Re-reading Mahasweta Devi.

I keep coming back to Breast Stories and I keep underestimating what the prose is doing.

The first time I read "Draupadi" I read it for the argument — the way it strips off the cloth of nationalist mythology, the way it ends with a refusal that is also a body. That's the reading the syllabus wants. It's not wrong, but it's the smallest possible reading.

The second time I read it for the verbs. Mahasweta Devi does so much of her work in the verbs. The sentences are short and the verbs are doing what a paragraph of political theory tries to do.

The third time I read it for the silences. The way she lets a description stop without explaining what it meant. The way she refuses to translate the body into thesis. Most political fiction wants you to be sure what it's saying. She refuses. The refusal is itself the form.

I think this is what I want my own writing on movements to do — refuse the obligation to neatly conclude. The conclusion is whatever you carry with you afterward. The book just shows you something.

— a note from the desk lamp.