The Sense of an Ending

Lately, I’ve been grieving a death still to come: Aren’t we all, you ask — always, yes always, grieving (deaths to come)? ‘Death is, of course, the ultimate tipping point’, Anahit Behrooz writes in her review of Anuradha Roy’s new novel, The Earthspinner. Tipping point (noun): the point at which a series of small changes or incidents becomes significant enough to cause a larger, more important change. Something significant. A substantial change. In a burning world – plagued by the pandemic, wounded by war – what does change, from summer to winter, look like? And how can it be described in words?

In commissioning for and editing this spring issue of Wasafiri, I’ve been thinking about beginnings and endings — not as binaries, or antithetical states of being, but together, all twisted, and tangled up with each other. Is it futile to speak of them as separate? How do we straddle the present and the past — or that which has passed? How do we hold death through our lives, and bring alive again that which has been buried? ‘and the flowers inconsolable/(for they fall too soon/after they open)’ writes Shahilla Shariff in this issue. Open and close. I recommend you read her sombre set of poems – ‘Permanence’ and ‘Buried Cry’ – as a pair.

I’m typing this six months after the death of Sara Suleri (1953–2022), and six months before you will be reading tributes to the iconic Yale professor and author of Meatless Days (1989) – part personal memory, part post-colonial history of Pakistan – and the seminal work, The Rhetoric of English India (1993), from five writers and academics in our Lead Feature: ‘Remembering Sara Suleri’. Spring to autumn, and spring again. Illustrated by the Jhalak Prize-winning Sabba Khan, these homages and elegies look at Suleri’s life’s work — an everlasting legacy, like embers in a dying fire, yet ready to reignite new works and worlds. Here, Kamila Shamsie confesses stealing an image from Suleri — that of a shrimp. For Ankhi Mukherjee, food, in Meatless Days, ‘becomes the playground and battleground as a nation survives its own blood-drenched genesis in the 1947 Partition’. Amina Yaqin zooms in from the political to the personal to pinpoint that Suleri ‘describes her relationships with two of her siblings through fruit’. Furthermore, Moni Mohsin shows how Suleri personifies the nation: ‘“I had a dread”, writes Suleri, of that time, “that the country was prepared to consume the last vestiges of its compassion.”’ Meanwhile, Sarvat Hasin, speaking to the seamlessness of Suleri’s work, writes: ‘There is only the clear, redolent memoir, the milk of family, the searching for meaning.’ Here, Meatless Days is bountiful — and also a beginning: for a country, for fictional characters, and literary careers.

Speaking to the UK literary prize industry, Stevie Marsden writes about the Costa Book Awards closing down after fifty years, the consequences of this closure, and how ‘the demise of, or threat to, long-standing literary awards in the UK can be used as a point of examination of the current funding and organisational model(s)’.

For her, this moment of loss suggests that old prizes and their outdated models require new pathways of prizing — and that endings can also be opportunities. The issue also fittingly includes a review of the final Costa Book Awards (2021) winner: The Kids by Hannah Lowe. The reviews section opens with Theodora Danek's powerful and poignant review essay, ‘“An Act of Politicised Attention”: War and the Writer-Witness’, on fiction, non-fiction, and forgotten conflicts, on texts in translation and the passing of time:

Ultimately, what Ahmad, al-Maqtari, and Belorusets succeed in is their detailed and compassionate attention to the individual, their insistence on exploring complex realities, their subtle analysis of how the wars in Yemen and Ukraine impact individuals.

As Danek writes, this is not war as seen on a ‘screen, or at a distance, as if in a computer game'; the three authors paint painful, impactful, and impressionable portraits of war — and the reader must pay attention. But where there are endings, there are also beginnings — new journeys and new lives, and this issue also features our 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize winners in Poetry, Fiction, and Life Writing: Hasti, Sylee Gore, and Nadine Monem, respectively. Monem’s ‘Salt Prints’ begins with an all-consuming, life-altering worry:

As a child, I would often be seized by the fear that my father would die. Not just that he would die, but that he would die before I had the chance to learn something essential from him, before he could pass down some knowledge that I could not live without.

While Monem's essay challenges the definiteness of archives and deaths – of the written word and the final word – Hasti’s poem ends with a transformation, in resignation: ‘After millions of years, even glass breaks down to clay.’ In Sylee Gore’s short fiction, ‘Cloud Archive’, the protagonist is a new mother. ‘The playgrounds where I nurse you show where the bombs once fell. … Life unspools its unsteady line. What was once tacit is simply gone,' she writes, in stunning, staccato-like sentences. Photographs – snapshots in time – and renewals and revolutions – somersaults in time – feature across the three texts, alongside the spectre of Flaubert, illustrated by Aude Nasr. These winners are joined in the Wasafiri Hall of Fame by our second Essay Prize winner, Rachel Bolle-Debessay, who writes about the dialogue between dub poetry and theatre through a close reading of Michael Smith's ‘Trainer’.

Poetry is pulsing through the issue. Alongside the four poets in the issue, Cristina Rivera Garza and her translator Sarah Booker speak movingly, indeed poetically, in an interview about the potency of language, proximity in translation, and writing with others; as does Lorna Goodison in her interview about paying it forward and radical gratitude in poetry. ‘We never mourn in the first person singular, I've said, and I insist. We grieve together—for the loved ones we've lost, for them and for us, now transfigured,’ says Rivera Garza. Both life writing pieces in the issue – ‘Season’ by Rebecca Tamás and ‘Uncommon Usage by Claudia Trifa – dwell on ideas discussed in the interview with Rivera Garza. While the former captures change – transfiguration and translation through time, those ‘pinpricks of mystery' – in life and loss, from spring to summer, the latter reflects on speaking for, if not with, others:

It’s much harder than I thought to be a voice in the world, to speak for others, not just for myself. But someone has to do it … to say yes when she is called upon to connect one language to another, one self to another. To be the link that keeps the chain from breaking.

To be the link that keeps the chain from breaking, no matter how fragile her attachment. Simlarly, Sharanya’s art feature focuses on re-tracing and making alive again archival art through linking the work of two South Asian artists, Dayanita Singh and Ali Kazim. In her essay, ruins and wooden panes, photographs and sheaves of paper are pulsing — despite their ephemerality or fragility. Keeping the chain from breaking, as it were, she writes:

We may not know how or where to rest our eyes as the teak chambers open or as images of ruins rise up. But we are hardly alone in our ignorance. Could not the same be said of all endeavours to archive the remains of the day?

Ali Kazim’s flecked terracotta fragments, his ruins, wrap our cover — speaking to the pieces in the issue, the starts and stops, the transient states of being, and indeed, the remains. To return, then, to the image of the potter’s wheel in Behrooz’s aforementioned review of The Earthspinner: ‘In the midst of its unremitting momentum, what is there to do but wet the clay and build something new.’ The writers and works in this issue grieve in solitude and silence, grieve collectively and communally, but also await a new dawn, gesture at a new world – through the passing of seasons and languages, the births and deaths of nations and national literary icons, the opening of archives and the closing of gaps. Try to cup water in your hands and it slips through your fingers. Grief is a lot like this — impossible to fully grasp, or generate the words for. What remains is the feeling of wet hands — the feeling. I hope what remains with you is the feeling of reading Wasafiri 113.