Tell me about despair, yours

Some thoughts from my diary on Rothko to recognition via Isabella Hammad

Hello! I’m Apoorva Sripathi, a writer, editor, and artist. If you think my work is valuable and would like to support me, follow 💌shelfoffering on Instagram, share this post, and consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you to my lovely paid subscribers!

This essay was supposed to be about Mark Rothko but has instead morphed into language and its limits and function during a genocide. Maybe the two are interconnected: after all, Rothko abandoned conventional titles for his paintings in 1947 and resorted to numbers and colour to distinguish his work because he acknowledged the power of words that could either paralyse the viewer or bind them to a certain way of thinking about his work. There is a sense of limitlessness to his colour compositions, which I hope to experience in the near future. To Rothko, the use of vibrant colours and later, a limited palette, represented “basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom”. To him, to artists, to all painters, colours are a kind of language; perhaps the limits lie in composition.

💌

In lieu of reading Isabella Hammad’s Recognising the Stranger, I’ve spent my time reading and listening to the living archive of Hammad’s knowledge on the internet: mainly her conversations with David Naimon for the Tin House podcast, her Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia, and her conversation with the novelist Sally Rooney via emails exchanged in 2023. All three conversations are remarkable, insightful, and revolutionary. In particular, the Edward Said Memorial Lecture ‘Recognising the Stranger’ which is also the eponymous title of her latest book.

Throughout the lecture, which focused strongly on narrative in literature, Hammad talks about anagnorisis (a word new to me), defined by Aristotle as a “change from ignorance to knowledge” in the context of Oedipus who kills his father, unknowingly marries his mother, only to learn the truth later. Hammad expands on this moment of recognition, of knowing again, as an ‘aha moment’ during points of transition. Recognition, she says, is knowledge that hasn’t been confronted.

I have been writing (and as it goes, rewriting) a short story for the past year on love and starvation, struggling on a linear narrative, maybe because I’m so sceptical of my own abilities throughout the process and my life itself. But I have managed to make it peregrine and somewhat unsettling. In the story, both the main character and the person she tries to fall in love with each have their moments of recognition, of anagnorisis, at the same time, during their separation. The true nature of circumstance is revealed when one character identifies the other in retrospect as a monster. Of course, in real life there are no monsters – there are human beings with violent rhetoric and actions, there are institutions that fail us continuously, there are political discourses of nationhood that employ violence to benefit the state, there are limits placed on language.

💌

Language by some pockets of media, the mainstream, is deceiving. It chooses to maim, it chooses to ignore the horrors right in front of it. It sanitises and penetrates and awards a fated quality to knowledge, to what we know collectively as true. It erases the oppressors and denies the structure of empires. As if there could be no turning point, no transition, no moments seen in retrospect. As if colonisation is a thing of the past and not of the present.

💌

I have borrowed the title of this newsletter from Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese, which I think speaks to the heart of human experience, of being a part of something bigger, of not having to prove yourself or your worth to be shown kindness or to be spared a violent death, to be cheesy and choose love, to listen to each other even in despair, to have fear but to operate in faith. I think it’s Oliver’s way of saying that life needs no justification. Hammad said this too, in conversation with Naimon on the podcast, that “it’s insane to me that human beings have to constantly humanise themselves; it’s not on us to prove that Palestinians are humans.” It should not be on anyone to prove that they are humans or that they have dignity that has to be honoured or that they are perfect victims. Humanity cannot be up for debate. Because despite the violence, the genocide, the policing language, there is also survival: of desire, resistance, and future.

The future does not have to be imagined because it simply already exists.

Another word that I have borrowed is camaraderie because I see so many of my writer peers, my friends and strangers alike, thinking in the same way, making a clearing ahead for us as they go along. Devin Kate Pope wrote a beautiful essay on work that has to be done both for the self and for the greater community. Sarah Thankam Mathews has been turning to the same Bertholt Brecht poem as me, When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain, while witnessing the horrors by Israel in Lebanon (and Palestine). Jessica Dore has been listening to the same podcasts and lecture, noting Hammad’s interest in points of transition. Kate Zambreno and Sofia Samatar, in conversation with Naimon for the same podcast, talk about literature as collaborative, “as a collective feeling”.

We are, none of us, alone in this. To invoke Hammad here, recognition as an act of witnessing; our memories, histories, and futures are collective.

💌

‘Israel sends troops to Lebanon’ reads one headline. ‘US believes Israel could imminently launch a more limited ground incursion in Lebanon than originally planned’ reads a tweet. ‘Israel begins ground operations in Southern Lebanon’ reads another news report. As if the troops were invited. As if they’re just gonna dig tunnels. I find this juxtaposition between the contortion of language and a reliability on it as nefarious. On the one hand, these headlines are misleading, dishonest, and bizarre. On the other hand, publications like the nyt are employing language to make a different kind of profit through word games such as wordle, the mini crossword, and connections as a way of distracting us from the reality; stripping off humanity from the language in one case and instrumentalising it in another. How do you maintain faith in language when it is weaponised?

💌

Ta-Nehisi Coates who was on a morning programme for cbs to talk about his new book The Message, which is about how stories shape and distort realities, was bombarded with hostility and evil rhetoric. I guess it’s always going to be challenging to explain moral clarity and humanity to people who have none of it, but Coates handles it with aplomb and composure. Coates states that the task for young writers should be nothing less than changing the world: “writing is how we interpret so much of everything that is around us.”

I’m moved by this statement; it echoes my belief (and other writers’) that this is the work. Writing as practice and not outcome!, is a phrase¹ I have picked up from elsewhere and transferred to every one of my notebooks (as well as running constantly through my mind) that greet me every morning as I log in shapeless prayers and confessions, wild dreams and anguish, and, often, futile thoughts and errands that have come to build my portrait.

Many years ago, Susan Sontag wrote, “The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood.” The writer’s diary is an archive, an artefact to peruse, full of confessions and revelations of humanity, especially during times of turmoil. In their conversation, Rooney brings up the relationship between artistic-intellectual work and the role of artists and intellectuals “at a time like this”, noting that even the usage of the phrase “at a time like this” feels erroneous.

Hammad responds by saying that “violence can make art-making seem quite futile and feeble, something easily crushed. At a time like this, it’s easy to feel useless, and from there it’s a short leap to despair. But I don’t believe we can afford to despair, nor do I think despair is ethical.”

The writer’s diary is a fearless space – it needs to be, to loosen the bounds of self that is constantly subjected to obligations, desires, vulnerabilities.

💌

I have collected some of these thoughts in my diary for over a year now, feeling too foolish, heartbroken, and absurd to publish them here. And against my own sense of self, I’ve decided to go with it. As Sally Rooney noted in her email exchange with Hammad, I also “acknowledge my own position as an ‘outsider’ to all of this. There’s a part of me that wants to say I should stay silent and leave these conversations to people who know better.” But I also know that to not write about the scale of Israeli violence against Palestine and Lebanon is a betrayal of self and a mutilation of my calling as a writer. And this is my stance for all violence against oppressed people, whether in Assam or the Just Stop oil protestors who have been jailed for throwing a can of soup while the world is burning and flooding, quite literally.

It’s easy to sink into despair and abandon faith, especially when we cannot afford to, when rather we should “speak truth to power when power is lying”. So take this as my humble offering to the echoes of agony from around the world. Confronting reality is the [collective] work.

💌

‘Rapid haphazard gallop’ as Virginia Woolf describes her diary keeping experience; both of us trying to cobble together the experience of living each day and documenting it as writing practice.

These are the bricks for my future self to construct my past, being supervised by my present.

1. If you know where it is from, please will you let me know?