The Spinning Head

We sit together in his small living room. There are no windows, and the little light that comes in is through small apertures where the walls meet the ceiling. There is no furniture either, and we sit on the surprisingly cool, immaculately clean cement floor. One of his children had placed a small cushion against […]

What is most material to some might not even exist for others. – Sara Ahmed Upon seeing me, she stopped dead in her tracks. A look of panic came over her as she took a step back, as if to run. But she must have seen that I was equally surprised, and she stopped and […]

If the idea of the modern nation-state is sustained by producing imagined communities, it also involves actively producing unimagined communities…whose vigorously unimagined condition becomes indispensable to maintaining a highly selective discourse of national development. – Rob Nixon For the British Indian colonial administration, western science and technical expertise, was the only way to develop regional […]

The landscape should belong to the people who see it all the time. – Amiri Baraka __ “The ocean no longer belongs to us.” I hear Khair Jan inhale deeply as he says this. I realize, when I turn around to look at him, that he isn’t speaking to me. He isn’t speaking to anyone […]

My mornings in Gwadar were spent on the waterfront. It was the coolest hour of the day, and also one of the busiest as fishermen, boat builders, fish traders, tea sellers, and young men doing calisthenics, all converged on a small stretch of beach facing the waterfront locally known as Paddi Zirr. Each morning as […]