Part memoir, part meditation on the practice that Makato Fujimura has popularized as “slow art”, Art Is: A Journey into the Light is pithy yet expressive. In the acknowledgments, Makato Fujimura recalls his publisher’s exhortation to create a “beautiful book” emerging out of the malaise of the COVID-19 pandemic and this is indeed in many ways a beautifully produced and designed one. It will be of interest predominantly to followers of Fujimura’s ongoing efforts to harmonize artistic practice and Christian faith.
Category Archive: Reviews
Intelligence failures are quite common in the history of warfare. During the First World War, according to a new book by Arabist and author Eamonn Gearon, British intelligence failures at Gallipoli and Kut al-Amara (in what later became Iraq) against troops of the Ottoman Empire spurred the creation of the Arab Bureau, which Gearon describes as an organization that “revolutionized the way in which intelligence operations were conducted in complex cultural environments, and pioneered methods that would influence approaches to intelligence work …for decades, … even up to the present day.”
In In Search of Green China, Ma Tianjie traces how China has achieved impressive net progress towards its environmental goals, including cleaner air and water, and hard targets for peak greenhouse gas emissions, while at the same time closing the political space that once allowed citizens, NGOs, and journalists to shape that progress. The result, he suggests, is a greener China whose achievements are real, but whose silenced civil society leaves its environmental future more brittle and less just—even if some in Beijing would argue that fewer voices have made environmental policy more coherent.
Jiban Narah’s The Yellow Metaphor is an unassuming collection of poetry, written from 1990 to 2023, that draws from the Mising and Assamese traditions of north-east India. Occasionally embedded in the English translation are the original Mising words, a translator’s decision to retain the otherworldliness of the poems. Assamese geography, fauna, and history feature prominently throughout the book. While steeped in regional references, Narah blends his poetry with literary allusions to Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot, as well as spiritual representations of Krishna.
There is a moment in Mohammed Hanif’s new novel where Baghi, founder of a cut-rate English tuition centre in Rawalpindi watches a Himalayan quack hawk libido supplements to a crowd of labourers on the morning after erstwhile PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging. Grief hangs in the air like smoke. The country is in shock. And yet here they all are, jostling for aphrodisiacs. Baghi wonders about a nation “where even on a day like this, when death hangs in the air, people are still interested in finding aids for their libido.” That sentence is the novel’s thesis statement, epigraph, and punchline rolled into one.
History is often told as the story of distinct societies, focusing on the ambitions of kings and the outward march of empires. Yet there is an arguably richer tradition that views the connections between societies as the true engines of human development. Just as Peter Frankopan (The Silk Roads: A New History of the World) reframed antiquity around the Silk Road, and David Chaffetz (Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires) recently argued that the horse was the definitive connection-technology of the terrestrial world, Barry Cunliffe’s Driven by the Monsoons applies this lens to the sea over the longue durée. Accomplishing for the Indian Ocean what Fernand Braudel did for the Mediterranean, the emeritus professor of archaeology at Oxford argues that the ocean was not merely a backdrop but the fundamental heartbeat of the ancient world, a rhythm dictated by the slow, unchanging geography of the earth and the seasonal back-and-forth of the monsoon winds.
Time is one of the grand themes of literature and art. A new comics anthology, Delay, brings together 11 pieces of graphic fiction in the short form from various Southeast Asian artists including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and connects the concept of time to such situations as feeling stuck, waiting, hesitation and anxieties about outcomes. Delay itself, as conceptualised by the editors Charis Loke and Paolo Chikiamco, and as captured by the writers in their contributions, has been handled in various scenarios: from old age, migration to recipes, exploration, parenting, infatuation and death. Published by the Singapore-based Difference Engine, the volume draws attention to the wider region’s expressions of the comics craft.
Set in the tea gardens of colonial Assam, Moonlight Saga follows the communities who built and maintain these delicate ecosystems on the frontiers of India, and the tensions and pressures of plantation life. Originally published in Assamese in 2022 and recently translated into English, this family saga set on the Atharighat Tea Estate in Assam, just below the Bhutan border, portrays life from both the perspective of Western planters and the Adivasi, India’s indigenous population, the labourers who sustain it. These alternating accounts provide contrasting portraits of life, danger and change on a colonial tea plantation. There is relatively little Assamese literature translated into English and this novel additionally benefits from a translation which incorporates some of the songs and phrases from Assamese.
Slavery underpins so much of the pre-modern Islamicate world, with its slave-sultans, eunuchs, elite dancing girls as well as household servants, and yet we don’t know much about this social institution and what we know is probably wrong. Perhaps because contemporary historians considered slavery so natural, we can glean little insight from their texts about how the institution functioned; who became enslaved, how did the slave trade work; how were its victims treated? Craig Perry seeks answers to those questions by delving deeply into the Cairo Geniza, a trash repository which by serendipity preserves for us tens of thousands of private, legal and commercial documents from the 11th-12th centuries. With these, he comes to a number of surprising conclusions about the workings of medieval slavery in the lands of Islam.
In a 2019 interview with Words Without Borders alongside her translator Natascha Bruce, Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse said, “I believe experimenting with language brings insight to any type of writing.” Later in the interview, Bruce remarks, “There is usually a playful element to Dorothy’s work, coexisting with—or perhaps contributing to—a deeply sinister one.”
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