Words and Worlds

Activist stories for a new year

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Photo by Han Chenxu on Unsplash

I can’t quite resist new year’s resolutions. I think of them more as promises to myself to expand my mind and universe than a disciplinary “to do” list. I don’t write them down or announce them to the world, though I do casually mention a few to friends in the early weeks of January.

One such promise for 2024 is to read more writing in translation, and to read and listen to more stories from outside the Anglo-American bubble.

Here are a few gems I’ve discovered over the past few weeks.

Martha’s Monthly

Last month I published a post on translation as activism, and through the wonders of the newsletter community I discovered this newsletter from

Martha

, who publishes monthly recommendations of novels from around the world, most in translation. Her December Reads includes reviews of writing from Finland, Mexico, Nigeria, Mexico and Colombia.

Territories of Extreme Violence in Ecuador’s War on Drugs

In the UK, you’ll have to scroll pretty far down these days to find news of the ongoing crisis in Ecuador, where political violence has reached alarming levels in the first month of this year, following the August 2023 assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio (a journalist and politician dedicated to uncovering corruption and human rights abuses amongst officials as well as criminals), and the subsequent election of conservative candidate Daniel Naboa in October. Much mainstream reporting in the West paints the situation in Ecuador as a battle of good vs evil, with an embattled democratic state fighting blood-thirsty rival cartels. In an article written shortly before the October 2023 elections, Jorge Nuñez paints a more complex picture, reminding us that the state itself is heavily implicated in the current crisis. Social media influencers are also in on the act, spreading both false and verified stories that “serve to confuse and deflect from the complicity of the state and security forces in perpetuating corruption and organised crime”. At the same time, the police, backed by far-right groups, regularly persecute grassroots Black, Indigenous and workers’ organisations. All this happens, as Nuñez argues in an earlier article from 2022, in the wider context of the international war on drugs, which continues to have devastating consequences for democracy and people, in Ecuador and around the world.  

Radio Semilla Podcast

Another problem with Western reporting on Latin America is the tendency to focus on sensationalist news about violence associated with drug trafficking, while overlooking community activities focused on building better worlds. This Spanish-language podcast from the Red de Guardianes de Semillas (Network of the Keepers of the Seed), a group of environmentalist and other activists practicing and teaching ecological and social regeneration in local areas throughout Ecuador, includes inspirational episodes on ancestral seeds, the anti-mining movement, the history of genocide and resistance in Latin America, water, mushrooms, urban gardening, healing food, and much more.

Moon of the Turning Leaves

In the sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow – Waubgeshig Rice’s brilliant post-apocalyptic novel that eerily presaged events of the Coronavirus pandemic in northern Canada – members of a small Annishinaabe community who had migrated north following a mysterious event that cut their power and contact with the outside world, face a new crisis when food and other resources start to dwindle and threaten their survival. The community sends a group of six – including the young hunter Nangohns and her father Evan – to find a suitable place to live further south, where they come across the haunting remains of the human world they had left behind.

Faltas: Letters to Everyone in my Hometown Who isn’t my Rapist

In this devastating but hopeful experimental memoir, trans activist Cecilia Gentili recounts the multiple violences of her childhood during the era of the last military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983). Written as a series of letters to family members, friends and others from her small-town working-class community, Faltas traces Cecilia’s life from the time she was first sexually assaulted by a friend’s father when as a child to her eventual departure. In the process, she not only paints a picture of growing up trans and poor in the provinces, but of a movement from isolation to queer community, sometimes found in the least expected places.

#WomanLifeFreedom: A Year Since “Jina’s Calendar” Began 

In her reflections on the 1st anniversary of the killing of Mahsa-Jina Amini in Iran in September 2022, writer and translator Poupeh Missaghi rejects the idea of bringing the year of action to a close, and instead provides a list of ongoing examples of Iranian state violence, as “a gesture toward keeping open the documentation of #WomanLifeFreedom and its translation”, using language to move from the passive to the active voice, underscoring women’s agency and resistance. Missaghi also underscores the importance of translation and the transnational transmission of activist knowledge:

The reason we need to learn about and engage with what is going on in Iran is not just because these events provide a larger context for the Iranian literature and arts we study, or because they help to expand our knowledge of foreign affairs and politics, or simply because we must feel empathetic and care about others (what does that even mean if that feeling is not supplemented by meaningful actions?). More importantly, we need to learn in order to see the shared roots of the injustices against which the people in Iran, especially the youth, are protesting, even risking their lives to bring change (...) We need to see the interconnections of the resistance movements that are happening all over the world because our problems are not that different from one another’s. (...) To heal it and make a livable future for us all, in the words of the late Iranian poet Sohrab Sepehri, “We should wash our eyes / See the world anew.” 

Global Day of Action for Gaza

Mumbai Paused is a newsletter recording life in and around Mumbai through photographs and words. On Saturday 13th January, the author posted a series of recordings of people in Navi Mumbai reading poetry from Palestine on the Global Day of Action for Gaza held throughout the world on that day, concluding:

I hope this will be a gateway to reading more poetry and writing and discovering art from Palestine or Israel and other regions worldwide that help us make this a better, equal and less violent world.

Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here. If you like what you read, you can:

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