Mike Driver
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AnasAbdin
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YOU ARE THE REASON
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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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Stranger Things
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The Body Remembers the Room
This week, on April 15th, I had the honour of delivering the opening keynote for the Social Safety Weeks 2026 at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, a programme that understands something many institutions still struggle to name: that social safety is not a decorative value to be displayed at the edges of institutional life, but part of the ground on which learning, teaching, and artistic becoming…
When the World Hardens, Go Where Beauty Still Lives
At the VU Women@VU International Women’s Day gathering this year, I found myself thinking about absence. Not only who is present in the room, but who goes missing from our frameworks. Whose names fall away. Whose lives remain insufficiently held by the language, institutions, and categories meant to account for them. During the event, Ismintha Waldring spoke about those who get forgotten, those…
Panjurli at the Edge of the Field, Poetry as Prayer, Ritual as Jurisprudence
Begin with poetry, because urgency belongs in the line break. I come to Bhoota Kola to watch belief take form as measure and cadence, and to see Panjurli hold the boundary where neighbor, field, and forest meet. In that courtyard, law is patterned, it moves in count and return, it speaks in responsorial rhythm the way a chorus answers a lead. Read through Jahan Ramazani, I learn how address,…
What My Crumpled ECER Notes Taught Me About Power, Silence and Hope
I came back from ECER 2025 in Belgrade with a notebook that looked like a battlefield. Names squeezed into margins, arrows flying across the page, words like “trust”, “silence”, “evidence” underlined three times. It felt messy and disconnected at first. Once I started reading through it at home, a different picture appeared. I kept returning to the session by Kiki Malte from Stockholm University…
Exception, By Another Name: answering some frequently asked questions about my identity
London, in the Heat of Memory and Change
Ziyafat and Radical Hospitality: Towards an Ethics of Reading Across Border
I have been ruminating on this topic for so long. It is time to stop reading it solely through the lens of an academic researcher and simply release it into the world, because its urgency can no longer wait. This essay examines the influence of Persian poetry on American literature, tracing its path from transcendentalist appropriations to contemporary invocations of Rumi and Indo-Persian forms.…
Burning Through the Forest of Noise: Mosab Abu Toha’s Poetics of Survival
In Forest of Noise, Mosab Abu Toha offers us not just poetry, but the breathless residue of survival. The title itself rings like an invocation: a forest, dense with memory, static, and surveillance; a noise, unceasing, buzzing with drones, rubble, and the keening of the dispossessed. This is Gaza, yes—but also the poetic terrain of witness, rupture, and resistance. In this book, every tree is…
The Secret Lives of Second-Hand Books
There’s a particular kind of magic that lives in second-hand books—a sort of hush, like the soft turning of pages in a dream. They arrive in your hands like messengers from another life, carrying the scent of time, the weight of old hearts, and the whisper of a reader who once fell in love at the very same sentence. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com A second-hand book is never just a book. It’s a…
The Beauty of Soft Living: Spring Insights
It’s spring again. The city wears green like a second skin, delicate and a little uncertain. Trees push out shy leaves, the wind smells of thawed dreams, and the light, so tentative at first, spills gold onto surfaces that had forgotten how to gleam. Everything is becoming. And maybe—so am I. I’ve been thinking lately about living softly. Not as weakness, not as retreat, but as choice. A…
Cats Don’t Chase Enlightenment—They Nap Through It
There are two cats who live rent-free in my head. One is a strung-out, cosmic being trying to meditate in a world that won’t stop spinning. The other is a sarcastic, loyal sidekick who, by the end of his story, learns to let go of language. Let’s begin with Flow—the Latvian animation that somehow feels like a Buddhist parable disguised as a fever dream. The cat in Flow (let’s just call him Cat,…
Fizz, Silence, and the Color of Connection: On Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop
In a cinematic world that often equates impact with intensity, Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop dares to whisper. Directed by Kyōhei Ishiguro, this 2021 anime film is a gentle study in restraint—a teenage summer romance told through soft hues, quiet poetry, and emotional understatement. Clocking in at just under 90 minutes, it’s light as air, but to call it insubstantial would miss the point…
Unmothering the Mind: Demented Mothers in Literature and Theory
“I do not know which to prefer,the beauty of inflectionsor the beauty of innuendoes,the blackbird whistlingor just after.”— Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Pexels.com The mother who forgets is often feared. She is no longer the custodian of the domestic archive, no longer the ground of the child’s stability or the embodiment of continuity.…
The Ache That Binds: Reading Difficult Mother-Daughter Relationships in Contemporary Memoirs
There is a particular kind of grief that does not scream. It simmers. It simmers beneath daily rituals, under the echoes of a mother’s reprimand, or in the silence that follows a phone call. To read memoirs like Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi, and I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy is to enter a literary space where this grief becomes language, structure,…
The Beauty of Grief in Performance Art
Photo by Jeffrey Czum on Pexels.com To the one who walked through light like it was ash, You came to me not with thunder, but like rain that had forgotten how to fall. On a screen already too full of noise, you entered quietly, like a question. I didn’t know your name then — and I don’t write this letter to learn it. I write because something inside me wants to say: I saw you. And that seeing —…
What to Do with All This Poetry?
Some days, it gathers in my throat like an unspoken prayer. Other days, it sprawls across the margins of meeting notes, bleeding into the white space between obligations. Poetry, in all its reckless abundance, arrives unannounced. It stands at the door like a lover who refuses to leave, or like a stray cat who has decided that I am home. But what does one do with all this poetry? Where does it…
Reclaiming the Body in Verse: Marginalized Poets, Hair, and the Politics of Presence
Photo by Thiago Matos on Pexels.com Poetry has long been a terrain where power structures are challenged, reimagined, and sometimes dismantled. Within this tradition, underrepresented and marginalized poets—particularly women, queer writers, and those of diasporic communities—have used the body, and often its most intimate and symbolic parts, as a site of resistance and reclamation. Among these…