Texting with … Kamil Ahsan

Kamil Ahsan is an environmental historian at Yale University, an essayist and critic, and founding editor of SAAG (South Asian Avant-Garde) — a website and magazine that publishes radical, dissident and experimental writing from South Asia, its diasporas and beyond. SAAG began as an argument that South Asians embraced avant-garde traditions long before the term existed — and experimented boldly with form, function and craft, influencing ??European?? avant-gardism. The ERB’s Sander Pleij texted with Kamil about the questions and quandries that come with editing an international yet regional magazine.

(SP)?Which writers or thinkers have the editors at SAAG been excited about lately, and why?

(KA) We’ve been fascinated by thinkers who’ve been navigating the very nature of absence (not just in the strict terms of extra-judicial disappearance or memoricide). Ather Zia, Ayah Kutmah, Mahvish Ahmad, Aria Pahari are amongst a giant cohort we’ve really enjoyed thinking with recently.

(KA) In thinking more broadly with regards to our core ethos, we’ve recently discussed Michael J. Shapiro, Tariq Omar Ali, Rachel Aviv, Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Gabriel Winant in rather great detail. They’re fairly disparate thinkers! But there’s certainly a unity of thought in politics, aesthetics and collectivity that we’re really quite taken by.

(SP) How about you? Who have you been inspired by recently?

(KA) I’d add a plug for Arielle Angel from Jewish Currents, who was interviewed by the New Left Review recently and I just have to say: I admired her approach in that interview so much!

(KA) I’d add Brian Dillon and Mathias Enard as two examples who are a perennial well for me, but for many of our editors too ??

(SP)?I can really fall in love with the writing of some of our writers: Adania Shibli writes about what she does not have the words for, Sudeep Dasgupta, Menachem Kaiser, Oksana Forostyna — I realise that I am naming people who write from — or in an indirect manner about war, they just DO NOT provide your regular op-ed service.

(SP) (Oh, and there’s Ali Smith, there’s always Ali Smith).

(SP) Can you focus on, say, three writers and give us a suggestion of what to read from them?

(KA) Ather Zia — Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir — a fantastic book & primer to Kashmir’s occupation & resistance movements.

(KA) Rachel Aviv — Strangers to Ourselves: — a book drawing from her reported pieces in the New Yorker. We discussed one of her pieces ??How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity??. A lot of what we discussed was about how singular and exceptional this story was — it’s not representative of something huge and pervasive, it’s just a very peculiar story. I think we talked a lot about the search for peculiarity despite our focus on stories the internationalist left would be interested in, partly because not only is it fascinating it blurs the lines of genre. Brian Dillon’s new book Affinities in particular scratched that itch for me.

(KA) Tariq Omar Ali – A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta — We run a LOT of stories focusing on labor, agriculture, local & global capital & this was an entry point into pinpointing our editorial standards for dealing with stories about political economy in local contexts.

(SP) Two quick thoughts: I must be misreading, or are you saying that the peculiar isn’t representative? We’re actually looking for the peculiar because it feels like the only thing that truly represents. Big statements, op-eds, argumentational smartassery don’t pull it off for me.

(KA) No I suppose I’m not saying that actually. The peculiar is absolutely representative. The story spoke to us and we talked about it at quite some length because it’s just very weird, but that kind of weird is everywhere. It takes a very special writer to pull off what seems a bit like a magic trick sometimes.

(KA) There is a time and place for a good polemic but I think what you’re saying is what I often say: don’t tell me something I already know, don’t pitch me stories that are already known, don’t preach to a choir, don’t be provocative for the sake of it. I don’t think we have a taste for that.

(SP) About the ??stories the internationalist left would like?? — hmmm. I push back when I’m targeted as anything but a questioning reader in a chaotic world (note that I’m writing from a comfy spot!)

(KA) I think what I’m saying is, I would rather take on a story I disagree with that is unique and weird and rigorous, rather than a story that I agree with whole-heartedly but there’s nothing more to it. I honestly don’t think we even get ??right-wing?? pitches. Getting the facts right, getting the right sources, just… unimpeachable journalism (if it’s a reported story). We’re actually not precious about identity at all for a mag that has ??South Asian?? in its title hahaha. We don’t define South Asia, we publish white writers, we have white editors, we write about everywhere in the world… yeah, internationalism for us does entail dismissing that any story need be ??South Asian?? in some way.

(SP) Just like we don’t know what Europe IS or who Europeans ARE! We just happen to write from Europe, which somehow led to poet Yu Müller writing Chinese palindromes and Argentinian writer Federico Perelmuter reflecting on Javier Milei. We want to be both regional and international. But how do we make sure writers from Turkey, the UK, Sri Lanka, and France don’t all sound the same in English, without turning their English into a caricature?

(KA) We’ve actually talked a lot about this, and I think we’ve found a balance based on our style, writerly style but also flexibility and an unwillingness to pander, even on banal things like allowing word spelling differences, or refraining translating a phrase that may be known only to people from a certain region but would certainly be known to a reader who likes to keep up with news in general.

(KA) It’s actually all quite fascinating to me how we began with the premise of investigating avant-gardes that hadn’t been seen much before — but when we did, the crucial aspect of them was the syncretic tendency to exchange with Europe. So, for instance, I’ve been mildly obsessed with the German typographer Jan Tschichold recently, which is just sort of an example of how … yeah, we’re very committed to two-way exchange. It’s just inaccurate to pretend otherwise.