حیدر شہباز Haider Shahbaz
@HaiderShahbaz5
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translator I phd student I thinking of ways to be together and free in a white world I header: Thania Petersen
Joined July 2017
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I’m happy to share my chapter, “Fahmida Riaz’s Awaz: Translation and Solidarities in the Global South,” which appears in the edited collection, Translation and Decolonisation:
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“They accuse us of what they themselves are guilty of. This is what the criminal always does. They’ll bomb you, then accuse you of bombing yourself. They’ll crush your skull, then accuse you of attacking him.”
- Malcolm X.
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Toni Morrison describes fascism as the conversion of “all public services to private entrepreneurship…so that the narrow chasm between governance and business disappears.” It “changes citizens into taxpayers..neighbours into consumers” and produces “the perfect capitalist…
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Marxist, feminist, and anti-imperialist Urdu writers have long written of Palestinian resistance. Their solidarity can guide us today as we try to learn once again, together, from the liberation struggles that are moving us towards a new world. Some Urdu examples below 🧵
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Langston Hughes attended Columbia. He was denied a dorm room because he was black. From his poem, Kids Who Die:
This is for the kids who die,
Black and white,
For kids will die certainly.
The old and rich will live on awhile,
As always,
Eating blood and gold,
Letting kids die
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The immigration officer at islamabad airport took one look at my passport and visa and said: itni umar ho gayi hai, abhi bhi student 😭😭
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The third world bourgeoisie will defend whiteness more passionately than the whites themselves. It’s all they have: etiquettes, metrics, the english language, legality, foreign aid.
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It's been 20 years since Edward Said passed away. His work has changed the ways we think about literature, culture, history, and politics in a world imagined and created by colonizers. I wanted to share some of my favourite recent works that engage his thinking 🧵
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‘Solidarity’ - a magazine published by the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) about non-alignment, anti-imperialism, womens liberation and national struggles in the Third World.
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Fahmida Riaz founded and edited the magazine, Awaz. In an editorial (June ‘80), she writes: “We don’t see hatred for Jewish people in Palestinian literature. Instead, it shows the developed consciousness that uncovers the ghost of imperialism, which gives birth to Zionism.”
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one who is willing to kill a human being for a product (a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car) or kill generations for control of products (oil, drugs, fruit, gold).”
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Balraj Manra was an avant-garde Marxist Urdu writer who published a handful of ‘compositions’ in the sixties and early seventies. My translation of his first composition - a surreal text that challenges how prose is seen and read - for
@FenceBooks
:
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Why I detest LLF and KLF:
When you cannot publicly criticise the military (the largest political economic and cultural force in the country), Baluch and Pashtun poets go missing every other day, progressive teachers are fired and conferences on ‘71 banned without reason...
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Walter Rodney’s children’s books told fictionalised stories about the histories and cultures of the different migrant groups that were brought to Guyana. He only got to prepare two of them before he was assassinated. They were published posthumously.
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Here’s my short essay on the connections between Urdu literature and Palestinian resistance. May Palestine be free and may all our collective freedoms become possible along the path of its liberation
📢NEW RELEASE📢:
From Faiz Ahmad Faiz to Fahmida Riaz,
#Urdu
writers and poets have long wielded their pen for
#Palestine
🇵🇸
@HaiderShahbaz5
explores this history.
a📸
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The debate around translator's name on book covers isn't just about due credit - it risks the very fiction of individualism that underpins modern creativity/creative industry. Books are never written by single authors, but by communities of people. Translators reveal this secret.
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The French Urdu writer Julien’s new book of stories, دریدا حرامدا (Derrida, You Bastard!), is now available with the Karachi publisher, Maktaba-e-Danyal. Includes a strange, hilarious story about Derrida coming to give a lecture at FC college in Lahore.
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Western academia still wants to treat our literatures as raw materials for their knowledge economy, their theory machines - not as theory in its own right. We must see our literatures as making theory, not as raw materials that need western theory to become meaningful/valuable.
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“Let us begin with the assumption that an artist is not a reactionary, a swindler, a hypocrite or a coward.”
- Faiz Ahmed Faiz (tr. Finna Glagoleva), “The Artist’s Role in a Developing Country” (from Lotus, July 1973).
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Faiz wrote many other poems about Palestine. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, he lived in Beirut in order to escape the dictatorship in Pakistan, and edited Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings. He had to leave the city due to Israel’s invasion. Edward Said wrote about Faiz in Beirut.
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The best thing a novelist or poet can teach you is bravery. Not how to use punctuation and metaphors. All my fav writers - Baldwin, Thiongo, hooks, Bolano, Sara Shagufta and more- have taught me to write without fear.
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Faiz arrived in Beirut in 1979 to take the editorship of Lotus, a magazine of Afro-Asian writers, and to go into self-imposed exile from Zia’s rule. He left in 1982 when Israel invaded. One of the Palestinians he met in Beirut was Edward Said, who wrote this in an essay from ‘84:
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some fav writings on Fanon: a thread
C.L.R. James, From DuBois to Fanon
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Spent a lazy day at the majlis taraqqi adab in Lahore.
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Fahmida Riaz published translations of the Palestinian writers, Mahmoud Darwish and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, in Awaz.
The magazine also published the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s famous poem, ‘For Palestinian Martyrs’
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Anwar Saeed. ‘Far From Love' I, 2021, Acrylics on Fabric (6 X 7 ft).
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Kishwar Naheed translated Leila Khaled’s autobiography into Urdu. In an interview I conducted with Naheed in Islamabad, Pakistan on 14th Sept 2022, Naheed said: “Tranlsating Leila Khaled was, for me, a way of honouring my desire to participate in the Palestinian struggle.”
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Pakistan’s first diamond jubilee film, Zerqa, made in 1969 by Riaz Shahid and starring Neelo, is about the Palestinian liberation struggle (and also serves as an implicit critique of dictatorship in Pakistan). The iconic leftist poet Habib Jalib wrote the lyrics.
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“Why was there no outcry? Why was there no concern? Because, again, the press very skilfully made the victims look like they were the criminals, and the criminals look like they were the victims.”
- Malcolm X. Rochester, New York. February 16, 1965.
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So many writers feel ‘useless’ in the face of historic crisis today because literature is increasingly being reduced to a private commodity for the purpose of leisure, entertainment, beauty - all things that obfuscate its social power to transform us and the world
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What orthodox Islamists, Western Islamophobes, and Tate-style Islamophiles all get wrong about Islam is that they reduce it to texts. Islam is not a series of texts, it is a series of histories. You can’t fit dynamic histories into static,unchanging textual representations.
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The best academic book on Urdu literature I’ve read this year. It shows how a narrowly defined modern Muslim identity, first invented by colonial institutions like Fort William, has shaped popular Urdu literature from Mir Amman to Deputy Nazir to Nasim Hijazi to Umera Ahmed.
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The radical poet, Habib Jalib, who was imprisoned by the military dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan, called out the military regime by showing its dependency on Cold War alliances between the US and Israel in his poem ‘Reagan’ (tr. Shahab Ahmad)
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I'm so happy to announce that I've been awarded the 2020 Jawad Memorial Prize for Translation for my work on Khalida Hussain's short story, The Sea. Many thanks to
@anniezaidi
and the judges, Mehr Farooqi and Rakhshanda Jalil.
Announcing the winner of the 2020 Jawad prize for Urdu English translation.
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Happy birthday Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin! Everyone should read Anarchism and the Black Revolution.
Happy Birthday to civil rights/Black Power movement veteran and former political prisoner, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin. We celebrated him in NYC recently and he was so so happy, it was a beautiful thing to see. Show him some love on his continuation day if you're able.
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Afzal Ahsan Randhawa was a Punjabi writer and translator. His translation of Achebe's Things Fall Apart is one of the best books I've read. He translated many other African and Global South writers including Kofi Anyidoho, Kofi Awoonor, and Luis Sepulveda
#WorldTranslationDay
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Kafka’s short stories. In Naiyer Masud’s translations. Available from Aaj Books. WhatsApp: 03212721195;
03003451649.
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An Urdu translation of the feminist, anti-imperialist writer Selma James’s iconic essay ‘Sex, Race, and Class’ was recently published.
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Said's 'The Question of Palestine' is one of his most important books. A reminder that his work can't be understood without the history of collective Palestinian resistance. It is also his only book-length translation in Urdu - a lesson in how, as Said would say, theory travels.
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Faiz's poem For Palestinian Martyrs in the '81 issue of Fahmida Riaz's feminist magazine, Awaz. At the time, Faiz was living in exile in Beirut. Soon after, Awaz was banned and Riaz charged with sedition. She also went into exile (in India), only to return after Zia's death.
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It's finally happening! My first translation will be out soon with
@HarperCollinsIN
. Got my first look at the cover today. More details soon. 🥳🥳🥳
I still can't believe I got to translate Mirza Athar Baig - a writer unlike any I've read before (anywhere, in any language).
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The avant-garde writer, Enver Sajjad, wrote the hybrid prose-poetry piece, ‘From A to Z: A Dialogue with Mahmoud Darwish,’ about the censorship of writers and texts under tyrannical regimes.
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The original publication of Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poem, “Come Back Africa,” inspired by the South African struggle against apartheid, published in the Urdu magazine Naqoosh (July 1955).
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Whenever I asked my grandmother about partition, she would say (in Punjabi): Who knows? One day we were eating from the same thaali. The next day they were gone.
That’s it? I always wanted to hear more. She didn’t - perhaps couldn’t - say more. Rest in peace Dadu ❤️
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As Cesaire, Fanon, and many others have pointed out, the Global North and the elites of the Global South work together. It’s not a matter of blaming one or the other. It’s a matter of understanding how they’re linked - and resisting both.
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“Colonialism gave capitalism an added lease on life and prolonged its existence.”
- Walter Rodney.
Today, on Marx’s birthday, here are some books that helped me better understand the relationship between imperialism and capitalism 🧵
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and beautiful thing (down to the Orientalism-lite design). But culture isn’t just a pretty thing you look at or hear. Culture is also the quiet and loud ways we tell the rich, the imperialists, the racists and patriarchs that their game is up, that new times are possible.
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Faiz’s late, Beirut period is some of his best poetry.
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I have not read Declan Walsh's book. It might be well written and full of profound insights. I dont know.
I'm simply tired of white experts (Walsh, Lieven, Lamb etc) who claim to explain Pakistan. The stench of orientalism coming from these books is too much.
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Booker winners and American authors are given special invitations but local authors are told to buy their own tickets, when there is zero arts funding in the country but all the development money in the world to buy computers and pay foreign experts, books that criticise the...
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“Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed otherwise to me...” Edward Said.
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The writer, critic, and editor, Asif Farrukhi compiled a double issue of his magazine, Dunyazad, on representations of Palestinian resistance in Urdu literature and Urdu translations of Palestinian writers. It is the most comprehensive work on this issue.
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The poet, Amjad Islam Amjad, dedicated his book of translations from Arabic to the Palestinian resistance. The book includes translations of Nizar Qabbani, Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, and Fadwa Tuqan.
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Excited to read some new stuff on translation 🙏🏾
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1. Maya Mikdashi and Jasbir K. Puar's "Queer Theory and Permanent War" asks "what queer theory may look like when it is not routed through Euro-American
histories, sexualities, locations, or bodies."
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Please stop this condemnation of people leaving the country “illegally.” The state is absolutely complicit. Pakistan’s economy cannot run without exporting labour. We sell the misery of our working class abroad. That is what sustains the bourgeoisie at home.
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America has perfected the technologies of a merely private life - drugs, tv shows, cars, games, comfort. There is little sense that there is a shared, public, collective world between us. Even politics is strictly personal - you wear it, eat it, buy it for your lounge.
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state are disappeared from shops overnight, when people like Sabeen and Mashal are murdered in broad daylight.
In such a time - what can a literature festival be except a gauche way for the rich to feel more rich? A way to restrict literature, turn it into a harmless...
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Sahir Ludhianvi’s Urdu poem, Khoon Phir Khoon Hai, written for Patrice Lumumba, in English and French translation. Afro-Asian Writings, Vol.1, Summer 1968.
Here’s Ludhianvi’s Urdu version:
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The cultural industry around Faiz today seems all the more distasteful when you read his work - he uses ‘hum’ (we) way more than ‘main’ (I), he rarely talks about his personal life, and he always emphasises collective Marxist liberation rather than the cult of individualism.
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From a speech delivered at Corn Hill Methodist Church, Rochester, New York. February 16, 1965 (just days before his assassination). Picture from the book ‘Malcolm X: The Last Speeches’, ed. Bruce Perry (Pathfinder, 1989), p. 161.
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I��m putting together an online course for
@kitabgharlahore
, a community library in Lahore, on anticolonial thought. Full scholarships available. All course fees will go towards maintaining the library and supporting its publications. Sign up here:
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It was an absolute pleasure to teach alongside Ammar Ali Jan at FCCU. I was inspired and invigorated by his work.
The way
@FCCollege
has treated him is shameful. I stand in solidarity with
@ammaralijan
and urge the administration to reinstate this brilliant academic and teacher
I sadly announce that I will no longer be teaching at Forman Christian College. Earlier this year, my contract was changed to visiting faculty from the position of Assistant Professor. Now I wont continue as a visiting lecturer either.
After returning to Pakistan in 2016, was
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Most of the country has no access to safe drinking water, but yes, let’s focus our energies on creating premium water companies that further destroy the environment and consolidate money and resources in the hands of a few. Bourgeois desires are a surreal dream honestly
Did you know that bottled water from Evian in France and Voss in Norway can sell for such high prices because of the premium quality of water that comes from the pristine glaciers in those countries? However, Pakistan too has some of the purest water in the world, sourced from
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Ghassan Kanafani, from a letter to his son.
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I’ve always been taught to control my writing, master it, make it mine. But the more I write, the more I think that my writing is not mine. It emerges from a web of relations and it creates, in turn, its own web of relations. Everyday, I sit and watch it spread, entangle.
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A profile of Ho Chi Minh in the Sept 1970 issue of the anti-imperialist, progressive Urdu weekly Lail-o-Nahar.
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Happiest in the archives 😊
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“Moscow is a city, and Moscow is an idea too.”
From Krishan Chandar’s 1952 Urdu novel on the Telangana Rebellion ‘Jab Khait Jagey’ (When Farms Woke Up).
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This is why I always read the Acknowledgements section first. It tells you a lot about the book. Who funded it, supported it, revised it. Who is the book talking to. Who is talking to the book. These relations are not extraneous but fundamental to the creative process.
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The most powerful medium of contemporary Orientalism is the Instagram of every other amateur Lahori photographer on a quest to ‘capture’ the ‘timeless’ city in some saturated photographs of old buildings and working class people.
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I spent a large part of the past four years reading, translating, and talking to Mirza Athar Baig. I can safely say that Urdu has never known a writer like him. I share what I've learned about him, literature, and (our) modernity in
@thecaravanindia
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My translation of the surrealist and Third Worldist Urdu writer Enver Sajjad’s prose poem “From A to Z: A Dialogue with Mahmoud Darwish.”
Enver Sajjad’s "From A to Z: A Dialogue with Mahmoud Darwish" (tr.
@HaiderShahbaz5
) imagines a world in which the very letters of the alphabet face persecution. Read this prose poem here:
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Walking into Amerika like...send your prayers 🙏🏾
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How about we agree that we don’t need to follow Europe and we don’t need to follow riyasat-e-madina. We dream and create something entirely new, entirely different, entirely better. Neither east nor west; neither tradition nor modernity. Let’s not restrict our imaginations 🌸
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I'm scanning a number of early Urdu prose texts for my grad studies. Happy to share the pdfs with other students or people who might be interested. Let me know🙏🏾
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The avant-garde Urdu writer Zahida Zaidi wrote poems, plays, novels, and also translated Beckett, Sartre, and Ionesco. Here is a poem, Tum (You), from November 1971 (Image:
@Rekhta
). Her rewriting of Waiting for Godot as a play set during the first Gulf War is also worth reading.
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Two books on Karl Marx and his relevance in South Asia by the iconic Sibte Hassan.
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Getting ready for Kishwer Naheed August 🙏🏾
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Sitting with my immunocompromised mother, hospitalised after 2 days in Lahore, she couldn’t breathe. Thinking of those fighting for clean air, for justice, and those who now fight from the other side - Fanon, Greg Tate, Agha sb - nd what Agha sb called “freedom’s terrible thirst”
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Amna Mufti’s Paani Mar Raha Hai is one of my fav contemporary Urdu novels. A surreal-mythical-religious story about the current ecological crisis and longer histories of water in South Asia, especially dealing with the Indus Water Treaty. My translation in
@asymptotejrnl
:
This
#TranslationTuesday
, we journey to
#Pakistan
with new fiction from celebrated author Amna Mufti.
Translated by
@HaiderShahbaz5
, this story set during
#partition
hinges on the fault lines between geopolitical boundaries, reverberating even today:
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I like historians who care more about the future than the past, who study the past to remind us of the possibility of the future.
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“Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed otherwise to me...” Edward Said.
APNews: Arts Council England (
@ace_national
) has updated its policies, warning that "political statements" made by individuals linked to an organisation can cause "reputational risk", breaching funding agreements (1/5)
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I’m thinking today of Lahore, the beat of dhol, the rhythm of a commons without end, the dream of a world without law. May we all live in the protection of music. Rest in peace Pappu Saeen.
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Check out this wonderful edited collection from
@kitabgharlahore
, edited by
@dontharrisme
and Ameer Hamza. Harris’s essay on the contemporary university in Pakistan and its colonial logics of humanities and social science education is the best thing I’ve read in months.
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My review of Julien’s latest Urdu short story collection, Derrida Haramda! (Derrida, You Bastard!).
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After a term full of French theory and Urdu lit, I’m looking forward to the guilty pleasures of Anglophone fiction. Might’ve gone overboard and got too many books for a tiny little winter break. What should I read first?
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Aimé Césaire taught us that fascism in Europe was the process of colonial techniques returning home. The horrors Europe had unleashed on the rest of the world were now applied to Europeans. A similar process is taking place in Pakistan...
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Please don’t refer to US/Europe as models we should aspire towards. Genocide and enslavement are not aspirations. We don’t have to be the image of our colonisers. There are other worlds, other futures, other life forms, other aspirations, and we can imagine them together 🌸
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A cartoon about the May 1926 British General Strike in the June 1926 issue of the Lahore-based, Urdu journal “Inqalab”.
Labour is drawn as a sort of Gulliver who is being tied to the ground by Lilliputian capitalists.
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Lenin: A Short Biography (Urdu)
Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971.
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The experience of reading a lot of contemporary American literature is no different from the promise of a grammarly ad - clean, efficient, marketable and dreadfully boring writing.
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Rich people in Pakistan should just be thankful the working classes haven’t burned their houses, farms, and factories to the ground. That’s already more patience than they should expect.
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You can now read my translation of Khalida Hussain's The Sea online. I'm still thrilled that this strange, surreal story won the 2020 Jawad Memorial Prize.
Many thanks to
@anniezaidi
for promoting translations and
@scroll_in
for publishing the story 🙏🏾
This translation of 'The Sea' won the Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu-English translation this year. Congratulations again to
@HaiderShahbaz5
and thank you Scroll for publishing it.
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The idea that the left is elitist and un-Islamic is linked to a long Cold War history of US funding aimed at attacking leftist movements and peoples all over the Third World. People arguing these points are furthering US imperial agendas, just like the military that props them up
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My mothers chemotherapy means that I’m often travelling between US and Pakistan as I do graduate studies. I wonder what that means for my work. What it means to take classes and submit papers, to think and write, far from my US university, even as I can never escape US hegemony🧵
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