A couple of weeks ago, I reluctantly attended a book club meeting. The root of my reluctance was that we were slated to discuss a book I really liked- A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine- and I wasn’t willing to listen to people criticize it, despite being aware of its failings. There are a couple of books that I resonate with in a way that leaves me unfairly taking criticisms of the book as criticisms of myself. The reason I resonated with A Memory Called Empire is because of Mahit, the protagonist, and her internal conflict as the ambassador from Lsel Station arriving in the heart of the Teixcalaani Empire. Her chief goals are to figure out why and how her predecessor died and to stop the empire from swallowing up her tiny but independent station in its never-ending expansion.
In the book, “Teixcalaan” literally means “civilization”. So anyone outside the empire is not Teixcalaani, not civilized. Including Mahit, who has been specially trained in Teixcalaani customs and linguistics her entire life. She’s also more than a little fascinated by Teixcalaani culture and struggles with delineating her allure for the empire that wants to consume her home. When she gets to the capital, she is unprepared for how often she will be called a barbarian, a savage, uncivilized. It’s her allies who use these terms- it’s not an insult, but a simple statement of fact.
My plan for book club was to stay silent, lest I betray my oversensitivity. There were too many ugly emotions brewing in me- memories of arriving in the US for college and having peers tell me my accent was cute and faculty praising how articulate I was. It was painful hearing all of this knowing how Westernized I already was, knowing I learned about exclusively European history in my high school “World History” class, knowing my school used to be owned and operated by the Church of England. Most importantly, knowing I spoke English much better than I spoke my mother tongue. I reacted to all of this in a way I’m not particularly proud of- I figured out how to affect a more American accent. It was all for naught, though, since now I have to listen to people telling me how impressive it is that I don’t have an accent. The hubris is so classically American, to think I don’t have an accent because I talk the way they do.
One of the problems of going to a science fiction and fantasy book club is that there’s a very particular demographic that’s over-represented. I’ll let you guess what it is, but it didn’t particularly surprise me that when the conversation veered toward themes of empire and colonialism, I started getting annoyed. I managed to stay silent through someone insisting that the book was unrealistic because they didn’t understand why Mahit would fight for Lsel Station’s independence because “it doesn’t seem like a very nice place to live.” I don’t even know what I would have said. Maybe it’s her home.
Anyone who’s ever met me could tell you that my internal promise to stay silent wasn’t going to work out. I managed it until someone again commented on the book being unrealistic. She said, if it’s such a powerful empire, why is it always at war? I managed to, quite neutrally, say that empires are only empires because they are always at war. Then she said that it didn’t make sense that Mahit and Teixcalaani politicians would be so interested in going to parties and poetry readings if the empire was dealing with constant border wars. This time, I was a little more frustrated. I said that we were sitting in a bookstore discussing science fiction in the capital of the US empire while the US was air-striking Yemen for resisting the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, so it made sense to me why a similar thing might be happening in the book. Yeah, there was an awkward silence after that.
My mother used to say that the problem with growing up in Pakistan is that you can’t have a childhood. And what she meant by this, I think, is that innocence is a privilege reserved for whiteness. I was 12 in 2009 when Obama started “surgical and precise” drone strikes in Pakistan. What I remember is picking up the newspaper for my parents to see the civilian death counts. I never got to misunderstand the costs of empire.
When I walked out of the bookstore, I felt a familiar sort of resigned sadness creeping in. Even though I’ve lived in the US for nearly 8 years, I often leave interactions with Americans feeling alienated and remembering that no amount of years living in the US will change the fact that I’m Pakistani. That many people around me see the genocide in Gaza as something happening “over there,” while I keep thinking my people, my people, my people. That some can read about American bombs dropping in Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and/or Palestine and shake their heads, while I feel a scream building inside that has nowhere to go. I try to remind myself that this is a kind of intentional psychological violence, to render me so alienated that I feel hopeless, but it doesn’t always help. I don’t mean to over-intellectualize this, because it’s just the difference between not being bothered to care, and not being able to help caring. Ah, my over-thereness is showing again.
To feel alienated is to feel rootless, or to experience the world as indifferent to oneself.1 This idea of alienation is famously explored by Marx in the context of workers under capitalism, but it was Fanon who extended Marx’s analysis in Black Skins, White Masks to apply to racial colonialism. His main line of argument is that racial colonialism infiltrates every facet of the colonized subject, including their inner psyche. At the center of this analysis is his acknowledgment that human beings need to be recognized. In a colonial society, colonized subjects can’t measure their own humanity by their recognition, because the colonizer does not see them as human. And so their very worth as a human being, and their own measure of it, is diminished. He calls this inhabiting a “zone of non-being.”
In my eternal wisdom, I have chosen to live in a country built on not recognizing humanity. Non-resident, non-citizen, non-being. Although, of course, it’s never really a choice.
I have repeatedly entered and exited this zone of non-being over the last few months, and many times before that. Every time I’ve been in a situation where acquaintances, coworkers, or friends draw a line that circles our humanity but excludes Palestinians, I feel myself disappearing. I think, oh, you’ve never really seen me. I feel like I’ve done a great magic trick, by somehow convincing them that there is any world in which I would be within their circle, or want to be, instead of outside. I may live in the imperial core, but I don’t belong here. And I likely never really will, since the belonging is predicated on drawing that fucked up circle.
It was in this personal context that I saw the news alert of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation and had the first thought: that makes sense. And then, the subsequent thought: oh god, no it doesn’t. No, it doesn’t. Of course, it doesn’t, it can’t make sense, because it is the not making sense that made Bushnell feel he had to do what he did. But I know that I’m nowhere near the only person moved by his sacrifice because I was not the only person who stood in front of his makeshift memorial and silently wept. I keep thinking of his words: “I am sorry to my brother and my friends for leaving you like this. Of course, if I was truly sorry, I wouldn’t be doing it. But the machine demands blood. None of this is fair.” None of this is fair.
The price of my staying here has already been paid, the alienation is a foregone conclusion. A tax, if you will. I read Hijab Butch Blues recently (very good) and I highlighted this quote from when the author is likening staying in the US to staying in an abusive marriage:
“I know what staying entails: becoming a part of the settler colonialist project that is this country, contributing to imperialist wars with my taxes, becoming complicit in the government-backed abuse of other marginalized people. But I want to stay. Because where would I go?
… I hold the card that says “Welcome to America” in my hands. And I feel nothing- no jubilation, no joy, no lightness, not even a sense of resolution that this saga is behind me. It doesn’t magically go away, this feeling of not being from here, that I might be asked to leave at any moment, of being trapped. I suspect it never will.”
She’s right, of course. It never will. And she’s also right later when she says community is the only thing that helps. Organizers in DC have done a incredible job with flyers and graffiti all over the city in support of Palestine. It doesn’t get covered up fast enough to replace the new flyers and slogans all over the walls. The one that always makes me smile a little is: fall into community/ not into despair/ not into indifference. I suppose it doesn’t hurt that I’ve always been good at funneling despair into rage, too.
If you enjoyed this piece and want to think about these ideas a little more, here are the books I was thinking about while writing:
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr
A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging by Lauren Markham
Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy by Cristina Beltrán
Amin, Sherifa. Dimensions of Alienation and the Postcolonial Context: Hegel, Marx, and Fanon. 2019. American University in Cairo, Master's Thesis. AUC Knowledge Fountain. https://fount.aucegypt.edu/etds/769
Laleh this is so beautifully written and poignant, thank you for sharing. I always count myself lucky to be able to read your writing
Laleh this is so poignant and the first piece of yours I've read. I could leave pages and pages about how deeply this struck a cord, the bit about the intentional psychological violence, the bit about alienation, the bit about never quite fitting in, the bit about developing an american accent just to still be annoyed when americans are surprised at how deeply their culture has become entrenched elsewhere ... I'm nearing a decade of living in the US and every year I become more and more alienated, more and more steadfast in wanting to leave. I tell americans that I came here for opportunity because there was no opportunity back home in Armenia and Iraq for me, but this year I've finally (embarrassingly) internalised the fact that there's no opportunity back home *in order for* this empire to flourish. It's fucked and none of this is fair.