Nate Pritts’ collection of poetry, “Post Human” (A-Minor Press, 2015), explores the terrain of living on the edge of what it means to be human. “Post Human” is divided into four sections with verses connected in one form or the other, whether thematically or in style.

The first section, “Pattern Exhaustion,” covers everyday life and the mundane. The narrator of the first section documents and archives minutia in various forms. This section is propelled forward by a sense of ennui while still making an effort to note small quirky habits and observations such as:

“I have learned that rain is easier
to deal with when it ruins you
completely.”

“I spend forty minutes
imagining what it would be like
to stand in the rain

but never consider going outside.
I write a note

to myself so I won’t forget
certain key data.”

“I check my email
for a message from you

twenty-three times

during a typical workday.
I’m too surly

& depressed about everything
about even my shirt.”

The section reads like a lover reliving old memories and patterns, as if mourning a loved one. Our habits may help us continue living during grief, and yet, so can breaking out of old patterns. Sometimes the way to keep living after a tragedy is to radically alter the network of relationships with everything around us. By delving into this conundrum we reach one of the limits of thinking that underlies the divide between the human and the post-human.

“Everything a pattern that can be
discerned                      or else
everything a pattern
because we say so.”

The above concern of the limits of human perception/language, a key concern in much of the philosophical discussion around ‘post-human’, is revisited later in the collection again.

In the second section, “No Filter,” we first encounter the narrator’s cynicism with respect to technology:

“Every person that I ever loved
Is just a trace on the screen today
Just a ghost in my soul
So I need to know
do I feel what I feel
When the machine tells me to?

When can I believe in myself?

Help me believe in myself”

Here the narrator laments the lack of a belief-system while at the same time wondering if feelings do indeed travel across the technological network.

“Dark mornings
abound            crowd the season.
You can’t distinguish

the noise of wind
the rilled air against leaves
from within the sinister engines
of the rain.
I am recording
the final experiences of a human
on this planet                   entangled
with nature.”

The narrator remains ambivalent about man’s relationship with nature and machines in this section, instead recording the events of the present like an archivist. The narrator does pass overt value judgments after a few pages, noting the existence of a consumerist culture and capitalism, as well as their environmental impacts:

“Here I am at the table, these chairs,
all painted fresh to look worn.
They blend in with this present age
of getting whatever you want
even when you have no idea what that is.
We generate more waste.
The days will eat you alive if you let them.”

The third section, “Ship of Nails,” names the concept of the “post-human” outright. The narrator in this section isn’t just a human but a system:

“I am a closed system
With unwanted precognition
A broken system in need of repair”

Even poetry is not idealized; there’s no romanticism to be found in this section:

“Inner wisdom activates you
Awakens you to yourself
The benevolence of the market god
The quiescence of morning as it unfolds
Watercolor sky above
So soft              So pretentious
My thoughts”

Language is no more a medium worthy of attention, a machine that merely generates artifacts. It is crude and not visceral enough to explicate the complexity of the systems around us:

“Participates in life
Is memorable
Events are changing
Feelings are changing
Events suffer powerful feelings
A verbal artifact makes patterns
I mean A linguistic artifact
Words on paper
I am suffering powerful feelings
In words on paper
I live viscerally In thought
Live apart from all this own crude matter”

The fourth section, “Life Event,” turns from deliberate cynical meditation back to the mundane, taking us back to where the first section began. But now the narrator is enriched by the journey and aware of the banality of much of the meaning-making systems that we humans are equipped with:

“You’ve spent so many nights
   trying to learn a shape
you thought you could hold
 an object you thought you could give a name to.

So many miles of night & still
no name for it                 no understanding.

My poetry remembers & forgets
this one self
the way my life            has learned routines
only to leave them
to lose faith
while my body empties of what it collects.”

There are moments of sheer nihilism, overwhelming the narrator:

“We’ve had it wrong. Life isn’t accumulation.
Every day is a slow destruction.”

But the section ends with an image of stillness and indifference, a position of deep resignation. We are no longer led by the lovelorn early narrator, and do not revisit any deliberation on the nature of post-humanity:

“It’s the kind of air that feels like rain
& when it starts I’ll go inside
to watch it.                    I’ll just watch it.”

Quotations from Thoreau and Upanishad are placed in the text to guide readers through the journey of this collection. The first and the fourth sections consider the slow-paced quotidian life and the way it offers us a counter-view to the breakneck speed that we are gathering as a civilization. Thoreau and Upanishad take a romanticist view of the world, especially considering that the latter is a spiritual or religious text. Our narrator takes an ambivalent approach when defining the post-human, yet invoking these romanticist notions gives a crypto-romanticist undertone to the text.

The post-human, for Pritts, is not simply a new age that needs to be dealt with, nor is it welcomed warmly. The future is a milieu from which one can chose to withdraw.

Debarun Sarkar is a writer currently based in Calcutta, India.

The post Hidden Romanticism in the “Post Human” Poetry of Nate Pritts appeared first on Newfound.

The book is arranged in five sections; the first three are the strongest and make for delightful reading. Unlike Lena Dunham’s character in the TV series “Girls,” who seeks out misadventure to help fill up a memoir while she is still in her 20s, Bell’s early life is extremely eventful and required no extra effort to find anguish. Her mother battled prescription drug dependency; Bell is a rape survivor who occasionally binged alcohol. At the end of the memoir readers may wonder how Bell emerged from it all so strong and capable.

I read the book around the time the TV series “13 Reasons Why” was released on Netflix, an adaptation of the young adult novel by Jay Asher, in which a teenage girl named Hannah narrates the reasons for her suicide in great detail. It struck me that that Bell’s narrative was the exact opposite of the fictional events depicted in the “13 Reasons Why”: her anger and despair were hard to put into words or make sense of. The inability to explain things seems more relatable, more realistic somehow.

Halfway through the memoir Bell befriends a guy named Cash. They grow close because of their mothers’ drug habits. She breaks down in front of him at one point:

I finished telling Cash how I’d thought about killing myself. I blamed it, out loud, on not being able to deal with my mum’s behaviour. But when I uttered those words, it felt like a mammoth lie. Mum’s behaviour was not the reason I wanted to kill myself. Yes, it may have heightened it, but it wasn’t the reason. I didn’t know the real reason why. Was I mad?

Can one really quantify a suicide like Hannah does in “13 Reasons Why”? Bell feels desperate like the fictional character Hannah and wonders how the world around her would react like after her death. Yet Bell lives on. Her story ends on a note of optimism, of finding a sense of self amidst extreme chaos, a dysfunctional family, teenage rebellion, and isolation.

Bell guides us through her life by talking to her reflection in the mirror and voices in her head. The “reflection” pieces are more introspective and read as if they serve a therapeutic function for Bell herself. Bell’s main narration style is precise and succinct, without the use of flowery language or overt emotional indulgence. It’s a breeze to read.

That is not to suggest that the text lacks depth. The relationship between Bell and her struggling mother is rich and remains at the heart of the story. It is their relationship that drives the narrative of Dear Reflection forward. The book includes an epilogue, a letter written by Bell’s mother about certain prescription drugs.

Bell moved from Australia to Greece after university, to be with the family of her partner. Her mother followed her to Greece eventually. In many ways the Mediterranean becomes a place of calm, of healing and starting over for Bell and her family. Moving from one side of the equator to another, as if mirroring the rhythm of the climate, changed the pace and tone of Bell’s writing about her life.

Readers do get some answers and clarity, eventually. By the end of the memoir Bell’s teenage life doesn’t really look like a string of unintelligible choices, but tell the story of a girl trying to fit in, find a place and people to belong with.

Debarun Sarkar is a writer currently based in Calcutta, India.

The post Jessica Bell’s Memoir “Dear Reflection”: Self-Discovery Amidst a Dysfunctional Family appeared first on Newfound.

Like much of pre-modern literature, the dating of the volume remains in dispute. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, who translated a selection of the volume titled “The Absent Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry from the Gathasaptasati of Satvahana Hala” (Penguin, 2008), notes that the text dates from around Second Century C.E. and also borrowed from traditions in the megalithic culture of the Deccan in the First Millennium B.C.E.

The title of the book is telling; the figure of the traveler is recurrent throughout. It isn’t surprising that the traveler here becomes the object of desire.

Roland Barthes notes in the second fragment “Absence” in his book The Lover’s Discourse, “Historically, the discourse of absence is carried on by the Woman; Woman is sedentary, Man hunts, journeys; Woman is faithful (she waits), man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises). It is Woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do so; she weaves and she sings; the Spinning Songs express both immobility (by the hum of the Wheel) and absence (far away, rhythms of travel, sea surges, cavalcades). It follows that in any man who utters the other’s absence something feminine is declared: this man who waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously feminized. A man is not feminized because he is inverted but because he is in love.: (Myth and utopia: the origins have belonged, the future will belong to the subjects in whom there is something feminine.)”

The sedentary figure and the traveler show up in the collection numerous times:

When she heard the bird’s flutter
As they rose from the rattan grove,
Her young limbs
Languished in the kitchen.

—

Ask next door
For deerskins, traveller:
Our men don’t stalk
Blameless creatures.

—

Friend I’m worried.
My bangles expand
When he’s abroad
Is this common?

—

The ache
Of separation
Ends
But in death’s
Diversions.”
“My braided hair’s
Not straight yet,
And you again speak
Of leaving.

The motif of the absent traveler is one the prime motif of the lover’s discourse, and it’s primary location in the woman historically is expected. But where this collection truly shines, is when the women speak of their sexual desires.

Lying in bed,
Eyes closed,
Remembering him,
Then with arms
From which bangles
Keep slipping,
Clasps herself.

—

In her first labour,
She tells her friends,
‘I won’t let him
Touch me again.’ They Laugh.

—

He groped me
For the underwear
That wasn’t
There:
I saw the boy’s
Fluster
And embraced him
More tightly.

—

Friend, you should’ve seen
His hands fumbling inside
The thin skirt glued
To my wet fanny.

—

One proud, the willful:
Act drunk, stumble, touch his hand.

The volume serves as a worthwhile reminder of a history of the region which was a little more erotic, a little less sanitized by Victorian morality, and a little more folksy. Transcending the Orientalist’s fascination for ancient India and sexuality, these texts also provide us with women’s voices from a time and space where the archive doesn’t help us unearth much. These voices still read as contemporary and attest to the universal quality of sexual desire and the lover’s discourse, across time and space.

More than anything, the work is a testament to the fact that risqué works are not so novel indeed.

Debarun Sarkar is a writer currently based in Calcutta, India.

The post Risqué Poetry is Not So Novel: Notes on the Gathasaptasati of Satvahana Hala appeared first on Newfound.

The “arrogant man” frequents the titles of several of Feldman’s poems and is also tucked within the works themselves. Feldman’s “arrogant man” seems to be a muse (whether real or not is inconsequential) which lets him write.

In “A Jungle Friend” the arrogant man appears to be an intimate friend:

“The arrogant man hums Shostakovich. We watch cartoons, naked
on top of the covers, and my fear’s the fear of half-apt hooligans in
a warehouse surprised by extra blackness in the night when the bat
kills the light.”

In “The Arrogant Man (My Man)” the scene becomes even more intimate:

“In which we collided in half-sleep.

In which God, not prudence, said so, and so I said, “Settle me here,”
not meaning only for a time.

In which the arrogant man half understood and halved the canvas gap

between us in the tent, intent on daring what not daring would have
made him fully afraid.”

The intimacy slowly gives way to scenes of separation in “Codicil of The Arrogant Man”:

“You peering cautiously beneath the sheet
as if still hardly daring, now the moon was dead,
to check out its backside.
How often we’d teased each other
about pinching its behind,
if only it would ever turn around.”

In “Letter for the Arrogant Man” the separation gives way to a certain melancholia with contemplation of death, of mortality:

“Even after I die, my fingers will play
across his skin – late petals dropping
in the north wind – already my touch so light
it hardly belongs to me.

Like words my fingers’ movements
are his when they’ve left me,
nails, knuckles, feathers
tangling hair.”

The contemplation on mortality is recurrent in the collection whenever the gaze is directed towards the body. In “Four  Leaf Clover,” the reader is jolted with a near-death experience:

“I know to get out of my seatbelt.
I sense that by a miracle I am unscathed,
that no one else is around.
But after I crawl out the window
you show me the other car,
crushed like clover.

Now I watch the policeman
questioning me. I’m walking slow
across a burning field,
telling the doctor how impossibly I stand
in relation to everything.
The radio plays a partita. The sun
plays checkers with the floor.”

In “Schematic of Procreation” Feldman asks self-referentially:
“Who made me
interested in tangles of wires,
in tangles
of bodies and their parts
and the physical properties of elements?”

In the closing piece “The Body as One,” the “arrogant man” has disappeared. He is not addressed anymore as “the arrogant man”:

“Bruised bundle, touch me again.
Climb on. I’ll lift us both
into flood

for forgiveness –

for the cuff quick
to the tissue
that contracts –
for the contacts we brush end to end
lightly, lightning, write down
our name again, compact

between tongue and pen.”

This collection of Feldman’s poems appear to be deeply confessional, yet ciphered enough to not make the references overtly obvious. If the collection is anything, it is a prayer of/for the lonely. Feldman after all quotes from Genesis unflinchingly “It is not good that the man should be alone.”

Check our Feldman’s pieces from Newfound Journal Vol. 2 Issue 3 here.

Debarun Sarkar is a writer currently based in Calcutta, India.

The post Ezra Dan Feldman’s Habitat of Stones appeared first on Newfound.

Dust in my imagination is more humble. It is not the fascination with cyclical history that attracts me to it but rather the mundane, everyday-ness of it.

Unlike Carolyn Steedman (in her essay “Something She Called a Fever“) dust has never had anything to do with history or the archive for me. My thoughts on dust might appear symptomatic of archive fever, the constant search for origins, I beg to differ.

Growing up in small towns makes one accustomed to dust. I grew up at the outskirts of a city on the western coast of India. Surat appears in history textbooks as the port of choice before Bombay was passed on to the British from the Portuguese. When someone asks me where I grew up, I say Surat, but I did not really grow up there. My father worked in a cement factory in Hazira, an industrial-shipping hub. So we lived near Hazira, near the village Vesu.

For the longest time our neighborhood was under the governance of a panchayat and not the municipality. The landscape was dotted with houses then priced at what today would be termed “affordable housing.” The houses and apartments were moderately-sized. The problem was never the fact that these affordable apartments and ‘row houses’ as they were called, were not sufficiently luxurious, rather the problem was that the land which it was built upon was a low-lying area, which meant that during every monsoon the ground floor flooded.

When I was younger, dust didn’t feel as uncomfortable as it does now. I have read that today the most-sold Chinese house appliances are air purifiers. Chinese manufacturers are trying to market the devices in India as well. Dust is unhealthy, scientists tell us. My father works for environmental accreditation at his factory now; he cannot help but reiterate how unhealthy dust is. Dust, now mixed with pollutants, has found its way outside of Steedman’s archive and into our everyday lives. Can one feel the archive fever when dust is mixed with pollutants? What kind of a history would our body imagine away from the dust of the archive?

A day of air in Delhi is supposed to be as bad as two boxes of cigarettes. I read this in the newspaper right before I left for Delhi. The first thing I did after getting out at New Delhi Railway Station was smoke a cigarette.

Landscapes determine so much of our thought. I cannot write about snow-capped mountains or a chilly winter without a sense of distance. Winter has never been uncomfortable. Winter was never supposed to be uncomfortable wherever I have lived.

Dust on the other hand is something that I have grown uncomfortable with. The city of Calcutta, where I live now, is not dusty, due to high humidity.

The dusty landscapes of the arid region resonate a feeling of lost home for me. A lost home which one doesn’t feel melancholic for but rather grows indifferent to as all migrants do, like dust itself. Like most uncomfortable homes left behind, they need not be returned to.

The landscape wasn’t like the desert, nor was it like the lush green of Bengal. The soil was pale brown, cracked dry, parched, and I wondered every time I looked into those cracks whether one could slip into the fiery orange core of the Earth of geography textbooks. Walking on the football ground in the summer was scary. The feet were too small and any moment they could slip inside the cracks of the soil.

Debarun Sarkar is an alumnus of English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad and Presidency University, Kolkata where he studied English and Sociology respectively. He currently lives in Calcutta.

The post Dust & Soil appeared first on Newfound.

The poem “Bone River (i)” is the first in the collection, opening with:

“Our child experiments with her
limbs, displacing air and
waiting for the vacancy to fill.”

There undoubtedly is a lyrical quality to Williams’ work. He navigates mundane private memories, the everyday, and adds subtle touches of flourish to them. In today’s world of urgency, this gives a reader a sense of pause. Today, moments of pause are undoubtedly political, as well as existential. And it is precisely there that things sometimes become muddled.

In “Salmon Run” the poetic voice expresses hopelessness with a deep sense of unmentioned guilt and regret. The poet eventually shrugs this off; these mistakes have been committed by forefathers before.

“inside so long. Shores erode and all
of a sudden we are chin-deep and vanishing
upstream in bundled schools toward whatever it was our
great-grandfathers were,

toward the temporary holiness of knowing
all my mistakes have been made before.”

The lines evoke a beat-like mysticism, a search for redemption. But a redemption from what exactly? This sense of guilt, of mistakes, is something I’m terribly uncomfortable with, if coated in ambiguous words. They appear too conservative in their tone. But at the same time, when put within a context of existentialism, it all suddenly makes sense. Thousands of years of human consciousness, of philosophy, and here we are, still, with our same philosophical predicaments, unresolved.

In the same poem, Williams leaves no room for criticism as he moves on. The voice seeks, looks forward to a new beginning, away from history, away from the mountains, from the source, and claims not to look back.

“River, angry

old river, I understand your need to run
swiftly from the source. I too don’t look back
at the mountains, so distant, dawn-red,

where I am headed to spawn.”

Like salmon, we flow down the river and swim up again. Stuck within the limits of our species we claim and hold on to a façade of progress. This cyclical nature of human lives, fueled by the process of reproduction, becomes a central ground to work on for Williams.

In “Grief is a Primitive Art” he writes:

“and faith
has forever been rendered
a shallow cup
inches from our lips.”

Reaching the existential limits of human lives, Williams does not fail to note the limits of identities that we find ourselves stuck within. Separated from the sense of belonging that families provide us, he paints a violent picture of the family unit.

Perhaps drawing from radical feminism in the poem “Oppenheimer,” the family is presented as a unit of belonging but also the primary source of violence.

“over your heart, then releasing. Son

and daughter and lover and home, how purified
we emerge from having expressed
and meant them, as if some great voice said

be
and erased all other verbs.

Mother we call the beauty in
what cannot be possessed,
and father, where are you
but in the violence it takes
to create her?”

In “A Dead Boy Distinguishes Proximal from Distal” neither is a child spared:

“I learned young the difference
between feeding and being fed,
pushing and the pushed.”

The violence of human life (within the family, in childhood, of growing up) is explored in Williams’ work without a sense of proselytizing or of the confessional. His work captures the universal sense of being born within this human body with all its limitations.

Politics it seems in Williams’ work is not merely at the level of the economical or the social but at the primary level of being.

In “Bone River (iii)” he writes:

“At night, sometimes, I hear them
grind dreamlessly against cold sheets,
longing

for something not yet named. Those
perfectly formed hands, so like mine,
alive with unrevealed obligations.”

The collection “Disinheritance” is as much about letting go or the inability to, as it is about the difficulty of grasping towards something alien.

Debarun Sarkar is an alumnus of English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad and Presidency University, Kolkata where he studied English and Sociology respectively. He currently lives in Calcutta.

The post Guilt and Redemption in “Disinheritance” by John Sibley Williams appeared first on Newfound.

I find poets and writers who emerge out of or are associated with writing programs in the West to be distant, with their concocted vocabularies and morphological structures. I rarely feel anything from their works. Much like the art-house cinemas of the world, the writers from university writing programs live in their own little cocoons. They neither display the concerns of the masses nor do they display an affinity with the Philistines on the street. Faris’s work traverses from high culture of Spinoza and Walter Benjamin to Eminem and Katrina Kaif, the everyday life that has no inkling of romanticism for the bygone era.

Faris, a Kuwaiti poet, brings with her work certain clichéd political expectations concerning pathos of war and migration. The expected themes are touched on without the expected motifs. Instead she paints a picture of a world in transition and contradiction through war, trade, consumption and morality in the everyday life of its people.

Faris’s work displays none of the regionalist aspiration that much of post-colonial academia cherishes as she situates her experiences, her place, within the network of this world. We expect this of an English poet of the post-colony and yet her words appear fresh when Faris articulates them.

In “The Death and Rebirth of Saddam Hussein” Saddam and Eminem share neighborhood;

Al-Jazeera in the background.
This time, we all pay attention
when my father cries, “Mat Saddam!”
But it’s just like every other time.
Wishful thinking on a couch.

March. The 75th Academy Awards.
My brother and I pretending to sleep
on makeshift beds on the floor.
[…] My computer in the bedroom.
Intermittent Internet. When
Souq Sharq was damaged,
I was still thinking of 8 Mile
and of Eminem’s Oscar.

“Arab Poetry of the Hereafter” touches on the contradictions that every post-colonial writer working with foreign languages feels or has at least thought of:

“Take me,” she said,
dabbing her lips with the curse of cognizance
—a second generation Anglophone writer,
the badge built with the labour of her forefathers
glinted with pride, poking holes
into her self-righteous visage.

“I don’t give a damn about your journey
of self-realisation, when your people
import my people as cheap labour,

and while we’re at it,
I would just like to add,
that you don’t have a history to write about.”

My preoccupation
with the language of modernization
was thwarted in one fell swoop
on the night of a gaggling gathering
glinting with dew on temples and brows
of ideological disseminators of truth,
with eyeballs half-watching the backs of their heads,
and half closed.

In “My Uncle Traveled on a Train” the everyday contradiction of ethnic warfare is put ever so succinctly:

He traversed lands that were not his own,
in army uniform, dapper
though creased and crumpled,
his backpack full of energy bars and batteries. My uncle
was ever so polite,
tipping his beige bent hat to strangers,
smiling, he asked about their names and health
                —strangers he would not hesitate to bomb
                                when elevated
thousands of miles in the air, and they
mere insects crawling on the planet that gave my uncle
                his accent, his mustard, his beard.

Beyond these contradictions, Faris’s work also displays a ferocity that is often missing from today’s literature of the gentry. Her work doesn’t just cover the anger or resentment against the political institutions or establishments, but also displays a keen distaste for the optimism (a sort of yuppism) that haunts much of the globalized urban spaces today.

In “Janus/Portunus” Faris doesn’t mince her words;

The selfish soul of man is found
at last in greedy genes disclosed
in cells and coined in labs.

But a fact is a whore
working for the rich and famous,
fearing the cabal of mercenaries,
ready and willing and able to teleport
at moment’s notice at the brothel’s door.
But what do you expect?

In “There is no Better” she hits on the global hysteria of “depression” that has hit all of the world replacing, melancholia and mourning:

          Get better.
          Get better.
          Are you better?
There is no better. Only. There is.

The Middle East in the dominant imagination of the globe today lacks nuance and depth. The television images of war, refugees, bombs and destroyed buildings are generally what comes to mind. Faris, on the other hand, displays how deftly one could write about years lived around the ecology of war. Her words and phrases are simple, some almost rudimentary. That is precisely where the strength of her work lies.

Despite all the negativity of the collection, the book comes to a close with words of wisdom in a couplet, a form which is extremely popular from the Middle East to South Asia.

Where the first poem in the book ends with the lines—

         This is
         a plantation

the last poem ends with—

Know then thyself, presume not God to find.
The proper study of mankind is kind.

In the book Faris covers the cycle of pessimism, nihilism, cynicism, pragmatism (in the poem about Walter Benjamin, for example) and ends with the most minimal couplet wisdom could offer. The dominant cutesy aesthetic of today, “find beauty in small things and memories,” is overturned by Faris for good.

In “Permit Me” she asks;
May I begin our tale with
“Once beyond the end”?

Debarun Sarkar is an alumnus of English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad and Presidency University, Kolkata where he studied English and Sociology respectively. He currently lives in Calcutta and divides his time between writing and freelancing.

The post Nada Faris’s “Fountain of Youth”: A Collection of Fiery Poems appeared first on Newfound.

The film has three narrators and these stories intertwine to unravel differing standpoints within the political landscape.

Nakos is a disenfranchised angry white man, unemployed at the age of 38 and living with his parents. When the film begins, Nakos’s comments regarding the infiltration of refugees on the streets of Athens appear almost objective, a mere recognition of the fact. But slowly, remarks and actions pile up. Early in the film there is a scene where Nakos introduces us to all the residents of his building. He counts the outsiders as a loss and the number of Greeks as victories, almost like counting score in a football match.

Nakos’s friend Billy is a tattoo artist who runs an illegal tattoo parlor and a bar with his sister Nadia, an activist. Billy maintains a cordial relationship with Nakos since they are neighbors and friends from childhood. Billy, unlike Nakos, sees in the landless refugees a will and desire to live, to survive against massive odds, unlike him and the people around him.

Billy notes in the middle of the film that refugees know where they are headed, even though they are not allowed to legally do so. On the other hand, those who are allowed to move chose to stay in Athens in spite of a dwindling economy. To counter Nakos’s increasing outrage against “outsiders,” viewers meet Billy’s love interest, a black singer, on the run from two men. During one of their early encounters, Billy’s pickup line is “God is Black.” Those are their words of farewell too.

The last character to drive the story is a man named Tarek, a Syrian refugee on the move with his daughter, headed northward of Greece. Through him we encounter the various modes and routes that refugees use to move across Europe. The narrative of the three characters cross and separate by the end of the film, though saying more would give away too much.

I found it fascinating that the film depicts Greece during the period of radical left political party Syriza’s rise and thereafter, yet there is almost no sign of utopianism or overt left propagandizing (except for the presence of some anarchist graffiti). The only overtly political link is provided when Billy tells Nadia not to spend time painting graffiti.

Instead, the movie tries to tackle questions that the revolution in Greece left unanswered: How can we all live in the age of globalized capital when some of our neighborhoods face violence? What does it mean when temporary settlements are an “American Square”? Does “Amerika” stand for multicultural capitalism with inter-ethnic animosities? Can any amount of governing of American Square change the world outside it like Nakos envisions, or does the world outside the “Square” only slip in and out in this age of global capital?

Tarek tells the viewer early in the film how his journey has reoriented his view of borders. He and his daughter are the products of border. Still, they invest in borders, by paying for their illegal modes of infiltration without proper documentation. Though the conclusion is cynical and Nakos’s increasing racist outlook and angst shows no sign of diminishing, it also provides us the first building blocks towards comprehending the monstrosity of the present predicament.

The film is a timely portrayal of characters and issues plaguing much of the world today. The fact that it manages to do it as a popular genre film with a fast-paced narrative is commendable.

Debarun Sarkar is an alumnus of English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad and Presidency University, Kolkata where he studied English and Sociology respectively. He currently lives in Calcutta and divides his time between writing and freelancing.

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