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 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.
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?