#decolonisation in fiction

[canyouhearthelight]

Nihilus Rex, Ch. 6: A Complication

So, Lash and Nils agree on everything, right? Right????

Except when Nils is being a complete dumbass and doesn't realize it.

This is the chapter where we start seeing actual existing 2017 classism, racism, and even just disparate treatment come into play.

Nils' perspective and beta-reading provided by @baelpenrose. Additional beta-reading by @writing-with-olive and @fandomized-insanity. Perspective from people of the global majority (read: non-white) provided by entirely too many people to name, but definitely look up 'decolonization' if you are curious.

Sometimes love is all that can save us

Sometimes love can kill a man

Yeah, sometimes love is a soft touch

Or a pistol in your hand

American Young, “Love Is War”

Lash

It had been a couple weeks since I last met with Nils in person.  A nice chunk of money had been deposited in my account from something that looked reasonably authentic and was completely unrelated to Brayden in any way shape or form.  Not the entire five grand, I noticed.  Figured that he realized I was adding punitive damages and took his own cut.  I could live with two fifty being taken if it got back my four grand and then some.

At the moment, I was sitting in my favorite spot on the bridge, thinking through my next commissions.  Anime girls were doing me pretty solid at the moment, but eventually I’d have to tackle all the lean brunettes that were waiting in email-hell.  The charity work was drying up a bit after Brayden screwed me over, so I needed to get all that sorted out, too…

My quiet moment was interrupted by a phone alert fed through my headphones.  Then another.  Gritting my teeth, I pulled out the offending device and braced myself to see messages from my parents about some vastly unimportant emergency.  Instead, it was an unknown number messaging me. “Sorry. I didn’t want to startle you and make you fall.”

“It’s Nils, btw.  Left side.”

I whipped my head around to see him standing on the embankment to my left, waving at me with his phone. I gestured for him to come closer so we could talk without shouting over the river.  To my surprise, he came out onto the pylon and sat next to me without a trace of awkwardness.

“New phone?”

Nils blinked. “Right, no. Uh. Work phone. At a guess you know the drill.” He tilted his head at my phone and made a vague gesture. “By the way, you could have told me you wanted punitive damages instead of overstating what he took. I’d have understood.” 

I shrugged. “Seemed pretty obvious. I mean, you figured it out and took your cut, looks like.” With my free hand, I waved at his leather ensemble. “Not like you need the money, clearly, Darth Lord Pizza Cutter.”

He made a coughing sound. “Dark Lord Pizza Cutter, or Darth Pizza Cutter, pick a metaphor. That’s great though, I’ll have to remember that one. And no, I don’t. I do this more for fun, the cut I took went to a charity I’m fond of.” 

“Funding leather pants for dramatic bitches in second-world countries,” I nodded in mock-wisdom. “I see.”

“Medical debt relief, actually.” He looked like he was stopping himself from the reflexive correction about what a second-world country was after he realized I was saying it to fuck with him.

“That’s actually admirable,” I confessed, giving up the bit. “I don’t know how much two-fifty is going to do for it, but judging by what a busy bee you seem to be online, you’re probably nickel and diming them with donations at a solid pace.”  After a pause, I nodded. “Yeah, I can see it.  So what brings you to my bridge, Billy Goat Gruff?”

He shrugged. “Two fifty looks like nothing unless you know where to send it, but there’s a charity who buys up medical debt for pennies on the dollar. Anywhere from 80 to 100:1 ratios, then forgives it. Financial expert. Information is the best way to make an impact, knowing who to go to for the best effect, and network them all together.” 

“Rolling Jubilee. I like it.”

“Sorry, though, you had an actual question. Uh. I wanted to talk to you again. You left me with a good question last time. How to make the world better. You’d want to eliminate poverty, but you’d also want to eliminate power structures that make it possible to consolidate power, and therefore money and monopolized resources, into one place, to prevent that cycle from starting over again. You’d need to start with fair access to food and housing, education. The same principle would keep people from just poisoning the world and getting away with it. I think you’d have to start by something to level the playing field for a revolution, maybe power grid or bank comms, not sure exactly how to do that, but thinking about it. Still workshopping it. What’s your idea of the ideal world, Lash?” 

I hummed a bit, wobbling my head side to side and kicking my feet a couple times. “Prove it can be done without money. Barter economy, punishment for hoarding more than you need. Homelessness has to go, for sure - there are so many vampire and zombie properties, even commercial ones, that could be used better just keeping people housed. Take over an empty strip mall, start there.  Comms are easier than we think, we’re just really spoiled with speed and access - did you know there are already communities in this country who built their own local wireless networks from the ground up and just include the maintenance in local taxes?  We could do that, teach everyone how to maintain it so they are part of their own community.  That’s a start.  Then educate people - mandatory education.  That would be the hard part.  Not just math or grammar, but teaching ideas and critical thinking.”  I chewed on my lip for a moment. “Critical thinking is definitely being outlawed, it feels.”

            Nils wavered a hand. “In not-expensive schools, yeah. Which are increasingly being restricted on purpose. Mandatory equal education, especially. Right now there’s a real effort to make a two-tier system. One of defunded, shit-tier schools for poor kids and kids of color to turn them into obedient little drones, and one for rich white kids like yours truly to turn them into future statesmen, CEOs, generals, doctors, lawyers. No real respect for where we’re gonna get all the stuff in the middle that society collapses without, ironically, but then the people who design capitalism never seem to think long term. Your thought is probably the right one, but you’d need to ensure that it isn’t based in purely local resources, or if you did, ensure that those resources were distributed more equitably before the localized systems started.” 

“As one of said brown children, can confirm,” I sighed. “My parents worked like hell to get me into a ‘good’ school, and trust me, it isn’t much better. Critical thinking in terms of thinking critically of people who are different. At least when I went to a ‘shit-tier’ school, you learned that almost everyone is one paycheck or generation from being poor, and everyone’s brown when you’re dirty.” I winced at how bitter I sounded.  “Sorry.  It’s a sore spot. So, add first aid to basic medical training as part of education.  No offense, but fuck CEOs and statesmen.  If we never had another one in the history of the world, or had never had one to begin with, I think we would be in a better place.”

“You and I find ourselves entirely in agreement.” There was a smile on his face like he was laughing at a private joke. “I do think people should also learn basic cooking, basic home repair. As part of education.” He glanced over the city. “It’s nice, being able to talk to a friend like this.” 

“Oh, so we’re friends now?” I clutched a hand to my chest in pretend astonishment. “Sir, you move far too quickly.”

Nils gave a little smile. “Oh, apologies for being so forward, my dear,” his affect abruptly matched my own. “But I so rarely find conversation so stimulating, and if you do I would ask you to tell me where on earth you spend your time.” 

I laughed at how ridiculous he was being. It was charming, but in a way that showed he clearly wasn’t being too serious about it. “Online, mostly. Physically, I’m here or at home, or at this awful coffee shop about six blocks that way…” I gestured in the direction toward where we had met last time. “Beyond that? Trying desperately not to cook, since you said something about reinstituting mandatory Home Ec.  My cooking would kill you.”

“Because I’m white and you’re…okay forgive me, is your family Indian or Pakistani?”

“Because my cooking is just that bad. Seriously. I am the bane of every well meaning mother and auntie in the world. They collectively meet and despair of how horrible a wife I will be one day.” After a deep breath, I gave in. “And I’m both. Baba is Goan - that’s Indian - Mama is Pakistani.  Dishonor on their houses, their cows, all that.”

“Doesn’t that depend on whether you get married and have kids? Like in general.”  Then he cycled back. “Also, apologies if it was a rude question. If I ever met your family I wanted to look up stuff and be respectful.” 

I snorted. “That’s because you are white. Daughters of immigrants are expected to marry and have children. We are either terrible wives because we did and were horrible at it, or terrible wives because we couldn’t even get a husband. And god willing, you will never meet my family. Not because of you, because I am such a disgrace and you will either be expected to marry me and save me from myself or be considered a disgrace by proxy.  If you ever run into me when I am with them, I hope you are very good at telling people you are gay.”

“Half time, friend. Half-time gay already. Also, everyone already thinks I’m a disgrace. No need to use it to make your life worse.” He seemed willing to change the subject.  “Oh, I promised to tell you about my project. Did a bit of homework you assigned me. So, you know those QAnon assholes who kicked the shit out of me the first day we met?”

“The brother-uncle-cousins with more muscles than brains and signs?”

“Yes, the ones that think the world is ruled by Jewish space lizards, those charmers. The ones who think you immigrants are coming to literally fuck white people out of existence and bring all of us backwards evolution-wise on orders of a blood drinking Jewish cabal. Those people. Anyway. I’ve been taking advantage of a very specific flaw of conspiracist thinking, which is the desperate need to think you understand the next mystery. Tell them it’s even bigger than they think even more complicated than they thought, and wrap that into what they already thought - there’s not ONE complicated evil cabal that rules the world, there’s like FOUR, and they all fight each other, all our politics is a complicated proxy war between all of these secret shadow governments. Muhahahah. They eat that shit up. Especially if you imply that two of those groups are loosely on the side of the common people and have formed a temporary alliance, and might be looking for recruits among their crowd.”

I blinked while I processed all of the absolute crazy that had just come out of his mouth. “You are… giving them more targets, or fewer?”

“Both. Focusing their insanity in a direction that is actually useful to their fellow human beings for once. If I can’t get them to be less crazy - and unfortunately that seems inoperable given that subculture - I can direct the inevitable stochastic terrorism towards, say, attacking banks and burning debt records. In the name of preventing the evil shadow government from controlling innocent people through debt. Written off as an attack by insane conspiracy theorist, innocent people get relief, it is left untraceable to us. And corporate eats the loss.” 

“And you are stopping them from taking pot shots at the minorities who are theoretically a part of these cabals how, exactly?” I waved a hand to cut him off from answering too quickly. “I get that you are redirecting them, but when you redirect something, you have to also cut it off from its original goal. How are you doing that part?”

“The ones who work for the banks, the cops, or in public office? Nah. Fuck ‘em. But the white people in those offices are fucked too, the way I’m working it. Cutting shit off is…complicated. Multi step. So, right now they’re under the impression that the one group of bad guys they initially believed in rules the government, right? They also believe, or are starting to - that the average activist is a proxy for a different thing entirely, which do not like the bad guys who run the government for one set of reasons. I have them believing that their “hero” Q, is part of a different, third group, who ALSO does not like the bad guys who run the government, who are all rich and powerful people, and that the reason people do not like the guys who run the government tends to vary. The important thing is its a shadow government and most people don’t know anything about it.”

“So, you’re playing three dimensional chess with people who believe whatever they are told that makes them feel important. Got it. And you’ve already set this into motion?”

“Haven’t started implying orders yet. But started just kinda. Movin’ em towards “there’s three groups, stop hate criming people, most people aren’t even part of this.” 

I felt a solid mass form in the pit of my stomach, and my heart sank. “So yes, you’ve already put this into motion, intentionally or not, with no checks or any way to keep the next  idiot on a power trip from turning them another direction.”  I stood up and dusted off my clothes, holding my hand out. “Come on. Time to buy you some actual coffee, because this is going to be a very long conversation.”

Nils winced and stood up. 

“Marry a white boy, she keeps saying,” I muttered. “Trying to save my ass from well meaning white people and she wants me to marry one.  PAH!”

[mangotalkies]

"after all, how can one feel the loss of a thing whose existence one has become unconscious to?"

a wonderful collection of essential and constant truth bombs.

[leciellilac]

Hey everyone! I am a dutch-somali writer living in the netherlands. I am currently in the process of building my own business: a publishing house centered around literary fiction that decenters the white gaze. So I wanted to specifically ask the somali community on here: what kind of things do you guys want to see in the media more regarding somali representation? And what kind of things are you guys sick of?

[sh3nlong-promakh0s]

Decolonisation is not a metaphor is sooo.good u should read it

Follow decolonised buffalo on ig he's got the goods

[arthur-the-knight]

Black Owl

Long after the world serpent had swallowed all of the Vikings and all of their colorful longships, there was an unspoken desert in the east, filled with many plants, animals and tribes unlike any other. Tribes such as the Zuni with their massive villages, the Yuma, the Yoeme, the Mayo, the Rarámuri with its fastest of runners, the Tepehuán and the newer tribes with their horsemen like the Lipan who had fought valiantly against the Numinu, the Mescalero, the Jicarilla, the Diné and the Chiricahua. However, the mightiest of all tribes are the Hopi who were the first humans to step foot on the earth and continually walked in the path of peace in the name of their creator god. But this peace was threatened when the wizard of hell led the seventeenth cavalry into an massive invasion of the desert with their hordes of goblins to pillage the very spirits of the tribes in the name of their pure dragon-god itself. Hither came the warrior-born hunter of the Siksika tribe, War-Crow. Destined to wear the hide of a slayed doe upon his long black hair. And with a longbow and a broadsword, he shall slaughter every goblin across the deserted land alongside his pixie, Banba while he felt the utter burning hatred inside of his spirit.

[identitty-dickruption]

book recommendations masterlist

disability books

Feminist, Queer, Crip by Alison Kafer

Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice by Michael Oliver

The Right To Maim by J.K Puar

Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited by Tom Shakespeare

Crip Negativity by J. Logan Smilges

Cripping Intersex by Celeste Orr

The Disability Studies Reader, 4th edition edited by L.J Davis

The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability by Susan Wendell

other non-fiction

Summoned: Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighbourhood by Iddo Tavory

State of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan by Jose Martinez

Abductive Analysis by Tavory and Timmermans

Among Wolves: Ethnography and the Immersive Study of Power by Timothy Pachirat

Decolonising Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith

fiction

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde

Outside Looking In by C.T Boyle

We Play Ourselves by Jen Silverman

Higher Education by Kira McPherson

[tastesoftamriel]

The issue I see with the ESO Dark Heart of Skyrim depiction of Reachfolk is primarily the division between "ethnic/indigenous" stereotypes, e.g. living in "tribes" in the middle of buttfuck nowhere and being hostile to outsiders, and the "civilised" Reachfolk who are depicted as far smarter because they live within the relatively safe confines of Markarth with taverns and banking services and other city crap that are the benchmarks of modernity and Tamrielic civility.

There is no reason beyond blind ethnocentrism that this is a division that exists, either in real life or in fantasy (if we allow the latter to truly break the bonds of fiction into something *better*). So-called "primitive" peoples, be that the Azande or Trobrianders, have been subject to ridicule due to their indigenous knowledge, myths, and beliefs as unaligned with our post-enlightenment, postmodernist, scientific worldview. In the eyes of many writers, projecting what is deemed within their worldview to be "good" for their characters is really a detriment when it comes to original worldbuilding.

At the risk of sounding like yet another unhinged Marxist, my final comment concerns the structures of Reach society. The hierarchical structure of Reach clans is not something I'm super familiar with so I may come off as sounding like an idiot here, but bear with me. Why are Reachfolk, with supposedly primitive and unchangeable belief systems, upheld to the societal structures of mainstream Tamrielic groups? Why would they trade with gold, if they traded at all; and if they didn't, someone needs to do some research on the historical basis of global trade, which cough cough involves cooperation and amicable relations between disparate groups over huge distances and periods of time. Why are the Reachfolk exempt from this cycle of amicability? Is it more thrilling to write them as hostile savages, ready to attack anyone who supposedly threatens their way of life?

Yes, they would be thoroughly aware of the dangers of colonisation. But why have city Reachfolk been portrayed as sensible citizens of Tamriel while their brethren in the wilderness are presented as wild, IGNOBLE savages? Where is the justice in portraying indigenous peoples as they truly are and are capable of, rather than re-used Western tropes surrounding the division of self and savage Other?

Once again, this ties into the prominent Western tradition of Othering those who don't follow the tenets of a monotheistic, hegemonic, organised religion, or similarly prescribed worldview. By not including Aedra worship in Reachfolk culture, they are seen as savages and people who should be civilised and brought into the fold of the Divines. There is a pervasive undertone of violence linked to so-called "primitive" groups in TES, and this may just be to make convenient NPC bandits, but also perpetuates a stereotype that deeply harms real-life indigenous and culturally marginalised groups.

This is why careful worldbuilding is so so so important because we can project the world WE want, free from the socionormative biases that taint fantasy writing. Yes it's necessary to draw inspiration from real life, I do it all the time, but there's a point where you say "what if real life isn't that great of an idea to project here?"

I'd like to conclude by saying that I'd like to see this decolonisation of fantasy writing extended to other socially marginalised and misunderstood groups in TES, such as Bosmer, Argonians, giants, minotaurs, and the Bandaari (I could rant about them all day but I have other writing to attend to). We can do so much better not only with our ability to create some truly original fantasy worldbuilding, but also by showing others that by decolonising our own writing, we are becoming more sensitive to the worldview of others and incorporating that in an insightful and respectful manner.

[communistkenobi]

Sorry if this is a dumb question can you talk a little bit more about what you mean when you say someone’s politics are reactionary? And what the opposite of reactionary would look like in politics or media or what have you? I get that it’s a bad thing but not totally why and also what something better looks like

Not a stupid question at all - I use the term reactionary broadly to refer to right-wing responses to/analyses of current political circumstances. They are reacting to social, economic, and/or political progress and fighting for those things to be dismantled or destroyed in order to return “back” to an idealised past where those social and political advances were not available to people. This is the reason why the right wing has an eternal obsession with “tradition.” I don’t know the exact scope of the term’s lineage within Marxist thought specifically, but part of reactionary politics is, well, reaction - there is no political imagination offered beyond what already exists or has existed, reactionaries can only react to current conditions, and so right wing political projects demand a backwards historical trajectory, either to an earlier stage of capitalism or even feudalism, where these institutions better enforced (in their view, not necessarily in reality) gendered divisions of labour and gendered roles in society, cisheterosexual norms and practices, racial segregation, imperial and colonial domination, aristocratic class structures, and so on. These are founded on moral claims about what society “ought” to be like, and those moral claims are often bound to religious authorities like the Christian church, intellectual and political projects like white supremacy, colonial states like the US or France or Canada or the UK or etc, and so on. The goal is to protect these existing institutions and reinvigorate them with more political and social power - to make them great again, one might say! 

Often to justify these political goals, claims are made about harm being done to a nation or people (this is what animates “the great replacement” conspiracy about white people being bred out of society), to traditional family values, to IQ, but these are not empirical claims being made - the harm is metaphysical, the progress they oppose destabilises idealistic categories like gender or race, it’s not actually physically harming real human beings in the world. Reactionaries can hold the belief that the white race needs to be protected from non-whites, for example, despite the fact that “race” is not something that can be discovered or proven in the material or natural world, it is a fiction that organises society hierarchically but is not premised on anything real. Reactionaries equate the destabilisation of these categories with harm (eg trans people destroy the gender binary, gender equality destroys the need for men, racial equality harms whites), and so their opposition is founded on maintaining these categories, not reducing harm. The harm is part of their goal! It’s why when you point out that, for examples, trans healthcare greatly improves the lives of trans people in order to rebut reactionary claims that most trans people regret transition, they don’t care - their goal is not to reduce harm, it is to maintain existing gendered institutions and norms. They are using the language of harm for rhetorical purposes, but they are not making empirical claims about harm because they don’t give a shit about reducing harm to trans people.

It is opposite to revolutionary politics, a political imaginary looking to produce new institutions, new forms of social and economic relationships, new political horizons not previously developed in human history, or to build upon past projects that have come before. These projects are premised on analyses of current political and social conditions in order to identify the harms they cause. Things like decolonisation, socialism, transfeminism, and so on can act as (potentially) revolutionary political projects that seek to abolish old social/political relationships and hierarchies, be they gender, capitalism, settler colonialism, etc, for the purpose of creating a more just and equitable society. Demands to abolish old social and political forms are founded on empirical claims of harm - settler colonialism produces harm, the gender binary produces harm, capitalism produces harm, etc., and we can measure and assess the extent of these harms. This is part of the reason people claim Marxism is scientific, because its political conclusions and proposed solutions are based on an analysis of “material conditions” ie the real world & its various structures

[ohmerricat]

re: the post below. fantasy vs reality

a discussion in the notes got me thinking about the recent trend (perhaps not the right word, maybe “tendency”) of communist/marxist bloggers on here, especially those concerned with decolonisation (as we all should be), to blanket-condemn all media which “romanticises” pirates, cowboys, knights, outlaws, and other “historical” (in quotes because, let’s be real, it’s more legend than history when we talk about the modern portrayal of these lifestyles) morally dubious yet immensely alluring occupations. there’s been this discourse spreading: the idea that somehow indulging in art which presents these figures in a generally positive or fun light is the same as being uncritical of manifest-destiny expansionism (i.e. the notion of the ‘wild west’ and an ‘untamed frontier’ is colonial), christian imperialism (since knights participated in the crusades) or even an apologist of the slave trade (because some pirates engaged in it).

to which i say, plainly, bollocks. if you’re 16 or younger, your critical thinking faculties are an untrained muscle, your media analysis capacity not yet switched-on, then yeah, you’re allowed to be susceptible to the inability to distinguish between what’s cool in fiction and what’s permissible in reality. any older than that, i start getting doubts. i question the frankly patronising notion that an adult with a basic understanding of history and politics is incapable of recognising when something fictional doesn’t map one-on-one onto the modern world, whether that be the mechanics of a story, the interactions between characters, the beliefs and goals which drive them, or the social mores and cultural norms (hierarchy of gender, race, nobility etc) which they accept as fact.

you should be able to hold (more than) two truths in your head simultaneously. you should be able to cheer when the knight pulls the sword from the stone and reclaims his long-denied royal heritage to become a well earned leader, and, at the same time, recognise that we live in the 21st century where monarchy is a long-obsolete, unjust and inhumane system of government. same as you’d readily accept that somebody in a novel can cast a spell, but you wouldn’t believe that a real guy could set a tree alight with his mind.

all fiction is fantasy because we don’t live in history. yeah, we have sources, but they’re not perfect. even the author attempting to be as accurate as possible will inevitably sneak in some tiny anachronisms, even if in language alone. medieval europe didn’t have potatoes. you will find potato stew boiling in every tavern in the fantasy pseudo-german towns your protagonists take a rest stop in. that’s fine. that’s normal. pirates in reality were mostly cruel hardened criminals with no respect for human life, which is why they gladly partook in slavery as well as pillaging and looting, anything for profit. pirates in a show can be kind, considerate, a rag-tag team of outcasts and freedom fighters with views that most correspond with modern anarchism. as long as you know the difference, as long as you’re not pretending that this fantasy is how historical events actually happened, it’s fine. you’re good. go watch your bridgertons.

make sure to stay prudent and always tell the difference, though. never ever fall into the trap of wanting to ‘retvrn’, and that goes towards ever cottagecore homesteader. let fiction remain fiction, and work to better the world.

[queer-geordie-nerd]

The Dunning-Kruger effect is mad strong in antisemites, isn't it? Such confidence, much ignorance, wow. I sometimes can't work out if they're deceitful or gullible or both. They create elaborate fictional stories, throw all the culty buzzwords at you, then plug their ears and go reblog about a thousand scam GoFundMes. It's almost as fascinating as it is frustrating. A message to the antisemites/pro-Hamas weirdos who seem to be obsessed with this blog: You're embarrassing yourselves! Look, babes, hunnies, trust us, you do not want decolonisation. That's what's making you throw all these tantrums! Israel is a successful example of decolonisation and you are seething over it! What you WANT is colonisation - you WANT the islamist regime to finish colonising the entire Middle East. You want that land to be an ethnostate run by a fascist terrorist dictatorship. And you want to genocide Jews. Weird flex, tbh. Can't relate, but you do you, boos! And when you screech at people for supporting democracy and wanting self determination for both people, and when they reply you whine, 'I'm not arguing with a ZIO!'/'I'm not reading all that!' *chef's kiss* tbh. Because yeah, we know you never read anything longer than a sentence or two, that's obvious from all the rest of the silly things you say! But maybe, if you can't actually ENGAGE like a sensible adult, you should just keep your nonsense off Jewish posts. Saves us the exasperation of having to deal with twattishness, and it would save you guys a lot of embarrassment.

Honestly, the mere fact that I openly support Jewish people and condemn antisemitism is enough for them to lose their entire minds. And for real, I would much rather they harass me with their cowardly little anons instead, someone who can't be personally hurt by the rancid antisemitism, than for them to go after a Jewish blogger (unfortunately they very much have limitless energy for that too).

[pomp-quio]

tagged by @cattus-catos 💛 who has excellent opinions and always accurate takes (especially about Crassus) -

last book i read: Dragonfly by Frederic S Durbin. I try to intersperse my mostly classics and french revolution reading with my second great love, fantasy books. Dragonfly is a cute little creepy standalone novel that I read when I was a teenager and ended up reading again recently.

book i recommend: Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. I have no explanation exactly for why but this is hands-down my favourite book. So it goes.

book i couldn't put down: Babel by R F Kuang. I was a bit concerned because I generally don't enjoy the plots of BookTok books, BUT the subtitle (The Necessity of Violence) intrigued me. And let me tell you I was blown away by this book. It was a bit clunky at times but I loved every second and coming from a country that is still recovering from its colonial past, with our own national language that is considered uneducated, crass, and rough, it just hit very hard.

book i've read twice: I'm a chronic book repeater because my brain is swiss cheese, but the one book I regularly re-read for fun (and sadness) is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. It's such a good book, actually I'm probably due for a re-read again! Also Watership Down by Richard Adams, I love that book so much ✨prince with a thousand enemies✨. And of course I have read the Odyssey several times!

a book on my tbr: my current TBR list stands at over 300 books (my Goodreads is Pompey Watching if you're interested). I think the next book I pick up will be The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk.

a book i've put down: Decolonising the Maltese Mind by Charles Xuereb. Not because it's bad but because I get so pissed off at the British every few paragraphs that I genuinely just need to take a mental break.

a book on my wishlist: oh dear there are so many. I desperately want the clothbound versions of the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Paradise Lost, and Inferno. I also REALLY want a physical copy of Sextus Pompeius by Anton Powell and Kathryn Welch, but its so expensive.

a favourite book from childhood: The Edge Chronicles The Edge Chronicles The Edge Chronicles I will never be okay about them, the plot, the arcs, the art, the characters!!!

a book you would give to a friend: Feral by George Monbiot. I am first and foremost an environmental/animal girlie and while I have some criticisms about this book, it genuinely argues for a lot of what I believe in when speaking about wildlife rehabilitation.

a book of poetry/lyrics you own: I sadly own very few poetry books! I do have a copy of Wilfred Owen's war poetry which makes me far too emotional for my own good.

a non-fiction book you own: so many! I have a lot of animal behaviour books, wild fauna books, french revolution books, and ancient Rome books. I guess one of my favourites would be Choosing Terror by Marisa Linton.

currently reading: House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewaki, Lucan's Pharsalia (Susan Braund trans), yay Pharsaliabookclub, and Xuan s posts made me start the Epic of Gilgamesh but I'm only at the introduction so far!

planning on reading next: I never quite know what I'm going to read next but it will probably The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk. I also want to get started on the Thebaid, but I fear reading it at the same time as Pharsalia will do some irreparable damage to my brain!

I'm tagging @kushielsmercy (Shiel this is my Rome sideblog hello and welcome sorry you had to find out like this) and @burritofriedrich ❤️❤️❤️

[apollos-olives]

I’ll sometimes see things like ‘how come fiction creatives can make violent decolonisation narratives but still be z*onists?’ as if fantasy decolonisation can’t be just an aesthetic for some people (esp white writers).

liberal mindset is to dream of decolonization but never act on it

[ghelgheli]

Stuff I Read In February 2024

bold indicates favourites

Books

The Mantle of the Prophet, Roy Mottahedeh

Serious Weakness, Porpentine Charity Heartscape

The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson

Pamphlets, Zines, etc.

Queer Fire: The George Jackson Brigade, Men Against Sexism, and Gay Struggle Against Prison [link]

Reform or Revolution? Rosa Luxemburg

Armed Joy, Alfredo M. Bonanno [link]

Designing Freedom, Stafford Beer [link]

Yuri/GL

Kill Switch, 1172

Immortal Parody, Kim Jong Geon

Her Tale of Shim Chong, Seri & Biwan

There's Weird Voices Coming from the Room Next Door! Suzuki Senpai

An Easy Introduction to Love Triangles (To Pass the Exam!) / Goukaku no Tame no! Yasashii Sankaku Kankei Nyuumon, Canno

Gentle Flutters, One Useless Dogggg

What Does the Fox Say? Gyeomji & Gaji

Our Dreams at Dusk / Shimanami Tasogare, Yuhki Kamatani

There Is No Love Wishing Upon a Star / Kono Koi wo Hoshi ni wa Negawanai, murasakino/Shinoa

Short Fiction

Serious Weakness but with Girls, Porpentine Charity Heartscape [link]

Dirty Wi-Fi, Porpentine Charity Heartscape [link]

Bist-o-chār sā'at dar xāb o bidāri / 24 Restless Hours, Samad Behrangi [link]

Yek hulu o hezār hulu / One Peach and a Thousand Peaches, Samad Behrangi [link]

Palestine

What Does It Mean To Be Palestinian Now? Noura Erakat, Ahmed Moor, Noor Hindi, Mohammed El-Kurd, Laila Al-Arian 01/25/2024 [link]

"If You Say Anything to Anyone, a Zaka Van Will Run You Over", Brad Pearce 10/18/2023 [link]

The Epistemicide of the Palestinians, Abdulla Moaswes 02/02/2024 [link]

Manufacturing Content, Nora Barrows-Friedman & Matt Lieb [link]

Comparison is the Way We Know the World, Masha Gessen 12/19/2023 [link]

The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé, Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim, Daniel Boguslaw 02/28/2024 [link]

Queer &c

Hands off our lives, our stories, and our bodies, AC 06/10/2022 [link]

Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance, Talia Mae Bettcher [doi]

A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway

Why Are "Gender Critical" Activists So Fond of Gametes? Julia Serano 02/13/2024 [link]

Pol

Why I Left the PSL… or the DSA or Socialist Alternative or whatever, filler kid 07/20/2021 [link]

Allies Not Accomplices: An Indigenous Perspective & Provocation, 05/02/2014 [link]

Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism, Attila Kotányi & Raoul Vaneigem 1961 [link]

Abolition, Nsámbu Za Suékama 06/06/2020 [link]

The Eye Upon Us Has Turned Upon Them, Nsámbu Za Suékama 07/16/2023 [link]

The Hindu Nationalists Using the Pro-Israel Playbook, Aparna Gopalan 06/28/2023 [link]

Ram Mandir and Hindutva Fascist Myth of Decolonisation, Rida Fathima 02/07/2024 [link]

How the United States Crippled Haiti's Rice Industry, Leslie Mullin [link]

A Talk to Teachers, James Baldwin [link]

Stranger in the Village, James Baldwin [link]

Other

no good alone, Rayne Fisher-Quann 04/03/2021 [link]

Everyone's A Critic, Richard Joseph 01/13/2022 [link]

Neoplatonic kingship in the Islamic world: Akbar’s millennial history, Jos Gommans & Said Reza Huseini [link]

Is `Race Science' Making a Comeback? Angela Saini 07/10/2019 [link]

you’ve been traumatized into hating reading, Ismatu Gwendolyn 02/15/2024 [link]

[akajustmerry]

Very random question but I saw many of your posts on being raised as an Arab Christian and the colonization of Christianity and I was wondering if you know of any Arab Christian non fiction writers or if you follow anyone on here you think would know.

hi! honestly it's more just something I casually engage with because I'm non-practising so I don't really have a reading list but this is a good article I read a few years ago that helped me win an argument against a racist colleague. good place to start I reckon!

[mariacallous]

At the National Opera of Ukraine in Kyiv recently, I watched a performance of an opera by the Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko. The work, charming and comic and an escape from the grimness of Russian missile attacks, is called Natalka Poltavka, based on a play by Ivan Kotliarevsky, who pioneered Ukrainian-language literature in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. Operas by Verdi, Puccini and Mozart, and ballets such as Giselle and La Sylphide, are on the playbill, despite the almost daily air raid sirens. But there is no Eugene Onegin in sight, nor a Queen of Spades, and not a whisper of those Tchaikovsky staples of ballet, Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake. Russian literature and music, Russian culture of all kinds, is off the menu in wartime Ukraine. It is almost a shock to return to the UK and hear Russian music blithely played on Radio 3.

This absence, some would say erasure, can be hard to comprehend outside Ukraine. When a symphony orchestra in Cardiff removed the 1812 Overture from a programme this spring, there was bafflement verging on an outcry: excising Tchaikovsky was allowing Vladimir Putin and his chums the satisfaction of “owning” Russian culture – it was censorship, it was playing into Russia’s hands. Tchaikovsky himself was not only long dead, but had been an outsider and an internationalist – so the various arguments went. It took some careful explanation to convey that a piece of music glorifying Russian military achievements, and involving actual cannons, might be somewhere beyond poor taste when Russia was at that moment shelling Ukrainian cities – particularly when the families of orchestra members were directly affected.

In fact, such moments have been rare in western Europe. Chekhov and Lermontov continue to be read and Mussorgsky to be performed. Russian culture has not been “cancelled” as Putin claims, and Russian-born musicians and dancers with international careers continue to perform in the west – assuming they have offered a minimum of public deprecation of the killing and destruction being visited on Ukraine. Only the most naive would decry the removal of Valery Gergiev from international concert programmes. The conductor, who is seen as close to Putin, backed the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 (unrecognised by most UN countries), has declined to condemn the current full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and has a history of using his artistic profile in the service of the Russian state, such as conducting concerts in Russian-backed South Ossetia in 2008 in the wake of the Russo-Georgian war.

Inside Ukraine, though, things look very different. For many, the current war with Russia is being seen as a “war of decolonisation”, as Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk has put it – a moment in which Ukraine has the chance to free itself, at last, from being an object of Russian imperialism. This decolonisation involves a “total rejection of Russian content and Russian culture”, as the writer Oleksandr Mykhed told the Lviv BookForum recently. These are not words that are comfortable to hear – not if, like me, you spent your late teens immersed in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Chekhov stories; not if you have recently rekindled your love of Russian short fiction via George Saunders’ luminous book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain; not if you adore Stravinsky and would certainly be taking a disc of The Rite of Spring to your desert island.

The context for this rejection has to be understood, though: Ukrainians are emerging from a history in which the Russian empire, and then the Soviet Union, actively and often violently suppressed Ukrainian art. This has worked in a number of different ways. It has included the absorption of numerous Ukrainian artists and writers into the Russian centre (such as Nikolai Gogol, or Mykola Hohol in Ukrainian), and the misclassifying of hundreds of artists as Russian when they could arguably be better described as Ukrainian (such as the painter Kazimir Malevich, who was Kyiv-born but Russian, according to the Tate). It has meant that writing in Ukrainian has at times been proscribed – Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, was banned from writing at all for a decade by Tsar Nicholas I. This silencing has encompassed the extermination of Ukrainian artists, like the killing, under Stalin, of hundreds of writers in 1937, known as “the executed renaissance”. Behind all of this stands horrific events such as the Holodomor, the starvation of about 4.5 million Ukrainians in 1932-33 in their forced effort to produce grain on Stalin’s orders.

This history places Ukraine in a very different position in relation to Russian culture than, say, Britain found itself in relation to German and Austrian art during the second world war, when Myra Hess programmed Mozart, Bach and Beethoven in her National Gallery concerts during the Blitz. “We have had cultural occupation, language occupation, art occupation and occupation with weapons. There’s not much difference between them,” the composer Igor Zavgorodniy tells me. In the Soviet period, Ukrainian culture was allowed to be harmlessly folksy – and Ukrainians, caricatured as drunken yokels dressed in Cossack trousers, were often the butt of belittling jokes. But Ukraine was not expected or allowed to carry a high culture of its own. At the same time, Russian artistic achievement was lauded as the very apex of human greatness. “We were raised in a certain piety towards the Russian literature,” explains the playwright Natalya Vorozhbit, who was educated in the Soviet period. “There wasn’t such piety towards any other literature.”

Putin himself has effectively doubled down on all this through his constant insistence, in his essays and often rambling speeches, that Ukraine has no separate existence from Russia – no identity, no culture at all, except as an adjunct of its neighbour. Indeed, his claim of Russia’s cultural inseparability from Ukraine is one of his key justifications for invasion. At the same time the Russian instrumentalisation of its artistic history is breathtakingly blatant. In occupied Kherson, billboards proclaiming it as a “city with Russian history”, show an image of Pushkin, who visited the city in 1820. Ukrainian artists also object to how, in a more general way, the projection of Russia as a great nation of artistic brilliance operates as a tool of soft power, a kind of ambient hum of positivity that, they would argue, softens the true brutality of today’s invasion. In Ukraine, there is a generalised cry of “bullshit” in relation to the myth of the “Russian soul”.

Some Ukrainians I speak to hope that one day, beyond the end of the war, there will be a way of consuming Russian literature and music – but first the work of decolonisation must be done, including the rereading and rethinking of classic authors, unravelling how they reflected and, at times, projected the values of the Russian empire. In the meantime, “My child will be perfectly all right growing up without Pushkin or Dostoevsky,” says Vorozhbit. “I don’t feel sorry.”

For many Ukrainians I encounter, the time for Russian literature will come again – when it can be critically understood as simply another branch of world culture, and as neither an unduly oppressive, nor overwhelming, force. At the National Opera House, I ask the choreographer Viktor Lytvynov when he thinks Tchaikovsky – a composer he loves – will be back on the programme. “When Russian stops being an aggressor,” he says. “When Russia stops being an evil empire.”

[arthur-the-knight]

Yellow Elk Skull

Long before an empire had been born by the son of Casear who had destroyed ninety tribes before him, there was a single island above the clouds which was untouched and undreamed by men of the earth. And had mighty races from an unspoken era before men and that ruled its grassy and snowy mountains. The elves. The dwarves. The Jotun. The Vanir. And the proudest race of them all are the Aesir who had built the greatest of all empires known as Asgard for their king, Bolverk who sat on the throne with the yellow elk skull above him in his castle while giving them all an oath to never give mercy to every man in their very eyes in hope to conquer the land below. And unto this, War Crow. Destined to enter the island on his alicorn, followed by a fairy by his side and with a great sword stained red, a bow with the white scalp of a god and arrows, painted in the colors of red and black, shall slay all the Aesir in his warpath to become chief.