BR!NK ISSUE 8 FALL 2022

Letter from the Editors

BR!NK: A Review of Books was founded by three undergraduates at Yale in the fall of 2017 to open up a space on campus for inquisitive readers and writers to think carefully about a wide range of subjects through one of the most incisive modes of critical engagement there is: the book review. Before it quietly disappeared during the pandemic, BR!NK published print issues filled with thoughtful and imaginative undergraduate writing on American and global politics, history, philosophy, litera ture, and the arts. We’re thrilled to reintroduce it to campus.

BR!NK was first conceived in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, amid a political and psychological moment that is impossible to recover today. On the oth er side of a pandemic, in the midst of inflation and recession, climate catastrophe, a new war in Europe, and the global right’s backlash to reproductive and gender justice and pluralism, it has never been more important to imagine a wider range of better futures. We hope these futures find expression in these pages, be it in Daniel Blokh’s essay on international leftism and the promise of global solidarity, or in Daevan Mangalmurti’s review of a collection of poems translating an ancient Sanskrit epic into the context of modern India, or in Sasha Carney’s commentary on social contagion and trans identity.

As a first principle, we believe that the best critique is that which considers the text and its interlocutors seriously. We believe that a book review is a natural conduit for imaginative and rigorous thinking that invites discussion and debate. We are glad and grateful to have you join us in this issue and issues to come.

Zachary Groz

Tyler Jager Emily Tian

New Haven, Conn. November 2022

Table of Contents

A New Internationalism, Daniel Blokh...............................4 Dissidents among Dissidents, reviewed

False Wilderness, Emily Tian...........................................................8 Bambi, reviewed

Shock Value, Jordan Jenkins...................................................................10 The Fed goes back to the seventies

Laundry Day and Variegation, Aaron Magloire...........................................13 Two poems

Taking Liberalism Seriously Again, Yosef Malka............................................16 Not Thinking Like a Liberal, reviewed

To Make Someone Less Lonely, Tyler Jager..................................................20 An interview with Rachel Aviv

Retranslating the Ramayana, Daevan Mangalmurti................................24 After, reviewed

Formed This Way, Sasha Carney...................................................28 In defense of social contagion

A New Internationalism

Daniel Blokh

In a 2014 lecture at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Timothy Snyder, the Levin professor of history at Yale, argued that Ukraine’s essentially European past justified its future membership in the European Union. Various features of Ukraine’s history, Snyder stated, were classically European, from its origins in a meeting of Vikings and local peoples to its experience of confrontation between Eastern Christianity and Western Christianity. Ukraine’s European path, which was disrupted during the Soviet period, could now be resumed by joining the EU. Putin’s military aggression made this project urgent: Ukraine’s Europeanization was now opposed by a competing Eurasian project. Ukraine therefore became Europe’s front against Russia’s Eurasian project. Snyder warned, “There is a Eurasian future, which you can all go into together, and there is a European future, a European Union future, which you can all go into together. There isn’t anything else. That’s what you have in common.” The crowd began to clap, causing Snyder to pause his speech and remark that he wasn’t expecting applause. Then he brought the argument to its conclusion: “Europe will be together, or Europe will be Eurasia.”

An intellectual celebrity of Central and Eastern European scholarship, Snyder is a favorite of many Russia-watchers, including my own Russian and Ukrainian parents. Yet, in Dissidents Among Dissidents, a collection of political essays written over the past decade, the socialist Russian organizer Ilya Budraitskis finds an unlikely parallel to Snyder’s argument — in the work of Russia’s chief ideologue, Alexander Dugin. The mastermind of Putin’s ideology of Eurasianism, Dugin reframes both Putin’s subversion of democracy and Russia’s geopolitical aggression as justified responses to imposed Western hegemony. On the face of

things, Dugin’s argument seems diametrically opposed to Snyder’s. Yet Budraitskis writes that “both of these constructs are identical in their fatalistic representation of the choices and the impossibility of any third position, no matter what its source or legitimations.” Snyder’s angle might be liberal, Dugin’s nationalist, but both are staging a clash of civilizations in which their position is legitimized by the essential evil of the other.

The alternative that Budraitskis suggests is leftist internationalism. Budraitskis, who was born in Moscow in 1981 and came of age in the chaos of post-Soviet Russia, gravitated from a young age to the works of Marx, Le nin, Trotsky, and the Western left. Since grad uating from the Russian State University for the Humanities, he has contributed to a vari ety of projects promoting the Russian socialist opposition movement, including translating Marxist texts to Russian, collaborating with the art collective Chto Delat? (“What Is To Be Done?”), and launching the podcast Political Diary with political scientist Ilya Matveev. Crucially, Budraitskis’ leftist internationalism staunchly rejects both Western and Putinist im perialism, therefore deviating sharply from the Stalinist and pro-Putin politics of the stodgy Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Recently, his unequivocal rejection of the in vasion of Ukraine has led him to move abroad, along with many anti-war Russians fleeing the crackdown on dissent.

Yet Budraitskis has also rejected the Russian liberal opposition that has coalesced around Alexei Navalny, a movement which seeks to replace Putin’s authoritarian system with neo liberal capitalism. Liberalism may be the less er of two evils, but Budraitkis insists that only the universal struggle against capitalist ex ploitation can lead to international solidarity.

Budraitskis urges readers to avoid uncondi tionally supporting one side of a geopolitical conflict, a framing which “[radically reduces] a huge variety of differences into one central conflict capable of explaining all contradic tions.” During the Cold War, this ‘campism’ pushed some leftists like Jean-Paul Sartre to embrace Stalin’s authoritarian bureaucracy, while other leftists like Arthur Koestler col laborated with the CIA’s anti-communist ef forts. Today, the same logic has returned in the rhetoric of Snyder and Dugin; indeed, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, writers from the Council on Foreign Re lations’ Elliot Abrams to the Boston Globe’s H.D.S. Greenway have explicitly referred to the present situation as the ‘new Cold War.’ No longer drawn along the lines of compet ing economic and nuclear blocs, this twen ty-first-century geopolitical showdown none

theless finds similar geographic boundaries: on one side, the liberal West, and on the other, the anti-liberal anti-West, with its anchor argu ably in China but its most explicit articulation in Putin’s militarily aggressive Russia. Both of these sides exploit and oppress while claim ing to speak in the name of the exploited and oppressed, and leftists are often unwittingly convinced by their rhetoric. “The Cold War’s atmosphere,” Budraitskis writes, “deprives intellectuals of the right to doubt—that is, it confiscates doubt from those for whom doubt is a crucial part of their professional vocation and political function alike.” The prevalence of modern leftists who support NATO expan sion and those who sympathize with Putin because of his supposed ‘anti-imperialism’ prove Budraitskis’ point. In this absurd situ ation, Budraitskis suggests the possibility for solidarity around a third position. “That which genuinely unites people on both sides of this illusory divide between the West and the nonWest is the continuing growth of inequality, the chasm between the ruling elites and the majority, and the alienation of the latter from political participation,” he writes. “Perhaps this is where an internationalist Marxism can regain its significance.”

Budraitskis participates in rehabilitating in ternationalist Marxism by casting doubt on many liberal assumptions about Russian poli tics which have long been taken for granted. In his 2016 essay “The Eternal Hunt for the Red Man,” Budraitskis targets the popular idea, promoted by the notable Belarussian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, that Russia’s modern ills result from its inability to revoke the mindset of the Soviet ‘Red Man’. Drawing a surprising parallel to the Stalinist belief that the linger ing Tsarist Russian mindset was responsible for Soviet failures, Budraitskis argues that, in both cases, the past becomes a rhetorical tool to dematerialize reality and discredit other ex planations for political failure: “The Red Man, deprived of any material explanation, turns into a purely moral problem that refuses any hard and fast resolution, leading to its repro duction.” The metaphysical Soviet specter, re sponsible for any present ills, proves not only an easy explanation for the West, but a con venient excuse for the modern Russian state when justifying its crimes and errors.

At the same time, Budraitskis also provides in cisive critiques of the Russian nationalist po sitions that sometimes appear in his leftist in tellectual milieu. In “Putin Lives in the World Huntington Built,” Budraitskis connects the foreign policy of Vladimir Putin (as well as George Bush, Marine le Pen, and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) with Western conser vative Samuel Huntington’s theory of a clash of civilizations. Skeptical of Fukuyama’s pre

diction that the end of the Cold War would usher in democratic universalism, Huntington instead foresaw a post-ideological epoch char acterized by essentialized, cultural conflict, in which the only guarantee of world peace would be rejecting universalist ambitions and allowing each civilization to follow its own national path. Budraitskis argues that Putin’s regime has followed Huntington’s logic of in herent civilizational traits, evading criticism by framing its “repressive political regime, clerical rhetoric, obscurantism in cultural life and military pressure on neighboring coun tries” as “stages along the path taken by a civ ilization as it returned to its true nature.” De spite the cynical appeal of Huntington’s—and Putin’s—anti-cosmopolitanism, Budraitskis argues, we should see that worldview for what it is: a cunning and effective tool for keeping the powerful in power and subduing a move ment toward international solidarity.

Though Budraitskis incisively deconstructs common misconceptions about Russian poli tics, the closest he comes to communicating a better political platform is in the long titular essay about Soviet socialist dissidents at the core of this book. This seems ironic, as the Soviet socialist dissidents have disappeared together with the state that shaped them; yet Budraitskis’ dedication to relaying these dis sidents’ lives, controversies and beliefs sug gests that perhaps they had it right all along. The term ‘socialist dissidents’ refers to a wide array of Soviet groups and intellectuals who disapproved of the Soviet leadership—not from a liberal capitalist perspective, but rather from a Marxist one. Drawing from old Marx ist treatises, the outlawed texts of Trotsky, and the Yugoslavian experience of anarcho-syndi calism, the socialist dissidents concluded that the stodgy bureaucratism of the Soviet Union was not socialism at all; rather, it was a state capitalism far removed from the worker lib eration and self-management envisioned by Lenin. Publishing in underground journals and organizing clandestine meetings, these so cialist dissidents shared the same space—and some of the same opinions—as other dissident groups, like the liberal capitalist dissidents associated with Andrei Sakharov, and the na tionalist dissidents associated with Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But their anti-capitalist senti ments and Marxist aims often led to divisions with the other dissidents. When Sakharov published a letter to Augusto Pinochet, warn ing that persecution of the poet Pablo Neruda might compromise “the epoch of restoration and consolidation of Chile that you [Pinochet] have declared,” Roy Medvedev, arguably the most prominent socialist dissident, published an impassioned criticism of Sakharov’s gro tesque praise of the coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salva

dor Allende. Ultimately, these dissidents’ het erodox positions led to a double marginaliza tion: their controversial opinions led to their suppression in the USSR, while in the West, their anti-capitalist principles made them far less convenient than Sakharov’s liberalism and Solzhenitsyn’s nationalism. But despite their marginalization, the socialist dissidents had considerable influence in everyday Sovi et discourse—so much so that even my vehe mently anti-socialist Ukrainian father was fa miliar with his doctrines.

Budraitskis’ chronicle of the dissident dramas omitted from Soviet history has urgent impli cations for contemporary Russia. After all, the brutality of the Soviet collapse, whose rever berations we continue to see today, suggests that Medvedev was right. Plunging headfirst into neoliberal capitalism was not the best alternative to stagnant bureaucracy. By shed ding light on the diversity of socialist thought in the USSR, Budraitskis undoes the mistak en idea that communism is synonymous with the Soviet state, thereby restoring the severed link between pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-So viet leftism. By destigmatizing Marxism, Budraitskis rehabilitates it as the best theory for understanding the perpetually widening gap between the rich and the poor, the austeri ty measures imposed on working class people around the globe, and the violent clash of em pires over subjects irrelevant to most peoples’ true interests. In a sense, then, Budraitskis is picking up Medvedev’s torch, resisting Dugin’s nationalism and Snyder’s liberalism much as Medvedev resisted Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov’s, and insisting on an international ist, anti-imperialist leftist movement. Dissi dents Among Dissidents serves as an ideolog ical genealogy of Budraitskis’ own beliefs: a third position, grounded in worker solidarity and not blindly aligned with either side of the ‘new Cold War,’ attempting to see the forest for the trees.

False Wilderness

Emily Tian

Salten’s novel was first serialized in the Vien nese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, Bambi — from which the 1942 film is adapted — has been re-released, courtesy of NYRB Classics, with a new translation from the German by Damion Searls.

It’s August. We are driving a rental car along the Washington coast, down roads that lean close to the sea, then away. Lunch stop near a small marina. Thick clouds gather over head. Only a few dinghies are out, leashed to the pier, on water the wind slivers into dashes.

Dad wants us to go to the mouth of the river. I don’t care to follow him; from where I stand the water looks gray, listless. Everyone’s inter ested in beginnings and endings, he says, half as a joke.

We begin in the brackish in-between. Before you and I got here, the world was already des perately in need of repair. Even on that trip I was let down that wilderness everywhere was bracketed by well-marked footpaths, the sound of my own sneakers on gravel, “wilderness” deliverable only in quotes.

As a kid I loved a famous story about a fawn in a false wilderness, and I’ve recently had a reason to return to it. Exactly a hundred years after Austro-Hungarian writer and critic Felix

In the first half of the book, when Bambi is still young, the prose is verdant and revelato ry, with Searls’ deft translation preserving the glancingly light sentences that make the nov el still accessible for young readers. Through Bambi, we meet a butterfly who takes offense when he is mistaken for a flower and an exqui sitely well-mannered hare whose mustachio sticks out stiffly in all directions.

The Disneyfied Bambi is a sad film, especial ly for the family movie genre, featuring not only the death of Bambi’s mother but also a truly infernal wildfire and a terrifying pack of hunting dogs. The novel is often even more melancholy, most of all in its brutal confronta tion with the irretrievable loss of youth. Adult Bambi, encountering two abandoned young deer in the forest calling after their mother, says admonishingly, “Your mother has no time for you now. Can’t you be alone?” — repeat ing what his elusive father, the Old Prince, had once told him. He walks on, disappearing into the forest.

When I was younger my father used to go hunting, which is surprising, because he is a very mild and quiet middle-aged Chinese man. And by hunting I mean he would enter an annual Maryland lottery to obtain a few open slots during game season, leave the house be

fore morning would break, sit in his camos in a tree stand, and wait. Despite the very cold, very uncomfortable position he routinely put himself in, through all those years he never once saw — or shot — a thing. (While deer were everywhere else! In the suburbs! Road side! In our own backyard!). My mother and I found this very funny.

Once, though, one of his friends dragged a deer to our garage. Blood pooled on the blue tarp they had put down in order to field dress it and prepare the venison. I was glad that my dad never hunted anything himself.

Hunting, in Salten’s novel, is not a punctuated event but a force that warps the entire social consciousness of the animal community. The bleakest scene in the book is when a hunter shoots Bambi’s childhood companion Gobo, who has foolishly grown to trust humans af ter one treats his wound. “He didn’t recognize me…” Gobo says, his voice breaking off, a tragedy of non-recognition that recalls Eu ripides’ The Bacchae, when Dionysus-crazed Agave rips her son into shreds. Unlike its phantasmic off-screen presence in the movie, humankind is rendered here unflinchingly. The hunter is “strangely upright, strangely narrow, and it has a pale face, utterly naked around the nose and the eyes…. It has a monstrous, disturbing, paralyzing violence in it, and is al most unbearably painful to look at.” Reduced to these perverse glimpses and the speculative stories the animals tell to one another, humans are completely estranged from the reader’s sympathy.

As Bambi comes of age, the rhythm of forest life becomes excruciating, even in the absence of human intervention. Animals who com mune together in the summer kill one another during wintertime. In Salten’s novel, Friend Owl does not explain twitterpation to wideeyed Flower, Thumper, and Bambi while they each fall head over heels in love with their springtime mates. Instead, to prove himself to Faline, Bambi goes wild fighting two other male deer, snapping one of their antlers and thrashing them mercilessly. As a brooding and serious grown-up later in the novel, he aban dons Faline without explanation. Such is love in Salten’s forest.

Bambi is part of a long, long literary tradition of using animals as allegory, and it isn’t hard to draw lines between the vulnerability of for est animals and the imperilment of European Jews, a subject Salten took seriously through out his life. He was Jewish himself, the grand son of an Orthodox rabbi, and had changed his name as a teenager in Austria to conceal his identity. In 1936, Hitler banned Salten’s books in Germany. Two years later, as war broke out,

he and his wife fled to Switzerland, where he remained until his death in 1945.

As with other works of animal literature, Bambi’s nonhuman animals can be conve nient representational vehicles for displaced and dispossessed people. And yet the novel is even more striking if we allow ourselves to imagine, with Salten, the dizzying crossweave of a multispecies world. Consider Salten’s ode to two autumn leaves, stragglers on an oak tree, who imagine what will happen when they fall down below: “Then the first leaf said to the second, fondly: ‘Don’t get so upset, you’re trembling.’ ‘Oh, never mind that,’ the second replied. ‘I tremble all the time now. One doesn’t feel so firmly attached to one’s place anymore.’”

The ending of Salten’s novel permits us to imagine that the natural cycle of life and death in the forest manages to continue intermina bly into the future. The Indian novelist Ami tav Ghosh writes in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable that narrative convention — particularly in con temporary works of literary fiction — has by and large failed to adapt to the demands of the climate crisis. Given the sobering reality of the environmental crisis today, Bambi’s soft landing could be dismissed as naive. But its empathy toward the world outside of individ ual human morality and consciousness, which is precisely that of a child, gives the novel its particular and precise nowness.

William Stafford has a great, frequently an thologized poem, about a driver who stops by a deer carcass to roll it off the mountain road before realizing that her belly is still warm with her unborn fawn inside. As he stands there deciding what to do:

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights; under the hood purred the steady engine. I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red; around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

In Bambi, too, we catch the wilderness listen ing to us.

Shock Value

On August 26, 2022, while speaking at the Federal Reserve’s annual confer ence in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Fed Chair Jerome Powell insisted that the central bank has internalized the lessons of the past in its current fight against inflation. “Histo ry shows that the employment costs of bringing inflation down are likely to increase with delay as high inflation becomes entrenched in wage and price setting,” Powell said in his prepared remarks. For this reason, he continued, the Fed eral Reserve would move now to stamp out in flation and “keep at it until we are confident the job is done.”

With these comments, Powell completed a hawkish turn in the Fed’s approach to inflation that was a year in the making. As late as Sep tember 2021, Powell had suggested that the contemporary surge in prices was largely “tran sitory”— the soon-to-pass side effect of supply chain disruptions and labor shortages that devel oped as the economy emerged from COVID-19 lockdowns. These hopes were dashed, howev er, as inflation continued to accelerate apace through the winter, exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent global energy squeeze. Forced to concede that infla tion posed a lasting challenge to the economy, Powell was pressured to ensure that the inflation did not become entrenched as it had when the United States last experienced sustained infla tion in the 1970s. His response to this pressure has been decisive: since March of this year, the Federal Reserve has embarked on the fastest monetary tightening since the 1980s— rapidly raising interest rates in the hopes that it might cool an overheating economy.

The economic tumult of the 1970s looms par ticularly large as governments face off against inflation, not least because the parallels be

tween that moment and our own are so easy to identify. Then, as now, a series of unantici pated disruptions to the global economy— the 1973 and 1979 oil crises— triggered a surge in prices. Then, as now, the initial surge in pric es exposed and exacerbated secular trends that preceded the disruptions themselves. But refer ence to the “lessons” of the 1970s often serves an additional, distinctly political purpose for hawkish policymakers and pundits alike. Their shared account of the era at once condemns New Deal-era economists for allowing inflation to persist through the decade and celebrates their neoliberal successors for restoring price stabil ity through brutally tight monetary policy. It’s ultimately unsurprising that Powell’s assertion that the Fed has learned the lessons of history came amidst his turn towards rapid monetary tightening: history, as it’s popularly construct ed, would seem to suggest that tight monetary policy is not only necessary in the fight against inflation, but noble as well.

While this conventional historiography sug gests that inflation was and continues to be a neatly-defined policy issue created and resolved through the actions of governing technocrats, more critical retrospectives point to inflation as a site of incredible contest. The inflation of the 1970s not only reflected the decisions of economic policymakers, but also the compet ing claims made by workers, consumers, and firms on the fruits of American capitalism. Re covering this forgotten history of contestation suggests an entirely different understanding of inflation, and helps to clarify just what exactly is at stake in Powell’s current anti-inflation cru sade.

In March 1976, famed Cambridge economist Joan Robinson was invited to Barnard College to deliver remarks on the peculiar crisis facing the U.S. economy. The United States had not yet fully recovered from the brutal recession of the previous three years, which had pushed the national unemployment rate to a staggering 9 percent and marked an end to nearly three de cades of virtually uninterrupted postwar eco nomic growth. More concerning to Robinson, however, was the fact that this downturn had been accompanied by a dramatic increase in

The Fed goes back to the seventies. Jordan Jenkins

the price of everyday goods. In the first year of the recession alone, the cost of a typical bas ket of household goods increased by 11.1 per cent— the largest recorded increase in the offi cial price level since the abolition of World War II price controls in 1946. This sudden inflation was made all the more perplexing by the fact that it violated some of the most basic assump tions of contemporary macroeconomic thought. The Phillips curve, the predominant model for forecasting inflation, assumed that inflation and unemployment were inversely related— mean ing that episodes of high unemployment were meant to be characterized by relatively low in flation. With the simultaneous intensification of both, Robinson observed that “all the old rules fail to hold— inflation no longer makes prof its buoyant and rising unemployment no longer keeps inflation in check.”

By the time of Robinson’s remarks, neoliberal economists who blamed inflation on the New Deal state’s fiscal irresponsibility and advocat ed monetary austerity as the only way forward were well on their way to forming a new gov erning bloc within policymaking institutions. Robinson, however, argued that inflation sim ply exposed the “class war” inherent to capi talist economies. Inflation, she held, was but a symptom of a broader struggle in which “work ers must struggle to keep their share in the prod uct of industry and corporations must struggle to prevent them from increasing it.” Conse quently, any credible solution to the “great un solved problem” of inflation would need to de termine which class forces emerged victorious. The failure of New Deal policymakers lie not in their fiscal irresponsibility, but in their “bas tard Keynesian” conviction that this founda tional contradiction of the capitalist economy could be resolved through mere welfarism of labor-management accord.

Robinson’s account of the class politics of in flation illuminates what conventional historiog raphy has more often neglected: the 1970s saw the most intense period of labor mobilization in the United States since the end of World War II. Across the nation, millions of workers went on strike and agitated for higher wages, expanded benefits, and improved working conditions— often over the protests of more moderate union leadership. As historian Robert Brenner has ob served, these rank-and-file actions were helped along by historically low unemployment of the 1960s and early 1970s, which simultaneously empowered workers to demand material con cessions from their employers and left employ ers hard-pressed to find replacement labor.

Robinson’s account also illuminates the ways in which the central bank-led resolution of in flation of the 1970s aimed to settle this class struggle. As inflation persisted through the de

cade— reinflamed by the doubling of global oil prices that followed the Iranian Revolution— President Jimmy Carter faced mounting pres sure to restore economic order. He eventually responded by tapping inflation hawk Paul Vol cker to lead the Federal Reserve in August 1979. Just two months later, Volcker would announce a series of policy moves that sent interest rates skyrocketing to 20 percent. The stated logic of this drastic anti-inflation program— known as the “Volcker shock”— was clear: higher inter est rates would make it more costly to borrow, restricting the supply of money and cooling an overheated economy. But Volcker was just as in terested in reimposing labor discipline as he was in reimposing monetary discipline. As workers demanded and secured material concessions from their employers through the 1970s, firms raised prices to offset increased labor costs and preserve profits. Central bankers feared that workers, after seeing that their real purchasing power had stagnated or fallen despite nominal wage gains, would demand yet higher wages— triggering a self-reinforcing wage-price spiral. Thus, in Volcker’s view, to bring inflation under control, labor unrest needed stamping out.

His policies accomplished this by triggering the most brutal recession since the Great De pression. The sudden ascent of interest rates to historic highs rapidly contracted the Amer ican economy. By October 1982, the national unemployment rate had climbed to 11 percent. The devastation was especially concentrated in Black and working class industrial communi ties, some of which saw unemployment rates in excess of 20 percent at the height of the crisis. This critically undermined the economic con ditions on which the labor militancy of the pre vious decade depended. With unemployment now pushed to unfathomable highs, workers were encouraged to accept work wherever they could find it— irrespective of the terms of employment. This material assault on the con ditions of worker power was coupled with an all-out political assault on organized labor with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Volcker, for example, heartily endorsed Reagan’s 1981 decision to fire striking air traffic controllers, praising the fact that the recently inaugurated president “took on an aggressive, well-orga nized union and said no.” Thus, while Volcker would likely cringe at Robinson’s invocation of class war, he proved as committed a class warrior as any. Through his policies, the grand distributional struggle that helped to propel in flation forward was unambiguously resolved in favor of capital.

The Volcker shock initiated the secular decline of virtually all measures of worker bargaining power, from union density of real wage growth to the labor share of national income. These trends have persisted virtually uninterrupted

into the present: national union density fell to just 10.3 percent in 2021, the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics first began collecting union membership statistics in 1983. The re cent string of union victories at retail giants like Starbucks and Amazon and successful strikes at corporations like John Deere and Kellogg have inspired hopes that the pandemic represented a turning point in the prospects of organized la bor. There are certainly reasons for optimism— labor unions currently enjoy their highest ap proval rating among the American public since 1965, and union organizers have won more NLRB elections in 2022 than at any point in the past 20 years. However, that the scale of cur rent labor militancy is considered exceptional is a testament to the long-term devastation of organized labor. In 1974, an estimated 1.7 mil lion workers went on strike; in the first half of 2022, an estimated 78,000 did. The epochal class struggle of the 1970s this is not.

Nevertheless, Fed Chair Jerome Powell appears poised to aggressively stamp out what traces of labor resurgence exist. In recent statements, Powell has repeatedly suggested that the labor market is currently too favorable to workers and that labor’s increased bargaining power is currently pushing up labor costs and fueling in flation. One of the explicit aims of the Federal Reserve’s monetary tightening is to “soften” la bor market conditions by pushing up the unem ployment rate— a dulled rerun of what Volcker did to smash organized labor in the 1980s. All signs suggest that Powell will be successful in this. Projections suggest that the Fed’s current interest rate hiking spree will push up the un employment rate from its current 3.5 percent to 4.4 percent over the next year. This not only threatens to send an additional million Ameri can workers into precarious unemployment, but also to undermine the tight pandemic-era labor market conditions that granted workers some bargaining power and facilitated many of the organizing successes of the past two years. Con vincing workers to sign a union card or vote to go on strike will no doubt be a harder sell if they are faced with an active recession and a height ened risk of unemployment. Powell claims that the long-term benefits of taming inflation out weighs whatever short-term costs might fall upon workers, asserting in his Jackson Hole speech that “without price stability, we will not achieve a sustained period of strong labor market conditions that benefit all.” But Powell declines to note that the “strong labor market conditions” that accompanied the pre-pandem ic price stability he champions nonetheless al lowed for unprecedented wage stagnation and skyrocketing inequality. Therein lies the prob lem. As historian Samir Sonti notes, “The half century during which inflation figured signifi cantly in U.S. politics was also the half century during which economic inequality was system

atically reduced.” Price stability, it seems, also comes at a cost.

If inflation necessarily implies a distributional struggle between capital and labor, what might it take for workers to prevail? The alternatives to labor-crushing tight monetary policy might elude us now, but as Robinson spoke in 1976, they were both evident and precedented. When Volcker moved to tame inflation, he did so by targeting the wage or demand component of the wage-price spiral— constraining the ability of workers to make inflationary material demands by heightening the live threat of unemploy ment. An alternative resolution to the wageprice problem— one advocated by Robinson at various points in her career— would involve moving to directly constrain prices through a system of price controls. Under such a system, material concessions won by workers could not simply be passed off as higher prices and cor porate profits could become grounds for labor contestation. In recent decades, price controls have been effectively demonized— so much so that economist Isabella Weber was ruthless ly condemned late last year for suggesting that they might have a role to play in the current fight against inflation. But the demand for price controls was one echoed by militant unionists and consumer organizations alike throughout the long 1970s. Partially in response to these demands, President Richard Nixon imposed an economy-wide freeze on prices in August 1971— though the scheme was controversial ly coupled with a freeze on wages and, thus, quickly lost the support of organized labor.

There is no significant political coalition cur rently agitating for such a response to the infla tion. Organized labor, though on an upswing, is not nearly strong enough to force the transfor mation of American political economy that is very likely required to push price controls onto the policy agenda. Moreover, President Joe Biden— the self-proclaimed “most pro-union president” in American history— has repeat edly committed to “respect the Fed” above all else, even as their anti-inflation program threat ens to reverse the reserved gains made by the labor movement under his administration. His tory marches along, but the politics of inflation appear helplessly stuck in the myths and pathol ogies of the neoliberal era. Destabilizing this status quo will no doubt be a herculean task. At the very least, however, it will require that we confront the historical narratives that were, in many ways, intentionally built to foreclose the possibility of an alternative.

Laundry Day

That long, sprawling month, we nearly lived together, which is to say I never did duplicate my key as friends told me I should, but I folded your clothes at the same time as mine.

It was efficiency, not love, even if hindsight’s unconcerned with semantics, even if I spent too long trying to find a match for all your standalone socks.

We were gentle with one another. You looked beautiful in my blue sweater. You looked beautiful asleep. Some days I wonder if I was wrong, after all, not letting that small tenderness be enough.

Two Poems

Aaron Magloire

Variegation

Joseph’s coat of many colors, some translators say, may in fact have been nothing but a coat with long sleeves— no collage of color worth writing about. In other words, forget what you have heard.

The idea is beautiful, but most truths are wholly plain, wholly disappointing. Let me put it this way: I believed I loved you vibrantly. That was just the right word up until it wasn’t.

Taking Liberalism Seriously Again

Yosef Malka

Raymond Geuss is now a 75-year-old po litical theorist and emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Cam bridge. When he arrived at Columbia Univer sity at age sixteen, in 1963, he felt that he was emerging from “almost complete isolation.” Up to that point, he had barely read a newspaper or listened to the radio. The teachers at his Hun garian Catholic boarding school, in a Philadel phia suburb, were less concerned with John F. Kennedy than with keeping alive the high cul ture of Habsburg Europe, which had ended in 1918 with the start of the First World War.

His teachers were Piarist priests who took vows to provide special care to young people. They had fled Hungary after the failed uprisings of 1956, and they warned him as he entered Co lumbia that, despite all appearances, America and its global hegemony would not last forever. Like Virgil’s Rome, post-war America was an empire expanding its ranks that would likely offer him, the poor son of a steel worker and a secretary, a valuable education at little cost. But it would only be a matter of time—30 years, they projected—before decline would inevita bly set in.

A Catholic boarding school run by Hungarian priests is not a traditional place to begin a nar rative about liberalism. But Geuss’s time at this school taught him that all views begin some where, and his memoir explores the effect of this odd education on his intellectual trajectory. Geuss has spent his career attacking core tenets of liberal theory: its conception of the rational and transparent self, the notion that deliberation

will lead to political consensus, and the promi nence of “ideal theory,” which prioritizes ethics over political reality in the study of politics. Not Thinking Like a Liberal (Harvard University Press, 2022), traces his lifelong skepticism of liberalism to conversations he had as a boy with his religious teachers.

Geuss argues in the book that Anglo-American hegemony has made it too easy to take liberal ism for granted. Because of the power of liberal nations and the fact that liberalism is dedicat ed, in principle, to pluralism and open-minded ness—“the marketplace of ideas”—it has come to see itself as an “anti-ideology.” In so doing, it has become blinded to its contingent history and to its embattled present. Geuss thinks he can define and diagnose liberalism’s problems be cause his education oriented him away from it and taught him the importance of seeing ideolo gies from the outside. The idiosyncratic Cathol icism of his school—inflected by Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Camus, and first-hand experience of fleeing the total breakdown of Europe—did not allow him to view the world as a liberal.

Geuss has critiqued in previous work the “count er-movement” of the 1970s that overturned so cial welfare and privatized public services— what many deem “neoliberalism.” In this book, however, Geuss lumps all versions of liberalism together, claiming that “a certain kind of liber alism is the very air that one breathes in most English-speaking countries.” This liberalism, he suggests, stretches from Locke to Rawls and is responsible for everything from the financial crisis of 2008 to Brexit to climate catastrophe. In fact, it is not clear that this is a unified tradi tion, or that it is fair to identify the excesses of neoliberalism with post-war liberal thinkers. In the current moment of crisis, why should we be inclined to caricature liberalism and agree with him that there is “no insight to be found” in its long history? Aren’t there some versions of lib eralism worth saving?

Geuss welcomes liberalism’s demise, but read ers need not join him. “Not thinking like a lib eral” simply means seeing liberalism from the outside as an embattled and historically entan gled “total ideology.” In that respect, Geuss’s book might serve as a wake-up call to readers, cautioning them against deploying stale invoca tions of “free speech,” “the open society,” and “the rules based international order” in order to stem the present crisis. Liberals must be willing to think critically about what they have to offer the world in order to defend their tradition.

“I do not mourn the passing of liberalism,” Geuss claims as he surveys its decline. He is hardly an “internal critic,” but he is also not a reactionary “post-liberal” with simple reme

dies like working the land and going to church. Liberalism, Geuss says, is buckling under the weight of internal contradictions. In their quest to dominate the globe, Britain and the United States created a “construct that combined uni versalist pretensions with hard-headed self-in terest.” According to Geuss, liberals put for ward doctrines of universal, natural rights, but excluded minorities. Universalist pretensions were a useful mask for a project of expansion, commercial exploitation, and deregulation that facilitated imperialism abroad and inequality at home, while restricting freedom to the few. Lib eralism, to Geuss, is an iceberg: universal prin ciples high and visible, with a mass of self-in terest and domination lurking underneath. A global financial crisis, slew of climate emer gencies, and wave of authoritarianism have ex posed the iceberg: they are symptoms of liber alism, Geuss argues—reasons why the ship is now sinking.

If not the iceberg liberalism, what does Geuss believe in? At one point he refers to the book as a lamentation of the “massive cultural loss” of Brexit, an event that Geuss says, “I think I shall probably never get over.” He suggests that Brexit was the logical conclusion of a system that prizes deliberation without acknowledging the ways that material interests and entrenched differences affect the public sphere. And he clearly prizes the way his boarding school nur tured skepticism about the regime from within its borders. Truth often thrives in the cracks of a dominant culture, Guess suggests. By clash ing with entrenched ways of thinking, minori ties often gain a prescient ability to understand societies. This is ironic, because for all of the hypocrisy behind liberal tolerance, tens of mil lions—including the Hungarian priests that raised him—fled to the United States for it. Ac knowledging this need not lead to glorifying liberalism as it exists, but to the realization that within the “constellation of ideas” that Geuss speaks of, there may be a few good ones.

Geuss’s book is almost evenly divided between his time in the boarding school and his time at university, but the lessons he internalizes in both spheres are almost exactly the same. While he did not become a “good Catholic,” Geuss found many parallels between his teachers’ criticisms of Protestantism and their critiques of liberal ism.

The priests at his Catholic school, Geuss reports, taught Luther’s letter on translation and letter against the peasants at the same time. Luther put forth the seemingly liberal, tolerant philosophy of sola scriptura—that believers can understand scripture without a priest. But, Geuss’s teachers claimed, his vernacular translation of the Bible was meant to support his own narrow reading.

When the preacher Thomas Müntzer and his band of peasants disagreed with it, sola scrip tura flew out the window: Luther called on the princes to slaughter them. This reminded Geuss of an anecdote his Irish literature teacher would often repeat: after Oliver Cromwell conquered Ireland, he proclaimed that he would permit “liberty of conscience,” so long as the Irish were not allowed to attend Mass. Though Cromwell is hardly a liberal icon, Geuss believes that this kind of hypocrisy is endemic in liberalism: “tol erance” and “neutrality” are usually a means of hiding principles from scrutiny.

His religious teachers and a discovery of The odor Adorno’s work formed Geuss’s suspicion of the “panacea” of deliberation often put forth in liberal democracies. Adorno, a shell-shocked Jewish emigré who helped found the Frankfurt School of critical theory and fled the Nazis, taught Geuss that truth is often deeply obscure and that we should not claim otherwise. Geuss frequently returns to the Adorno quote that “the piece of grit in your eye is the best magnify ing glass.” Adorno’s point is that subscribing to total ideologies which would otherwise seem to cloud our visions of the world is often the only way to get some purchase on it. Without presuppositions, we are completely adrift. It is natural and, in fact, ideal to change course at different times in life, but we need to enter the journey with some equipment—some baggage. Once we realize that the grit is in fact grit, and understand where our worldviews come from, we can start to experiment with ideas and see politics clearly.

Much of Geuss’s theoretical work since entering Columbia has centered on “total ideology” and the possibilities of deliberation, and the mem oir traces his skepticism of “baroque” ideals of consensus and clarity that end up privileging the status quo and stifling difference. Liberals often think that discussion and clarity are nec essary to reach truth and order, but notions of “clarity” usually reflect the dominant ways of thinking. “Clarity” is rarely a pure, philosoph ical standard, and claims that something is not “clear” often serve to repress those who think differently. To have a truly “open society,” one would have to be comfortable with the obscure nature of many truths.

Readers of Geuss’s memoir still face a tension: as many of his critics have pointed out, Geuss’s work seems to veer towards a pugnacious vi sion of politics where reason and persuasion are fantasies that only serve to uphold a regime built on violence. On the other hand, there is something deeply pluralistic and empathetic in his effort to expose the ways in which calls for unity and deliberation often bulldoze legitimate forms of difference and suppress those who di verge from accepted norms.

Totalizing worldviews are, in an odd way, liber ating: but only once we see them for what they are. Growing up with a set of guiding princi ples, myths, and narratives is often necessary to become oriented in the world. After grasping where these categories come from and seeing them from the outside, we are free to continue making use of them or to seek new orientations.

Rather than offering a systematic critique or alternative to the dominant system, Geuss sim ply wants readers to realize that liberalism is as totalizing as Catholicism or Communism, even if it pretends not to be. It has myths, stock re sponses, and transcendent truths that take root as deeply as any other ideology—its principles are not “neutral.”

Guess’s book prompts this moment of disen chantment for liberals who grew up during the “end of history” and do not know how to re spond to a new era of crisis. However, many who see through liberalism’s pretensions may still find that they believe in its transcendent claims and wish to save them. While Geuss is unwilling to do this, we may choose to abandon the false universalism that has blinded us to the possibility of change and encouraged collective political immaturity. We may be forced to take liberalism seriously again.

To Make Someone Less Lonely

An interview with Rachel Aviv

Tyler Jager

Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Sto ries That Make Us (Farrar, Strauss, and Gir oux, September 2022). The book, her début, explores how personal and institutional narra tives shape what Aviv terms the “psychic hin terlands,” accounts of mental distress that are less distinct from “a setting which we might call normal” than we might believe.

Aviv tells the stories of four very different people and their encounters with psychiatric explana tions for their illnesses: Ray, who sues a famed psychoanalytic institution in the 1960s for fail ing to cure him; Bapu, who abandons life in an elite Brahmin family to devote herself to ascetic mysticism; Naomi, a Black woman who is in carcerated in Minnesota for throwing herself and her two children off a bridge; and Laura, a wealthy Harvard graduate who decides to go off her prescribed psychiatric medications to discover a new identity for herself. Aviv closes the book with Hava, whom she met as a young girl in an anorexic ward, and whose story ends up veering far from where Aviv herself ends up.

I spoke with Aviv in September over the phone to discuss Strangers to Ourselves, her magazine writing, and her singular approach to narrative nonfiction. As she describes in this interview, edited for length and clarity, “There’s the hope that if you get close enough to someone’s own point of view, their behavior no longer seems alien and unattractive, but feels to some degree legible.”

In Strangers to Ourselves, you mention how you felt self-conscious about your choice of career after reading your psychiatrist’s notes as an adult, which said that when you were in medi cal intake as a child, you ‘could control the in terview.’ Was this related to your first interest in a career in journalism?

Not totally. I think I just really wanted to write. I didn’t know what form it would take. I assumed I wanted to write fiction, so I would write short stories, and something that I noticed was that I was good at describing. The idea of creating my own plot—it just seemed like an act of true ge nius, that people are able to do that. Right after graduating from college, I started reading a lot of nonfiction, people like Adrian Nicole Leb lanc, or Tracy Kidder, and I discovered for the first time that there really was a genre of writ ing that could develop the characters in a way that felt novelistic but that was true. So I think I approached journalism more from that angle. If I wanted to be writing this kind of story, I need ed to figure out how to find a story and how to collect the acts, and how to interview people. It stemmed more from finding a form that I found incredible as a reader and wanting to be able to do that.

Are there ways of getting your audience—for lack of a better word—just, to care? To ap proach something that might already have a turn-off effect because the very subject is stig matized?

Right, like when I write about Naomi, she is a mother who kills her child. That, for most peo ple, is it. You’re done. You don’t feel anything for her. Actually, my editor originally said that’s too much. But I approached it as, ‘here is this woman in pain, who’s having all these real ly complicated thoughts about the community in which she’s moving around, and if we can understand the way she’s being in the world,

and how she’s tried to articulate for herself what she just did—this unthinkable thing she just did—the challenge is to get the reader in a space where the unthinkable thing she just did feels legible, because of all these thoughts she’d been having up to it.’ There’s the hope that if you get close enough to someone’s own point of view, their behavior no longer seems alien and unattractive, but feels to some degree legible.

Another theme in your magazine writing is that you’re often following one character, say, through a journey or reacting to some institu tion. But a lot of the stories in this book felt really multivocal.

I’m glad you felt that way, because I felt like that was one of the freedoms of having more space. I could enter more people’s perspec tives. I did like the experience of having a con versation with one person and coming away with a certain view of the situation, and then I would have a conversation with her sister, and come away with a very different view, and come away with the mother, and then I’d have a third view. I think in the writing I wanted to be able to preserve that experience so that a reader also feels their perspective shifting, and feels the possibility of seeing the same set of events through different frameworks.

I’d like to ask you about Naomi specifically— because it is a story wrought with emotion in so many ways. There are so many documents involved, and also the challenges of people knowing you’re interviewing many members of your family, who may say things that are out side their control. What was building that rela tionship like?

I just started by sending her a Facebook mes sage, and then we talked on the phone. She was very open. I was like, ‘I’d love to read your unpublished memoir,’ and then she sent it to me, and I read it and responded. From there, I planned a meeting with her in person. It might have been after our first meeting in Minnesota when I asked if I could read some of the docu ments related to her case. But it was a very slow process. It wasn’t until I had been talking to her for more than half a year that I finally met her in Chicago, and her sister gave me these gar bage bags full of her letters from prison.

I think for Naomi, something that she’d faced was that she had gotten the worst media cover age possible. ‘Mother of children kills child.’ I think she rightly understood that there was a way of telling her story that was far more com passionate, and nuanced, and true to the experi ence. She wanted to participate in that, and felt

actively passionate about that. So I think she was quite open because the work I wanted to do was very much aligned with work she want ed to do in her own life.

Is that how you came across her story? Through this rotten media coverage?

There was one good article in the Star-Tribune, after [Naomi] had gotten out of prison where she was just reflecting on her life, and a friend had sent me the link. There was something about the way she spoke that was just arresting. She spoke with such detail, and is just a beau tiful thinker and speaker and I was drawn to that. She seemed like someone who was really actively trying to make sense of her experience on a number of different registers. Medical, sociological, political—she was just trying to grapple with it all. Someone could have gone through the same experience as she did, and maybe all those same factors would have been at play, but she had this unique capacity to re flect on them and write about them. That was something I pointed out in our first conversa tion, and it became the root of our relationship, talking about those multiple registers.

I was also curious about your relationship with Laura, because that was a story you’d written already for The New Yorker [“Bitter Pill,” April 8, 2019 Issue]. Was that an example of coming back to someone and re-evaluating, or were there other aspects of the story that changed when writing for a magazine versus a book?

When I wrote the magazine story, I was think ing a lot about how there just wasn’t enough at tention to problems of withdrawing from med ications. It felt like it was this underexplored, under-discussed area. I approached Laura’s story through that framework: why are people talking about this? Why is this such a feature of people’s lives, getting off these drugs?

For the book, that question no longer felt as prominent to me. It was more about how Laura had really embraced one story about herself: she was bipolar, she needed to take medications for the rest of her life. And then there was this 180-degree shift to ‘no, it’s been medications that have caused all these problems.’ The chapter was a little less aligned with her argument than the magazine piece had been. In the book, I was looking more into how the new view she had— the view that seemed to have saved her—also had a lot in common with the previous story she had, that psychiatry was this precision instrument that could solve her problems.

Was that a reaction to your own personal re evaluation of her story?

It was just doing more thinking and research on these questions, and having more space. I think I was kind of angry about the lack of knowledge about why all these people were on these medications for so long, and why we don't know enough about getting off them. When I wrote the book chapter, I think some of that anger had cooled. In the context of, ‘ what is this evolving story of what psychiatry has been telling to people,’ it felt like I was in a space of more critical distance.

I think one reason your reporting is really fas cinating because there’s this sort of seamless way that you’ve weaved in academic research into your writing. For example, you cite Mi randa Fricker in the book—epistemic injus tice is really her concept—and I know you’ve written on the philosopher Martha Nussbaum in the past. At what stage does that research enter your reporting? Is it more of an ideation stage of what you might want to write about, or does it present different ways to think about the subject?

I’m glad you like that. I think it comes in earli er. Sometimes, if I’m thinking, ‘is this a worth while story?’ I will read academic work on the subject—just to understand if there’s a rich discussion about this idea. Then, I’ll often read academic work as a way of thinking about the most important questions to ask people. I love reading anthropology, because in a way it’s a version of journalism—a more rigorous ver sion—and you can see what other people are saying about the subject.

Sometimes I’ll introduce work in conversations, and it’s always nice when someone has read it —like if Naomi said, ‘yes! I’ve read this piece by Miranda Fricker,’ that would have been a really organic way to talk about her ideas. So I love when someone I’m writing about is read ing something; then I can read it too, and we can build off that. When it comes to integrating the actual academic work into the writing, I try to only do it unless I can’t otherwise make the point, or there’s the question of giving credit to an idea that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to articulate. But I am wary of putting it in for any reason other than because it thick ens or advances a reader’s understanding of the narrative. I try not to do a dump of research, where I’d be horizontally explaining the situa tion without moving the narrative forward.

In other interviews, I’ve heard you describe how having a narrative that exists—either if

it’s in psychiatry, or if it’s in media—can help people give meaning to their own sense of ill ness or crisis, by giving it language. That’s a big theme in the book. I’m wondering if you have thought that your own writing has done that. Say someone that’s struggling with one of these conditions picks up a copy of Strangers to Ourselves and it changes the way they think about it.

I mean, that would be the dream. To make someone less lonely. My best reading experi ences are like that: “oh my god, someone ar ticulated this shape of experience that I wasn’t totally aware of, and now I am, and I feel this relief from a loneliness that I didn’t totally know I had” — that’s, to me, an amazing thing that reading does. So I would love it if some one had that experience.

That’s one other reason I loved the themes of the book. There are, for these individual peo ple—for Hava, for example, it’s her partner— people they rely on who make them feel less alone. Was loneliness always a theme you an ticipated in advance?

No, no. That was something I noticed after I finished writing, that people’s sense of recov ery seemed to hinge on their sense of isolation. I was really interested in Frieda Fromm-Reich mann’s essay about loneliness, about how it’s this experience that’s so terrifying that people really don’t want to talk about it. It’s not seen as a phenomenon within psychiatry’s purview. So that emerged in part because I was seeing the moments of commonality in the lives of the people I was writing about.

It’s interesting because it seems like what makes that special could disappear if you tried to remedy it through policy—the spontaneity of personal relationships.

Right. But I do think there could be more of an emphasis on peer care, if other people have had similar experiences. There are more programs like that today, where people who have experi ences with mental illness mentor and visit oth er people who are deeper in a crisis. I think that seems like a really important and financially viable method, rather than expecting that ev eryone’s going to have a deep relationship with their doctor.

Retranslating the Ramayana Daevan Mangalmurti

The foundational act of translation in the Ramayana is the passage of the word from sorrow into verse. Bathing in a river, the sage Valmiki is captivated by the union of two cranes flying over the bank. A hunter’s arrow pierces the breast of the male crane, casting it to the ground. In anger and in grief, the sage makes a fateful utterance: mā niṣāda pratiṣṭhā tvamagamaḥ śāśvatīḥ samāḥ yat krauñ camithunādekam avadhīḥ kāmamohitam!

“Oh fowler! Since thou hast slain one of a pair of Kraunchas [cranes], thou shalt never attain prosperity!” [translated by M.N. Dutt, 1894].

Shoka, in Sanskrit, means sorrow. Shloka, a let ter away, is the Sanskrit word for verse. Valmi ki’s curse is recorded by Hindu tradition as the first of these 32-syllable shlokas, the founda tional stanzas of Hindu epic poetry. As a result, Valmiki is remembered not just as a sage but as the Adi Kavi, the first poet. Pleased with Valmi ki’s invention, the creator god Brahma charged him with the responsibility of telling the sto ry of Rama, an incarnation of the god Vishnu, and the rescue of Rama’s wife, Sita, from the clutches of the evil Ravana. The result was the Ramayana, “Rama’s journey,” one of South Asia’s great epics.

Valmiki’s Ramayana is divided into seven kan das, or books. Valmiki begins with Rama’s childhood and lineage. He then describes Ra ma’s exile by deceit from the city of Ayodhya. In exile, Sita is kidnapped by Ravana, the Lord of Lanka (modern Sri Lanka) and a rakshasa (a malevolent demigod). Rama and his brother Lakshmana ally with vanaras (monkey-like for est dwellers) to win her back. The feats of one vanara, Hanuman, in his search for Sita, are the focus of the fifth book. Rama and Ravana fight a war for Sita. The saga ends with the aftermath of the war, Rama and Sita’s return to Ayodhya, and their deaths.

Valmiki’s is the first Ramayana, but every cul ture and language to encounter it has retold it. The Ramakien is Thailand’s national epic. The Khmer Reamker—a Ramayana with Buddhist influences and mermaids—plays the same role in Cambodia. In modern India, the telling most familiar to readers is Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas,

a medieval devotional masterpiece in Awadhi, a dialect of Hindi, that transformed Valmiki’s Ra mayana into a vernacular, accessible text. Kan nada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese, Odia, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Farsi, Gondi: every major Indian language has its own ana logue to Valmiki, its own Rama’s journey. Some stories place greater weight on Lakshmana, Ha numana, or Sita. Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, and warring Hindu sects have retold the saga to suit their moral, religious, and social purposes, recasting gods as mortals and demons as saints. Sometimes, as in Pulavar Kuzhanthai’s Ravana Kaviyam, Ravana is the hero. The Ramayana exists in a state of constant interpretation and reinterpretation. It is as much a process of con tinual translation as it is a polished work.

But what is poetry in the Ramayana has his torically been translated into English as prose, obscuring something essential about Valmiki’s work. The Ramayana sprang from an oral tradi tion: it was heard before it was written. Like the Qur’an, it is a work that should be recited, not just read. Too often, in English prose transla tions, the rich sonic possibilities of being heard are lost.

Vivek Narayanan’s After, a collection of po ems, art, and song inspired by the Ramayana, is not, at least not in the modern sense, a transla tion of the older work. But After cannot be read without thinking of it through the lens of trans lation. The work is an attempt to do for English what Tulsidas did for Hindi: to “reanimate the Ramayana,” Narayanan writes, “as poetry.” Re animation is the ideal world to describe what Narayanan does to Valmiki’s words in After. In keeping with Indian tradition, he speaks as a present-day Valmiki. By speaking, he again breathes life into an epic that demands retelling.

After spans millennia, from the battlefields of Valmiki’s Lanka to so-called “encounters” be tween militants and security forces in the for ests of twenty-first-century central India. Key to the spirit of its retelling is the classical con cept of translatio, a transfer of material from the source language to the receiving language. Living in our age, the Ramayana must be ac countable to us: answer our questions, speak to our needs, recognize the bounds of our perspec tives. To craft his retelling, Narayanan, a poet and professor, draws on the innovations and innovators—Ezra Pound, Mughal art, Livy— of the human experience since Valmiki. After exists in an India that has been shaped by the

first Ramayana. In his personal journeys, some of which are incorporated into After, Narayanan visits a temple where Rama might have killed a transgressing ascetic, a river where Sita might have been abandoned after the war on Lan ka was won, the city where Rama might have reigned. But After is firmly tied to the pres ent. Narayanan makes brilliant use of primary sources—Maoist magazines, for instance, and accounts of torture in Kashmir—to link the war that the Indian state has, for 75 years, waged on its own citizens with the crusade Rama waged against Lanka.

One of Narayanan’s most powerful pieces, “Poem Without End,” combines three threads: the war between Rama and Ravana; modern India’s long-running Maoist insurgency, re layed to the reader through documentary mate rial taken from articles in the Maoist magazine People’s March; and the simmering conflict in Kashmir, a story told through descriptions of torture and intimidation. The poem disqui ets the reader’s psyche by forcing on our con sciousness the casual, bureaucratic brutality India inflicts on its people in pursuit of peace and democracy. “Smoothed by congealed blood / With black tributaries / —like the red Palash flowers that cover / The mountain in spring”—,” Narayanan’s description of the bat tlefield in Lanka is only a few pages away from disturbing modern accounts of banal terror car ried out by police functionaries. In this excerpt, Narayanan narrates a disturbing scene of quo tidian sexual abuse: “A few days after his arrest the DCP brought / The sweeper M. into the police station / To sodomize him M. was a 55-year-old man / To humiliate him further they / Brought another person S. / A clean shaved person who / Was running a tea stall outside / The police station and forced / His private part into U.’s mouth. The officer offered him a cigarette / And or dered for a cup of tea.”

As a boy, my father wrote an essay with the premise that “Rama is a cad,” based on the he ro’s treatment of Sita. The essay horrified his parents, who, like most Hindus, saw Rama as a virtuous god. Their feelings are easy to un derstand: to most of its readers, the Ramayana is a simple moral story that emphasizes the im portance of duty. Rama does his duty, even if it hurts—and so, the Ramayana suggests, should every king or statesman. After is not so straight forward. Narayanan’s Rama is complicated: he burns with world-consuming fury, he gives his rescued wife the coldest of cold shoulders. Ra vana is wrong, but sensuous and perhaps sym pathetic: a ten-headed demon, he has ten fac es. If After has an antagonist, it is the state and its ruthless but indistinct functionaries: “Touch / even one paisa [cent] and / they are ready to kill.” That choice reflects how far Narayan’s

readers have moved from the age of Valmiki. Could a writer of such vividly rendered kings and demons have imagined such a faceless vil lain? The bureaucratic apparatus wielded by the state turns suffering into statistics and govern ment reports. Could Valmiki have understood the resulting violence, fast and slow, that such a state can so easily inflict? Neither Rama nor Ra vana, at their most awesome and most armed, can compare to the machinery of the modern state, away from Delhi and Mumbai, grinding Indians into the ground. That the state exists at all in this retelling of the Ramayana—that Af ter is conscious of the concerns that preoccupy us the way dharma preoccupied Valmiki’s first readers—is an example of successful translatio.

One of modern India’s formative memories is the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid, a mosque in Ayodhya, the city from which Rama was exiled. Animated by the belief that the mosque stood atop Rama’s birthplace, a Hin du nationalist mob razed it brick by brick in a single day. In “Ayodhya,” Narayanan visits the city. In After’s retelling, Ayodhya is a holy city only insofar as as surveillance is held sacred: “The galvanizing mosque-raid 1992 / sucked the life out of this city / and established the Site. So I walked in it and into it / and true to form noticed virtually nothing / but the monitored cage / in which I moved its endless maze-like twists and turns.”

There is nothing vibrant about a city constant ly on edge, not with nervous violence but al most with ennui. Narayanan’s Ayodhya exists in a subtle malaise, best represented by the slow crumbling of its physical form years after the rapid destruction of its spiritual vitality. “You could see how the grand / mansions of Ayodhya were falling apart / not just the paint but often the cement / or plaster come off to show like / a spreading crystal the raw brick / below.”

In 1992, the mob that destroyed Babri Masjid was not the state. Today, it functionally is. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which organized the rally that led to the mosque’s destruction, now dominates India’s central government. That government has adopted anti-Muslim policies, suppressed the press, intimidated civil society, and battered the pillars of democracy by weak ening courts, the opposition, and human rights. It commands the imprisonment of civilians whose genitals are electrically shocked every day until they confess to crimes pre-established by the state. Its soldiers conduct a war in the name of the people, part real and part staged, against village women and university students promised undelivered rights by the same state that covets the bauxite under their land. This was true before the present moment, when oth er parties ruled India, and it will likely continue to be true after, even if another party rules. That

does not detract from the horrifying parallels between the violence of the war between Rama and Ravana and the countless wars the Indian government, seeing itself as Rama’s successor, wages against modern Ravanas, real and imag ined. In the Vedic rituals common in Rama’s story, fire is a purifier. After her rescue from Ravana, Sita is made to step into a fire to prove her chastity. When she walks out unscathed, Rama takes her back. After follows the trauma and the strange wonder of a country whose fire and blood has not left it cleansed, but smelling of charred, burnt flesh.

Narayanan’s epic, then, is like its precursor: generated by sorrow and turned into beauty. Naturally, it lives in verse. And the verse is wonderful. Something pulses, like a heartbeat, in Narayanan’s description of Ravana’s harem in “Ravana’s Rooms (Take One)”: “And the wives’ fermented breath / tickled Him in his sleeps / While pretending they were each Rava na / they kissed each other once more once more.” On the page, visual art is formed out of arrangements of language. Sound and move ment emerge through the deliberate placement of words. Aural and visual art reciprocate by feeding into the feelings the words we read give us. Sometimes Narayanan offers actual sketches and paintings instead of words. Other times he gives us the text of the Sanskrit origi nal instead of English. The complexity of form in After and its mixture of rawness and polish push back against the refinement of the origi nal epic. Narayanan understands that despite our immense material progress since the age of Valmiki, the world often feels like it is in flux, wobbling on a precipice. In its intentionally un finished complexity, After suits our world better than Valmiki’s Ramayana can.

One of the most impressive demonstrations of Narayanan’s ambition is “Kumbhakarna Sound System.” The legendary slumber of the giant rakshasa Kumbhakarna, Ravana’s brother, is enwrapped in a 13-minute composition by sax ophonist Maarten Visser, stretching over ten pages in Sanskrit, English, and scratchy pitch es, using both text and sound to tell a story. The visual component of the score, as in oth er places in After where Narayanan incorpo rates paintings, drawings, and word art, cross es the boundary from literary to visual art. The multi-media composition could risk a degree of clarity: I am more than unsure of how to ap proach parts of the “Kumbhakarna Sound Sys tem.” The poem has gone through a process of transmutation that moves it beyond the famil iar culture reference points I can turn to while reading other poems of Narayanan’s. Yet the process of transmutation may be so singular as to justify its use. Narayanan’s innovative use of sound and distinctive way of representing it are a testament to his creative ability.

The translator Gregory Rabassa (whose trans lation of One Hundred Years of Solitude Ga briel García Marqúez considered finer than the original) wrote in one of his essays that “Ear is important in translation because it really lies at the base of all good writing. Writing is not tru ly a substitute for thought, it is a substitute for sound… The translator with a tin ear is as deadly as a tone-deaf musician.” And Narayanan’s ear may be golden. After, unlike any prose trans lation or adaptation of the Ramayana, has the flow of poetry: it is beautiful and it is jarring, it is angry and it grieves, and sometimes, like a waterfall, it crashes down in eddies on the ears and the mind of the reader who listens.

In a short poem called “Sentences Toward Another Manifesto of Translation Practice,” Narayanan writes, “All poetry is translation. / All translation is not poetry.” Translation is riddled with pitfalls and traps for the overam bitious. There is an eternal risk of bringing too much of the source language into the receiv ing language. There is a corresponding risk of bringing too little. And that’s before we even get to the key material elements of rhythm, words, and sound, the way it feels to your ears and mouth when you utter the word “ichorsmeared,” śoṇitaraktadehau. All of this exists within one dimension of translation: the craft of turning sound and meaning in one language into alike sound and meaning in another language.

There is a second dimension to translation: the process of reviving a work in a new context, in an age unlike the age it came out of, in a culture that has moved in scary, exciting directions. It is all too easy for a work to lose some of its vital power in translation or retelling. To bring Rama, Sita, and Ravana into the world of the Babri Masjid and flawed democracy, Narayanan experiments in both form and content. He cre ates in After an epic that confronts in turn the power of the Indian state; the suffering inherent in the conflict between obligation and person al desires; and the beautiful, horrifying legacy of a myth that has tangible effects in a country ruled by men and women who believe it is real. Valmiki’s Ramayana is a text of enduring beau ty containing moral instruction for princes and statesmen. It is intended for rulers. After is beau tiful and instructive, but Narayanan’s aesthetic and moral decisions are both more nuanced and more on the side of resistance to violence, chauvinism, and the ruthless exercise of power. After counters the process of cultural and po litical domination that is sweeping India in its own idiosyncratic way. The challenges inherent in such an ambitious project are legion, but for the most part, Narayanan overcomes them. At its finest, After is exactly what it should be: a great retelling of the first retelling, a work of both poetry and translation.

Formed This Way In defense of

social contagion

Sasha Carney

The first thing you are told when you begin to understand yourself as transgender is that you had no choice in the matter. “Born this way,” “born in the wrong body”: these same ascriptive phrases were the soup of the day on Tumblr in my teenage years of the mid2010s, where anxious young trans and nonbi nary people reassured ourselves, and each oth er, that we were born into transness. Centre-left human rights discourses embraced the tenden cy to theorise gayness and transness alike as unchanging, essential, and instilled in the body since birth. The ease of the narrative was, and remains, excellent fodder for shiny liberal me dia consumption: in a 2016 Guardian profile produced, it seems, for the consumption of cis people, trans university student Keith testifies that “it’s not a choice. Nothing has happened in my life to make me trans. I was born trans.” Under “born this way” logic, identity is not something formed through living in the world, but rather a nugget of information to be exca vated, polished, and eventually presented to it.

The belief in an innate gender is an under standable defense against a homophobic and transphobic world: Lady Gaga sang “Born This Way” to a pre-Obergefell v. Hodges America, after all. Queers are prickly in the face of conversion therapy logic, which is correctly perceived as the attempts of domi nant society to nudge aberrant desires towards more palatable ones. If we as trans people did not choose our strangeness, if it is, instead, a naturalized, cradle-to-grave form of human difference, then it follows that it can be tol

erated in the name of equality; maybe even, in extraordinary circumstances, embraced.

The alternative notion—that queerness, par ticularly transness, is conditioned by the social rather than intrinsic to the self—seems to be the domain of right-wing news outlets, Repub lican lawmakers, and the occasional classical liberal professor. Over the last few years, trans children have been thrown into the harsh spot light of national news like never before. Over on Fox News, Tucker Carlson decries trans childhood as “grotesque” and an instance of “ventriloquism” where children are unwittingly puppeted to political ends. The logic of those in Carlson’s camp, echoing and informing the early 2020s’ spate of anti-trans American leg islation—what the historian Jules Gill-Peterson terms the recent emergence of “the cis state,” the specific wielding of state power to preserve the cisness of its subjects—is characterised by two entwined arguments. First, it is trans chil dren who need to be protected from their own transness. Their desires to transition, wheth er socially, hormonally, or surgically, will not help them, but rather lead them further astray. Second, and crucially, these protective inter ventions are required because the children in question are not truly trans. They were not born this way. Rather, they are corroded into trans ness, which sweeps the nation like a disease. As Nicholas Christakis, sociologist and Ster ling Professor at Yale, has written on Twitter, “I think there is a large element of social conta gion with respect to transgenderism.” He placed the desire to transition in the same category as bulimia, peanut allergies, and “(mild) autism.”

When members of this camp—let’s call them the social contagion critics— talk about trans people, they constantly invoke the horrors of a

surgically changed body in hushed, fear-strick en tones. The primary body under threat is, for the social contagion critic, that of the young teenage or prepubescent “girl” or person as signed female at birth: always white, vulnera ble, and constructed as lacking its own auton omy. (It must be noted here that transphobes primarily construct trans men and transmascu line people as “victims” of transness, and trans women and transfeminine people as predato ry “perpetrators” of it. The body at threat is always that of a young woman, or “woman,” whether at risk on the operating table or in a women’s restroom.) The cover of Abigail Shri er’s 2020 book Irreversible Damage—an an ti-trans text I have never read, and never will— features this horror embodied: a young white girl with a pixie cut and a hole where her re productive organs should be. That a sickness has been produced in “our” children that might lead them to “mutilate” what is healthy is the greatest, most soul-striking fear of them all. As gender-affirming surgical and hormonal pro cedures become increasingly thinkable over the course of the last few years, with waiting lists at gender clinics swelling to years-long wait times, their visibility circulates as the transphobe’s nightmare. Surgery, for the social contagion critic, is the logical endpoint of a so ciety that allows its children to be cross-con taminated by inappropriately gendering ideas.

A gender-affirming procedure is usually a life-affirming one. Though statistics alone can’t define the value of a trans life, a study led by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Pub lic Health found that gender affirming surger ies were associated with a 42% reduction in psychological distress and a 44% reduction in suicidal ideation. Even these statistical re buttals, though, are unconvincing to the social contagion critic, since they hardly get to the heart of their fear mongering. The transphobe is terrified of the creep of inauthenticity, and wields that terror effectively. The idea that ventriloquised, aberrant gender can be sepa rated from “authentic” manhood or woman hood works so well because it is the process of questioning the purity of one’s motivations. Your desires are not your own, transphobes of all stripes argue, not truly desired. If you can only disentangle the toxic terminology of gender from what you truly want, you will be free to be in your own body without alteration.

This is ultimately premised on the idea that transness alone is inauthentic, that all other ex pressions of gender are naturalized. “Born in the wrong body” activism attempts to rebut this by naturalizing transness: by testifying to the lack of choice we had over our trans identity, we hope to make ourselves immune from the so cial contagion critique. But what might it mean, instead, to reveal all gender as inauthentic?

Gender is inherently a process of social rela tion: who you are as a woman or man or other wise forms in relation to the gendering of those around you. A cisgender man in a locker room may feel socially compelled toward certain motions, phrases, or stories to affirm and so lidify their own manhood in the world. What is so “natural” about that? Ask yourself now: how do your friends perform, or ‘do,’ gender? Your mother, your father, your partner? Is the performance of cisgender heterosexual man hood, for instance, any less determined by who you are friends with, the insecurities you have around your body, or your desire to amass so cial capital? Brazilian waxes and pre-workout smoothies alike are gender-affirming process es; shaving your face or wearing a dress can be, too. We can scarcely conceive of gender with out these social rituals and practices. There is no true Archimedean standpoint where we can live outside gender as we speak about it: cis or trans, we are, like Heidegger’s subject, always already thrown-into-the-world as gendered be ings. To rephrase Christakis, I think there is a large element of social contagion with respect to gender—not specific to trans people, but with respect to the territory of gender itself.

And what of it? Of course, not all forms of social contagion are healthy or positive. Gen der can hurt as much as it can heal. But I be lieve we, as trans people, lose more than we gain by pretending that gender is ever, has ever been, separable from the realm of the social. To slightly bastardize Lady Gaga, I’m on the right track, baby. I—just like you, whoever you are—was formed this way.

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About Our Contributors

Daniel Blokh is a junior studying Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies and comparative literature at Yale. He is the creator of God Himself Was Our Neighbor, a podcast about Jewish life in the Soviet Union.

Emily Tian is a senior studying philosophy at Yale.

Jordan Jenkins is a junior studying labor economics and history at Yale.

Aaron Magloire is a senior studying English and African American studies at Yale.

Yosef Malka is a junior studying political thought and Jewish history at Yale.

Tyler Jager is a senior studying human rights and political philosophy at Yale.

Daevan Mangalmurti is a junior studying ethics, politics and economics at Yale.

Sasha Carney is a senior studying English and gender at Yale.

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