To See, To Witness, TO record
Liz Tascio
The World With Its Mouth Open, by Zahid Rafiq Tin House, 2024.
If you, like me, had only the faintest, most embarrassingly light grasp of the geopolitics of Kashmir when you began reading The World With Its Mouth Open, you still won’t be conversant in the political details when you finish this debut short story collection by Kashmiri journalist Zahid Rafiq. The decades of violent dispute by India, Pakistan, and China are not discussed; Kashmir is not even named as the setting.
But you will have shared Rafiq’s close attention to its neighborhoods, its classrooms, market stalls, living rooms and bedrooms, kitchens, hallways, alleyways—the plain, intimate places of everyday life.
And it’s there, in the close, living portraits of each person, that the destabilizing pain of living in this contested place, in this time, becomes clear. Threading through everything is a delicate sense of dread, of constant and quiet unease, the grief of losses and the certainty of more loss to come.
In the opening story, “The Bridge,” a pregnant wife, anxious after two miscarriages, tentatively visits a traditional clinic, no longer sure she should rely only on modern medicine. She receives prescriptions for powders and teas and a directive to eat fish; she wonders if she can afford all of it. She emerges into the teeming, disorienting marketplace and thinks she might recognize a lost-looking man standing on the bridge: the older
brother of her childhood friend, with whom she has lost touch. She decides to walk by him and say his name.
‘Rajaji,’ she said, a smile on her face. It was him. Something strange lay in his eyes, something distant and cold. His face frightened her. ‘I am Nusrat,’ she said, ‘Saira’s friend.’ Uncertain, she smiled wider. ‘Don’t you recognize me?’ For a moment she thought he had lost his mind, but he didn’t look mad. Or maybe he was not Rajaji.
‘Baybi,’ he said [using her childhood nickname]. ‘You have grown.’
They talk for a few minutes, but he is vacant and sad; eventually Nusrat is so uncomfortable she tries to take her leave. But Rajaji, suddenly enlivened, tells her he will walk with her.
Shopkeepers rolled open shutters around them; some swept patches outside their stores. She wanted to say something [to him], but she was not sure what. Two soldiers in motorcycle helmets stood with their guns pointing at the street; a half-empty bus trudged past, the young conductor beckoning . . .
And there it is, blended with the busy shopkeepers, Nusrat’s worry, and the empty bus: the soldiers, the guns. In most of these stories they are simply background. They seem at first to have nothing to do with Nusrat’s anxiety—about her pregnancy, about Rajaji—and yet the soldiers are there, creating their own low hum.
Nusrat and Rajaji walk together, awkward and a little aimless. Gradually they recall tiny, happy details of their childhood together: Rajaji buying cold bottles of Pepsi for her and Saira; Nusrat cooking for them with too many spicy green chiles.
She gets tired, and he suggests they stop at a milk seller’s stall for a glass of laess, and though she worries whether someone she knows will see her sitting and visiting with a man, she agrees and they sit; then he offers to go buy bread for them to eat with it.
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Almost the entire second half of the story is taken up by Nusrat’s anxiety increasing as she waits and waits for him, and even leaves the milk stall to search for him in the disorienting, unfamiliar marketplace. She wonders if he’s gotten confused, or had an accident, or if soldiers have taken him—all equally possible. She doesn’t have his cell number or know anyone who would have it; she becomes annoyed and embarrassed and worried, and her surroundings become louder, more chaotic, and eventually, terrifying.
This is the world with its mouth open.
In all of these stories, Rafiq finds this dread and tension and loss again and again, but always with tenderness and empathy for the fallible human beings living in nearly impossible conditions.
In “The House,” a woman tries desperately to ignore the fact that a laborer has dug up a hand on the construction site of her new home. In “Beauty,” a boy becomes obsessed with a girl whose family has moved in with his friend, but his youth means he doesn’t even wonder what tragedy displaced them as he tries constantly to be near her. There is an echo here of Joyce’s “Araby,” of the sadness of sudden, shame-filled epiphany at a young age.
“The Man with a Suitcase,” “In Small Boxes,” and “The Mannequin” all feel close to Kafka—they operate with that slightly askew, maze-like sensation of trying very hard to survive in a world where the rules are unknown, changeable, and often cruel. But where Kafka pulls us far into unreality to help us see what he sees, Rafiq keeps us close to the world as it is, always with that open mouth in our peripheral vision.
In “Bare Feet,” a young man comes home to visit after living in America for three years, and he dreams that a ghost has asked him to find his family and relay a message. He reaches out to a friend whose brother has died, and they search. As the
two of them ride a motorcycle around the city, the man thinks uncomfortably of his friend’s grief and the fact that he has failed to help him shoulder it, and he tries guiltily to justify his inattentiveness. The two men come upon children playing a version of hopscotch, and he tries to hold the moment against his heartache:
Each time she jumps, her two thin braids tied with yellow ribbons jump and dance behind her; it needs to be seen, witnessed, recorded, this moment, this girl.
He is also overwhelmed by the changes he sees:
Neighborhood after neighborhood, desolation. Nothing but bunkers made of sandbags with loops of barbed wire wound around, and from little holes in the bunkers, dark eyes watched you with pointed barrels. They are everywhere, the bunkers, the blind eyes, the searching muzzles. I had heard all this in my absence but to see it is another thing.
Later, when he is walking home alone, he is stopped by soldiers—and all the small background tensions in the collection flare into bright, terrifying focus; the sudden possibility of his detainment or death is imminent. It doesn’t matter now that I cannot give a detailed history of Kashmiri politics: The world is roaring and snapping its teeth. We are face to face.
No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity, by
A. Kendra Greene Tin House, 2025.
To see, To wiTness, To record—to collect disparate images, objects, and observations and transmute them into something greater than the sum.
That’s the alchemy in A. Kendra Greene’s rich new collection of twenty-six essays, No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity. It is wildly diverse, poignant, and often delightful, anchored by a sense of seriousness, by a sweet, wry humor, an athleticism of thought, and a riot of fantastically long sentences. Greene, also a visual artist and bookmaker, has a background in museums, and a deep curiosity about what we hold dear, the ways we try without ceasing to understand the world we are in. She is someone who notices, who wonders with empathy and generosity; someone who categorizes, organizes, describes in small detail; she reaches deftly to draw connections I wouldn’t have imagined; she sees the surprising, the absurd, the mundane, and knows better than to pass them by.
Above all, she is exquisitely sensitive to language, and to how we make meaning.
In “The Sorcerer Has Gone to Italy,” Greene explores the shock of grief after she learns an acquaintance has died, and the way in which she was told—in metaphor.
So much of our thinking is done in metaphor, so much of our language. We are forever making sense of one thing through another . . . working it out like that: the vast and unfathomable translated through and given tether to the known. . . . But metaphor in all its guises is not mere euphemism, no such gentle code, no, it is not a veil but the light itself: a way of seeing, of transforming . . . [It is] the pinhole projection that lets us stare at the otherwise unseeable sun.
In “The Half Story,” she visits her childhood home with her nieces, and they hear animal noises above the ceiling. While the essay is about ways we manage to live with the unknown, and whether we’re wrong about what we think we know, it’s also a chance for Greene to gently send up some of the absurdity of humans and all our desperate meaning-making, including her
own: She names whatever is above the ceiling Mortimer, to make it less scary.
“We don’t even know if it’s an it, I tell the nieces. It might be a them.
“Or a her,” the nieces cheer from the back seat.
“Quite possibly, yes, but I’m saying Mortimer might be a family. Or Mortimer may be two Mortimers fighting. Mortimer may be a series of roommates and sublessors and stand-ins and substitute teachers collectively amounting to Mortimer. This might be Mortimer I, II, III and IV, all together or in succession over time. This may be two friends in a Mortimer suit.”
While she listens to the sound of scrabbling and rasping, Greene watches herself try to make meaning:
I have named the unknown Mortimer. And suddenly I feel so tenderly about it. And from that leap . . . does it go from a thing to a symbol. . . . By turns it is searching, it is home, it is intrusion, it is displacement, it is warning, it is threat.
But she scoffs at herself a little. Long ago, Greene writes, humans believed that whatever god made the world also left messages everywhere:
[The] whole world coded in allegory, ready for the faithful to crack. Why else are walnuts shaped like that, if they aren’t good for your brain? Look at this leaf like a heart! … [You] can feel it, can’t you? The meaning? The world itself awash in sympathy and resonance?
But it kind of is awash, and Greene knows it—and thank goodness, because her particular way of seeing all this resonance is clear-eyed, empathetic, poignant.
In “Wild Chilean Baby Pears,” Greene considers what it means to encounter something life-changing—an extinct bird on display, a rare book, a piece of art—and to realize that despite
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it fairly glowing with significance for you, it’s still an object, something that can be owned, is owned, and it’s out of your particular reach. She imagines her way into the mind of a visitor to an Iowa museum who, in 1979, stole one of the world’s only specimens of the extinct ivory-billed woodpecker:
I assume Visitor X had seen this very display more than once, had come back again and again. I assume he did not mean to take the ivory-billed, not at first. No, I assume there was no premeditation, that Visitor X did not case the joint. . . . I imagine there was a moment, just a moment, a flash as Visitor X realized this idol was an object and, feeling only devotion, without thinking anything else, reached out.
The thief wrote to the museum to assure them he would keep it safe, that he would never sell it, at any price. Greene rolls her eyes at his greed, but she also empathizes with his desire, “the mere possibility that at any turn we might stumble on something so stunning it takes us out of ourselves for a moment, compels us in some matter, and leaves us changed.”
In “By Degrees,” it’s February of 2021, and Greene’s life is mostly about looking for work and trying to get a Covid vaccine; then a massive snowstorm knocks out the electrical grid in Texas and the temperature drops to three degrees. She and her partner check on the few empty apartments in their building, since the landlord hasn’t, and we get this incredible paragraph:
I pointed the beam of my flashlight down at the cold splendor of the toilet water frozen solid, as if an ostrich laid a diamond egg, its curves round echoes of the pot and the pipe, this bubble in the bowl like a glass paperweight, a crystal gem, the light filtered through the orb ghostly and miraculous like nothing I have ever seen. It was unearthly. It spelled disaster, but there was nothing we could do for the infrastructure by then but witness.
At first the snow has its delights; things are manageable. Greene gathers a bouquet of icicles and makes a sculpture in her yard. She and her partner collect clean snow for washing up and to carefully flush their toilet.
But the outage drags on, damage and frustrations accrete, their building is still without running water, and the snow has melted away.
That’s when Greene notices the snowman. Or what’s left of one: a large, round bottom in a front yard. She worries whether the kids who live there will be suspicious or even crushed if it, say, disappeared overnight. If they saw her take it. She considers dressing up in costume, wondering if she can trade them a story in exchange for the theft:
It seemed wise to err on the side of whimsy, to be eccentric but benign. I regretted that there was not currently a long sea-green tutu in my closet. I calculated how long it might take to fashion wings.
Spending time with Greene’s essays is like being in a wild museum she is building and curating; following her as she looks curiously at the world and draws connections, as she builds and rebuilds taxonomies that inevitably sway and creak under the weight of all we ask them to hold. It makes me want to look at the world as she does—to see, to witness, to record, and then look for meaning, again and again:
It is a thing the essay loves: to tend, carefully, painstakingly, to the fact of the world. Sheer material, corporeal existence, all its textures and interactions, what any of it is and how any of it works — is there anything more stunning? … But the essay cannot help itself. It wants also for that very fact, that insight, that mechanism so keenly seen in itself to be exactly that and be a symbol, an allegory, a metaphor, another meaning, too.