And what will you do with your righteous silence?
Jhalak Review editor Guy Gunaratne writes on the pervasive silence that risks complicity among British writers and publishers.
Editor’s Note by Guy Gunaratne | Originally published in the print edition, October 11th 2024
In the long chain of stories that precedes any life, how do we account for lives buried before they have a chance to live? Does it resound as too little, or as naïve to suggest that language can cohere around atrocity? What can be said about the destruction of institutions, university buildings, cultural archives, schools and burned libraries?
In a landscape wherein our limited encounters with loss of life are mediated by statistics that hold no referential force, what can words qualify that numbers cannot?
Language, for the most part, does one of two things; it either works to deepen the way we attend to the world, or it conceals the very idea that our attendance matters and is enough. A similar distinction is often made between stories and lies – one brings you closer to the truth, the other conceals it.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that silence is what pervades when our words feel horrifyingly inadequate. But then what do we do, as writers and publishers, who have come to understand that righteous silence risks only complicity?
There exists a kind of storytelling that brings the frailties and exposures of being human into view. It provides a kind of recognition that can allow us to respond with outrage when human life is defiled and eviscerated.
When we discover its presence in a novel, play, or poem, usually as an affirmation of the sanctity of life, it is often deeply felt and unmistakable. We might choose to name the feeling as others have, using words like grace, beauty or connection. Sadly, using common words to describe the sublimely universal doesn’t make the recognition any less perishable. In naming it, however, and in reminding each other of our mutual relation, we save ourselves from having to attune to the undulating cruelties of our times.
Few art forms can elicit this kind of awareness better than live performance and theatre. In this issue, I’m grateful to have the playwright Vinay Patel contribute an essay on the cycles of creation and destruction in a recent staging of the epic Mahabharata. Wars, we are reminded, are as old as stories. The result, Patel says, left him “grappling with moral questions and carrying stories far older than me”.
It’s this ‘carrying’ of stories that I refer to. And whatever we might want to call it – this remarkable presence in art that reminds us of the precarity and dignity of life – if there is enough of it in what we read, or participate in, we come away with the feeling that we have experienced, for the length it has taken to receive it, something true.
It’s this recognition which is read in the astonishing Adam, a first book of poetry from Gboyega Odubanjo, who tragically passed away a year before its publication. In our Poetry review, curated by Will Harris, the poet Mantra Mukim offers a superbly dialectical response to Odubanjo’s imagery of sacrifice, ritual, entry and refuge, alongside Anthony Vahni Capildeo’s Polkadot Wounds, where patterns of creation, repair and shelter infer a deeper sensitivity to an unsparing world.
When these truths of feeling are voiced in times of recoiling silence, deference, and cowardice, they not only ring louder as notes of resistance and moral courage but can also represent acts of enduring love.
Take the symmetries in the two books under review in our Fiction pages curated by Derek Owusu. Writer Jendella Benson enquires into two works from Aiwanose Odafen and Maame Blue about Black female friendship which extends and fortifies across personal and political divides.
Similarly, Yassmin Abdel-Magied curates our Children’s and Young Adult section where writer Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé writes on the subtexts of tropes in the books Their Vicious Games by Joelle Wellington and Helen Comerford’s The Love Interest.
Sarah Shaffi, in our Notable section, challenges silence by gathering upcoming works from the likes of Edward Said, Ibtisam Azem, Mosab Abu Toha, and translator Sinan Antoon and journalist Jenna Krajeski. Shaffi ends by quoting the martyred poet Hiba Abu Nada, whose poetry is included in the collection Daybreak in Gaza.
It’s with the unbearable events in Gaza that we turn for our Glimpses section, a page dedicated to literary provocations. In this issue, the academic, poet and sculptor Samer Abdelnour writes about the transgressive practice of imagining chimaeras in contest with ‘earthborn monsters’ in Gaza’s ruins. Abdelnour is a powerful, almost elemental voice, and one I’m proud to publish here.
For our Last Word, novelist and essayist Meena Kandasamy – whose exacting clarity holds no equivalent in this editor’s opinion – writes with typical directness about what writers risk when refusing to cower to homegrown fascism and institutional malaise.
Reading Kandasamy today recalls the same bracing lucidity as when reading Said, or the likes of Judith Butler, or Eduardo Galeano, who similarly called out the apathy, and at times, callous triumphalism among their contemporaries. As Butler once wrote: “Righteous coldness is not only what it takes to kill, but also what is required to look on the destruction of life with moral satisfaction, even moral triumph.”
The prospect of where all this might end after we stay silent during atrocity does not bear imagining. Our imaginations are worth more, and there is more to mortality than death. It’s this editor’s conviction that we must do more than meet the absence of voices with hollow echoes of opinion. What is required, and is in this publication’s promise, is to commit ourselves, as writers and publishers, to language that honours life.
Guy Gunaratne is a novelist and playwright and is editor of the Jhalak Review.
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