The Politics of Numbers

With the Africa Center at the LSE, I have a paper out on the Security Sector Reform process in South Sudan. If that sounds too dry, then let me say that the paper is really about the fictions of bureaucracy and the silence of power. It’s full of historical ironies and international perversions, ghost soldiers and briefcase rebels, technocratic fantasies and oil economies. It’s about the way the state becomes autonomous from society through petrol-dollars and the humanitarian industry, how the war economy has created new class dynamics of immiseration and displacement, and the way centralisation and fragmentation in South Sudan are not opposites, but processes locked into a deadly spiral.

You can read it here.

Winning Entry in Five Dials

A few months ago, Hamish Hamilton's literary magazine, Five Dials, posted a very specific competition prompt for a very short story. As I was in quarantine, and had nothing to do but inspect the fascinating texture of the fibres in the couch, I entered. The magazine is out now, and it turns out I won. You can read the magazine here. I have put both the prompt and the story below:

Prompt: The narrator is an infectious disease expert at a hospital in London. Describe what happens when she finally gets home from work. What are her new rituals? How does she relate to her family?

The story must include a scene in which the narrator interacts with someone delivering food to her flat.

The story must contain the line of dialogue: ‘My hands never shake.’

My entry:

Work is alveoli, membranes and flesh. It’s best not to remember work. I’m grateful for those minutes on the Tube, standing awkwardly in a hazmat suit. Minds need cleansing, too. At the apartment, we built a small decontamination room where the hat-stand used to be. I strip naked and scratch my skin with dry soap, as if I were at some new-fangled spa, ready to endure medieval tortures in the name of beauty. Then I put on a tracksuit and go through the second door. I’m home.

That’s my life. At work, there is only flesh and its images. At home, there is only family. Life is slimmed down to two poles.

When I come home, we replay the drama of the hospital. Mark, my youngest, takes my temperature, while James, already serious about his work, clamps the oximeter on my finger to read the oxygen levels in my blood. My husband has already taken the children’s readings and, as a family, we collectively enter our results into my phone. We are fine. Just fine.

James looks at me. Why are your hands shaking, Mommy? I tell them, my hands never shake. I am fine. Just fine.

Now it is time to order dinner. We no longer cook. It’s a public duty to get delivery. This is war, and our only weapon is consumption. Tonight, we order Sichuan. A year ago, I would have eagerly waited to pay with a card. One gloved hand passing plastic to another gloved hand. Cards were abolished a month ago; money, dirty, smelly money, was abandoned soon after the beginning of the crisis. We are all contactless now. The courier’s arrival is announced by the thud of my order on the doorstep. For the courier, I am just an address and a predilection for Mapo tofu and pea shoots with garlic.

We eat together and I gather the remains for incineration. The children go to bed; my husband goes to his screen. That’s the most intimate part of him these days. I clean away and get into the shower. My hands run over my body; I remember the flesh I have seen and the faces struggling to breathe behind glass barriers. That’s when I start preparing for work: Klonopin, Zoloft, Halcion.

I’m on life support; they are on life support. We are all on life support now.

Reading this evening

Tonight, I'm giving a short reading from my book-in-progress as part of @fondationthalie's plateforme poétique at 20:30 UTC. You can listen along here.

Merci à @fondationthalie pour cette invitation!

New Report out with Small Arms Survey

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I have a new report out with Small Arms Survey.

The civil war that began in South Sudan in December 2013 has had dire consequences for the Shilluk people of Upper Nile, with civilians killed, villages and buildings destroyed, and humanitarian aid blocked. Although exact figures are elusive, estimates suggest that as much as 50 per cent of the Shilluk population has left the country during the current civil war—a figure that rises to 80 per cent if internally displaced people are included.  

Displaced and Immiserated: The Shilluk of Upper Nile in South Sudan’s civil war, 2014–19, my new report from the Small Arms Survey’s Human Security Baseline Assessment for the Sudan and South Sudan (HSBA) project, places events in Upper Nile from 2014–19 in their historical context and analyzes the main military tactics employed by government forces in Shilluk areas.

Embassy of Foreign Artists

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Next year, from October-December 2020, I will be an artist-in-residence at the Embassy of Foreign Artists in Geneva, where I will be working on a novel, Anatomy of Exile, which I will write in dialogue with the archive of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) . You can read more about the residency here.

Asymptote's Summer Issue

Asymptote’s summer issue is out. The nonfiction section includes texts by Fausto Alzati Fernández, Rasha Khayat, and Silviano Santiago.

After six years at the nonfiction editor of Asymptote, this was my last issue, as I step down to focus on my own writing. It was a great pleasure, and a wonderful education in literature, to work with Asymptote for all these years.

I was able to edit and publish some of my favourite writers, including Dominique Eddé, Abdourahman A. Waberi, Abdelfattah Kilito, Abdellah Taïa, Antonin Artaud, Gonçalo M. Tavares, Miljenko Jergović, and Semezdin Mehmedinović, amongst so many others.

Learning about writing from all over the globe, and then somehow managing the challenge of editing it all, made working with Asymptote a true education in literature.

A new issue of Asymptote is out

I am the nonfiction editor at Asymptote, a journal of literature in translation, and we have a new issue out! In the nonfiction section, read Waberi on his travels in Rwanda, Singer on the nature of the feminine, and a wonderful piece of Polish reportage by Ziemowit Szczerek on his travels to the grave of Bruno Schulz.

How To Do Things With(out) Words

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On 25 April 2015, I participated in a panel entitled 'Fact, Fiction and the In-between' at the Art in General What Now? symposium on the Politics of Listening, organized in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

A book that collates the discussions which occurred during that symposium has now been published, and my talk, entitled 'How To Do Things With(out) Words', which dealt with redacted documents from the war on terror, is on pp.48-53.

A State of Disunity: Conflict Dynamics in Unity State, 2013-15

Image (c) Jérôme Tubiana

Jérôme Tubiana, Claudio Gramizzi and I have a 256 page working paper with Small Arms Survey's HSBA project, that looks at the history of the South Sudanese Civil War in Unity State, 2013-16.

It includes analysis of the UN's decision to arm the rebels at the outset of the conflict, the manipulation of humanitarian aid, and a blow by blow account of the war, county by county.

You can read it here.