celeste de los días de enero.

También mi sangre bulle
y río por los ojos
que han conocido el brote de las lágrimas.
Creo que el mundo es bello,
que la poesía es como el pan, de todos.

Y que mis venas no terminan en mí
sino en la sangre unánime
de los que luchan por la vida,
el amor,
las cosas,
el paisaje y el pan,
la poesía de todos.

— Roque Dalton, "Como tú," Poemas Clandestinos, 1974

In English

Like you,
I love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky-blue
landscape of January days.

And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

And that my veins don't end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.

— translation by Jack Hirschman, widely circulated

The man

Roque Dalton García was born in San Salvador in 1935. He went to law school in Chile and Mexico, became a communist while abroad, and returned to El Salvador to organize. The state arrested him repeatedly through the 1960s; he escaped a death sentence in 1964 only because an earthquake collapsed the prison wall and he walked out. He went into exile — Cuba, Czechoslovakia, North Vietnam — and wrote feverishly: poetry, journalism, the novel Pobrecito poeta que era yo.

In 1973 he returned clandestinely to El Salvador to fight with the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP). He wrote the Clandestine Poems in 1974 under five different invented identities — a bricklayer, a teacher, a sociology student — to embed poetry inside the daily life of revolutionary struggle. On May 10, 1975, four days before his fortieth birthday, he was tortured and shot by his own ERP comrades on a bogus accusation of being a CIA agent. The murder was ordered by people who later admitted, when the truth came out in the 1990s, that the charge was false. His body was never recovered.

Why this poem first

"Como tú" is the door into the entire volume because of what it refuses. Revolutionary poetry is supposed to harden — to scold, to mobilize, to harden the line between us and them. Dalton refuses. He opens with the softest possible declaration: I, like you, love love. Tenderness is the political position. The poem then does its second move: the veins that begin in love do not end in the self; they end in the unanimous blood of those who struggle. This is not abstract solidarity. It is a circulatory system. The poem pumps love into politics and politics into love and refuses to let either of them stand alone.

This is also why "Como tú" anchors a volume called Reading the Removed. The people U.S. policy removes are not abstract numbers; they are people who, like you, love love. Returning to that simple sentence is the discipline the rest of the volume builds on.

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The opening · the sinkhole

I'm dead, Makina said to herself when everything lurched: a man with his mecapal full of fodder, a dog leaping back, the screech of brakes. The earth opened under her feet, swallowing a man and his car in one bite, and then she was running. The first sign that she was crossing was the ground giving way beneath her.

— Working English of the opening of Chapter 1, "The Earth," after Lisa Dillman, 2015. Makina watches a sinkhole open in her village and swallow a neighbor whole. By page two she has accepted a message to carry across the border to her brother, and a small package from a man called Mr. Aitch.

The crossing · the river

When she reached the other side, she felt that something had broken, but she didn't know what. She felt the cold air of the gringo land and thought: this is what it is to be there. The water still ran from her clothes. She remembered her mother saying once that the river was a tongue. Now she understood: the tongue had spoken her into another country.

— Working English of the river-crossing in Chapter 3, "The Place Where the Hills Meet," after Dillman. Herrera invents a verb for what crossing does to a person — jarchar — borrowed from the Spanish jarcha, the closing couplets of medieval Andalusian poems written in vernacular Romance under Arabic frames. To jarchar is to leave one language inside another.

The novelist

Born 1970 in Actopan, Hidalgo. Studied political science at UNAM and earned a PhD in Hispanic literature at Berkeley. Has taught at Tulane in New Orleans since 2014. Three slim novels make up the Mexico-border trilogy: Trabajos del reino (2004) on a narcocorrido singer in a kingpin's court, Señales (2009) on Makina's crossing, La transmigración de los cuerpos (2013) on plague-time in an unnamed city. Each is under two hundred pages. The compressed Spanish — full of neologisms drawn from Aztec and pre-Columbian roots — is what makes him almost untranslatable; Lisa Dillman's English is itself an act of literary invention.

Why this voice

The bookstore default for "Mexican border novel" is social realism. Herrera refuses it. He writes border-crossing as myth: nine chapters, nine levels of the Aztec underworld, a Charon-figure who runs the river, a final scene of arrival that is also a death. The refusal of realism is not a retreat from politics — it is a politics. Realism narrates the migrant as a problem to be solved by U.S. policy. Myth narrates the migrant as a soul carrying a message that pre-dates the policy. The book is the most-translated Mexican novel of the last fifteen years and has been adopted into U.S. high-school and college courses on borderlands and translation.

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The opening · I'd like to stress

My name is Rigoberta Menchú. I am twenty-three years old. This is my testimony. I didn't learn it from a book and I didn't learn it alone. I'd like to stress that it's not only my life, it's also the testimony of my people. It's hard for me to remember everything that's happened to me in my life since there have been many very bad times but, yes, moments of joy as well. The important thing is that what has happened to me has happened to many other people too: my story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality of a whole people.

— Opening of Chapter 1, "The Family," translated by Ann Wright, 1984. Menchú frames the entire testimonio at the start: the "I" speaking is a collective "I." This is the formal definition of testimonio — first-person narration that stands in for many.

The killing of her father · the Spanish Embassy fire

On January 31st, 1980, my father went to occupy the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City. With him went a group of campesinos and students who wanted the world to know what was happening to us in Quiché. They went peacefully, with no arms. The police surrounded the building and would not let anyone leave. Then the building burned. My father was inside. Thirty-seven died. The Spanish ambassador escaped through a window. My father did not.

— Working summary of Chapter 25, after Wright. Vicente Menchú was killed in the Spanish Embassy massacre of 31 January 1980 — a fire set by Guatemalan state security forces during a peaceful occupation by K'iche' farmers protesting army violence. Spain broke off diplomatic relations with Guatemala for fourteen years over the killings. A Guatemalan court convicted former police chief Pedro García Arredondo of the massacre in 2015 — thirty-five years later.

The book · Internet Archive

The witness

Born 1959 in the K'iche' village of Chimel, El Quiché. Joined the Comité de Unidad Campesina (CUC) in 1979. Her father Vicente was burned alive in the Spanish Embassy massacre, January 1980. Her mother Juana was raped, tortured, and killed by the Guatemalan army in April 1980. Her brother Patrocinio was tortured and burned alive in front of his family in 1979. Menchú fled to Mexico in 1981, where in exile she gave the interviews that became the testimonio. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 — the youngest laureate ever at that time. The 1999 Stoll controversy disputed peripheral details of the book; the UN Truth Commission's 1999 report and subsequent forensic exhumations confirmed the genocide, the embassy massacre, and the killings of her family. She ran for President of Guatemala in 2007.

Why this voice

The testimonio that named the U.S.-backed Guatemalan genocide. The Reagan administration certified Guatemalan human rights compliance and resumed military aid in January 1983 — the same year the book was published. Hundreds of thousands of K'iche' deaths were occurring under U.S. munitions and U.S. training while the book was being read. Menchú's voice did what diplomatic cables could not: she made the killing legible to a Spanish-speaking, then English-speaking, world. The book also raised — and remains the central case for — the question of how the academy handles indigenous testimony when a witness is also a survivor and an organizer.

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The thesis · banking vs. problem-posing

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits.

Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapter 2, 1968 · trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, 1970. The chapter that named "banking education" and gave the global left a vocabulary for what was wrong with public schooling.

The opening · why pedagogy is political

The pedagogy of the oppressed, as a humanist and libertarian pedagogy, has two distinct stages. In the first, the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through the praxis commit themselves to its transformation. In the second stage, in which the reality of oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation.

Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.

— Chapter 1, "The pedagogy of the oppressed: an introduction." Freire reverses the colonial-school assumption that learners are empty: every learner already knows the world; the teacher's task is to surface that knowledge and put it into dialogue.

The book · Internet Archive

The educator

Born 1921 in Recife, Pernambuco, in northeast Brazil. Lost his middle-class status in the Great Depression; his hunger as a child shaped his pedagogy ("hunger so real that without knowing it, I joined the ranks of the great army of those who, because they cannot eat, cannot study"). Studied law and philosophy. Became director of education for the Pernambuco state literacy program in the early 1960s. His method taught 300 sugarcane workers to read and write in 45 days, using only words drawn from their own lived vocabulary — a technique later known as the círculos de cultura, "culture circles." The Goulart federal government adopted his method nationally. The 31 March 1964 coup overthrew Goulart, jailed Freire for 70 days, and exiled him. He spent the next sixteen years in Chile, then at the World Council of Churches in Geneva, then back to Brazil after the 1979 amnesty. Served as Secretary of Education for the City of São Paulo 1989–1991 under the Workers' Party (PT). Died of a heart attack in May 1997 in São Paulo.

Why this voice

The book that named "banking education" and proposed an alternative — pedagogy as the practice of mutual humanization. Freire's literacy work in northeast Brazil taught sugarcane peasants to read in 30 hours, using words drawn from their own labor: tijolo (brick), enxada (hoe), fome (hunger). The regime that overthrew Goulart in 1964 considered him dangerous enough to imprison and exile. The book is the result of that exile. It has been translated into more than 30 languages, banned in apartheid South Africa, taught in every U.S. teacher-prep program, and used by Highlander Center to organize the Civil Rights Movement and Appalachian coal miners. Reading Freire seriously is hard work — the prose is dense Hegelian Christian-humanist Brazilian Portuguese — but everyone who teaches anyone anything is doing some version of either banking or dialogue, and the book asks which.

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Vozes-mulheres · Women-voices

A voz de minha bisavó ecoou
criança
nos porões do navio.
Ecoou lamentos
de uma infância perdida.

A voz de minha avó
ecoou obediência
aos brancos-donos de tudo.

A voz de minha mãe
ecoou baixinho revolta
no fundo das cozinhas alheias
debaixo das trouxas
roupagens sujas dos brancos
pelo caminho empoeirado
rumo à favela.

The voice of my great-grandmother echoed
a child's voice
in the holds of the ship.
It echoed laments
for a childhood lost.

The voice of my grandmother
echoed obedience
to the white-owners of everything.

The voice of my mother
echoed quiet revolt
at the bottom of other people's kitchens
beneath the bundles
of soiled white clothes
along the dusty road
home to the favela.

— "Vozes-mulheres," opening stanzas. Working English after Lisboa & Viswanathan, 2018. The poem traces five generations of voices — slave-ship, plantation, kitchen, struggle, and finally the speaker's own daughter — until the voice that began as a "lament" arrives as "the keyword: liberty."

The poet

Born 1946 in the favela of Pindura Saia in Belo Horizonte. Worked as a domestic servant from age eight to put herself through school. Earned her teaching degree, taught in Rio public schools for decades, completed a master's at PUC-Rio (1996) and a doctorate at UFF (2011), both on Afro-Brazilian women's writing. Her concept of escrevivência — writing-as-living, the inseparability of Black women's text from Black women's life — has been adopted across Brazilian Black feminist scholarship. First novel Ponciá Vicêncio (2003) translated to English in 2007. Inducted into the Brazilian Academy of Letters chair candidacy in 2018. Now in her seventies and still publishing.

Why this voice

The bookstore default for "Black Brazilian woman writer" is Carolina Maria de Jesus's Quarto de Despejo — and Carolina is essential. Evaristo is the wider archive: a working scholar and poet of memory whose escrevivência made the inseparability of Black women's text from Black women's life into a method. "Vozes-mulheres" is the poem most often anthologized; it traces matrilineal voices from the slave ship to the favela to the speaker's daughter, each generation carrying the next's possibility. The 2018 English collection makes the work available in U.S. classrooms — but Brazilian Portuguese poetry rarely crosses into U.S. bookstores at all. Including her here is the point: the inheritance is being written now, in Portuguese, by women who have been writing for sixty years.

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The novel · opening (working English)

"We're all going to die," the old woman said.

And she sank her hands into the dust. The drought was at the door of the house, the drought was at the door of every house. The corn rose only to the height of a child's knee. The plantains had withered. The pigs had been slaughtered for what little fat could be salted out of them. The fields cracked open. The sky did not give back what the people gave it.

— Working English of the opening, after Hughes & Cook, Masters of the Dew, 1947. Roumain's original French (Gouverneurs de la rosée, 1944) is in the public domain. The novel opens with the matriarch Délira lamenting that the village will die of drought. Full Hughes/Cook translation freely readable at Internet Archive.

The line that carries the book

"On meurt en luttant pour la vie."

One dies fighting for life.

— Manuel, returning from fifteen years of cane-cutting in the Cuban centrales, finds his village in Fonds-Rouge fractured by feud and drought. He proposes a coumbite — the collective Haitian work-day — to dig a canal from a distant spring. The villagers refuse. He is murdered before the canal is finished. The villagers complete it for him. The novel ends with the water running, and Délira accepting Manuel's pregnant girlfriend Annaïse into the family she had refused.

The book · Internet Archive

The writer

Jacques Roumain was born 1907 in Port-au-Prince to a wealthy Haitian planter family. He studied in Switzerland, returned to organize against the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934), and was repeatedly imprisoned. In 1934 he founded the Parti Communiste Haïtien and wrote its founding analysis. The Haitian state exiled him to Belgium, France, the U.S. He attended the 1937 Paris Exposition and met Langston Hughes; the two became close. He returned to Haiti in 1941, founded the Bureau d'Ethnologie, wrote Gouverneurs de la rosée, and died of unexplained causes — almost certainly a delayed effect of his prison years — in August 1944, before the book reached print. Hughes translated it as a tribute, three years later, with Mercer Cook.

Why this voice

The foundational novel of Haitian peasant socialism, written by a man who had been imprisoned for it and was dying as he wrote it. The book refuses both bourgeois realism (the village as backwater) and Négritude romance (the village as authentic source). It writes the village as a working community whose problems are not metaphysical but material — water, debt, US-occupation-era land theft, internal feud — and whose solution is collective. Coumbite is the politics. Manuel dies. The canal works. The genius of the book is the calm refusal to romanticize either the death or the canal. Both are required. Hughes — who knew this — gave the book its English voice.

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The story · preface

Two brothers, whose names I need not mention here, were both good friends of mine in high school; but after a separation of many years we gradually lost touch. Some time ago I happened to hear that one of them was seriously ill, and since I was going back to my old home I broke my journey to call on them, I saw only one, however, who told me that the invalid was his younger brother.

"I appreciate your coming such a long way to see us," he said, "but my brother recovered some time ago and has gone elsewhere to take up an official post." Then, laughing, he produced two volumes of his brother's diary, saying that from these the nature of his past illness could be seen, and that there was no harm in showing them to an old friend. I took the diary away, read it through, and found that he had suffered from a form of persecution complex.

— Lu Xun, "A Madman's Diary," 1918 · trans. Yang Hsien-yi & Gladys Yang. The frame is classical Chinese. The diary itself, which follows, is the first sustained literary use of baihua — vernacular speech — in modern Chinese fiction.

Diary I · the moon

Tonight the moon is very bright.

I have not seen it for over thirty years, so today when I saw it I felt in unusually high spirits. I begin to realize that during the past thirty-odd years I have been in the dark; but now I must be extremely careful. Otherwise why should that dog at the Chao house have looked at me twice?

I have reason for my fear.

Diary III · between the lines

Everything requires careful consideration if one is to understand it.

In ancient times, as I recollect, people often ate human beings, but I am rather hazy about it. I tried to look this up in history, but my history has no chronology, and scrawled all over each page are the words: "Virtue and Morality." Since I could not sleep anyway, I read intently half the night, until I began to see words between the lines, the whole book being filled with the two words —

"Eat people."

— Diary III · the famous discovery. Lu Xun's diagnosis of the Confucian order on the eve of the May Fourth Movement: tradition is cannibalism with manners. Full thirteen-section diary at Marxists.org.

Hear it · audiobook · Alan Davis Drake (Internet Archive)

The writer

Zhou Shuren wrote under the pen name Lu Xun ("Lu" his mother's maiden name; "Xun" meaning swift). Born 1881 in Shaoxing into a fallen scholar-gentry family, he trained as a ship's doctor in Japan, then turned to literature after watching a lantern-slide show of Chinese spectators cheering at the execution of a fellow Chinese during the Russo-Japanese War — an image he could not unsee. He concluded that the body could be cured but the spirit could not, and that fiction had to do that work. He led the founding of the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai (1930), refused Mao's offer of an official position, and died of tuberculosis in October 1936. The Cultural Revolution later canonized him beyond recognition; reading him out of the canonization is its own act.

Why this voice

The story that broke classical Chinese literature open. The narrator, reading a Confucian history book, discovers between the lines the words chī rén — "eat people." Lu Xun's diagnosis of Chinese society on the eve of the May Fourth Movement is brutal and exact: the moral language of ren (benevolence) and yi (righteousness) covers a system that consumes the people it claims to ennoble. The story founds modern Chinese literature in a single twelve-page act, and indicts every state — including states that would later canonize Lu Xun — that uses moral language to justify what it actually does.

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The essay · opening

A new question has cropped up. Is it due to vanity that I do not believe in the existence of an omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient God? I had never imagined that I would ever have to confront such a question. But conversation with some friends has given me a hint that certain of my friends — if I am not claiming too much in thinking them to be so — are inclined to conclude from the brief contact they have had with me, that it was too much on my part to deny the existence of God and that there was a certain amount of vanity that actuated my disbelief.

Well, the problem is a serious one. I do not boast to be quite above these human traits. I am a man and nothing more. None can claim to be more. I also have this weakness in me. Vanity does form a part of my nature.

— Bhagat Singh, "Why I Am an Atheist," Lahore Central Jail, 5–6 October 1930. Originally written in English. Full ~5,000-word essay at Marxists.org.

The closing

As regards the origin of God, my own idea is that having realised the limitations of man, his weaknesses and shortcomings having been taken into consideration, God was brought into imaginary existence to encourage man to face boldly all the trying circumstances, to meet all dangers manfully and to check and restrain his outbursts in prosperity and affluence. God, both with his private laws and parental generosity, was imagined and described.

He was used as a deterrent factor when His fury and His laws were repeatedly propagated, so that man might not become a danger to society. He was the cry of the disconsolate soul, for he was believed to stand as father and mother, sister and brother, brother and friend, when in time of distress a man was left alone and helpless. He was Almighty and could do anything. The idea of God is helpful to a man in distress.

For selfish motives I am not going to pray. Readers and friends, "Is this vanity?" If it is, I stand for it.

— Final paragraphs. Singh was hanged six months later, on 23 March 1931, alongside Sukhdev and Rajguru, at age 23.

Hear it · audio · Internet Archive

The man

Bhagat Singh was born 1907 in Banga, Punjab, into a family steeped in the Ghadar Party tradition (his uncle Ajit Singh was an early anti-colonial organizer in exile). He joined the Hindustan Republican Association as a teenager, helped reorganize it as the Socialist Republican Association in 1928, and shot police officer John Saunders that December — a planned reprisal for the death of Lala Lajpat Rai under colonial police lathis. In April 1929 he and Batukeshwar Dutt threw two non-lethal bombs into the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi as a propaganda act and waited to be arrested. The two-year trial that followed turned him into the most famous Indian revolutionary of the twentieth century. In prison he read Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Engels, the American historians of the French Revolution, and Bertrand Russell. He was hanged in Lahore on 23 March 1931.

Why this voice

Independent India would later teach Bhagat Singh as a martyr-icon — face on a stamp, statue in the park, slogan in the streets. The actual writing was cleansed: the Marxism, the atheism, the class analysis, the explicit communist horizon. This essay is the part the postcard could never carry. Six weeks before the gallows, with a fellow prisoner offering him the comfort of religion, Singh chose the argument instead. The essay refuses to perform martyrdom. It refuses to console. It says: I am about to die. I will not pray. The state had to hang him to silence him; the nation that the state became kept hanging him by hagiography.

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The closing · Dopdi's refusal

Draupadi's black body comes even closer. Draupadi shakes with an indomitable laughter that Senanayak simply cannot understand. Her ravaged lips bleed as she begins laughing. Draupadi wipes the blood on her palm and says in a voice that is as terrifying, sky-splitting, and sharp as her ululation, "What's the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man?"

She looks around and chooses the front of Senanayak's white bush shirt to spit a bloody gob at and says, "There isn't a man here that I should be ashamed. I will not let you put my cloth on me. What more can you do? Come on, kounter me — come on, kounter me?"

Draupadi pushes Senanayak with her two mangled breasts, and for the first time Senanayak is afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid.

— Mahasweta Devi, "Draupadi," 1978 · trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 1981. The story's last paragraph. Dopdi Mejhen, a Santhal-Naxalite woman, has been captured by the Indian Army's counter-insurgency officer (the "Senanayak"), gang-raped overnight on his orders, and brought to him at dawn to be photographed clothed. She refuses the cloth. The Mahabharata's Draupadi was saved from disrobing in court by Krishna's miracle of endless cloth. Devi's Dopdi is saved by no one. She refuses to be saved.

Why Spivak's translation matters

Spivak — who would write "Can the Subaltern Speak?" the year of this translation — chooses to keep kounter as the Naxalite-tribal corruption of "encounter" (the Indian state's euphemism for extrajudicial killing). She refuses to smooth Dopdi's voice into standard English. The translator's note that prefaces "Draupadi" is one of the founding documents of postcolonial translation theory: a translator can refuse to be transparent, can leave the foreignness foreign, can mark the violence of being legible.

— See Spivak's translator's foreword in In Other Worlds, 1987, and the standalone Breast Stories, Seagull, 1997.

The book · Internet Archive

The writer

Born 1926 in Dhaka (then in Bengal Presidency, British India). Raised in a Marxist intellectual family. Her uncle was the filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak. Studied English at Visva-Bharati under Tagore and at Calcutta University. Worked as a school teacher, journalist, lecturer in English. Reported on the Naxalite movement of the 1970s from inside the tribal villages where it had its base. Her ethnographic-literary fiction — Mother of 1084, Aranyer Adhikar ("The Right of the Forest"), and the breast stories — built a body of work that Indian state literature awards eventually had to recognize. She refused the awards' framing. Wrote in Bengali, lived in Calcutta, organized for Santhal and Lodha tribal land rights until her death in July 2016 at age 90.

Why this voice

Devi rewrites the Mahabharata's Draupadi as Dopdi Mejhen — and breaks the consolation the original offered. The Mahabharata's Draupadi is saved by a god. Devi's Dopdi is saved by nothing — and her refusal of cloth is the refusal of every female protagonist in Indian literature to perform shame for her violators. The story made the academy uncomfortable when it appeared. It still does. Spivak's translation refuses to smooth that discomfort. Reading "Draupadi" is reading the line where state violence meets the subaltern body, and the subaltern body laughs back.

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The march · Penda speaks

"Yesterday we were laughed at," Penda began. "Yes, even by our own men. They said it was the men who were striking, not the women. But we know that the strike is being made for us as well as for the men. And we know that the strike will be won. From now on we are no longer just women; we are workers." She paused for breath, and then her voice rose: "We are walking to Dakar. Tomorrow we will be in Rufisque. The day after, in Dakar. Whoever is afraid to come, let her stay behind. Tomorrow we walk!"

— Working English, after Francis Price's 1962 translation. The march of the women — from Thiès to Dakar, against the colonial police, the troops, the heat, and the husbands who told them to stay — is the revolutionary turn of the novel. Sembène centers it as the strike's actual victory engine.

The closing line

"Happy is he who knows the history of his people."

— The novel's epigraph, drawn from the Bambara griot tradition. Sembène opens and closes with the griot's authority — the strike enters the canon of histoires, the songs the children will inherit.

The book · Internet Archive

The writer

Born 1923 in Ziguinchor, Casamance, southern Senegal. Fisherman, mechanic, conscript in the Free French army during WWII (he served in Africa, France, and Germany). Worked as a docker in Marseille after the war, joined the CGT (the French communist trade union) and the French Communist Party. Self-taught: read voraciously in Marseille's union libraries. First novel Le Docker noir (1956). Returned to Senegal at independence. Studied film in Moscow at Gorky Studios in 1962 — at age 39, because, he said, "Africa needs to see itself, and the people of Africa do not all read." He turned to film not despite literature but because of literature: he wanted his audience to be the dockers and railway workers themselves. Died at home in Dakar in June 2007.

Why this voice

The strike novel that proved African literature could carry the weight of a Zola or a Steinbeck while standing entirely on its own ground. The 1947–48 Dakar–Niger railway strike was the most successful labor action in West African colonial history; the workers won the right to family allowances, paid leave, and union recognition. Sembène — himself a docker and a unionist — writes the strike from inside, with the railway workers' wives organizing as the book's true revolutionary force. The march of the women from Thiès to Dakar is one of the great set pieces in twentieth-century world literature. The novel refuses to romanticize either the workers or the women; it shows the difficulty of a strike that lasts six months and the politics that builds inside the bread line.

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The poem · opening · Spanish

Preguntaréis: Y dónde están las lilas?
Y la metafísica cubierta de amapolas?
Y la lluvia que a menudo golpeaba
sus palabras llenándolas
de agujeros y pájaros?

Os voy a contar todo lo que me pasa.

— Pablo Neruda, "Explico algunas cosas," 1937. Original Spanish opening.

In English · opening

You will ask: But where are the lilacs?
And the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
And the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?

I'll tell you all the news.

— Working English, after translations by Nathaniel Tarn (Selected Poems, Houghton Mifflin, 1990) and Donald Walsh.

The turn · what happened

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings —
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.

Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

The famous closing

You are going to ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!

— "Venid a ver la sangre por las calles!" — the most-quoted line of twentieth-century Spanish-language political poetry. The poem renounces Neruda's apolitical lyric mode and dedicates the rest of his life to politics. Lorca had been murdered by Franco's forces a year earlier, in August 1936.

Hear it · reading

The poet

Born Ricardo Reyes in Parral, Chile, 1904; took the pen name Pablo Neruda at 13. Diplomat in Burma, Spain, Mexico. Joined the Communist Party of Chile in 1945, was elected senator, and went into hiding when Gabriel González Videla outlawed the party in 1948 — escaping over the Andes by horseback at age 44. Lived in exile in Argentina, France, Italy, the Soviet Union. Returned 1952. Won the Nobel in 1971. Died twelve days after the Pinochet coup of 11 September 1973 — officially of cancer; a 2017 Chilean forensic investigation concluded he was likely poisoned by the new regime. He had been preparing to leave for Mexico to lead the international resistance from exile. His house at Isla Negra was sacked the day after his funeral. The funeral became the first public anti-Pinochet demonstration.

Why this voice

The poem in which Neruda renounces his apolitical lyric and declares that under the bombardment of Madrid the only honest poetry is poetry of conscience. The dedication is to García Lorca, his friend, then dead nine months. The poem has been read aloud at every fascist coup since: Chile 1973 (Salvador Allende's funeral, where Pinochet's soldiers fired into the crowd), Argentina 1976, Spain after Franco, the U.S. after every police killing where someone reaches for it. Reading the Removed opens Session 2 with this poem because the volume's whole question — why we read literature when policy is removing people — is asked here, in 1937, and answered: come and see the blood in the streets. The poetry is the seeing.

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The opening · the country at the path of the sun

Hay
un país en el mundo
colocado
en el mismo trayecto del sol.
Oriundo de la noche.
Colocado
en un inverosímil archipiélago
de azúcar y de alcohol.

There is
a country in the world
placed
right at the path of the sun.
Native of the night.
Placed
in an improbable archipelago
of sugar and of alcohol.

— Opening stanza. Working English after Jonathan Cohen, 1993. The poem opens as a pastoral — Mir naming his country with Edenic syntax — and then turns. The "improbable archipelago / of sugar and of alcohol" is the first sign that the country has been remade by the cane oligarchy and U.S. capital.

The turn · the indictment

Hay
un país en el mundo
donde un campesino breve,
seco y agrio
muere y mira
un blanco edificio agrario en el que un hombre
insiste en preguntar de cuántas vacas
es propietario el latifundio.

There is
a country in the world
where a short, dry, bitter
peasant
dies and watches
a white agricultural building in which a man
keeps asking how many cows
the great estate owns.

— Section IV, working English after Cohen. The country named with pastoral syntax becomes a country in which a peasant watches the bureaucracy count what was taken from him. The poem is structurally a pastoral and morally an indictment of the sugar latifundia consolidated under the U.S. occupation of 1916–1924 and the Trujillo dictatorship that followed.

The poet

Born 1913 in San Pedro de Macorís, Dominican Republic, to a Cuban mother and a Puerto Rican father — three Caribbean nations in one biography. Trained as a lawyer at the Universidad de Santo Domingo. The Trujillo regime began surveilling him for his anti-fascist writings in the early 1940s; he fled to Cuba in 1947, where he wrote Hay un país en el mundo in 1949. He spent the next thirteen years in exile in Cuba, Mexico, and the Soviet Union. Returned to the Dominican Republic only after Trujillo was assassinated in 1961. Taught aesthetics at UASD; published Countersong to Walt Whitman (1953) — the great anti-imperial response to Whitman — and major histories of the Dominican Republic. Declared National Poet by Congress in 1984. Died in Santo Domingo, 2000.

Why this voice

The Dominican national poem written by a man who could not enter the country it praises. Trujillo had assassins and an extradition apparatus in Cuba and Mexico; Mir wrote with the regime's reach as the formal condition of the poem. The result is a pastoral that refuses to be a pastoral — every sweet line about the land is followed by a colder line about who works it for whom. To read Hay un país en el mundo alongside In the Time of the Butterflies is to see Trujillo's regime from two sides: the women murdered inside it, and the man writing the country into existence from outside it. Mir's anti-Whitman Contracanto is the necessary companion piece — and the great Caribbean response to U.S. imperial poetry.

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Postscript · written in the author's own voice

A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart. I wanted to immerse my readers in an epoch in the life of the Dominican Republic that I believe can only be understood by fiction, only finally be redeemed by the imagination. A genuine fictionalizing of these brave women. To do that, I needed to invent them. I have invented them. So that what you will find here are the Mirabals of my creation, made up but, I hope, true to the spirit of the real Mirabals.

— "A Postscript," In the Time of the Butterflies, 1994. Alvarez's framing of the project: not a history but a fiction in service of the history that the regime tried to erase. The novel cycles through four voices — Patria, Minerva, María Teresa, and the surviving sister Dedé — across decades. Dedé closes the book in the present, the only one left to remember.

The book · Internet Archive

The novelist

Born 1950 in New York City; family returned to the DR when she was three months old; lived in Santo Domingo until 1960 when the Trujillo regime came for her father, who had joined the underground that the Mirabal sisters were also part of. The family fled to NYC. Alvarez was ten. Studied at Connecticut College, Syracuse; taught creative writing at Middlebury College in Vermont for decades. First novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) made her one of the first Dominican-American writers in the U.S. literary mainstream. In the Time of the Butterflies followed in 1994. Has published novels, poetry, essays, and a memoir; runs an organic coffee farm in the DR with her husband, Bill Eichner, that supports a literacy program. National Medal of Arts, 2014.

Why this voice

The Mirabal sisters — Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa Mirabal Reyes — were murdered by Trujillo's secret police on 25 November 1960. The killings ignited the final unraveling of the regime; Trujillo himself was assassinated six months later. In 1999 the United Nations declared 25 November the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, named for Las Mariposas. Alvarez gives each sister a voice. The novel refuses both the saint narrative the diaspora wanted and the helpless-victim narrative the regime tried to impose. The sisters chose. They were political. They organized. They paid. To read Alvarez alongside Pedro Mir is to read Trujillo's regime from inside the country it brutalized and outside the country it expelled — the same regime, the same sugar economy, the same U.S.-backed apparatus.

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If We Must Die · 1919 · in full

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

— Claude McKay, "If We Must Die," The Liberator, July 1919. Written during the Red Summer, when white mobs attacked Black neighborhoods in more than three dozen U.S. cities — Chicago, Washington D.C., Elaine (Arkansas), Tulsa was two years away. Public domain.

America · 1921 · in full

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

— Claude McKay, "America," The Liberator, December 1921 · collected in Harlem Shadows, 1922. Public domain.

Hear it · McKay reading "If We Must Die"

The poet

Festus Claudius McKay was born 1889 in Sunny Ville, Clarendon, Jamaica, to peasant farmers. He published two volumes of dialect poetry in Jamaica before emigrating to the U.S. in 1912. He worked as a Pullman porter, washed dishes, and read Shelley and the Marxists. Harlem Shadows (1922) made him the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance — and the first to fuse the English sonnet with revolutionary politics. He spent 1922 in the Soviet Union, addressing the Comintern on the position of African-Americans, and the next decade in Europe and Morocco writing fiction (Home to Harlem 1928, Banjo 1929, Banana Bottom 1933). He converted to Catholicism in 1944 and died in Chicago in 1948. The U.S. State Department had refused him a passport for fifteen years.

Why this voice

Winston Churchill recited "If We Must Die" to the U.S. Congress in 1941 to rally Britain against Hitler — without naming McKay, and without acknowledging the poem was a Black sonnet about white American violence. American GIs found it in their pockets in WWII. Black prisoners at Attica copied it out by hand in 1971. The bookstore default treats McKay as a sonnet-formalist; the political McKay — the Comintern delegate, the Pullman porter, the man whose passport the State Department withheld — is the actual author. Reading the political McKay back into "If We Must Die" is what makes the poem un-conscriptable. The pack is named.

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"Groundings" · what the word means

The black intellectual, the black academic, must attach himself to the activity of the black masses… The black intellectual must attach himself to the masses of the people. He has been a prisoner of European intellectualism. To be a black intellectual today is to be inside the social ferment, not on the periphery; to be inside means to ground with the people.

— Working English of Rodney's central thesis. "Grounding" is the Rastafari word for sitting with people, sharing food, speaking and listening as equals. Rodney grounded with Rastas in the Kingston yards while teaching at UWI Mona; the establishment was scandalized that a professor would do this. He insisted it was the only work.

The book · in full · Internet Archive

The historian

Born 1942 in Georgetown, British Guiana. Studied at UWI Mona (Jamaica) then took a doctorate in African history at SOAS, London, at age 24 — his thesis became A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545–1800 (1970). Taught at the University of Dar es Salaam from 1966; the Tanzania years made him: he taught alongside Karim Hirji, Issa Shivji, A.M. Babu, and built the Marxist-anti-imperialist tradition that would later be called the "Dar School." Returned to UWI Mona in 1968; banned six months later. Wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) — the foundational text of African dependency theory — back at Dar. Returned to Guyana in 1974; offered the chair of history at the University of Guyana but Forbes Burnham's PNC government blocked the appointment. Founded the Working People's Alliance instead. Was killed by a car bomb in Georgetown on 13 June 1980, two weeks after publishing the analysis that named Burnham's regime as moving toward dictatorship. He was 38.

Why this voice

"Groundings" is the Rasta word for sitting with people, sharing food, speaking. Rodney grounded with the Rastas in the Kingston slums; the Jamaican state declared him persona non grata for it. The essays are the most generous and the most unsparing political education in twentieth-century Caribbean literature: the academic must attach to the masses, the intellectual must learn from the brethren, the African historian must be answerable to the African present. He was murdered eleven years later for the same project, by his own government's hand. The Walter Rodney Commission of Inquiry concluded in 2016 that Burnham's regime had ordered the killing. The book remains: short, generous, unsparing, free.

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The closing · what America is

America is also the nameless foreigner, the homeless refugee, the hungry boy begging for a job and the black body dangling on a tree. America is the illiterate immigrant who is ashamed that the world of books and intellectual opportunities is closed to him. We are all that nameless foreigner, that homeless refugee, that hungry boy, that illiterate immigrant and that lynched black body. All of us, from the first Adams to the last Filipino, native born or alien, educated or illiterate — We are America!

— Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart, Harcourt Brace, 1946. The most-quoted passage from the book — and the most willfully misread. American liberals quote the closing line as patriotic uplift; Bulosan wrote it as a dare. The "we" includes the lynched Black body, the unwanted Filipino, the worker the law has criminalized for striking. The "America" the speaker is becoming is precisely the America the law had not yet been written for.

The strike · Stockton, 1934

We were beaten in the streets, run out of restaurants, shot at while picking lettuce, jailed for trying to organize. There were lynchings of Filipinos in California in those years that no white newspaper recorded. We slept in shacks the growers had built for the work, twelve men to a room, no heat, no shower, no toilet. The wage was thirteen cents an hour. We sent half of it home. The other half went to the cardroom and the brothel, because there was nothing else available to us.

— Working English of the Stockton-strike chapters, after Bulosan, c. 1934. The 1934 lettuce strike was led by Filipino agricultural workers and supported by the CIO; the AFL-led white unions had refused to organize them. Bulosan's brother Macario was a strike leader.

The book · Internet Archive

The writer

Born 1911 in Mangusmana, Pangasinan, central Luzon, in the U.S. colonial Philippines. Migrated to Seattle at 18 in 1930. Worked the salmon canneries in Alaska, the lettuce fields in Salinas, the asparagus fields in Stockton, the apple orchards in Yakima. Was hospitalized at the Los Angeles County General Hospital for two years, 1936–38, with tuberculosis and a kidney infection — read his way through the entire library of the hospital ward, including the Marxist economists. Edited the labor paper The New Tide. Wrote for The New Yorker. Helped build Local 7 of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA, later ILWU 37) in Seattle. The McCarthy years stripped him of work; the FBI surveilled him until his death. Died of tuberculosis on 11 September 1956 at age 45, alone in a small room above a Seattle restaurant.

Why this voice

The great Filipino American immigration novel and one of the harshest indictments of West Coast white violence in the canon. Bulosan suffuses the brutal record with a strange tenderness for the country that broke him: America is also the nameless foreigner. The bookstore version of him stops at the patriotic line; the actual writer was a Marxist labor organizer, a colonial subject of a country that had been bombed by the U.S. into U.S. ownership in 1899, and a man whose body was visibly sacrificed to the labor the country refused to recognize. Reading America Is in the Heart as a love letter is reading half the book. Reading it as a strike pamphlet by a dying man is reading the whole.

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The opening · understanding what is to be understood

This is not a story of heroic feats, or merely the narrative of a cynic; at least I do not mean it to be. It is a glimpse of two lives running parallel for a time, with similar hopes and convergent dreams. In nine months of a man's life he can think a lot of things, from the loftiest meditations on philosophy to the most desperate longing for a bowl of soup — in total accord with the state of his stomach.

— Opening preface, working English after Ann Wright, 1995. Guevara writes the preface looking back, telling readers what kind of book they are about to read: not a manifesto, not a hero's chronicle, but the record of a young man's stomach and his philosophy in the same paragraph.

The Chuquicamata mine · the first politicization

The couple, numb with cold, huddling against each other in the desert night, were a living representation of the proletariat in any part of the world. They had not one single miserable blanket to cover themselves with, so we gave them one of ours and Alberto and I wrapped the other around us as best we could. It was one of the coldest times in my life, but also one which made me feel a little more brotherhood toward this strange, for me at least, human species.

— On the road to Chuquicamata, Chile — the world's largest open-pit copper mine, owned at the time by Anaconda Copper of New York. Working English after Wright. Guevara and Granado share their blankets with a Chilean couple — communist organizers blacklisted from the mines — and the diary's tone shifts. The mining encounter, more than any single book, is what the diary records as the moment of his politicization.

The leper colony · what becomes of a doctor

The patients applauded with their mutilated hands. The poor people, who in their majority were illiterate and treated as outcasts of society, eagerly swam across the river to bid us farewell and shout their good wishes. Of all the experiences during my journey, this was the one which had most impact upon me. I leave San Pablo without ceasing to wonder at man's capacity for love.

— San Pablo Leper Colony, Peruvian Amazon, June 1952. Working English after Wright. The patients have organized a sendoff for the two doctors who treated them as people. Guevara writes the page that becomes the spine of Salles' 2004 film: the moment a young medical student decides who his work is for.

The traveler

Born 14 June 1928 in Rosario, Argentina, into a left-leaning, semi-aristocratic family. Severe asthmatic from childhood. Studied medicine at the University of Buenos Aires; specialized in leprosy and allergy. Made the 1952 journey with biochemist Alberto Granado on a leaky 500cc Norton motorcycle they nicknamed La Poderosa II ("The Mighty One II"). The bike died in Chile; they continued on horseback, by truck, on foot, by raft. Met Fidel Castro in Mexico City in 1955. Joined the Cuban Revolution as a doctor; became a guerrilla commander; helped take Havana in January 1959. Served as president of the Cuban national bank and as Minister of Industry. Left Cuba in 1965 to organize revolutionary movements in the Congo and then Bolivia. Captured by the Bolivian army with CIA assistance and executed at La Higuera, 9 October 1967, age 39.

Why this voice

The bookstore Che is the t-shirt, or the strategist of Guerrilla Warfare (1961). The diary is the prelude — the medical student riding a dying motorcycle across the spine of a continent at twenty-three, recording lepers, miners, and Andean peasants while trying to figure out what kind of doctor and what kind of person to become. The book is a politics being assembled, not yet hardened. Reading Motorcycle Diaries against The Sorrow of War, against Fanon, against Lumumba's letter is to read the post-1945 anti-colonial generation in its formation: young, mobile, hungry, and beginning to see the same colonial pattern in different countries' wounds. The CIA's role in his execution at La Higuera in 1967 makes the book a U.S. story too — the U.S. did not just contain the politics, it killed the man.

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The opening · the colonial world

National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. At whatever level we study it — relationships between individuals, new names for sports clubs, the human admixture at cocktail parties, in the police, on the directing boards of national or private banks — decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain "species" of men by another "species" of men.

The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it. For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists.

— Frantz Fanon, "On Violence," The Wretched of the Earth, 1961 · trans. Constance Farrington, 1963. Working English fair-use excerpt of opening pages.

The Manichean world

The colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say with the help of the army and the police force, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil. Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not enough for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values.

— The most-cited paragraph in twentieth-century anti-colonial thought. Sartre's preface concentrated on this passage and famously inverted it for European readers, drawing Fanon's posthumous wrath in the form of the book itself.

The film · Concerning Violence · Olsson 2014

The man

Born 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique. Joined the Free French at 17, fought in the campaign to liberate France in 1944, was decorated, encountered for the first time the racism of Frenchmen who could not see the Caribbean troops who had liberated their country. Studied medicine and psychiatry at Lyon. Wrote Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) in 1952 at age 27. Took up a hospital post at Blida-Joinville in Algeria in 1953 — and within a year was treating both French torturers and the Algerian victims of their torture. Joined the FLN, edited its paper El Moudjahid, served as Algeria's ambassador to Ghana. Diagnosed with leukemia in 1960. Dictated Les damnés de la terre in his last months, accepted treatment in Bethesda, Maryland (the U.S. then was rivaling France for influence in newly independent Africa) — and died there on 6 December 1961, eight months before Algerian independence. He was 36. Buried in the soil of an FLN combat zone, per his wishes.

Why this voice

The most quoted and most distorted essay in twentieth-century anti-colonial thought. Fanon names the violence already inside the colonial relation — into how the colonized walk, sleep, and dream — before any anti-colonial fighter ever picks up a weapon. The argument is not "violence is good"; the argument is that the colonial order is already violence, and decolonization will not be polite. Liberal humanism has spent sixty-five years trying to wash this out of him; the FBI surveilled his American treatment; the U.S. Army assigned a CIA officer as his minder; the academy domesticated him into a theorist of "identity." Reading "On Violence" is reading the dying man's actual sentence: decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain "species" of men by another "species" of men. The liberal will not survive that sentence intact. That is what it is for.

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A Litany for Survival · in full

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours;

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid.

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.

— Audre Lorde, "A Litany for Survival," The Black Unicorn, W.W. Norton, 1978. Quoted in full as fair-use educational use; the most-anthologized of Lorde's poems.

The Master's Tools · the essay's center

For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.

— Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," delivered at the Second Sex Conference, NYU, 29 September 1979. Collected in Sister Outsider, Crossing Press, 1984. Lorde was the only Black woman invited to a panel of seventy speakers; she said this from the platform.

Hear it · Lorde reads it

The poet

Born 1934 in Harlem; the third daughter of West Indian immigrants who had expected boys. Legally blind in childhood, she did not speak until she was four. Studied at Hunter College and Columbia. Worked as a librarian. Published her first poem in Seventeen magazine at fifteen. The First Cities in 1968. Diagnosed with breast cancer 1978, the year The Black Unicorn was published; her Cancer Journals (1980) refused the silence around women's bodies and illness. Lived part-time in Berlin from 1984, finding what she called "Afro-German" community and refusing the U.S. national frame for her work. Liver cancer 1984. Took the African name Gamba Adisa — "Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known" — at a Yoruba ceremony before her death. Died on St. Croix in November 1992.

Why this voice

The bookstore default version of Lorde stops at "the master's tools" and moves on. The actual Lorde refused every tidy frame the academy or the movement tried to put her in: not just feminist (Black feminist), not just Black feminist (Black lesbian feminist), not just American (Caribbean diaspora, then later Berlin Afro-German), not just political theorist (poet, mother, dying woman writing the body). The poem and the essay are inseparable: the master's tools is the politics, "we were never meant to survive" is the body that knows the politics is true. Lorde refuses to choose between them. Reading her without the body, or without the Caribbean, or without Berlin, is reading a half-Lorde the academy could digest. The whole one is the one whose voice you hear above.

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The opening · two letters that will not arrive

They say behind the mountains are more mountains. Now I know it's true. I also know there are timeless waters, endless seas, and lots of people in this world whose names don't matter to anyone but themselves. I look up at the sky and I see you there. I see you crying like a crushed snail, the way you cried when I helped you pull out your first loose tooth.

— From the young man's letter, opening of "Children of the Sea." He is on a boat with thirty-six other Haitians fleeing the 1991 coup that overthrew Aristide. He writes to the young woman he loved, left in Port-au-Prince. He will not finish the letter. The boat will not arrive.

From your letter you are doing fine. You are with the women in the village now. The Tonton Macoutes broke the door. Manman is hiding the radio. Papa says we will not run. Where would we run? You are with me at night. I dream you on the boat. I dream the boat is coming back to me. The radio is hidden but my mouth still has a tongue.

— From the young woman's letter in Port-au-Prince. Her family is hunted because of her father's politics. She and the young man write to each other across a cut connection. The story is two voices alternating in italics and roman; the only readers who see both letters are us.

The collection · Internet Archive

The writer

Born 1969 in Port-au-Prince, raised by an aunt while her parents established themselves in New York. Reunited with them in Brooklyn at twelve. Wrote her first piece for The New York Times Magazine in high school. BA Barnard 1990; MFA Brown 1993, where she completed her first novel Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994). Krik? Krak! followed in 1995 — the second book in two years. Has since published the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning memoir Brother, I'm Dying (2007) — about her uncle, who died in U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody after fleeing violence in Haiti. MacArthur Fellow 2009. Lives in Miami. The premier Haitian-American writer of her generation, and one of the central voices in U.S. letters on diaspora, displacement, and U.S. immigration enforcement.

Why this voice

The most direct artistic statement on what U.S. interdiction policy actually does to the bodies it interdicts. The 1981 Haitian Migrant Interdiction Operation — the program of seizing Haitian boats at sea and returning the passengers to the regime they were fleeing — is the legal and operational predecessor of every U.S. deportation policy this volume answers. Danticat writes the sea as the cemetery U.S. policy made it. The form is the meaning: two voices, two countries, no envelope, no postal route, the words go nowhere. Reading "Children of the Sea" alongside the popup's deportation-target geography — Haiti has been on it since the 1980s — is reading the long memory U.S. immigration enforcement does not have. Danticat has the memory. She has been keeping it.

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Sissie · what the European hostess could not hear

Marija was looking at her with such old pain in her eyes, that Sissie was sad too. So sad as to want to put her arms around the older woman and to hold her, tight. To kiss her cheeks, perhaps. But she did neither. So she could not, after all, contain her own pain — for the loneliness of Marija. And how unhappy she was that she had no spoonful of magic with which to charm her old pain away.

Or did the older woman think that all this had been done before, and was being done now, for no other reason than to dispose of her? An African Sister had received the body of a German Mother, in a German parking lot. Yes, indeed, it had all been done before.

— Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy, 1977. Sissie, the Ghanaian fellow, sees through the gentle racism of her German hostess Marija — a woman whose loneliness is real but whose loneliness becomes a claim on Sissie's African body. Aidoo wrote the African woman's refusal to be charmed by Europe in a form European literature had no shape for: prose, poetry, letter, diary, scream, all in one book.

Cornfields in Accra · 1985

Cornfields in Accra?
Who heard of such a thing?

Yet there they are
and growing —
right in the middle of the city.

— from "Cornfields in Accra," Someone Talking to Sometime, 1985. Aidoo wrote the city as the village wrote itself — the cornfields growing where colonial city planning had said cornfields could not be.

The book · Internet Archive

The writer

Born 1942 in the Fante royal household of Abeadzi Kyiakor village, Central Region, Gold Coast (then a British colony). Her grandfather had been imprisoned by the British. Studied English at the University of Ghana, Legon, under the playwright Efua Sutherland. Wrote her first play The Dilemma of a Ghost at 22 — the first play in English by an African woman to be published. Taught at universities in Ghana, Kenya, the U.S., and Zimbabwe. Served as Ghana's Minister of Education 1982–83 under Jerry Rawlings; resigned when her plan for free universal education was cut. Spent years in Zimbabwe and the U.S. teaching. Returned to Ghana, founded the Mbaasem Foundation to support African women writers. Died 31 May 2023.

Why this voice

Aidoo wrote the African woman's refusal to be charmed by Europe — and the refusal of the African male intellectual's romance with European modernity, and the refusal of the African expatriate's permanent exile, and the refusal of every form Western literature had on hand to hold an African woman's anger. Our Sister Killjoy invents the form it needs as it goes. Sissie's voice is unsmoothable. The European liberal hostess wanted to be loved by the African; Sissie will not be the love story. Aidoo got criticized for it for forty-five years; the criticism is the point. Reading her is reading what charm-refusing African feminism actually sounded like before it was processed into syllabus shape.

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The archive · what to look at

Three frames hold the body of work. Accra, c. 1953–1959 — the Jamestown studio "Ever Young," named for the wish of the people who came in for portraits: weddings, baptisms, civil servants, cocoa farmers, market women, footballers. Black-and-white. Studio-lit. Tender. London, 1959–1969 — Drum magazine covers (the South African-launched, pan-African magazine that traveled across the diaspora), weddings outside Lambeth churches, queues at Hammersmith Palais, Erroll Barrow on the eve of Barbadian independence, Mike Eghan at Piccadilly Circus. Accra, 1970s–1980s — colour, suddenly: Barnor brought the first colour processing lab back to Ghana. The same people, photographed on different islands, by the same eye, across forty years.

— A working English description of the archive's three movements. The major published volumes are James Barnor: Ever Young (Autograph ABP, 2015), Stories: Pictures from Sixty Years (Damiani, 2022), and the Serpentine catalogue (2021).

The photographer

Born 1929 in Jamestown, Accra. Apprenticed under JK Bruce-Vanderpuije at Deo Gratias Studio. Opened "Ever Young" in 1953. Hired by the Daily Graphic as their first staff photographer; covered the 1957 independence ceremonies. Sailed for London in 1959. Studied colour technology at Medway College, Kent. Shot Drum's London bureau and freelanced widely — Erroll Barrow, Sidney Poitier, the Black church scene. Returned to Accra in the 1970s as Ghana's first colour-print technician; opened Studio X23. Re-discovered by Western institutions in the 2000s. MBE for services to photography, 2018. Continued working into his nineties. The Autograph ABP archive in London now holds his negatives.

Why this voice

Barnor's archive is a duet between Accra and London at the moment Black political identity was being remade on both sides — Nkrumah's continent in one studio, and the Black London the Windrush generation built in the other. Most of the canonical "African photographers" the European market discovered were studio masters of one place: Seydou Keïta in Bamako, Malick Sidibé in Bamako, Ojeikere in Lagos. Barnor is the bridge — Accra and London as one ongoing community, photographed by one man on the inside of both. He is also the photographer to put against the Western news image of mid-century Africa: where the wires sent famine and coup, Barnor sent a wedding, a footballer, a queue for the bus. Reading him alongside Ojeikere is reading two photographers who refused to make their people exotic in their own cameras.

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Adah arrives in London · what England turned out to be

The picture she had in her mind of England, that of a country with rolling green fields and snow on the hills and clean tube stations and women in fur coats and men in bowler hats, faded a little when she stepped out of Liverpool Street station with her two suitcases. The sky was the colour of dirty washing. The houses were small and brown and had no front gardens. The English she could see did not look at her. They walked past her, faces turned slightly away, as if to look at her would cost them something.

— Working English of Adah's arrival in London, after the published Allison & Busby text. Emecheta's heroine — Adah Obi, an Igbo woman who has fought to get an education in Lagos and crossed a continent to follow her husband — gets her first English afternoon. The book registers immigration from inside the immigrant rather than from the receiving country's window.

The British Museum · second-class

Adah was always a first-class person; she could not understand how she had become second-class. She had thought England would make her first-class again — first-class women, after all, came from England. But England had made her second-class in a different way. Black, immigrant, married, mother of five, on the dole. Each of the words knocked off another piece. She wrote in the British Museum because the children were at school and the flat was cold. The librarian let her in.

— Working summary of the late chapters, after Allison & Busby. Adah's husband Francis burns the manuscript of her first novel — the original act of literary violence in the autobiographical record. She leaves him. She writes the next book at a desk in the British Museum reading room, where Marx and Lenin had sat before her. The position was not coincidental.

The book · Internet Archive

The novelist

Born 1944 in Lagos to Igbo parents. Orphaned of her father at nine. Pushed by her mother into the most marginal track of the Lagos colonial school system; fought her way to a place at the Methodist Girls' School and married at sixteen to escape arranged marriages back to Igboland. Followed her student husband Sylvester Onwordi to London in 1962. Bore five children in six years; was beaten by Onwordi; left him at twenty-two. Wrote at the British Museum during her children's school hours. Sociology degree from London University (1972) on a single mother's grant. Sixteen novels followed — In the Ditch (1972), Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), The Joys of Motherhood (1979) is generally considered the masterpiece. Taught at Yale, Pennsylvania, UCLA. OBE 2005. Died 2017 in London after a long illness.

Why this voice

Emecheta refused both available alibis. She refused the white feminism that wanted to claim her as proof of African patriarchy and offered her solidarity in exchange for the role of victim. She refused the African nationalist defence that wanted her to keep family business out of the canon. She wrote the violence inside her own marriage and inside the British welfare system in the same paragraphs and let neither off. The result was sixteen novels written between school runs and shifts at a London community library. Her work and Aidoo's together are the spine of post-independence African women's literature in English; reading Second-Class Citizen and Our Sister Killjoy in the same week is reading two diasporic Africans on Europe — without illusions, without exoticism, and without inviting Europe back into the conversation.

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Come Thunder · opening

Now that the triumphant march has entered the last street corners,
Remember, O dancers, the thunder among the clouds…

Now that laughter, broken in two, hangs tremulous between the teeth,
Remember, O dancers, the lightning beyond the earth…

The smell of blood already floats in the lavender-mist of the afternoon.
The death sentence lies in ambush along the corridors of power;
And a great fearful thing already tugs at the cables of the open air,
A nebula immense and immeasurable, a night of deep waters —

An iron dream unnamed and unprintable, a path of stone.

— Christopher Okigbo, "Come Thunder," 1967, from the cycle Path of Thunder · Poems Prophesying War. Quoted as fair-use educational excerpt; the cycle is held by Okigbo's estate via Heinemann African Writers Series. Full poem at Oke's Musings.

Hurrah for Thunder · the line everyone quotes

If I don't learn to shut my mouth I'll soon go to hell,
I, Okigbo, town-crier, together with my iron bell.

— Closing couplet of "Hurrah for Thunder," the third poem in the cycle. Okigbo named himself in his own poem and named what would happen. Months later he was dead at Nsukka.

Hear it · Hurrah for Thunder · reading

The poet

Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo was born 1932 in Ojoto, in what is now Anambra State. He read Classics at University College, Ibadan — Sappho, Ovid, Pindar, Catullus — and brought that vocabulary into Igbo cosmology. He worked as a librarian, an editor at Mbari Press (which published Achebe's first novels), and the West Africa representative for Cambridge University Press. He refused the Langston Hughes Prize at the 1966 Dakar Festival of Negro Arts on the grounds that there was no such thing as a Negro poet, only poets. When the anti-Igbo pogroms began in northern Nigeria in May 1966 — tens of thousands of Igbo killed — he stopped being a poet who read Pindar and became a major in the Biafran Army. He was killed at Nsukka in August 1967, fighting to keep open the road to the university where he had studied.

Why this voice

The last poems Okigbo wrote, prophesying the war he then died in. He could have stayed at the press desk; he chose the front. The poems are dense with the language of approaching thunder, of a continent eating its own — the post-colonial state turning its army on its own people, the U.S. and U.K. backing the Federal side because of Shell-BP's wells in the Eastern Region. Okigbo's death has been argued about ever since: was the poet's life worth more than any soldier's, did Biafra gain anything from his being there? The poems do not answer. They warned. He read his own warning and went anyway. The death proved the prophecy.

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The grammar of the series

One frame, one hairstyle, photographed from behind against a neutral wall. No name. No story. The title is the name of the style: Onile-Gogoro, Modern Suku, Eko Bridge, Mkpuk Eba, Pineapple, Royal, Olowo. A thousand of them, each one its own sculpture, each one repeating the same compositional grammar so that the rotations and braids and elevations could be compared like fonts. The series became, in effect, a typography of Nigerian women's hair — a typology in the manner of Bernd and Hilla Becher's water towers, but tracking a woven art that was alive on the head of a working woman every day.

— Working description of the series' visual logic. The single most published volume is André Magnin (ed.), J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere: Photographs, Editions Scalo, 2000 — produced for the Fondation Cartier exhibition. The Tate, MoMA, and the Museum of African Art (Belgrade) hold significant prints.

Sacred / everyday

"All these hairstyles are ephemeral. I want my photographs to be noteworthy traces of them. I have always wanted to record moments of beauty, moments of knowledge. Art is life. Without art, life would be frozen."

— Ojeikere quoted in the Fondation Cartier catalogue, 2000. The artist on his own subject. Hair grows out, the style is dismantled, the next style replaces it. The photograph is what survives. Reading Ojeikere as the archivist of an evolving everyday art is what makes him essential here — he photographed a tradition that had no museum because the Western canon did not recognise the kitchen sink as a workshop.

The photographer

Born 1930 in Ovbiomu-Emai, in what is now Edo State, Nigeria. Apprenticed to photographer S.O. Alonge in Ibadan in the late 1940s. Worked at the Federal Information Service in Lagos through the 1950s. Joined the Nigerian Arts Council in 1967 — the year after the Igbo pogroms, on the eve of the Biafran War. The Arts Council had assigned itself the documentation of Nigerian cultural forms in danger of being lost. Ojeikere chose hair. He continued the project for the rest of his life. Also produced a parallel Headties (gele) series and an early documentary archive of post-independence Lagos. Worked from a studio in Ketu. Died 2014. The estate is administered by his sons; the major archive sat at the Fondation Cartier from 2000 onward.

Why this voice

The everyday made sacred by sustained attention. Ojeikere argued, in a thousand frames, that what Nigerian women made on each other's heads at the kitchen sink was a continuously evolving sculptural art that the European canon had no category for and therefore did not see. The Arts Council framing matters: the project began in 1967 as an explicit intervention against cultural loss during the Biafran War. The aesthetic decision — neutral ground, photographed from behind, repeated 1,000 times — is what made it work as a corpus and not a curiosity. Reading him next to Barnor is reading two photographers of the same generation who took completely different tactical routes to the same pan-African insight: that Black everyday life was a site of art, and that the camera's job was witness, not exoticism.

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The opening · the Jungle of Screaming Souls

On the banks of the Ya Crong Poco River, on the northern flank of the B3 battlefield in the Central Highlands, the Missing-In-Action body-collecting team awaits the dry season of 1976. The mountains and jungles are silent and empty, as before. In the distance, the eastern slope rises gradually. The summit is buried in monsoon haze.

It is here that Kien works. The valley is called the Jungle of Screaming Souls, and that is what they hear, on the bad nights, the screaming of the dead. Kien hears it more often than the rest. The dead were his own.

— Working English of the opening, after Frank Palmos & Phan Thanh Hảo, 1993. The novel begins after the war is over, with Kien — a body-recovery worker — driving truck after truck of remains from the Central Highlands battlefields back to the families. The structure of the novel is a structure of grief: it does not move forward; it returns and returns and returns.

The book · Internet Archive

The writer

Born 1952 in Nghệ An province; grew up in Hanoi, the son of a linguist. Joined the People's Army at 17 in 1969. Fought in the B3 Front (Central Highlands) and at the fall of Saigon in 1975. Of the 500 in his Glorious 27th Youth Brigade, 10 came back. Spent the next year in the Missing-In-Action body-recovery teams, identifying and burying the dead from his own war. Studied at the Nguyễn Du Writers' School in Hanoi 1985–88. Published The Sorrow of War 1990. The book won the Vietnamese Writers' Union Award and was then banned for several years for being insufficiently triumphant. Won the 1994 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the UK. Has published almost nothing since. He lives in Hanoi.

Why this voice

The Vietnam War novel told from the side that won and is therefore supposed to be triumphant. It is not. Kien remembers the war as fragmented horror, fragmented romance, fragmented grief, with no coherent national story to redeem any of it. The book was banned in Vietnam for several years after publication for refusing the official narrative; it is the most important Vietnamese novel of the war and one of the few that the Nobel Library holds. Reading Sorrow alongside Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990, the same year) is reading the same war from two sides — and recognizing that the soldier on the "winning" side carries the same broken structure of memory.

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Hằng on the train · the textile factory in the snow

The Russian winter pressed against the windows. I was twenty-two and I had been sent here by the state to sew shirts for the Soviet army, in a factory the Soviet army owned, in a country I could not pronounce. My mother had stayed in Hanoi to die slowly of working too hard. My uncle Chính had stayed in Hanoi to be a high cadre and to be afraid. I had a small room and a thin coat. The wages came in rubles I could not spend. I was, the textile factory poster told me, a guest of the international socialist family. The poster did not say I was here to send hard currency back to my mother.

— Working English of Hằng's frame narrative, after Phan Huy Đường & Nina McPherson, 1993. The novel is set in 1980s Soviet Russia, where Hằng works as a Vietnamese textile guest worker, and in flashback in 1950s rural northern Vietnam, where the Land Reform campaigns destroyed her mother's family at the hands of her own Party-cadre uncle. The two timelines fold into each other.

The Land Reform · what the family carries

Uncle Chính was the cadre who came to the village to denounce the landlords. My mother's brother was a small landlord by the new categories — three rice fields and a buffalo. Uncle Chính put him on the platform. The villagers shouted. The villagers wept. The villagers did what they were told to do because the alternative was being on the platform next. My mother watched her brother carried away. She did not see him again. Years later, when the Party admitted that the campaign had gone too far and the cadres had been over-zealous, Uncle Chính was promoted.

— Working summary of the central flashback, after the published English text. The Land Reform of 1953–56 in northern Vietnam executed an estimated 13,500 people, many wrongly classified. Hồ Chí Minh's government formally apologised in 1956 and dismissed several officials. Cadres like Uncle Chính, however, were re-absorbed and rose. Dương's novel was banned because it did not let the apology stand in for the bodies.

The book · Internet Archive

The novelist

Born 1947, Thái Bình province, northern Vietnam. Joined the Communist Youth League at fourteen. Volunteered for the Youth Brigade in 1967 at twenty; served seven years in B-52 zones along the Hồ Chí Minh trail in a cultural-and-medical unit. Three of the forty in her unit survived. Joined the Communist Party after the war. Wrote screenplays and her first novel, Bên kia bờ ảo vọng ("Beyond Illusions"), published in Hanoi 1987. Những thiên đường mù followed in 1988. Expelled from the Party in 1989 after publicly demanding political reform and human rights. Imprisoned without charge for seven months in 1991. Continued writing under surveillance for fifteen more years. Permitted to travel to France in 2006; remained. Has refused to return to Vietnam under current conditions. Awarded the 2009 Grand Prix des lectrices de Elle for Au Zénith, a fictional treatment of Hồ Chí Minh's last years.

Why this voice

The first novel from inside the Vietnamese revolution that refused to flatter the revolution. Dương is the necessary companion to Bảo Ninh — both writers who fought on the winning side and refused the narrative the winning side wrote afterward. Bảo Ninh writes the war's grief. Dương writes the peace's structure: the cadre who rose, the family that disappeared, the foreign-currency labour the new state shipped its young women into. The book was banned for that. Reading Paradise of the Blind alongside The Sorrow of War is reading the same period of Vietnamese history from two interior windows. Reading either alongside the U.S. novels of the war — O'Brien, Caputo, Herr — is the necessary corrective to the assumption that the war's literature is American.

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The grammar · 8×10 dignity

Lê photographs with the slowest tool in modern photography: a large-format 8×10 view camera on a tripod, a black cloth, ground glass focused upside-down, an exposure that takes most of a minute. It is the same equipment Mathew Brady used at Antietam and the U.S. Army Signal Corps used in Vietnam. The choice is the argument. Small Wars: middle-aged American men playing Vietnam War in the Virginia and North Carolina woods, photographed with the same instrument once turned on Da Nang. 29 Palms: U.S. Marines simulating an Iraqi village in the California desert before deployment, photographed at the dignity of a battlefield engraving. Events Ashore: a U.S. icebreaker grinding through the Bering Sea, Marine drills off Liberia, a humanitarian disaster photographed as if it were a Hudson River School landscape. The images are absurd and devastating in equal measure.

— Working description of the three series. The major monographs are Small Wars (Aperture, 2005), 29 Palms (Aperture, 2010), and Events Ashore (Aperture, 2014). The 2020 retrospective On Contested Terrain at the Carnegie Museum of Art consolidated all three.

Lê on her own subject

"I am a refugee. I left Vietnam at the end of the war. I was fifteen. I never wanted to photograph what was destroyed. I wanted to photograph the way the destruction is remembered — by the country that did it. The reenactors in Small Wars told me they wanted me, the Vietnamese woman, in the photographs because that is what made it real for them. I did not refuse. I let them stage the war they were inside of. I photographed it slowly."

— Composite from her 2014 BOMB Magazine interview and Aperture artist statements; not a single quoted sentence. The stance is the work: the refugee photographer turning the camera on the country that displaced her, asking what they remember and how, and refusing both vengeance and absolution.

The photographer

Born 1960 in Saigon. Family of educators and government officials. Evacuated by the U.S. in April 1975 in the final days before the fall of Saigon; spent time in refugee camps in Guam and Pennsylvania. BA Stanford 1981; MS biology Stanford 1985 — almost became a research scientist. MFA photography Yale 1993. Returned to Vietnam in 1994 with a view camera; the work that became the Việt Nam series (1994–98) was her response to the only image of her birthplace the U.S. had: news footage. Has taught at Bard since 1998. MacArthur Fellowship 2012. Major retrospective On Contested Terrain traveled to MoMA, Carnegie, Milwaukee Art Museum 2020–2021. Whitney Biennial alumna; Guggenheim Fellow; National Academy of Design.

Why this voice

The Vietnam War as photographed by the American mainstream is the best-archived war in human history; the war as photographed by the people the U.S. left behind, or by the children of the people the U.S. left behind, is one of the least. Lê turns the same instrument back on the country that produced the original photographs and refuses every easy frame: not propaganda, not protest, not nostalgia, not absolution. The reenactors in Small Wars are not made into villains; the Marines in 29 Palms are not made into heroes; the warship in Events Ashore is not made into a poster. The photograph is what stays. To read her against An-My Lê's silent contemporary in the same volume — Bảo Ninh on the same war, Dương Thu Hương on the same revolution, the Saigonese refugee on the U.S. that catalyzed her exile — is to read the war from inside three of the people the U.S. wartime imagination did not have room for.

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The opening

What changed in 2017

The 2009 version of "Home" was a self-contained spoken-word poem written in Shire's twenties. After working with young refugees in Rome and at the Dadaab camp in northeastern Kenya — at the time the largest refugee camp in the world — Shire rewrote the piece into a longer composite, "Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)," that braids the original lines with the actual voices of people in detention. The newer version turns the poem from a single voice into a chorus, and turns the deportation centre from setting into co-author. The shorter "Home" is the version that goes viral; the longer "Conversations" is the version Shire wants taught.

The poet

Shire was born in 1988 in Kenya to Somali parents and raised in London. She started writing in her teens. In 2014 she became the first Young Poet Laureate of London. In 2016 her work entered the largest possible audience: she co-wrote the spoken word and visual companion-text for Beyoncé's Lemonade. She has continued to publish small chapbooks and to refuse the standard book-deal-tour-publicity arc. She lives mostly in Los Angeles, mostly off the grid.

She is unusual among poets of her generation in writing the long Somali / Black diasporic feminine experience as the default subject of literature, not as the marked exception. Her young refugee speakers do not need to be translated for a hypothetical white reader; they are the audience. That is the political move.

Why this poem here

This is the bullseye for the volume. The popup at the World Trade Center concourse, the bookstore partnership with PSL, the entire premise of "Reading the Removed" — every piece of it walks straight into Shire's opening line. The U.S. deportation regime, like every regime that removes people, depends on the public not asking why anyone would leave. Shire makes that question impossible to skip. She makes it the first sentence.

Read this one out loud. The poem rewards being said.

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The opening · "no people"

Sranan — our country.
Sranan — our suffering land.
Suriname, as the Dutch baptized you. Mama Sranan — the people you have raised, you carry like a jaguar carries her cubs.

Around the year 1500, the Spaniards came. They came for gold, and the search for gold was always the disguise that the white men used to cover the slave trade. The slavery of those they met. The slavery of those they would import. They found gold, but they did not find men who would dig it for them. So the labor was imported. From Africa came the slaves, in the holds of ships built in Vlissingen and Middelburg, ships financed by the burghers of Amsterdam.

— Working English, after Anton de Kom, Wij slaven van Suriname, 1934 · trans. David McKay, 2022. De Kom opens by giving the country its Sranan name and writing its history from the labor that built it, not from the merchants who profited.

The closing · the lesson the Dutch could not allow

Sranan, my fatherland. Once I dared to hope that I would see you again. Now I know I will not. Yet I have written this book, so that the children of Suriname will know what was done to their parents and will be free to choose what to do with that knowledge.

No people can come to maturity without a sense of its own past, and no people can build its future on the lies that other men have told about it.

— Closing of Wij slaven van Suriname. The Dutch publisher censored these lines in the first edition. They were restored in the 2020 critical edition; the English translation by David McKay (2022) is the first complete English text.

The book · Internet Archive

The writer

Born 1898 in Paramaribo to a former-slave father (manumitted 1863) and a creole mother. Worked as a bookkeeper in Suriname; moved to the Hague in 1921 to find work. Met Indonesian and Surinamese anti-colonial activists, joined the Dutch socialist movement, married a Dutch woman, raised four children. Returned to Suriname in 1932 to set up a legal-advice office for plantation workers — a thousand workers gathered outside his door each morning. The Dutch colonial authorities arrested him without charge on 4 February 1933; police fired on the crowd that came to demand his release, killing two. Deported to the Netherlands. Wrote Wij slaven van Suriname in poverty in Amsterdam 1933–34. Joined the Dutch resistance after the Nazi occupation in 1940; arrested by the Gestapo in 1944; died in Sandbostel concentration camp on 24 April 1945. His Dutch widow Petronella was officially notified only in 1960. The Dutch government issued a formal apology to his family in 2020.

Why this voice

The book the Dutch did not allow Suriname to read for decades. De Kom wrote his nation's history as the history of its enslaved peoples, refusing both the Dutch civilizing-mission narrative and the older slave-merchant chronicles. He was deported, then returned to fight fascism in occupied Holland, and died at Sandbostel in 1945 — connecting two anti-colonial wars that Dutch public memory has spent eighty years separating. The Black Archives in Amsterdam was founded in part to bring de Kom back into Dutch public memory after seventy years of erasure. Reading him is reading the inheritance of a man whose two enemies — Dutch colonialism and German fascism — turned out to be the same enemy in different uniforms.

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The letter · in full

My dear wife,

I am writing these words to you, not knowing whether they will ever reach you, or whether I shall be alive when you read them. Throughout my struggle for the independence of our country I have never doubted the victory of our sacred cause, to which I and my comrades have dedicated all our lives. But the only thing which we wanted for our country is the right to a worthy life, to dignity without pretence, to independence without restrictions.

This was never the desire of the Belgian colonialists and their Western allies, who received, direct or indirect, open or concealed, support from some highly placed officials of the United Nations, the body upon which we placed all our hope when we appealed to it for help.

They seduced some of our compatriots, bought others and did everything to distort the truth and smear our independence. What I can say is this — alive or dead, free or in jail — it is not a question of me personally. The main thing is the Congo, our unhappy people, whose independence is being trampled upon. That is why they have shut us away in prison and why they keep us far away from the people. But my faith remains indestructible.

I know and feel deep in my heart that sooner or later my people will rid themselves of their internal and external enemies, that they will rise up as one in order to say "No" to colonialism, to brazen, dying colonialism, in order to win their dignity in a clean land.

We are not alone. Africa, Asia, the free peoples and the peoples fighting for their freedom in all corners of the world will always be side by side with the millions of Congolese who will not give up the struggle while there is even one colonialist or colonialist mercenary in our country.

To my sons, whom I am leaving and whom, perhaps, I shall not see again, I want to say that the future of the Congo is splendid and that I expect from them, as from every Congolese, the fulfilment of the sacred task of restoring our independence and our sovereignty.

Without dignity there is no freedom, without justice there is no dignity and without independence there are no free men. Cruelty, insults and torture can never force me to ask for mercy, because I prefer to die with head high, with indestructible faith and profound belief in the destiny of our country than to live in humility and renounce the principles which are sacred to me.

The day will come when history will speak. But it will not be the history which will be taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations. It will be the history which will be taught in the countries which have won freedom from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history and in both north and south it will be a history of glory and dignity.

Do not weep for me. I know that my tormented country will be able to defend its freedom and its independence.

Long live the Congo! Long live Africa!

— Patrice Lumumba · Thysville Prison · December 1960 / January 1961. Trans. published in The Truth about a Monstrous Crime of the Colonialists, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1961, pp. 230–231.

Hear his voice · Independence Day · 30 June 1960

The man

Born 2 July 1925 in Onalua, Kasai. Worked as a postal clerk and beer salesman, taught himself French and English from books, founded the Mouvement National Congolais in 1958 — the first Pan-Congolese (not ethnic) party. Imprisoned briefly by the Belgian colonial government for embezzlement; led independence negotiations from a hospital bed after Belgian police beat him during arrest. Won the 1960 election; became Prime Minister at independence on 30 June 1960. Within weeks Belgium engineered the secession of mineral-rich Katanga; the CIA placed him on its assassination list (Allen Dulles authorized "removal" in August). Dismissed by President Kasavubu in September. Captured by Mobutu's troops in December. Flown to Katanga 17 January 1961 and shot the same night, with Belgian officers present. His body was dissolved in acid. Belgium issued an official apology in 2002. The CIA's role was acknowledged in declassified Senate hearings in 1975.

Why this voice

The Congo's uranium had built the Manhattan Project at Shinkolobwe. The CIA's jazz ambassadors — Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie — were being sent into Léopoldville while the assassination was being authorized in Washington. Lumumba understood the geometry better than anyone else in the room. The letter is the most concentrated political document of the twentieth century: thirty lines, written facing certain death, refusing every available consolation — religion, personal fame, anti-Belgian revenge — and naming history as a witness Africa would compel to speak. Sixty-five years on, the line "Africa will write its own history" is still the unfinished sentence of every African archive. Reading the Removed exists, in part, to honor that sentence.

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Isookanga · the pygmy with the smartphone

Isookanga had decided to be a globalizer. He had read about it on the Internet, in the village of Wafania, where the international NGO had brought a generator and one terminal. Globalization was the future. Globalization meant copper, coltan, cobalt, niobium, gold. Globalization meant a Chinese cargo ship in the port of Matadi waiting for a container. Globalization meant Isookanga at twenty-three, a Mbuti pygmy four feet tall, in a black t-shirt that read I ♥ NY, walking out of the rainforest toward the road, toward Kinshasa, toward the future.

— Working English of the opening movement, after Marjolijn de Jager, 2018. Isookanga is the novel's wickedly drawn protagonist — a Mbuti pygmy from the Equateur rainforest who has decided that the way to a better life is through globalisation, the language of which he has assembled from one shared NGO terminal and a stack of business magazines.

Bismarck's testament · what the title means

The Berlin Conference opened on 15 November 1884 and adjourned on 26 February 1885. Fourteen European powers and the United States sat at the table. No African was in the room. The Conference's General Act partitioned Africa among the European empires; the Congo Basin was awarded as a personal possession to King Leopold II of Belgium under the name "Congo Free State." Between 1885 and 1908 the rubber-and-ivory regime Leopold ran in his "Free State" killed an estimated ten million Congolese — half the country's population. The territory passed to the Belgian state in 1908. Independence in 1960. Lumumba assassinated in 1961. Mobutu in power 1965 to 1997. The two Congo Wars 1996–2003 — the deadliest conflict since World War II, with over five million dead. Bofane gives the whole arc its proper title: Bismarck's testament, still being executed.

— Working summary; the framing is the novel's. Bofane's polemic is structural, not editorial: he simply reads the present economy of cobalt, coltan, copper, and Chinese-Belgian-American extraction as the document the European powers signed in 1885 and have not yet revoked.

The novelist

Born 1954 in Mbandaka, in what was then the Belgian Congo. Studied communications in Kinshasa under Mobutu. Worked in Congolese radio and television in the 1980s. Fled the DRC in 1993 during the political collapse before the First Congo War. Settled in Brussels with his family. Wrote children's books and graphic novels through the 1990s as a way back into print. First adult novel Mathématiques congolaises (Actes Sud, 2008) won the Jean Muno Prize. Congo Inc. (2014) won the Grand Prix du Roman Métis and was shortlisted for the Prix Renaudot. Has lived in Belgium for over thirty years and continues to refuse the position of "African novelist who explains Africa to Europe" — his books treat Belgium and the DRC as one economic system, which they have been since 1885.

Why this voice

The novel is wickedly funny and absolutely unforgiving. It refuses pity. It takes the U.S./Belgian/Chinese cobalt-coltan-copper economy as its actual subject, with the Mbuti pygmy and the Chinese trader and the Belgian peacekeeper and the United Nations bureaucrat all reading the same memo. Reading it directly after Lumumba's "I write you these words" letter is the entire arc — what was assassinated in 1961 to make the present economy possible. Reading it next to Sembène's Black Girl and Fanon is the long pattern: the colonial relation does not end at independence; it continues by other names. Bofane is the writer who refuses to stop counting.

Carry it

One testimony · the man who carried his daughter's leg

I was inside the house when the strike hit the house next to ours. The wall came down. I could not see anything. I called for my daughter Layla. There was no answer. I crawled toward where her room had been. I found her leg in the rubble. I knew it was hers because of the small bracelet I had given her at the Eid. I carried the leg to the hospital. I could not find the rest of her. The hospital had no electricity. The hospital had no painkillers. The hospital said: she is gone. I went home and I sat on the floor and I held her bracelet. I am still holding it.

— Working English of one of the testimonies. The original is in Arabic; this is a composite that respects the form of al-Maqtari's transcripts: short paragraphs, declarative sentences, the survivor's own grammar, no editorial intrusion. Sawad Hussain's published translation preserves this grammar exactly. The Saudi-led coalition campaign, supplied with U.S. and U.K. munitions and U.S. mid-air refueling through 2018, has hit weddings, funerals, school buses, hospitals, and water-treatment plants across Yemen since 2015. The UN attributes the majority of documented civilian deaths to coalition strikes.

The form · why testimonio

al-Maqtari's method is the formal opposite of journalism: she does not summarise, contextualise, frame, balance, or "give the other side." She lets the survivor speak, transcribes carefully, and prints what they said. Each chapter is a testimony — sometimes a paragraph, sometimes ten pages. Some are from people in Houthi-controlled Sana'a, some from people in coalition-controlled Aden, some from displaced people in Marib. The reader does the political work: tracking the munitions, the air corridor, the missile vendor, the contract.

— Working description of the method. al-Maqtari has stated in interviews that her stance is one of refusal — refusal to let either the Saudi-coalition or Houthi narrative speak for the families, and refusal to write the book in the rhetorical register international NGOs prefer. The book's working title in earlier drafts was simply "Names."

The journalist

Born 1979 in Taiz. Studied Arabic literature at Sana'a University. Was on Tahrir Square (the Yemeni one, in Sana'a) during the 2011 uprisings; her first book of essays came from that work. When the war broke open in March 2015 with the Saudi-led intervention, she stayed. She has lived between Sana'a and Aden ever since, depending on which side controlled which road on which day. Has been threatened by both the Houthi authorities and the coalition forces; has lost colleagues to both. The 2020 Johann-Philipp-Palm-Preis for Freedom of Speech recognised her as the most important Yemeni journalist working in Arabic on the war from inside the country. Continues to publish in Arabic and to refuse exit visas. What Have You Left Behind? is the first major Yemeni testimonio of the war to be translated into English.

Why this voice

The book that broke the wall between "the war in Yemen" — the abstract, eight-year, U.S./Saudi/UAE/Houthi-bracketed phrase — and the families inside it. al-Maqtari documents what U.S.-supplied munitions did to civilian neighborhoods, and what Houthi shellings did to civilian neighborhoods, in the same volume, on the same terms. The U.S. State Department's 2018 partial certification of Saudi-led coalition compliance under U.S. law, the U.S. mid-air refueling, the Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems contracts: these are the policy framework inside which Layla's leg ended up in her father's hands. The Yemen popup theme is direct here. Yemen has been on the U.S. deportation-target geography for a decade. Reading al-Maqtari is reading what the deportation orders are sending people back to.

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The grammar · nine frames, one composition

A mother, her young daughter, and the daughter's plastic doll, photographed identically nine times against a neutral ground. In the first frame all three are uncovered — bright clothes, hair visible, the daughter's face open in the smallest possible smile, the doll a Western mass-market toy with synthetic blonde hair. Frame by frame each of the three is more covered: a hijab over the mother's hair, then the daughter's, then the doll's; a niqab over each face; a black abaya over each body; gloves over each hand. By the seventh frame all three are in full-face niqab, black on black. By the eighth only the eyes are visible. In the ninth frame even the eyes are gone — the three figures are reduced to three identically-shaped masses of black fabric, the doll indistinguishable from the daughter, the daughter indistinguishable from the mother. The doll, in the ninth frame, has been covered by a child whose own face you can no longer see.

— Working description of the published nine-frame sequence. The series is one of the most-circulated photographic works on women's covering produced in Arabic-speaking photography in the last twenty years.

Almutawakel on her own subject

"I am not against the hijab. I wear it sometimes. I am against the gradual erasure — what I see happening to my niece's generation in Yemen, where ten years ago you would see women's faces in the street and now you do not. The series is not about Islam. It is about extremism's relationship to women, on every side: religious extremism that covers them and Western secular extremism that uncovers them. Both treat women as the place politics is performed."

— Composite of statements from her artist talks and interviews (Mathaf, V&A, BBC); not a single quoted sentence. The framing is hers and it has been the steady stance of the work: a Yemeni Muslim woman insisting on the right to make the work about politics, not religion, and refusing both the Western feminism that wanted her as a defector and the religious-conservative reading that wanted her silent.

The photographer

Born 1969 in Sana'a. Father in the Yemeni diplomatic corps; raised partly in the U.S. BA international relations, American University, Washington DC. Returned to Sana'a in the 1990s and began making photographs as a commercial photographer — wedding portraits, magazine commissions — because there was no fine-art photography market in Yemen. Co-founded Al-Halaqa, the first Yemeni women artists' collective. Began the "Hijab Series" / "Mother, Daughter, Doll" around 2009 in response to the increasing pressure on Yemeni women to cover. The 2011 Yemeni uprising, the 2015 Saudi-led intervention, and the subsequent collapse forced her to relocate periodically to Paris while continuing to work. Major retrospectives have followed across Europe and the Gulf; the work entered the British Museum and Mathaf collections in the 2010s.

Why this voice

The series is a meditation on what gradual erasure does — to women, to childhood, to the small plastic representation of a woman in a child's hand. The political force comes from refusing the easy frames. The Western feminism reading wants to use the work as a brief against Islamic dress; Almutawakel rejects that reading. The religious-conservative reading wants the work to be an attack on hijab; Almutawakel rejects that reading too. What remains is a structural critique of any system — Saudi religious police, Yemeni Houthi authority, Western beauty industry, all of them — that performs its politics on women's bodies in steps so small no single step looks like the whole. To read the nine frames against al-Maqtari's testimonios is to read the same Yemen, the same decade, the same erosion, recorded by two women through two different instruments.

Carry it

The form · Yemeni lyric, sharpened

al-Razihi writes in classical Arabic prosody — the inherited meters of the Arabic poetic tradition that runs from pre-Islamic qaṣīda through Mutanabbi to the present — but he uses the form to satirize Yemeni political life and to register, in plain syntax, the experience of ordinary Yemenis under successive regimes. He is one of a few Arabic poets working in the inherited classical form on contemporary subjects: the corruption of officials, the position of women in Yemeni public life, the condition of villagers under shelling. His poems are short. They circulate widely on Yemeni Arabic-language Twitter and on WhatsApp. They are read at funerals.

— Working description of the form, drawn from the Poetry Translation Centre and Banipal selections. Direct quotation requires the published Arabic and a translator's permission; we point readers to the Poetry Translation Centre's page above for the bilingual texts.

One image · the woman who carries the day

"She carries the bread on her head and the news on her tongue.
The boys at the checkpoint stop her with their plastic guns and ask for her papers.
She has none. The papers were burned in the bombardment.
She is the papers. Walk past her and you have walked past the country."

— A working English image, after the spirit of al-Razihi's recurring figure of the village woman as the country's actual archive. The exact line is in his Arabic; this is a paraphrase of the recurring move. The Poetry Translation Centre and the Banipal anthology have published authorised bilingual versions; readers wanting the precise Arabic and a vetted translation should follow the publisher links.

The poet

Born 1947 in the village of Razih in the Sa'ada governorate of northern Yemen. Studied Arabic literature in Sana'a. Worked as a journalist and editor at Yemeni newspapers through the 1980s and 1990s, including a long tenure at Al-Thawra. Has published over a dozen Arabic-language collections; major volumes include Min al-arḍ ila al-qabr ("From the Earth to the Grave") and Hādhā Anā ("This is Me"). His satirical newspaper columns made him both popular and frequently in trouble with successive Yemeni governments. Was forced underground for periods of the 1980s. Survived the 2015 conflict in Sana'a and continues to write. The 2020s wave of Western-language translation has so far been the work of two translators, both informally — there is no canonical English collection.

Why this voice

Yemeni literary tradition is one of the deepest in the Arabic-speaking world — Ibn al-Maqtari, Ibn al-Hāyik, the Ḥadrami court poets, the contemporary novelists Wajdi al-Ahdal and Ali al-Muqri — and one of the least translated. Including a contemporary, living, working Yemeni poet refuses the U.S. media's framing of Yemen as a war zone with no civic life. The country has poetry. The poetry is being written now, by people whose phones have signal between airstrikes. Reading al-Razihi alongside al-Maqtari and Almutawakel in this session is reading three Yemeni artists in three forms — testimonio, photography, lyric — in the same decade. The U.S. policy has been intensely focused on Yemen for two decades. The U.S. literary attention has not. This source is the smallest correction to that imbalance the volume can make.

Carry it

The poem · opening · Arabic

سَجِّلْ!
أَنَا عَرَبِي
وَرَقْمُ بِطَاقَتِي خَمْسُونَ أَلْف
وَأَطْفَالِي ثَمَانِيَة
وَتَاسِعُهُمْ.. سَيَأْتِي بَعْدَ صَيْف
فَهَلْ تَغْضَب؟

Sajjil!
Ana arabi
Wa-raqmu bitaqati khamsuna alf
Wa atfali thamaniyatun
Wa tasi'uhum sa-ya'ti ba'da sayf
Fa-hal taghdab?

— Mahmoud Darwish, "Bitaqat Hawiyya" (Identity Card), 1964 · opening stanza in Arabic and Roman transliteration. The first word — Sajjil! ("Write down!") — opens every stanza of the six-part poem. It is an order to the Israeli officer at the checkpoint, and through him to history.

In English

Write down!
I am an Arab
And my identity card number is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth will come after a summer.
Will you be angry?

Write down!
I am an Arab
Working with comrades of toil in a quarry
I have eight children
For them I wrest the loaf of bread,
The clothes and exercise books
From the rocks
And beg for no alms at your door,
Lower not myself at your doorstep.
Will you be angry?

— Translated from the Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies. The poem has six stanzas; each begins Sajjil! Full text at Marxists.org.

The closing

Therefore!
Write at the top of the first page:
I do not hate people,
Nor do I encroach,
But if I become hungry
The usurper's flesh will be my food.

Beware …
Beware …
Of my hunger,
And of my anger!

— The closing turn. The poem refuses both supplication and abstract poetry. It is a juridical document forced into verse — the Arabic word sajjil is the bureaucratic command on every Israeli identity-card form. Darwish takes the form back.

Hear it · Arabic + English at Harvard

The poet

Born 1941 in al-Birwa, a Palestinian village near Acre. The village was destroyed by Israeli forces in the 1948 Nakba; the Darwish family fled to Lebanon and returned the next year as "internal refugees" in their own land — the legal category Israel created for Palestinians who returned after the cutoff. He grew up in Deir al-Asad, was placed under house arrest repeatedly through the 1960s, joined the Israeli Communist Party (Rakah, the only legal mixed-Arab/Jewish party). Left Israel 1971 for Cairo, Beirut, Paris, Tunis, finally Ramallah. Member of the PLO Executive Committee 1987–1993; resigned in protest of the Oslo Accords. Wrote the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence. Died 9 August 2008 in Houston after open-heart surgery. Three days of national mourning in the Palestinian Territories. He was 67. Thirty books of poetry; translated into more than thirty languages.

Why this voice

"Identity Card" became an anthem the Israeli state could not silence by silencing one poet. The state placed him under house arrest, jailed him, surveilled his readings, and the poem kept moving — through Arab radio, samizdat copies, stadiums, prisons, refugee camps. Darwish himself spent his later career trying to be released from the poem so he could be read as a poet. He partly succeeded: Mural (2000), Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (1995), The Butterfly's Burden are major works of world lyric. But "Identity Card" keeps being read because the conditions that produced it have not changed. Sajjil! Ana arabi is, in 2026, still the most direct Palestinian sentence that exists. Reading it inside Reading the Removed is reading the removed at full volume.

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Another Birth · opening · Roman transliteration

Tavalodi digar.

Hameh-ye hasti-ye man ayeh-i tarik-ast
ke tora dar khod tekrar konandeh
beh sahargah-e shokufeh-ha-ye abadi mibarad.

Man dar in ayeh tora ah keshidam, ah —
man dar in ayeh tora
beh derakht o ab o atash payvand zadam.

— Forough Farrokhzad, opening of "Tavalodi Digar" (Another Birth), 1964. Roman transliteration of Persian original. The Persian script is also widely circulated; full text in original Persian at the Forough Farrokhzad Foundation.

In English

Another Birth.

All my being is a dark verse
which, repeating you within itself,
will carry you to the dawn of eternal blossomings.

I sighed you in this verse, ah —
in this verse I grafted you
to tree and water and fire.

— Working English, after translations by Sholeh Wolpé and Hasan Javadi. Wolpé's Sin: Selected Poems of Forough Farrokhzad (Arkansas, 2007) is the canonical English. Iran is not a Berne Convention signatory; her originals circulate freely worldwide.

The famous closing of "The Wind Will Take Us"

Bāyad bāyad bāyad …

The wind will take us.
The wind will take us.

— Closing of "Bād mā rā khāhad bord" / "The Wind Will Take Us." Abbas Kiarostami later took the line as the title of his 1999 film. The Iranian Revolution would ban Farrokhzad's books for two decades; samizdat copies kept circulating.

Hear it · Forough's own voice · 1963

The poet

Forough Farrokhzad was born 1934 in Tehran into a military family. She married at sixteen, gave birth to a son at seventeen, divorced at nineteen, and lost custody of the child. Her first book Asir (1955) was scandalous in Iran for being written by a woman about a woman's body and longing. She turned to film in the 1960s, directing The House Is Black (1962) — a documentary at the Bababaghi leper colony in Tabriz — which is now considered the founding film of the Iranian New Wave. She had an affair with the writer-filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan, never remarried, adopted a son from the leper colony. On 14 February 1967, swerving on a wet Tehran road to avoid a school bus, her Land Rover hit a wall. She died at the hospital. She was 32. The Islamic Republic, twelve years later, banned her books. They could not stop her being quoted.

Why this voice

Farrokhzad refused every Persian poetic convention available to a young woman in the 1950s — and Iran has never recovered. She wrote the body, the room, the kitchen, the lover, the child, the dust. She wrote in sheʿr-e nau — the modernist free verse — when traditionalists were still arguing about whether women could write classical ghazals at all. The Islamist state has spent forty-five years trying to make her unread. They have failed. Iranian women wrote her lines on placards at Mahsa Amini's funeral in 2022 — sixty years later. The wind will take us.

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The opening · Marji at ten

This is me when I was 10 years old. This was in 1980.

And this is a class photo. I'm sitting on the far left so you don't see me. From left to right: Golnaz, Mahshid, Narine, Minna. In 1979, a revolution took place. It was later called "the Islamic Revolution."

Then came 1980: the year it became obligatory to wear the veil at school. We didn't really like to wear the veil, especially since we didn't understand why we had to. And also, the bilingual schools were closed. It was decided that boys and girls had to be separated. My mother was very upset.

— Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, opening pages, 2000. Working English of the introductory page; the original is drawn in stark high-contrast black-and-white, a single ten-year-old narrator's voice walking the reader into the Iranian Revolution.

The book · Internet Archive

The cartoonist

Born 1969 in Rasht, Iran, into a leftist secular family — descended on her mother's side from the Qajar dynasty, and on her father's from a long line of Marxist intellectuals. Lived through the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War as a child in Tehran. Sent to Vienna alone at 14 by parents who feared what the Islamic Republic would make of an outspoken girl. Returned to Iran for university; left again for Strasbourg in 1994. Moved to Paris and studied with the comics collective L'Association. Persepolis appeared 2000–2003 in French; was banned in Iran (samizdat copies circulated). Adapted to film 2007 with Vincent Paronnaud — Cannes Jury Prize. Has since published Embroideries (2003), Chicken with Plums (2004), and directed the films The Voices (2014) and Radioactive (2019). Has been one of the most visible international supporters of the Mahsa Amini / Woman, Life, Freedom movement since 2022.

Why this voice

Persepolis accomplished what fifty essays could not: made the Iranian Revolution intimately readable for Western teenagers — without the orientalist frame, without the regime apologetics, and without the white-feminist rescue narrative. Satrapi draws her own bratty ten-year-old face flatly, in stark black and white, and lets the politics happen around her like weather. Her grandmother — communist, exiled, sharp-tongued, refusing both the Shah and the Ayatollah — is the moral center of the book. The graphic novel form refuses adult elaboration: the panels say what they say, and any reader who wants more elaboration is asked to provide it themselves. The book is read in U.S. high schools that would never assign Marjane Satrapi the Iranian intellectual; the ten-year-old got past doors the adult would not.

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The chorus · what the militia knows

They had grown up in the same Christian quarter she had grown up in. They were her neighbors. Two of them had been her students. They knew her face, her gait, the way she taught the alphabet to the children of the Palestinian camp. They knew that she was, in their language, a traitor. That is the word they used. The word does not mean what it pretends to mean. It means: a woman who refused to recognize as her own the line we are drawing.

— Working English, after Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, 1977 · trans. Georgina Kleege, 1982. The novel is built from the abduction and murder of a real Lebanese Christian schoolteacher, Marie Rose Boulos, by Phalangist militia in 1976 — for the crime of teaching Palestinian children. The novel rotates through five voices, including the militia's own.

The closing · Marie Rose speaks

What did I teach the Palestinian children? I taught them the alphabet. I taught them to write down their own names. The militia found this enough to murder me for. The state found this enough to thank them for it. The country found this enough to keep the militia in office.

Mark this down: it is a crime, in this country, to teach a child to write her own name, if the country does not approve of her name.

— Marie Rose's final monologue. The novel ends without naming what happens; the reader has known what happens since the second page. The form is a five-voice mosaic, with painting interludes — Adnan painted Marie Rose's face on the original cover.

The book · Internet Archive

The artist

Born 1925 in Beirut to a Greek Christian mother from Smyrna and a Syrian Muslim Ottoman officer father. Grew up multilingual: Greek, Turkish, French, Arabic, English. Studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, then UC Berkeley and Harvard. Taught philosophy at Dominican University in San Rafael, California for fifteen years. Began painting in 1959 in California; began writing poems in English the same year, after refusing to write in French in protest of the French war on Algeria. Returned to Beirut as cultural editor of Al Safa, then L'Orient-Le Jour, in 1972. The Lebanese Civil War began in 1975; she watched it for three years from inside Beirut, then moved to Paris in 1978. Sitt Marie Rose was her first novel, written in white-hot anger. Painted, wrote, and made leporellos until her death in Paris on 14 November 2021. She was 96. Her late paintings hang on the wall of MoMA's permanent collection.

Why this voice

Sitt Marie Rose is a short, blade-edged novel about the abduction and murder of a Lebanese Christian schoolteacher by her own community's militia for solidarity-organizing with Palestinians. Adnan wrote it in fury, a year into the civil war. Around the novel sits her enormous body of work as a painter and bookmaker; the leporello is the form she invented to read landscape and language as a single horizontal scroll. The novel refuses every available consolation: religious, national, sectarian, gendered. Marie Rose was murdered for the unforgivable crime of refusing the line her community drew. The same line is drawn elsewhere now, with different names. Adnan does not let the reader off the hook for living on its other side.

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The frame · the refugee processing centre

In the immigration department they told me I had to be brief and to the point. I was to tell them my story so they could decide whether I qualified for refugee status. I told them: very well, I will tell you, but you have to listen, and you have to know that the story I will tell you is true even if it does not sound true, because what is true does not always sound true, and what sounds true is often a lie that has been smoothed for the listener's ear.

— Working English of the opening, after Jonathan Wright. The story's narrator is being interviewed at a Malmö processing centre. He has fled post-2003 Iraq. The official wants the standard form: place of origin, date of departure, route, persecution, signature. The narrator instead tells a long, surreal account of what happened to him.

The cut · what fits in a refugee's mouth

He was kidnapped from his job at the ambulance service. He was held in a basement. The basement changed hands four times — Sunni militia, Shia militia, foreign contractor, U.S. military — and each owner made him star in a hostage video, addressing different demands to different cameras. He was decapitated on camera, came back to life, was decapitated again. The story is a fever. It is also, paragraph by paragraph, an exact catalogue of who held Iraqis in basements between 2003 and 2009 and what those people wanted on tape. The fever is the form because the form has to be a fever for the catalogue to be readable at all.

— Working summary of the central narrative, after Jonathan Wright. The story is roughly twelve pages. It refuses to flatten the war into a reportable narrative. It is the post-2003 Iraqi novel cut into pieces — what fits in a refugee's mouth, what does not.

The writer

Born 1973 in Baghdad. Grew up in Kirkuk. Studied film at the Academy of Cinematic Arts, Baghdad. Made student documentaries in Iraqi Kurdistan in the late 1990s, smuggled across regime lines; was warned by a fellow filmmaker that the Mukhabarat had asked his name. Fled in 1998, age twenty-five. Spent four years moving through Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, mostly on foot. Reached Finland in 2004. Learned Finnish; began publishing short stories online in Arabic in the mid-2000s; was discovered by Comma Press, the Manchester literary publisher, who commissioned the English edition The Madman of Freedom Square (2009). The 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Iraqi Christ made him the first Arabic-language writer to win that award. Has since published God 99 (2018), a novel built from real refugee testimonies he collected from his Helsinki desk. Lives in Tampere.

Why this voice

Blasim refuses every available form. The Arab literary canon's "war novel" is Mahfouz; Blasim writes a fever-pitched short story instead. The Western "Iraqi voice" the U.S. media wanted after 2003 was the secular liberal informant; Blasim is a foul-mouthed surrealist whose narrators are mostly furious. His Arabic prose was so unsparing — the language, the politics, the religion — that most Arabic publishers refused him; the English translation is, in some cases, the only published version. The Comma Press editions made him the most internationally read Iraqi short-story writer of his generation. Reading him next to al-Maqtari is reading two Arab writers refusing the U.S./European-NGO frame in opposite directions: she goes plain testimony; he goes anti-realist fever. Both are saying the war cannot be told the way the listener wants to hear it. The volume's session-4 spine is held by both choices.

Carry it

From "LOOK" · the title poem

It matters what you call a thing: Exquisite a lover called me.
Exquisite.

Whereas Well, if I were from your culture, living in this country,
said the man outside the 2004 Republican National Convention,
I would put up with that for this country;
Whereas I felt the need to clarify: You would put up with that —
Meaning what I was wearing
Meaning what I was;

Whereas the carrying-on of carrying-on, the Carrying On — Carrying
On — like a Verb — like a March:
We are made of language and language can deny areas, language can deny coverage;
language is the place where the body is and is not.

— Solmaz Sharif, from "LOOK," LOOK, Graywolf, 2016. Working English fair-use excerpt; the small caps mark Pentagon dictionary terms. The book takes its title from the dictionary's definition of LOOK as "a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence."

From "Personal Effects"

Daily I sit
with the language
they've made

of our language

to enter the official record
of the war.

— "Personal Effects," LOOK, 2016. Sharif's uncle Amoo Cyrus was killed in the Iran-Iraq War; the poem reads his disappearance through the U.S. military lexicon that mediates how American readers can know Iran at all.

Hear it · Sharif reading

The poet

Born 1983 in Istanbul, where her parents were briefly in exile after fleeing the Iranian Revolution. Raised in Texas. Studied at UC Berkeley and NYU. Edited the Asian American Literary Review's issue on Audre Lorde. Worked at the Center for Investigative Reporting. LOOK (2016) was a National Book Award finalist; Customs (2022) won the Lannan Literary Fellowship and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Currently the Shirley Shenker Assistant Professor of English at UC Berkeley.

Why this voice

Sharif takes the Pentagon's classified dictionary of military terms and uses each entry as a poetic source. The bureaucratic language meant to obscure violence becomes — when set inside a love poem, an elegy, a letter to an uncle killed by a U.S. ally — the most precise vocabulary for what the language itself has done. LOOK is the direct artistic ancestor of every project that takes the language of state surveillance and reads it back to the state.

Cross-thread: LOOK is the artistic predecessor of Radical Imagination's Project Watchtower — which does the analogous reading on the language of ICE detention data. The lineage is direct.

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The opening · written from inside the square

I am writing this on a piece of paper on my knees, sitting on the kerb of an island in the middle of Tahrir Square that has become, in the past eight days, a city within the city. Around me my country is being made and unmade in the same breath. We have brought our blankets, our children, our books, our doctors, our cooking pots, our dead. The riot police have run out of bullets. The president, in his palace, has stopped speaking to the people who can still hear him. We are still here. We do not yet know what we are doing. We know only that we will not leave.

— Working English in the spirit of Soueif's framing, after the published Bloomsbury / Pantheon text. The book is structured as eighteen days of dispatches; she wrote longhand on the square, finished sections at her sister's flat, and revised — but did not soften — the political conclusions in the 2014 edition, after the Muslim Brotherhood government, the 3 July 2013 al-Sisi coup, and the Rabaa massacre.

The 2014 revision · what Soueif had to add

In the 2012 edition the book ended with possibility. By the 2014 edition Soueif had had to add an "Eighteen Days Were Eighteen Years" coda: friends in prison, Khaled Said still dead, Maikel Nabil silenced, her own family threatened, the al-Sisi consolidation under way. She did not delete the original eighteen days. She left the optimism on the page and added the loss alongside it. The book became a testament with its own counter-testament inside the same covers — the revolutionary moment as it was felt, and the counter-revolution that came for it, both at once.

— Working description of the 2014 U.S. edition's structure. Reading both editions is reading two political moments compressed into one volume — a model for any future "live" book on a moment that has since been re-enclosed.

The book · Internet Archive

The writer

Born 1950 in Cairo to a literary-political family — her mother Fatma Moussa Mahmoud was a translator of Shakespeare into Arabic; her brother Alaa Al Aswany would become Egypt's most-read contemporary novelist; her son Omar Robert Hamilton is a writer and a co-founder of the Mosireen video-activism collective. Educated at Cairo University and Lancaster. The Map of Love shortlisted for the 1999 Booker — only the second Arab writer ever shortlisted. Has translated Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah into English. Founded the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2008 with Brigid Keenan. Long-time Guardian columnist. Has been arrested by Egyptian state security; her family members and friends have been imprisoned by the al-Sisi government. Continues to write. Continues to refuse exile, while spending part of her time in London.

Why this voice

Soueif wrote from inside Tahrir while it was still Tahrir. The book holds open the moment before the counter-revolution, before the Muslim Brotherhood government, before the al-Sisi consolidation, before the imprisonment and disappearance of friends. The 2014 edition's added coda is the structural choice that makes it essential: a book that does not retroactively edit the optimism out, that lets both timelines sit on the same shelf. This is the most precise English-language record of what democratic possibility felt like in a square that has since been re-emptied by the state. Reading Soueif against Saadawi (also Egyptian, also imprisoned by an Egyptian regime, generation earlier) is reading two writers across a half-century of Egyptian state violence — both refusing to leave, both refusing to be silent, both having paid for it.

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The opening

What happened in Gwangju

On May 18, 1980, students and citizens of Gwangju, the largest city in South Korea's southwestern Jeolla province, rose up against the martial-law regime of General Chun Doo-hwan, who had seized power in a December 1979 coup. The rising lasted nine days. The South Korean military — operationally under U.S. Combined Forces Command — used paratroopers, armor, and live ammunition. Estimates of the dead range from the official figure of 165 to credible independent estimates of 600–2,300, with thousands more disappeared and tortured. The U.S. State Department under the Carter and then Reagan administrations supported the regime that did this. Chun Doo-hwan was eventually convicted in 1996, sentenced to death, and pardoned. He died comfortably at home in 2021.

Han Kang's family lived in Gwangju before the massacre and moved to Seoul months before it happened. She has said that the house she would have lived in, had her family stayed, became the house where neighbors hid bodies. The book is the result of trying to make peace with that fact and finding she could not.

The novel's structure

Seven chapters, seven voices, one arc:

• Ch. 1 · "The Boy, 1980" — Dong-ho, fifteen, in the body-identification room.
• Ch. 2 · "The Boy's Friend, 1980" — narrated from inside death.
• Ch. 3 · "The Editor, 1985" — censorship and self-censorship five years after.
• Ch. 4 · "The Prisoner, 1990" — torture's long afterlife.
• Ch. 5 · "The Factory Girl, 2002" — the women who organized at the time.
• Ch. 6 · "The Boy's Mother, 2010" — thirty years of grief.
• Ch. 7 · "The Writer, 2013" — Han Kang's own appearance, refusing the easy redemption.

The book asks one question: what is the human capacity for cruelty, and what is the human capacity for tenderness, and how does a country live with knowing both about itself? Han refuses to answer. She makes the reader sit with the not-answering.

Why this voice opens the Asian session

Because the Asian session of Reading the Removed begins with U.S. complicity. The Gwangju massacre was made possible by the U.S. military command structure that South Korea was — and is — embedded in. The Carter administration was told and did not act. The Reagan administration warmed to the regime. American grain shipments and weapons sustained Chun's government while it killed people in Gwangju and tortured survivors for a decade after. Han Kang is the South Korean writer who has written the most carefully about what an empire does when it underwrites a massacre and then forgets.

She is also the first South Korean to win the Nobel in Literature. The 2024 award has been treated, in the West, as a kind of cultural diplomatic achievement. It is not. She won for refusing the diplomatic register entirely.

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Day Two · Black Death

You open the door of the morgue and you see your mother lying there
You open the door of your mother and you see yourself lying there
You open the door of yourself and you see your mother carrying you out

A black plastic bag is tied around your face
The bag has a small hole in it
You can breathe but only one breath at a time
The breath does not return.

— Working English in the spirit of "Day Two · Black Death," after Don Mee Choi, 2018. Each of the forty-nine poems is titled by its day, counting through a soul's wandering between bodies. The "you" of each poem is the dead, the body, the speaker, the reader, the country — the second-person pronoun is the central technical instrument of the book.

Day Forty-Nine · Face of Rhythm

By Day Forty-Nine the soul has either crossed or has not. Kim's last poem refuses both. The "you" is now also the country: the South Korean state that drowned three hundred children on a ferry it had failed to inspect, the U.S./Japanese occupation governments that drew the partition, the conscripted bodies that crossed the 38th parallel in both directions, the women who served as "comfort" for two empires. The forty-ninth poem returns the unburied to the country that did not bury them, and asks the country to count.

— Working description of the closing structure. The book's epilogue, "Face of Rhythm," reflects on the writing process and Kim's encounter with her own near-death paralysis during composition.

The poet

Born 1955 in Uljin, on Korea's east coast. Grew up under the Park Chung-hee dictatorship. Began publishing in the 1970s, when most established Korean literary journals refused women writers. Forced her own way through the shut door: thirteen collections of poetry over forty years, a dozen books of literary criticism, the reinvention of Korean lyric form via what she has called "women's writing as the writing of the dead." Has taught at Seoul Institute of the Arts since 1990. The 2018 New Directions volume — her ninth full-length English translation — and the 2019 Griffin Prize made her, in her sixties, one of the most internationally circulated Korean poets in any genre. Has continued to publish steadily into her seventies. Don Mee Choi's translation work has been honoured alongside her: the two are the rare poet/translator pair where both sides of the seam are recognised authors in English.

Why this voice

The Sewol ferry sank on 16 April 2014; 304 people drowned, 250 of them high-school students. The Park Geun-hye government's catastrophic response was a major cause of her impeachment and removal in 2017. Kim writes the dead the way the country tried not to. The forty-nine-poem structure is borrowed from Buddhist jaeil rites; she uses the inherited form to refuse the inherited consolation, and turns each day into an indictment of the South Korean state, the U.S. military presence, the patriarchal grammar of the Korean lyric tradition. The book is the most formally inventive Korean poetry collection of its decade. Reading it next to Bei Dao is reading two East Asian poets responding to two state-violence aftermaths — Tiananmen, Sewol — by making the lyric the place the dead can return to be counted.

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The opening · Minke speaks

People call me Minke.

My own name… for the time being I need not tell. Not because I'm crazy for mystery. I've thought about it quite a lot: I really do not need to push it forward to just anybody. So forgive me if I keep it to myself. The general picture is enough for now. Yes, of course I'll write it.

I've finally tamed myself to write something. Something? Yes, what you've just begun to read. Tame? Indeed: it has not been easy for me. Note: I am writing in Dutch, my second language, learned at Wonokromo, then in school. The language of my colonizer, my education, my masters.

— Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Bumi Manusia, 1980 · trans. Max Lane, 1990. The narrator Minke is a young Javanese man at the elite Dutch HBS school in 1898 — a fictional rendering of Tirto Adhi Soerjo, founder of the first Indonesian-language newspaper.

Nyai Ontosoroh · the concubine teaches

We have been ordered to fight, child. With what tools we have. With what dignity we can find. We have been beaten before. We will be beaten again. We fight as we are able. As honorably as we are able.

— Working English of Nyai Ontosoroh's instruction to Minke. The "Nyai" — the Javanese concubine to a Dutch master — is the moral and intellectual center of the novel; Pramoedya's most controversial choice and his greatest. The Indonesian state banned the book in 1981 for, among other things, "promoting communist sympathies"; the actual offense was that a colonial-era concubine was the smartest character in the book.

The book · Internet Archive

The writer

Born 1925 in Blora, central Java. Imprisoned three times — by the Dutch (1947–49, for the independence struggle), by Sukarno briefly (1960, for a book defending the Indonesian Chinese against the discriminatory PP-10 decree), and by Suharto (1965–1979, fourteen years, no trial, for being on the editorial board of Lentera, the cultural section of an organ associated with the Indonesian Communist Party). On Buru Island prison camp 1969–1979 he was denied paper and pencil for the first six years. He composed the four-book Buru Quartet in his head, telling it aloud to his fellow prisoners after work hours; finally permitted writing materials in 1975. Released 1979, kept under city arrest in Jakarta until the fall of Suharto in 1998. Won the Magsaysay Award 1995 (Indonesian government opposed). Died 30 April 2006 at home in Jakarta. Six wife, eight children. Eighteen books. Indonesia's most banned and most read writer.

Why this voice

The book documents the formation of Indonesian national consciousness in the late Dutch colonial period — and was banned in Indonesia for thirty-seven years for it. Pramoedya was imprisoned for fourteen years total, never charged. He composed the novel in his head, told it aloud to fellow prisoners after work hours, and only wrote it down after his release. The reasons the Indonesian state could not let this book circulate are exactly the reasons to read it: a young Javanese man learns, in colonial Dutch, that the canon of Europe is not enough to think Indonesia. He becomes a writer. He marries a half-Dutch girl whose colonial-era status the law refuses to recognize. He loses everything. He keeps writing. The novel is the founding document of how a colonized country becomes a nation in its own language. It was composed in the language of the Dutch and translated into the language of every other empire that has tried to make Indonesia legible.

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April 17, 1975 · the day everyone leaves

We are seven children and Pa and Ma. Pa is a captain in the Lon Nol military police. Pa has a Jeep. The Jeep has petrol. The men with the black pajamas come into our courtyard with their guns and they tell Pa we have to leave the city for three days because the Americans are going to bomb. Pa says yes. Pa says we will pack a small bag. Pa says we will be back. Pa is lying because Pa knows. I am five. I do not know that Pa is lying. I am happy because we are going on a trip. The trip will last four years.

— Working English of the opening movement, after the published HarperCollins text. Ung's narrative voice is the child she was — present-tense, simple-sentence, accreting the catastrophe one observation at a time. The Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh of its 2 million residents in 72 hours. The "trip" was the start of the four-year regime that killed an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians, roughly a quarter of the country.

The deaths · counted, in the order they came

Pa was taken into the forest on a borrowed bicycle and shot. Loung was six. She listened for the gunshot from the rice field. She did not hear it; the distance was too far; she counted the silence. Ma sent Loung and her two sisters to a "youth camp" — child labor in a separate village — to keep them alive. Ma was taken later, with the two youngest. Loung's older sister Keav died of food poisoning in a labor brigade; Loung was not there. Loung was trained as a child soldier. She was seven, then eight, holding a rifle most days taller than she was. The Vietnamese army crossed the border on Christmas Day 1978 and pushed the Khmer Rouge into the western jungles. Loung was eight when the regime ended. Three of her four parents and siblings she'd known on April 17, 1975 had been killed by the Khmer Rouge.

— Working summary of the central narrative, after the published English text. The book's structural choice — the present-tense voice of the child, refusing the survivor's retrospective wisdom — is what makes it work both as memoir and as documentary. The reader is forced to assemble the politics; the child cannot.

The book · Internet Archive

The writer

Born 17 April 1970 in Phnom Penh. Father was a captain in the Lon Nol regime's military police; the family was upper-middle-class urban Cambodian — the precise demographic the Khmer Rouge targeted for elimination. Five years old when Phnom Penh fell. Lost her father (executed), mother (killed), and two sisters during the regime. Smuggled out to a Thai refugee camp in 1979 with one surviving brother; resettled in Essex Junction, Vermont in 1980. Learned English; finished high school in Vermont; BA Saint Michael's College. Worked at the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association in Vermont; became national spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World in 1997 — the year the Mine Ban Treaty was signed in Ottawa. First They Killed My Father (2000) was the first full-length English-language memoir of the Khmer Rouge by a child survivor. Has returned to Cambodia repeatedly to work on landmine clearance and to support Cambodian women's organisations. Lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Why this voice

The U.S. role in Cambodia's catastrophe is the part of the story U.S. classrooms most often omit. The 1969–1973 U.S. bombing of Cambodia — Operation Menu and the subsequent campaigns — dropped roughly 2.7 million tons of explosives on a country the U.S. was not at war with. The bombing radicalized the rural Cambodian population that the Khmer Rouge then recruited from. Ung does not editorialize this; she is five years old. The political reading is the reader's responsibility. Reading her next to Bảo Ninh and Dương Thu Hương is reading three Southeast Asian writers on the same regional catastrophe from three positions: Vietnamese soldier on the winning side, Vietnamese dissident on the home front, Cambodian child survivor of the war the U.S. expanded into her country. The U.S. deportation regime that returns Cambodian-Americans to a country most have not seen since 1979 makes this voice immediate to the volume's premise.

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The festival on the island of K—

The Festival began at dawn. The drums had been wet down so they would not split. The young men carried the wooden Christ on their shoulders and the older men carried the rooster cages and the women carried the children. The Commander's helicopter passed overhead three times before settling on the football field that had been the schoolyard before the schoolyard had been the parade ground before the parade ground had been the rice field that the Spaniards took in 1571. The drums were dry now. The drums could split. The Festival could begin.

— Working English of the opening movement, after the published Norton text. Three lives — Anna Villaverde, the resistance organizer; Eliza Hansen, her American-Filipina cousin; Adrian Banyaga, the wealthy son of a Marcos collaborator — intersect during a Marcos-era Festival on the southern Philippine island of K—. The Festival lasts three days. So does the novel's present tense. Around it Rosca rebuilds three centuries of Philippine colonial history — Spanish, American, Japanese — in extended flashback.

The architecture · three days, three centuries

Each of the three days holds a section. Each section interleaves the festival present with a generational flashback that reaches back through the families' colonial past — Spanish encomienda, U.S. occupation after the 1898 Philippine-American War (an American war the U.S. school system mostly forgets), Japanese occupation, Marcos's martial law. The three protagonists are each, in some way, descended from the same colonial wound; the novel argues that the Marcos dictatorship is not a deviation from Philippine history but its logical heir. The festival climaxes in an assassination attempt against the Commander. The novel ends without telling us whether it succeeded.

— Working description of the structure. The novel is a deliberate settling-of-accounts: it asks the reader to track each colonial generation forward to the present and to identify whom each character's grandparents served, owned, killed, or fled.

The book · Internet Archive

The novelist

Born 1946 in Manila. UP Diliman, where she studied with the great Philippine novelist NVM Gonzalez. Worked as a journalist at the Asia-Philippines Leader through the early Marcos period; the magazine was shut down when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law on 21 September 1972. Detained in 1973 in Camp Crame — the same complex where opposition leader Benigno Aquino was held — for her writing. Released after international pressure; went into exile in 1977. Settled in New York. Co-founded the Philippine Forum and GABRIELA Network USA in 1989. Twice Blessed (1992) won the American Book Award. Continued to organize for women's rights, against U.S. military bases in the Philippines, and against the Duterte and Marcos Jr. governments. Returned to the Philippines in the late 2010s. Lives in Manila. The most consistently radical Filipina novelist of her generation in the U.S. literary system.

Why this voice

The bookstore default for "Filipino American novel" is Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (1946), and Bulosan is essential — the volume already pairs them in this session. Rosca is the contemporary cousin: a writer who lived under and was imprisoned by the U.S.-backed Marcos dictatorship and who wrote the book that explains why the Marcos period is not a foreign aberration but the logical inheritance of three colonial regimes. The U.S. role is fully on the page: the 1898 annexation, the half-century occupation, the Cold War alignment, the basing agreements, the Reagan administration's continued support for Marcos until weeks before his fall. Reading State of War next to America Is in the Heart is reading the U.S./Philippines relationship from both directions across forty years. Reading both alongside the volume's deportation theme is reading why the U.S. expects Filipinos to be deported back to a country whose 20th-century catastrophe the U.S. helped make.

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The poem · opening (Roman transliteration)

Hum dekhenge
Lazim hai ke hum bhi dekhenge
Wo din ke jis ka wada hai
Jo lauh-e-azal mein likha hai
Hum dekhenge.

Jab zulm-o-sitam ke koh-e-garaan
Rui ki tarah ud jaayenge
Hum mehkoomon ke paaon tale
Jab dharti dhad dhad dhadkegi
Aur ahl-e-hakam ke sar oopar
Jab bijli kad kad kadkegi —
Hum dekhenge.

Uthega an-al-haq ka naara
Jo main bhi hoon, aur tum bhi ho
Aur raj karegi khalq-e-khuda
Jo main bhi hoon, aur tum bhi ho.

— Faiz Ahmed Faiz, "Hum Dekhenge," 1979 · opening + closing of the 21-line nazm. Full Urdu (Nastaʿlīq + Roman) at Rekhta.

In English · same lines

We shall see —
It is necessary that we, too, shall see
That promised day
Inscribed on the eternal tablet —
We shall see.

When mountains of cruelty and torment
Will fly away like cotton
Under the feet of we, the ruled,
The earth will pulse and beat —
And over the heads of those who hold power
Lightning will crack and crack and crack.

The cry of An-al-Haq — "I am the Truth" — will rise,
The truth which is me, and which is you,
And khalq-e-khuda, the people of God, shall reign —
The ones who are me, and who are you.

— Working English, after translations by Naomi Lazard (The True Subject, Princeton, 1988) and Mustansir Dalvi (2020). The Sufi cry An-al-Haq is the tenth-century declaration of Mansur al-Hallaj — "I am the Truth" — for which he was executed in Baghdad in 922. Translators of Faiz handle the line variously; it refuses to flatten in English.

Hear it · Iqbal Bano singing Faiz

The poet

Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born 1911 in Sialkot, colonial Punjab. He served in the British Indian Army, edited the Pakistan Times, and was imprisoned four years in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case (1951–1955) for an alleged communist plot against the Liaquat Ali Khan government. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize, awarded the Lenin Peace Prize (1962), and lived in exile in Beirut during the late Zia years editing Lotus, the journal of the Afro-Asian Writers' Association. He died in Lahore in 1984. His Urdu fused the classical ghazal — its mehbooba, its wine, its night — with the political vocabulary of the twentieth century.

Why this poem

Zia-ul-Haq seized power in 1977 and tried to bind Pakistan to a state Islam. Faiz wrote his answer in 1979 — a poem that takes the regime's own scriptural language and turns it into a promise of overthrow. Wa-yabqā wajhu rabbika is Quranic: only the face of God remains. Faiz: yes — and on that day, the idols (the regime's, money's, power's) are smashed, the thrones tossed, the people khalq-e-khuda rule. It is sung wherever a state tries to silence its writers — Lahore 1986, Delhi 2019, Karachi students 2022. The poem refuses to stay in 1979.

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The poem · opening · Chinese

卑鄙是卑鄙者的通行证，
高尚是高尚者的墓志铭。
看吧，在那镀金的天空中，
飘满了死者弯曲的倒影。

— Bei Dao, "回答" ("The Answer"), opening four lines, 1976. The poem was photocopied and passed hand to hand at the April 1976 Tiananmen demonstrations; published officially only after 1979 in Today (今天), the underground literary magazine Bei Dao co-founded.

In English

Debasement is the password of the base.
Nobility is the epitaph of the noble.
See how the gilded sky is covered
with the drifting twisted shadows of the dead.

The Ice Age is over now,
why is there still ice everywhere?
The Cape of Good Hope has been discovered,
why do a thousand sails contest the Dead Sea?

— Translated from the Chinese by Bonnie S. McDougall. The August Sleepwalker, New Directions, 1990.

The famous refusal · the central stanza

I — do — not — believe!

I came into this world
bringing only paper, rope, a shadow,
to proclaim before the judgment
the voice that has been judged:

Let me tell you, world,
I — do — not — believe!
If a thousand challengers lie beneath your feet,
count me as number one thousand and one.

— The four-word refusal that became the unofficial anthem of post-Cultural-Revolution Chinese youth. Read at Tiananmen 1976, then 1989; spray-painted on Beijing walls in both Aprils.

The poet

Born 1949 in Beijing, the year of the People's Republic. Sent down to a construction labor brigade outside Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. Started writing poems on construction-site scraps. Co-founded the underground literary magazine Today (今天) in 1978, which printed mimeographed poetry on Beijing brick walls during the Democracy Wall movement. The Misty Poets were so named by their detractors — official Party critics complained the new poetry was insufficiently transparent in its meaning. Was on a reading tour in Berlin in May 1989 when the Tiananmen massacre happened; the government arrested him in absentia. Lived in exile in Stockholm, Berlin, Aarhus, and finally the U.S. for nearly twenty years. Returned to China in stages; lives now in Hong Kong and Beijing intermittently. Has been on the Nobel shortlist many times. Heavily censored in mainland China; freely published elsewhere.

Why this voice

"I — do — not — believe!" — the poem's central refusal — became the unofficial anthem of post-Cultural-Revolution Chinese youth. Bei Dao is the most translated Chinese poet of his generation and one of the few whose work has remained legible across the political divides of the last fifty years. The poem refuses both the Maoist orthodoxy that produced the Cultural Revolution and the post-Mao orthodoxy that justified Tiananmen 1989. It refuses by means of the simplest move available to a poet: insisting that the language of belief, of nobility, of debasement, is not the property of the state. Bei Dao counts himself, on the day of the poem, "as number one thousand and one." The refusal is not heroic; it is bureaucratic. He is taking a number in a long line.

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The opening · "Dear Husband"

Dear Husband,

I lost our children today.

Her name was Rehana Haque, and she had lost her children at the start of a war.

— Tahmima Anam, A Golden Age, opening, 2007. The whole novel turns on the gap between Rehana writing to her dead husband — telling him she has lost the children — and what "lost" means: not dead. Joined the resistance. The novel is the long act of refusing to let that gap be a tragedy.

The hidden weapons

Rehana buried the rifles under the rosebushes. The rifles were heavy, and the earth was light. She had not known earth could be so light. She had not known her hands could be so strong. The roses, she thought, would be confused. They would lift their faces toward the rifles and call them sun.

— Working English of the rose-garden chapter — Rehana hides the Mukti Bahini's weapons in her own Dhaka garden. The novel writes the war through what the woman of the house must do to keep her children alive: feed soldiers, bury rifles, sew flags, lie to neighbors. The domestic interior is the war front.

The book · Internet Archive

The novelist

Born 1975 in Dhaka, four years after the founding of Bangladesh. Daughter of Mahfuz Anam, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Star, the largest English-language newspaper in Bangladesh. Grew up in Paris, New York, and Bangkok with her parents' UN postings. Doctorate in social anthropology at Harvard 2005, with a dissertation on Bangladesh's collective memory of the 1971 war. A Golden Age grew out of that research, woven through with her own family's stories. Co-founded the tech-for-social-justice startup ROLI, then helped run her father's newspaper through the Hasina-government crackdowns on independent press. Lives in London. Trilogy continues with The Good Muslim (2011) — about the post-war Islamicization of Bangladesh — and The Bones of Grace (2016) — about the diasporic Bangladeshi inheritance.

Why this voice

The 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War from the perspective of a widowed mother whose two children join the resistance. Pakistani forces killed an estimated 300,000–3 million Bangladeshis during the nine-month war; an estimated 200,000–400,000 women were raped. The U.S. under Nixon and Kissinger backed Pakistan throughout — Nixon called the West Pakistanis "the people we admire" and called Indira Gandhi "the old witch" for supporting the Bengali resistance. Anam writes the war as the entry of women into a public-political subjectivity Bangladesh did not return them from. The most political move in the novel is the smallest: Rehana buries rifles in her rose garden. The interior of the home is the war front. This is the work the U.S. canon, which has spent fifty years calling the Vietnam War "the war," cannot read because it has not been told to.

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"My Tibetanness"

Thirty-eight years in exile.
Yet, no nation supports us.
Not a inch of land we can call our own.

Everywhere I go,
they ask me, where are you from.
I say I am from Tibet,
they look at the map.
The map does not have Tibet.
I look at the map.
The map does not know me.
The map and I
are not on speaking terms.

— Working English in the spirit of "My Tibetanness," from Kora, after the published TibetWrites text. Tsundue's recurring formal move is the deadpan factual line followed by the small turn — "the map does not know me" — that reframes the politics from inside the speaker's body. He writes from the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, McLeod Ganj, and Bangalore.

"Horizon"

From home you can see
home no more.
You moved one street, then another;
you moved one country, then another.
You will move once more.
The horizon is moving with you.
The horizon is now your only home.

— Working English of "Horizon," after the published Kora. The poem is read at most Tibetan exile community gatherings. The third-generation Tibetan refugee — born in India, schooled in India, identified by the Indian state as a "foreigner," refused entry by China, and ineligible for an Indian passport — is the figure the poem holds.

The poet · the activist

Born ~1974 to road-construction-worker parents in a Tibetan settlement near Manali. Educated at Tibetan Children's Village schools. BA Literature, Loyola College Madras; MA English Literature, Bombay University. In 2002, scaled the scaffolding of the Oberoi Towers Hotel in Mumbai during a state visit by Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji and unfurled a "Free Tibet" banner from the eleventh floor; arrested. In 2005, climbed onto a high-rise in Bangalore during another visit by Premier Wen Jiabao with a similar banner; arrested. Has been arrested at least ten times for nonviolent protest against Chinese state visits, in India, and against Tibetan exile community marches that the Indian government has tried to contain. Lives in Dharamsala and Bangalore. The most internationally read Tibetan-in-exile writing in English; Kora has gone through multiple expanded editions, each adding new poems written for new actions.

Why this voice

Tsundue is the rare writer who is both a serious activist and a serious poet. The headband is not symbolic in the soft sense; he has worn it every day for over twenty years, and will continue until the political condition of Tibet changes or he dies. The poems refuse both the orientalist Tibet of Western romance — the singing-bowl, robes-and-incense Tibet that funds Hollywood — and the gloomy position-paper Tibet of policy NGOs. He writes the Tibet of someone who has never been there and may never go: the Tibet of the third-generation refugee whose passport says "Identity Certificate (Yellow Book)" and whose country exists on no map his neighbors can recognize. The poem is the country, until the country can be a country. Reading him in this volume's last session sets the deportation question against the longest-running modern statelessness in Asia.

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The narrator · Seit, age fifteen, remembers

I am standing again in front of this small painting in its plain frame. Tomorrow I must leave for the village in the morning, and I look at the painting long and hard, as if it would tell me, on this farewell, my road to take.

Two travellers are crossing the steppe. The man is taller, with broad shoulders, wearing a shabby quilted soldier's coat. He walks with firm steps, leaning slightly into the wind. Beside him, holding fast to his arm, walks a young woman. You can not see her face, only her form, in a long old dress that the wind whips against her body. They are not running. They are walking. Walking toward something the painter has not painted, but that they can see.

That woman is Jamilia. The man is Daniyar. I am the boy who painted them.

— Working English, after the Russian translation of Jamilia, 1958. The novella is a wartime love story narrated by Seit, a fifteen-year-old who watches his sister-in-law Jamilia fall in love with the wounded soldier Daniyar. The frame is a painting Seit makes years later in art school, of two figures walking out of the village toward an unknown horizon.

Daniyar's song

The voice rose. The Kyrgyz steppe rose with it. The mountains, the rivers, the great absences. Jamilia stopped pulling at the harness. She turned to listen. We all turned to listen. The horses lifted their heads. The night was very still.

— Daniyar, the wounded soldier-stranger, sings in the night while threshing grain. The song is what makes Jamilia leave her absent husband — the village judges her; the judgment is the village's tragedy, not hers. Aitmatov's first major work; the moment Soviet Central Asian literature became readable as world literature.

The book · Internet Archive

The writer

Born 1928 in the village of Sheker, in what is now the Talas Region of Kyrgyzstan, then a republic of the USSR. His father Törökul was a Kyrgyz Communist Party official, arrested in 1937 and executed in the Stalinist purges of 1938; the family was officially "enemies of the people." Chingiz survived only because his mother fled with him to a remote village. Trained as a livestock veterinarian, then as a writer at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow. His Buru Quartet equivalent — the Stalin-era writing he could not publish — appeared only after glasnost: The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years (1980), The Place of the Skull (1986). Served as Kyrgyzstan's ambassador to the EU after Soviet collapse. Died 2008.

Why this voice

The U.S. left's Asian canon mostly stops at the borders of the former French and British empires — Vietnam, India, the Philippines. Soviet Central Asia is a literary blank to most American readers, even those who have spent twenty years arguing about Afghanistan. Aitmatov is the entry. Jamilia is short, gorgeous, and carries a culture that the U.S. has been fighting wars adjacent to (Afghanistan, the post-Soviet republics, the Uyghur question) without ever reading. The Kyrgyz oral tradition runs through the prose: the song that wins Jamilia is not a metaphor but the specific Kyrgyz köchpö — a song that arrests labor and rearranges the village. Aitmatov writes Soviet Central Asia from inside, as a literature, not a frontier.

Carry it