What I recently read
If anyone out there is (still) in doubt about whether an academic text can also arouse emotions, I suggest you read Marina de Regt’s ‘In Friendship One Does Not Count Such Things - Friendship and Money in War-Torn Yemen. She explores her bond of a couple of decades with Noura, an interlocuter and friend, as it transforms and morphs while war ravages Yemen, and she cannot travel there anymore. What happens to a Calvinist with a secure job in Western Europe, when a faraway friend, financially in need calls again and again and asks for funds? Friendship = money? Money = friendship? I lost myself in the ins and outs of this relationship as heart and mind came together. Have you read/written texts that do this?
What I’m presently reading
‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James, published in 1881. I inherited it from my mother-in law. Classics are a mandatory part of my menu. They are the ones I chew on, take time over and digest. It took me a while to get into it in the beginning, but I discovered soon enough that this is so because a book like this demands a sitting of at least half an hour or forty-five minutes at a time from me. And now I can hardly put it down. Graham Greene’s words resonate: ‘it is as a great, leisurely built cathedral that one thinks of it …. The whole building indeed, is a triumph of architectural planning”. Nice to think of a book as a building, don’t you think?
What I recently edited
‘Art of Impact’
I had the privilege of editing some parts of this report of a project in Bangladesh and I helped the two authors (Nasrin Siraj Annie and Eeva Kaun) see how their voices differed, and how they could turn this into a strength. The project brings artist/activists, women located in diverse under-represented parts of Bangladesh together with Nasrin, a Dhaka based academic and a Eeva, a Swedish filmmaker together, to create a potent mix. I was pleased to see how much had gone into the lay out and visuals with the written word flourishing creatively alongside. So not your typical report.
Living Between Borders
I edited this paper by anthropologist Corina Tulbure. It is an auto-ethnographic account of her memories of her Romanian childhood in the 1980s on the other side of the Berlin wall, her crossing of borders and the treatment meted out to her by the border guards, as she travelled into Spain, where her status changed over the years. During her recent field work in Tunisia, while sitting around a table on which her interlocutors have served up a wonderful meal to please her, the aromas and attitudes make her reflect on herself as the privileged one, the one with access, with freedom of movement, with a life her companions can only dream of. It makes her ask questions about borders and the marks they leave in the imaginations and bodies of people like her.
Besides…I continue to teach English at a vocational school to students of economics. It’s always useful to deconstruct language and have to explain the rules that underlie what we take for granted….
And I like the contact with young people that teaching brings.