menu

By the Sea

A truly beautiful book, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea is full of quiet insight about leaving home, about families, about illegal immigration, and about malice.  It has a brilliant humour.  Here is a bit about  a madrasa, a chuoni on the island of Zanzibar: Chuoni, that was where we went to learn the aliph-be-te so we […]

Read more

imaginary cities

Hav is like a nested doll.  There is an original fictional travelogue published in 1987 embedded within the arc of a narrative that updates the story originally published in 1987 with “the events”; with the resulting diptych published in 2007.  Then this embedded story is itself embedded within the life of the travel-writer/popular historian/fiction-writer, Jan Morris.  Jan […]

Read more

“…for rivers and seas are not to be regarded as disjoining, but as uniting”

From Hegel through Schmitt to Foucault and onwards, there is a way of thinking about sea and land not as inert backdrop but as factors determining politics, history and the transformation of the world. Hegel’s The Philosophy of History is geographically deterministic and intensely racialised.  His reading of Africa and Africans doesn’t even bear thinking about.  And […]

Read more

The ship as the heterotopia par excellence

How wonderful is it that Foucault considers the ship the perfect heterotopia: Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is […]

Read more

“war, commerce, and transit”

“Let us have the courage to be crude: let us sweep the spirit of subtlety down the sewer along with the flags and the great warriors.” Paul Nizan Paul Nizan’s star burned bright and brief.  He was a classmate of Jean-Paul Sartre‘s at École Normale Supérieure and a member of the French Communist Party who resigned his membership […]

Read more

Edward Said on Cavafy in Alexandria

In his Reflections on Exile, Edward Said has a lovely elegiac essay called Cairo and Alexandria, which is an ode to Cairo and a eulogy for Alexandria.  I love the bits that follow (and especially sympathise with the fear of consulates disappearing): Her loneliness convinced me that Alexandria was in fact over: the city celebrated by […]

Read more