Interesting Links: Week 3
I might have to actually start scheduling these into my calendar so that they at least resemble weekly articles!
With the holidays coming up, I’ve had far too much free time and far, far too many rabbit holes to wander down. Here’s just a few of them to tumble down along with me!
The Zara scandal has shown that online activism does not always fall on dead ears.
We live in a scary world. Unless you live under a rock, I am sure you have been bombarded with posts, articles, and links about the Gaza conflict on all social media platforms. The images of bodies, some of babies as young as a few months, shrouded in white cloth have overtaken every waking moment. It is impossible to look away, and we should not be allowed to look away because it is a privilege that the people living this reality do not have. I wrote a little about the conflict in my #30TubeReads review of Minor Detail and at the same time I decided to read more fiction from authors from the region, and read more about the history of the land itself. As part of my search for narratives from the region I came across a beautiful piece in the New Yorker.
The View from my Window in Gaza by Mosab Abu Toha
The houses in Jabalia are so small that the street becomes your living room. You hear what your neighbors talk about, smell what they cook. Many lanes are less than a metre wide. After two days in the camp, on Saturday morning, my family has no bread to eat. Israel has cut Gaza’s access to electricity, food, water, fuel, and medicine. I look for bakeries, but hundreds of people are queuing outside each one. I remember that, two days before the escalation, we bought some pita. It is sitting in my fridge in Beit Lahia.
When I was in Journalism school, before the pandemic completely changed our ideas about communication and activism, my teachers, more accustomed to the workings of traditional media would often turn their noses up at the idea of online activism. We were a class of idealistic wannabe journalists. The rebellion anthem Khalabali ran through a veins.
A Professor once promised to mark attendance for the entire class if we decided to go for a protest instead of actually attending her lecture. But the shutting down of a Zara campaign that unabashedly showed images that were too close to the images regularly coming out of Gaza, due to the uproar online shows that there is power in the voices of the common man. Even when the powerful ones refuse to end the genocide.
Zara’s New Campaign is Under Fire for Parallels to Gaza Crisis by Danya Issawi
On Monday, people familiar with the matter told the Cut that the campaign was conceived in July, shot in September, and was allegedly not intentional. On Tuesday, the brand posted to a statement to their Instagram, saying the Zara Atelier campaign, titled “The Jacket,” “presents a series of images of unfinished sculptures in a sculptor’s studio… unfortunately, some customers felt offended by these images, which have now been removed, and saw in them something far from what was intended when they were created.” The post goes on to say “Zara regrets that misunderstanding and we reaffirm our deep respect towards everyone.”
My never-ending TBR just grew by one.
I have a love-hate relationship with Zadie Smith’s work. I absolutely enjoyed reading White Teeth by Smith. It felt like I was being sucked into the crazy dynamics of a family other than my own but still as real in their intensity. But then I read Swing Time by her and I could not tell you what the book was about. (Although I do have a feeling that it was trying to do something similar to Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie.) To be true to this statement I am resisting the urge to look the book up on Goodreads.
Smith’s work is laced with references to the past. Tales of political and social conflict in history form the framework of all her works. However, now she has written her first piece of historical fiction and I am extremely intrigued. But I am procrastinating reading the book itself, maybe it has something to do with the fact that I am a little nervous I won’t like it, so I decided to read all about the book instead of reading the book itself.
In ‘The Fraud’, Zadie Smith Has Doubts About Fiction by Jordan Kisner
The metaphor is not subtle. This will be a book about the dead weight of literature; the saggy, impractical, possibly elitist enterprise of revering it; the ambivalences and frustrations involved in making it; the embarrassing excess of it all. This will also be a novel about the fear of using the “wrong word,” or the right word the wrong way, and what happens when that fear curdles into resentment.
Crushing the Port Glasses by Colin Burrow
The Fraud is a paradigmatic instance of a mature work by someone who began life feeling as though they belonged outside a national canon and got famous by doing something brilliant and different; someone who then finds herself rather awkwardly central to an age in which her kind of urban, eclectic, consciously mixed race, sometimes angry, sometimes funny, sometimes funny-angry writing is what a lot of people want to read, and is so much what people want to read that it has become canonical. That isn’t an easy transition to negotiate. Smith began by thinking about herself as edgy, both culturally and tonally. Then, as the formerly edgy becomes the new canonical, the big questions begin to loom. What am I doing to the English literary canon and what has it done to me? What am I doing for the people and histories it has hitherto marginalised?
This is now a Donna Tartt fan club. Care to join?
The first time I read The Secret History by Donna Tartt was in 2020. Since then I’ve read The Goldfinch once, and The Secret History twice more. For someone who does not reread novels very often this is high praise from me. (Obviously Tartt had been dying for this accreditation from me!) Tartt’s books are beautifully written and in the 30 years since The Secret History was published first the novel has only become more famous, especially with the takeover of the Dark Academia vibe on Instagram and TikTok. However, she still does not receive the same kind of acclaim as other male authors who belong to similar genres as her. There is debate about why this is. I recently read an article in which the author discusses the politics of genre fiction and where in that debate does Donna Tartt fit in.
Fooled You: On Donna Tartt’s Genre Fiction by Richard Joseph
Tartt’s books, by contrast, are what happens when a literary novel does not condescend to genre but takes it seriously. When Theo, the protagonist of The Goldfinch, smuggles a priceless painting through airport security, he imagines “some cinder-block room like in the movies, slammed doors, angry cops in shirtsleeves, forget about it, you’re not going anywhere, kid.” The genericity of this — “like in the movies” — is not here played for laughs but imbued with genuine menace. The familiar scene becomes an effective shorthand for a world of torment, the law clamping down on Theo’s childish hopes. In fact, the whole novel is rife with genre allusions and techniques, particularly the genres of cinema.
The burkini makes a comeback!
Earlier this month the Miss Universe contestant from Pakistan wore a burkini during the swimsuit round of the pageant. It led to a lot of different conversations on the internet.
But this is not the first time that the burkini has been in the news. Apart from its ban in France, this piece of swimwear has had a varied history.
The History of Burkini: From France’s 2016 Ban to Miss Pakistan 2023 Erica Robin’s Change-making Swimsuit Look by Allie Fasanella
In 2016, several of France’s seaside towns, including Cannes and Nice, banned burkinis, with former Prime Minister Manuel Valls declaring them tantamount to “woman’s enslavement” and “not compatible with the values of France and the Republic.” The strict clothing rules applied to public pools and beaches run by the state.
Women working in the Islamic fashion industry expressed disappointment around the decision. “The burkini was intended to integrate and bring people together. To give them the freedom of choice to wear something modest if they choose to be modest for whatever reason they need to be modest for. It should be happy and positive. It is turning something meant to give women the freedom of participating in health and fitness into a negative thing,” Zanetti said in 2016.
The 2016 France ban on the burkini is not the only time that women have been policed for the clothes they decide to wear. For centuries commenting on the clothes women decide to wear has become a way to not only control them in a patriarchal society but also in some cases a way of victim-blaming in rape cases. It also becomes a subtle way for societies to influence a population and impose their own ideas.
Ban the burqa? Scrap the sari? Why women’s clothing matters by Rafia Zakaria
Ending sati or widow immolation in 19th-century India, and founding women’s shelters to protect women from honour killings in 21st-century Afghanistan: these campaigns bookend two centuries of Anglo-Americans standing squarely against horrific local customs. Specifically: protecting brown women from barbaric local customs. The 19th-century British Missionary Register and The New York Times Magazine of the 21st-century both tell urgent stories of Anglo-Americans as the fragile ‘thin line of defence’ protecting vulnerable local women.
Awkward anecdotes that should belong in memoirs.
One of my guilty pleasures is that I really enjoy books in which women recollect really awkward stories from their lives. It kind of helps me find solidarity in the weird situations I often find myself in. These are situations that are unique to being modern women as we try to work, date, and just live in the world. Occasionally, I come across personal essays that belong to the genre and they immediately manage to suck me in right from the first line. It is just a bonus if the person writing also happens to be funny.
Only ‘Okay’ on WikiFeet by Ziwe
I had body odor. As an adult, I am known for smelling as fresh as a tropical beach after a rainstorm, because I surround myself with candles and fragrances. However, when I was a child, I was unfamiliar with the concept of deodorant. For some reason, it had never been explained to me. Not to point any fingers, but my mother refused to buy me products that acknowledged that I had hit puberty, and instead told me to scrub my armpits harder. One issue for a stinky middle schooler is that people will actually remark on your scent. The most memorable conversation about my stinkiness was when my sixth-grade teacher, Mr. [REDACTED], pulled me aside during gym class to ask me if my parents were dead. Confused, but ever cheery, I informed him that they were not. He replied, “Well, then, tell your mother to buy you deodorant.”
My Tinder Date Stole My Tabis, But I’m Having The Last Laugh by Daniel Rodgers
Yes. It is rough. To find something serious or real, it takes forever. I feel like it’s gotten worse over the last couple of years. People are like, ‘I’m young and wanna have fun’, and there’s not a lot of serious connection-making. People are dating just to meet a new person every week! They’re not intending for anything to be meaningful. It’s interesting when I get comments like, ‘You just invite anybody over!’, and I’m like, ‘That’s kind of how it is going right now.’ It means these things are bound to happen. You meet someone and realize they’re awful without thinking that would ever happen.