Recently loved & why we need new words
Podcasts, songs on repeat, poetry, and the messages strangers leave on sidewalks
Recently loved is exactly that: a roundup of the thing I’ve been glad to discover recently, from songs to podcasts and personal essays. This issue features five things, hope you enjoy.
At least three million people died in the Bengal famine in India during the Second World War, yet it is a history I’m embarrassed to admit I knew little about before listening to this five part series. I learned this was by design: news about the famine was aggressively censored, newspapers were actively discouraged from covering it or even using the word ‘famine’, and not only were the British responsible for the highly avoidable conditions that lead to it, but the relief they provided was too little too late.
I couldn’t help but think about the parallels with what is happening in Gaza today, where over a million people are facing a man-made famine, and Israel continues to actively block aid. Not only this— but for Palestinians to even stand in line for basic necessities— flour— is a life-threatening risk. (Even as I edited this, news broke that several volunteers for World Central Kitchen were killed in airstrikes).
Listening to this series on the Bengal famine raised a lot of questions relevant today: what motivates the refusal to call something what it is— a famine, a genocide? How does the not-naming allow for the evasion of accountability, and therefore delayed action? And how does this manipulated evasion eventually dictate what— or who— is remembered?
I got chills when the podcast presented a letter by a junior officer that had been intercepted and censored during the Bengal famine:
“Whenever I sit for my meals, a dreadful picture of the appalling Indian food problem passes through my mind, leaving a cloudy sediment on the walls of my heart, which makes me nauseous, and often I leave my meals untouched.”
I listened to this episode shortly after reading Mosab Abu Toha’s essay, “My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza,” and was struck by the parallels, and how the person witness to such suffering is impacted, especially when that suffering is gaslit.
80 years after the junior officer wrote this letter which never made it to its recipient, Mosab Abu Toha wrote:
“.. lately, hearing about unprecedented starvation in Gaza, I have felt a sort of hatred for the food in front of me. As I eat simple meals of chicken, rice, salad, and olives with my family, I think of the hunger in my homeland, and of all the people with whom I want to share my meals. I yearn to return to Gaza, sit at the kitchen table with my mother and father, and make tea for my sisters. I do not need to eat. I only want to look at them again.”
2. Nina Simone’s MY BABY JUST CARES FOR ME, Honne remix.
This one has been on repeat for weeks now. I’m a big fan of covers and remixes when they offer something completely new to a song, or when they bring out a tone that always shimmered in the original, and this one does that. It pulls out the heartbreaking undercurrent in the lyrics in such a beautiful way, I can’t stop listening to it.
3. This brilliant interview in The Yale Review between Aria Aber and Fady Joudah on his poetry collection […], which he wrote over the course of ten weeks in response to the war on Gaza. The entire conversation is full of so many gems, but these answers by Fady Joudah stayed with me in particular:
On the responsibility of the poet:
… I often think that the responsibility of the poet is to strive to become the memory that people may possess in the future about what it means to be human: an ever-changing constant. In poetry, the range of metaphors and topics is limited, predictable, but the styles are innumerable. Think how we read poetry from centuries ago and are no longer bothered by its outdated diction. All that remains of old poetry is the music of what it means to be human. And perhaps that’s all we want from poetry. A language of life.
On the eros in his poetry:
… Eros is a marker of life, against alienation, against death as a tool that imposes subordination. I am a Palestinian man. An Arab man. A Muslim man. My desires are ordinary. My fragilities, too. In these poems of longing, I reclaim my body from the culture that wants to hear and read me only as a voice in the aftermath of disaster and as a wound at that, not much more.
This message on the sidewalk I walked by yesterday. Not sure who needs to see it, I certainly did: