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Who Gets to Take Up Space? Women, Desire and the Ordinary in All We Imagine as Light
This essay is adapted from the introduction I presented at Rialto/Griffioen for a screening of Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. I had the privilege of introducing the film and wanted to offer the audience a few ideas to carry with them into the screening: about women and the city, migration and home, intimacy,…
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The Body Remembers the Room
This week, on April 15th, I had the honour of delivering the opening keynote for the Social Safety Week 2026 at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, a programme that understands something many institutions still struggle to name: that social safety is not a decorative value to be displayed at the edges of institutional life, but part…
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Panjurli at the Edge of the Field, Poetry as Prayer, Ritual as Jurisprudence
Begin with poetry, because urgency belongs in the line break. I come to Bhoota Kola to watch belief take form as measure and cadence, and to see Panjurli hold the boundary where neighbor, field, and forest meet. In that courtyard, law is patterned, it moves in count and return, it speaks in responsorial rhythm the…
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What My Crumpled ECER Notes Taught Me About Power, Silence and Hope
I came back from ECER 2025 in Belgrade with a notebook that looked like a battlefield. Names squeezed into margins, arrows flying across the page, words like “trust”, “silence”, “evidence” underlined three times. It felt messy and disconnected at first. Once I started reading through it at home, a different picture appeared. I kept returning…
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Exception, By Another Name: answering some frequently asked questions about my identity
Today the state writes my name with a borrowed pen. Not the pen kept in velvet for lost inheritance certificates, but a pen found in the bottom of a drawer: a little cracked, ink clotted around the nib, the kind you warm with your breath to make it move. They call it citizenship by an…
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London, in the Heat of Memory and Change
The city arrived first as a smell—Hot brick dust and the faint iron taste of the Underground, mingling with the ghost of diesel and rain. The kind of smell that makes you feel you’ve lived here before. London in July and August—it pretends to be gentle with you, lets the sun linger longer on your…
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Ziyafat and Radical Hospitality: Towards an Ethics of Reading Across Border
I have been ruminating on this topic for so long. It is time to stop reading it solely through the lens of an academic researcher and simply release it into the world, because its urgency can no longer wait. This essay examines the influence of Persian poetry on American literature, tracing its path from transcendentalist…
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Burning Through the Forest of Noise: Mosab Abu Toha’s Poetics of Survival
In Forest of Noise, Mosab Abu Toha offers us not just poetry, but the breathless residue of survival. The title itself rings like an invocation: a forest, dense with memory, static, and surveillance; a noise, unceasing, buzzing with drones, rubble, and the keening of the dispossessed. This is Gaza, yes—but also the poetic terrain of…
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The Secret Lives of Second-Hand Books
There’s a particular kind of magic that lives in second-hand books—a sort of hush, like the soft turning of pages in a dream. They arrive in your hands like messengers from another life, carrying the scent of time, the weight of old hearts, and the whisper of a reader who once fell in love at…
