using this space to file bits and pieces for a game (games?) i'm working on about time travel, hacking the entanglement of space & mathematics & technology in imperialism's forever wars, vietnamese worlds, hearing voices & visions, absurdities in the lives of refugees & exiles, ecologies of chemical fallout, inventing new instruments & old songs, honouring the truth of the dead, the underdark of a good meal...mainly it's a container for me to archive research and channel anger and grief in a somewhat productive way :p
i started this blog as a repository of strange/hybrid spatialities & architectures. i'll still be on that, but now it's become set design inspiration to set my ideas loose in. there will also be other history & politics posting not immediately related to the project. tagging not guaranteed but i do try to go back and re-tag from time to time.
đ±âĄwhile you're here:
spark space is one of the last operating workspaces in gaza, providing a lifeline with electricity and internet for students and workers. they're also organising courses in economics, first aid, programming, and other fields. this is critical in cultivating resilience and dignity for youth, as seeds for the future.
please consider setting up a recurring donation to support them if you have the means. you can also print and share flyers in your local community. anything makes a difference đ±
Happy Birthday Bertolt Brecht! (February 10, 1898 -August 14, 1956)
âGeneral, your tank is a powerful vehicle
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.
General, your bomber is powerful.
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.
General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.âÂ
can u fathom the horror of a viet that's been a child soldier?
OPTIMIZED FOR MOBILE
<<CLICK THE BOTTOM RIGHT TO PROCEED>>
when i think about asian american heritage as a vietnamese person i think about the viet war survivors from the previous generation. i think about what they became. because to the asians i went to college with, they aren't even human
TW: vietnamese diaspora trauma, including brief nondescriptive mentions of sexual assault, war atrocities, the vietnamese war, drugs, heroin, cigarettes, child soldiers, domestic violence, vietnamese war veterans of the vietnam war (as opposed to the white ones who are most vocal in the usa about how They suffered the most)
do you believe it when i tell you a story of the ghosts i knew and loved? was it me, or an invention of my mind? how close am i to the viet auntie i speak about, who was lost in dreaming most of the time? or her husband, who grew up in the jungle of a warground.
were these real people? how do you know they aren't?
when i speak of myself through a character, how do you know how much is falsified, and how much is my heart?
the truth is what you believe it to be.
i think these people existed. but do i know? i know my compulsion to speak about them exists, especially in the context of asian american history. the vietnamese war veterans of the vietnam war should be spoken about. what happened to them after?
i feel sorrow for the crooked-teeth immigrants with the heavy accents that their children shun in order to assimilate as americans.
in order to be american, you must accept that capital is king.
there must be no such thing as filial piety.
(isn't that feudal thinking?)
no offense to you all but if I were a mech pilot and my handler was trying to do some brainwash me into a dog for sexual purposes nonsense Id just flatten the hangar I wouldnt let that happen to me. Ive meditated for decades in the mountains with a secretive clan of ascetic monks known only as the bloodshades and they taught me kung fu and muay thai and brazilian jiu jitsu and so on so even if I get brain shocked or whatever I can thug it out and if they manage to get me out of the mech well thats their own mistake because well lets just say it will hurt a lot more for them
like. a vampire biting you (non-consensually) is someone violating your bodily integrity, in a way that often grants sexual satisfaction, that is often motivated by sexual desire and objectification, but is also a tool of domination that increases the vampireâs power, both literally in bestowing the very same extra-human strength that allowed for your violation in the first place, and also in terms of a feeling of mastery to the perpetrator, and that offers reproductive benefit (in the sense of reproduction of life) from oneâs violated body and life force to another, from the capacities they could and would direct elsewhere, taken by force in a violent way that destroys safety and sense of bodily integrity, that is exploitation in as literal a way as anything you might imagineâŠthe absence of metaphor IS striking!
the thing about "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding" is that these games exist and are out there and you have to make the conscious choice to seek them out instead of just expecting the big companies to deliver this, because they will not
Iâve been asked to provide better access to the files I obtained almost a decade ago that revealed the inner workings of the Tor Projectâs r
"The Tor Project is a private non-profit that underpins the dark web and has enjoyed cult status among anti-government privacy activists and libertarian crypto anarchists who say it will protect you from government surveillance. Edward Snowden has been a big Tor promotor, as has Julian Assange. The thing about Tor, though, is that it is private and anti-government only in its public facing image. The organization, which was spun off from a US Naval intelligence project, has continued to receive the bulk of its budget from the very U.S. security state that it claims to be fighting. Its backers have included the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG).
In the process of writing my book Surveillance Valley, I was able to obtain via FOIA roughly 2,500 pages of correspondence â including strategy and contracts and budgets and status updates â between the Tor Project and its main funder, a Central Intelligence Agency propaganda spinoff now known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors (now known as the US Agency for Global Media). These files showed close cooperation between Tor and this regime change wing of the US government. They also revealed the agency financing some of the most famous privacy activists in the worldâŠ
As I wrote at the time:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation held up Tor as the digital equivalent of the First Amendment. The ACLU backed it. Fight for the Future, the hip Silicon Valley activist group, declared Tor to be âNSA-proof.â Edward Snowden held it up as an example of the kind of grassroots privacy technology that could defeat government surveillance online, and told his followers to use it. Prominent award-winning journalists from Wired, Vice, The Intercept, The Guardian and Rolling Stone â including Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Andy Greenberg â all helped pump up Torâs mythical anti-state rebel status. Even Daniel Ellsberg, the legendary whistleblower, was convinced that Tor was vital to the future of democracy. Anyone who questioned this narrative and pointed to Torâs lavish government support was attacked, ridiculed, smeared and hounded into silence.
ButâŠ
The documents showed Tor employees taking orders from their handlers in the federal government, including hatching plans to deploy their anonymity tool in countries that the U.S. was working to destabilize: China, Iran, Vietnam, Russia. They showed discussions about the need to influence news coverage and to control bad press. They featured monthly updates that described meetings and trainings with the CIA, NSA, FBI, DOJ and State Department. They also revealed plans to funnel government funds to run âindependentâ Tor nodes. Most shockingly, the FOIA documents put under question Torâs pledge that it would never put in any backdoors into their software. The documents conclusively showed that Tor is not independent at all. The organization did not have free reign to do whatever it wanted, but was kept on a short leash and bound by contracts with strict contractual obligations. It was also required to file detailed monthly status reports, giving the government a clear picture of what Tor employees were developing, where they went and who they saw.
[...] The files are sitting on DocumentCloud:Â You can view them by following this link."
okay the thing that i keep trying and failing to say, i think, re. this whole commonwealth thing (sorry! i will be over it soon!) is that like, there is already an assumption when white euramerican readers encounter a work that is about race or about a country in africa, asia or latin america, that it can fit only a few categories:
it is a moral educational fable and lesson about race or colonialism; this can either be heartwarming or tragic
it is a portal into a world of misery that is simultaneously designed to instruct and to affirm the fortunate nature of their own world
it is unreal and magical
it is impenetrable, incomprehensible and unknowable because it is a portal into the impenetrable, incomprehensible and unknowable
which really is just two categories: either you are easily knowable entirely through the lens of your country and race, or else you are inscrutable and incomprehensible. you are either a simplistic child, or you are the inscrutable and unknowable [oriental].
-- this was the beginning of, i think, the fourth or fifth draft of this post, which i have been writing and rewriting for the past week, trying to nail down exactly what i want to say about this whole wretched affair.
the first draft went into a long and winding diversion about the perils of how non-white authors are (mis)read today, no matter how they write. that was not what i wanted to say, but what i had to end up saying in order to justify and clarify what i wanted to say which is that non-white readers get to demand higher standards of style of their writers and interlocutors. i said "get better taste" then clarified all the ways in which i meant to absolve non-white authors of the burden of better taste because i recognised they work in a poisonously white industry.
the second draft went into a long and winding diversion in which i ended up trying to defend jhumpa lahiri's latest short story collection from being misread and cut down to being about "immigration", when in fact these stories are much deeper than review allows them to be.
the third draft required another long diversion, because i observed that the reviewer in the guardian who cut ms lahiri down to a writer who writes merely about immigration in the ways we imagine it - from the global south, characterised by precarity and poverty - was in fact not a white person. it was vital to discuss the problem of double consciousness and the processes by which we come to acquire the tastes of the very institutions that refuse us full personhood. no one knows this better than me, who speaks only english with any reasonable fluency, and grew up reading more english novelists from the 30s - 50s than the average english person appears to.
the fourth draft finally got somewhere that i wanted it to be: that we cannot mistake unintelligible writing filled with beautiful words with difficult writing that articulates difficult thoughts perhaps through not very exciting words, perhaps through the poetic. that deliberate strangeness and defamiliarisation deployed as literary technique is different from a mere statistical combination and shuffling of words done by a machine. that we must insist on our own comprehensibility on our own terms and legibility to the white gaze be damned; but we must not allow them to confuse our illegibility with a flattening incomprehensibility.
however, all of this is really just four different ways of describing a) the processes by which those four misreadings outlined above are enforced on non-white writers whether they like it or not and b) some thoughts on escaping this, or ignoring it, or doing our own thing. the object lesson was: no matter what we do we will be bundled into category 4 if we say anything too uncomfortable, but we must not mistake the difficult for the nonsensical and vice versa simply because white people cannot do this. in other words, what i was really asking us to do was to stop reading like white people.
the other problem with this is that the ode to difficult writing can be misused anyway. witness sam kriss' concern for us: "white people eat this shit up and hand out condescending prizes; Indians tend to prefer people like R K Narayan or Sadat Hasan Manto, who actually know how to write." mind you, sam kriss is not indian and this follows on from a tirade in which he deliberately decontextualises and misreads an arundhati roy quote from god of small things (a quote, if which, taken in context is actually an interesting and effective use of language and repetition to tie across a particular thematic strand across the novel) and where he accuses salman rushdie of writing things to the effect of "she fed me the chapatti of her lies and the rotis of her deceits". needless to say: that's kind of immensely fucking racist. i don't think more close reading is actually going to solve this problem and neither do i think more difficult writing will, because there is always some bozo in the world who is going to insist that it is, in fact, nonsensical.
so what to do?
anyway, i witnessed a very interesting conversation earlier today in which some people we talking about how a particular adaptation of a work had made the work "more racist". in this conversation, an essay by a very thoughtful non-white writer had been deployed as "proof" of how the adaptation had become "more racist". of course a close and thoughtful reading of the essay in question might have suggested that the "more racist" was perhaps something written with a level of anger or bitterness, or perhaps an emotional statement: the bewilderment of encountering something so vilely racist, seeing no one react to it, and trying to make sense of it by grappling at the nearest racist thing and gesturing at it. which in this case, is the actual literal source text. there is no "more racist" in this case, because the source text is essentially mired and dripping in it and the escapes from its racism are slim to none; accidental rather than intentional.
this is interesting to me because it reveals a very different reading strategy than the one deployed above: if non-white writers are read either as moral fables or unreal or as nonsensical, white writers are read as real, as universal statements about the human condition, as stylists; are given reparative readings of every kind. writing by white euramericans, therefore:
is universal and therefore particular: it speaks for all but it does so by speaking in specifics of themes and emotions and experiences
is a work of art, made with a particular style, whose artistic processes can be analysed and studied to yield greater appreciation
draws from the real to tell real stories, even when its magical and fantastical
surpasses and transcends politics, which is to say that nothing can be said about the text by looking at the world from which it comes
comes from a world which is simultaneously both a product of its time (exculpatory) and the vanguard of its time (laudatory) and thus, it cannot be held responsible for any of its views
therefore, there are no racist texts or authors, only accidentally racist ones. therefore, jonathan franzen writes about family, but arundhati roy writes magical realism and unreal people in an incomprehensible indian family. therefore, tim o'brien is writing about the horrors of war, but bao ninh is writing about the misery of vietnam, the country. therefore, tolkien is writing about the horrors of environmental destruction and war, but arundhati roy is writing about the unreal because a muslim character is displaced into living in a graveyard after a literal pogrom. therefore, jilly cooper, heyer, christie and sayers are all products of their time, but [insert woc author of the week getting cancelled here] is a racist, sexist, imperialist etc etc etc. wodehouse, is ofc, innocent of collaboration with the nazis (despite having made actual propaganda for them, tho he claimed he didn't understand what he was doing), but r f kuang is normalising genocide*. on and on it goes ad fucking infinitum.
provocatively, therefore, i would like to invite an experiment: what if we were to switch up modes of reading for the two? what if i was to say that since they're all from england, that therefore pratchett, susanna clarke and tolkien are only ever saying something about england and its miseries, and those miseries concern england's flirtations with eugenics driven aristocratic racism (remember, after all, clarke & pratchett exists downstream of and inherit from tolkien)? what if i was to say that wodehouse is writing magical realism, because surely no one can behave that farcically and surely nothing can shake out so improbably; surely jeeves must be a magical construct of some sort? or perhaps tim o'brien is, in his evocations of war and its aftermaths. what if i was to insist that sylvia plath is incomprehensible, because her language is rich and strange, or that victor hugo is writing incomprehensible word salad because of his digressions. what if, instead, you were to understand that arundhati roy is an artist, that perhaps brandon taylor is more interested in gay life than race, that there is no particular lesson to be learned from the sorrow of war except that war is hell, that perhaps jhumpa lahiri is telling you stories about women in unhappy marriages first, and immigrants second? what if you were to understand salman rushdie's midnight children as a real story about real things? what if you could stop feeling that thrill of glee every time some non-white writer gets taken down? what if you could feel less self-satisfied that the author you were told is important turns out to have been unimportant? what if your first instinct wasn't to insist that either the author or the text is unreal or impossible when encountering a piece of writing by a non-white author that you can't wrap your head around? what if you tried? what if you tried even a little?
*using this as an example to make a specific point, i am deeply uninterested in litigating whether or not wodehouse or rf kuang are guilty or not; i am interested in the reception these respective "misdoings" have received and how they've been narrated to the world
Iâve been spinning like a chicken on a spit ever since I heard about the whole âAI generated story places in renowned Commonwealth Writing Prizeâ scandal and now has come the time to regale you with my Opinionsâąïž about the matter, because itâs hit on some thoughts Iâve had for a while re: how I approach writing, both fanfic and original fiction⊠and thoughts Iâve had as a reader. long read, strap in.
tldr scandal speedrun: story by Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir just won the Caribbean regional prize at the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize ie one of the biggest short fiction awards in the world (almost 8000 entries this year) and was subsequently published on Granta's website, as all regional winners are. readers start flagging that something is off, and it quickly becomes clear that the story is almost certainly AI generated, and obviously the press and wank started up, media coverage, and my all time favourite part: Granta editor Sigrid Rausing uploads the story into an AI to ask if an AI wrote it and then puts out a statement that pretty much says âprobably, but guess weâll never know!â (SORRY THIS PART IS SOOOO FUCKING FUNNY TO ME LMFAO đ)
much of the earlyish discourse has focused on the AI detection question, what does this mean for literary prizes going forward, how do we verify human authorship. some responses have been very good/interesting (the Africa is a Country piece especially). what I want to yap about is what the judges' response to this story tells us about how postcolonial writing is read by the institutions that gatekeep it and readers who dismiss it (and this puts it perfectly with Arundhati Roy as an example), what the judging panelâs language reveals when read as a critical object in itself, and why the failure mode here is so damaging. tldr: the story is dogshit and so clearly AI generated you can even see the AIâs âthoughtâ process, but the mainstream reactions are slagging off the wrong thing, and for reasons that have little to do with AI.
it has been actually infuriating to watch a significant chunk of the online reaction use this nonsense piece of writing as a launching pad for a much broader dismissal. someone posts the bench-men sentence or the sunrise-over-a-sink sentence as evidence of AI, and then in the replies someone else will say some shit like "well this is just what postcolonial writing is like" or "I've read prize-winning stuff that reads exactly like this". and suddenly we're not talking about Jamir Nazir anymore, we're talking about whether this entire mode of writing, postcolonial literary fiction, global south prose âin generalâ, varied and distinct language plays associated with everyone from Roy to Walcott to Kincaid, as somehow inherently gaudy, unmoored, purple, a performance of profundity that collapses under scrutiny. sheer vim against styles of writing unfairly and lazily judged as âfloridâ and âoverwroughtâ, ie people calling for the clinical manicuring of prose through a lens of anti-AI progressivism.
and this rage has very little to do with AI or this AI generated story, and a lot more to do with the epistemology of reading across cultural difference:
what assumptions are you making when you encounter prose that doesn't do what you're used to, and how do you distinguish between:
this is doing something I don't have the framework to follow/yet
and
this is doing nothing
the uncomfortable answer is that a lot of people, at levels high above the average reader mind you, being prize judges and all, don't make that distinction. they experience the unfamiliarity and name it as failure, as excess, as incoherence, as the literary equivalent of noise, without asking whether the problem is in the text or in the reading, or they fall prey to a manifestation of âtrim the fat cultureâ (good post on this).
this is not an accusation of bad faith reading necessarily; it is just what happens when you read without the relevant context and without the intellectual curiosity to notice that you're missing something and attempt to find it. telling, however, is how quickly that experience of unfamiliarity, in this particular case, became a generalisation. not "I find this story's specific metaphors incoherent" but "I find this kind of writing incoherent", as if âthis kind of writingâ is a stable category and not just something this AI slapped together. a sliding from the fraudulent to the traditional that happens with striking confidence, and one which you do not see applied with the same ease to, say, Western European modernism, where the response to difficulty tends toward "I need to read more Woolf to understand Woolf" rather than "yucky stinky Woolf is AI-slopâ.
anyway. here is my favourite sentence from the shitty AI story:
"she had the kind of walking that made benches become men."
and like itâs my all time favourite sentence ever because like. what does it mean. what is it doing. why is it there. what decision was made in its construction and to what end? and I just could not come to a conclusion because the real answer is that no actual decision was made, because decision-making requires an engagement with the writing, requires a reasoning for the sentence to exist in the way it does, and this exists across all literary prose styles, from the sparsest to the lushest. the bench-men sentence is difficult to interpret, but not in a âthis is difficult to interpret which makes the reward of interpretation sweeterâ way, it is difficult to interpret in a âthere is nothing under this sentenceâ way, and that is made very clear when even the slightest interpretative pressure is laid on the story.
anyway, turns out the judges of one of the worldâs biggest literary competitions did not apply that pressure. caribbean regional judge Sharma Taylor described Nazir's language as "sublime â precise yet richly evocative â conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy" and like man this isnât to dunk on Taylor personally but i think that sentence, in being a diagnostic object, is in itself a diagnostic object as to the whole scandal here: itâs evaluative language that doesnât touch the text itself, a string of compliments whose terms donât require a unique object. "precise yet richly evocative" is a sentence that could describe anyone from Chekhov to MT Vasudevan Nair.
what it cannot do is tell you what is precise about Nazir's objectively vague, dreary sentences, or where exactly economy manifests in a story that opens with three subordinate images somehow being unable to create even half an image. the judges either didn't notice or didn't give a fuck, and imo the honest interpretation there is that the evaluation was matching the text against a prior model of what this kind of writing is supposed to feel like, rather than what it actually does.
the main vulnerability of this kind of matching-against-model judging criteria is that it can only flag deviation from the expected shape, not absence within it. a story that inhabits the expected form, even hollowly, passes muster. a story that does something actually unexpected might fail on those same grounds, whether or not it's extraordinary. the AI machine got through to the prize list not because it fooled sophisticated readers into thinking they were reading a great work of literature, but because the reading operation in use did not require that experience of reading great literature to complete successfully. you just needed the vague shape, and the machines are good at making vague shapes.
what shape?
seemingly lyrical, lush, image-dense, located in rural poverty or landscape-as-metaphysical-weight, threaded with folk memory and unresolved grief, incantatory, myth-grabbing, rum shops, zinc rooftops, zinc-hair. what the AI has done is precisely what it is built to do: grab tiny scraps and fragments from actual prize-winning postcolonial stories and shoved them all together into an amorphous, senseless mass, knowing what it is supposed to do but not knowing how to do it. and so to me the most astounding/horrifying aspect of this scandal is how the judges who one can safely assume, based on their credentials, are very familiar with âworld literatureâ, proved unable to tell the difference between a form inhabited and a form vacated.
and I really donât like bringing up my literary/academic credentials (derogatory) etc etc on here anymore, because it at times positions me in an uncritical way I donât intend or enjoy and I spent my early months in fandom realising just how very uncomfortable I was with the image I inadvertently curated as a result of coming straight from that sort of literary-academic space. so to put it very basically: I have spent my academic career broadly specialising in the very style and period of postcolonial literature that this AI story is attempting (badly) to emulate. my focus has always been south asia but i have also worked extensively with caribbean lit especially early on, and iâve been taught/examined by some very well known caribbean writers and literary scholars, etc etc. ie iâm just trying to say that this post isnât just me talking about a vague grievance with literary cultures but something iâve been neck deep in for 10+ years now, ie i do know my shit and am not just knee jerk wanking, even though frankly i donât think i should have to explain my background because way too many people are being way too confident with the âi have been writing for THREE BILLION years and they gave ARUNDHATI ROY THAT BITCH the booker prizeâ atmâŠ
anyway after that, and very abruptly, the story takes a hard pivot to what it actually is, which is not an apolitical portrait of India, not diasporic literature about the Indian subcontinent, not even an Indian novel about Kozhikode, but a Kozhikodan novel about India, down to the style: my writing in general tends to lean on carnivaleque and incongruous tonal whiplashes between âlowbrowâ humour, abject tragedy and direct critical fourth-wallfucking commentary, but that whiplash is turned all the way up to 100 in Prayers and the humour especially is taken to borderline slapstick levels, and that style is evocative of Kozhikodan literary cultures (seeâwritings of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, who is mentioned in the story in that Comrade Maedhros lies claims they are great buddies lmao), only that most writing from the region is in Malayalam, etc.
do I personally enjoy every single one of these authors? no, I would probably cagefight two of them at least. what I am saying though, is that that their writing isnât some kind of incomprehensible mess that nobody aside from their little tiny id-group can understand, not amorphous or vague or too overwrought to comprehend. their prose, all differing styles, can be rich, lush, playful, meandering, yes. but they are not unclear: theyâre so clear that the positionality of the authors, their class and caste backgrounds, their educational and migratory trajectories, are often painfully evident (hence the cagefighting). the reason i used those aspects in my fic to signal towards a particular kind of globally lauded postcolonial literature is because those signals are clear, not confusing.
ie it is not a case of âglobal southâ writers being incomprehensible, it is a case of readers walking into a garden with a few flowers they havenât seen before and immediately going âdamn, look at this jungle. canât navigate it but iâm sure itâs great, ok byeâ then turning the fuck around and writing the travelogue anyway. which is to say, applying a colonial reading practice to postcolonial writing.
and thereâs a similar, though differently approached, aspect in globally renowned caribbean anglophone writing: a history of deliberate formal difficulty. where the difficulty isnât some ambient mystery or marker of âseriousâ literature but a formal consequence of a model of storytelling. eg. Selvon's Creole narration in The Lonely Londoners was a decision with costs+purposes about what it would mean for Moses Aloetta's interiority to be rendered in standard English versus in a voice that had not been, at the time, admitted to the Anglophone literary canon, rather than being the inevitable default of a Caribbean writer. Harris's dissolving frames in Palace of the Peacock are not difficult because Harris was apathetic to comprehensibility but because the Guyanese historical consciousness the novel examines does not easily resolve into stable subjectivity.
form is so often part of the argument across literature, across the English canon itself, and normally in literary criticism, âdifficultyâ is approached epistemologically alongside aesthetically. this is common knowledge yet the first part is something that appears to be hard to grasp for people reading and commentating on âworld literatureâ.
what is this form doing that another form cannot?
you can answer that question for Harris and Selvon and Ghosh and Roy and man, I think heâs so fucking annoying sometimes, but you can even do it for Rushdie. you cannot do it for "coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all". and this impossibility has nothing to do with foreignness or excessiveness but because the question, when applied to this AI generated piece of writing, has no answer.
and like⊠what does that tell us about what the judges were evaluating? imo it tells us they were at least in part evaluating surface-level compliance. compliance with recognisable genre conventions and an expected register, and so with the right signals of âauthenticityâ. and in the case of âGlobal South literatureâ, these conventions include an emphasis on the rural, the embodied, the rooted, the mythical.
an AI is very good at compliance because compliance is, quite literally, what AI does: every LLM is trained on the corpus of what has been rewarded before and thus it reproduces the patterns of that reward. if the judges were themselves rewarding compliance with a known type, then of course the AI passed with flying colours, because they were, in effect, running the same operation as the LLM model: matching input against a predetermined template instead of engaging with the work itself.
and so imo the question that should haunt every future Commonwealth Prize shortlist is not "did an AI write this?" but "what model of literary value are we using to judge Anglophone literature?â, and âwhy the fuck are we doing that???â
bc if your aesthetic criteria are vague enough that a sentence like "the grove isn't a ledger; it's a mouth â it closes only when it's satisfied" reads as "vivid, lush imagery" delivered with "quiet authority," then your judging criteria is less criteria and more vibes. you are literally just playing a high-stakes vibes-based game of Pin the Tail on the Mango whilst wilfully ignoring how vibes are precisely what AI large language models are the best at faking.
anyway, like I said in my intro, this scandal is already sliding into a secondary discourse in which âOrientalâąïž opacity/incomprehensibilityâ is being treated as the general category, of which this AI-generated confusion is just the most recent instance. you can watch it happening in real time, unbearably prolonged: people who rightly found the Nazir story incoherent, reaching way too easily for other examples of postcolonial prose they also apparently found incoherent or âpurpleâ, prose that is, in fact, doing things they just didn't know how to follow. the AI story has handed a lazy, sneering and dismissive reading practice the veneer of clinical diagnosis.
that is the horribly ironic thing here. reader after reader, openly admitting to doing the exact same lazy, apathetic reading of postcolonial literature as the literary prize judges they are (rightly) criticizing have done with this AI story, have been doing for human-writing from the global south for all this time. âewww this is what that writing looks like when a machine does it" (correct) is sliding so so so easily into "ewww this is what that writing looks like" (not correct). dog after dog, chasing tail after tail.
and that slide, from a machine having âsuccessfullyâ impersonated prize-winning prose, to a panel of judges who clearly weren't really reading, to the genre itself being defined as imitable machinery, is imo the most damaging thing to come out of this whole affair, and the people most hurt by it are the writers who have fuck all to do with Jamir Nazir, who is clearly just a chancer who fucked around and found out.
because somewhere in those 8000 entries, there is a writer, possibly many writers, who solved their riddle, who knew what every sentence was doing, who had made the thousand small decisions that constitute a story, and whose difficulty (if their story was difficult: difficulty is subjective and not a default, as we have established) could easily be accounted for. that writer did not win, because the judges were not looking for them. and now, in the aftermath, the interrogation of the incident continues to refuse to ask the questions that would have found them.
I first thought it would be blowing smoke up my own ass to finish this post with a quote from my own story. and then I remembered that this is my circus and you are all my monkeys, so I will indeed be ending with a (spoiler-free, context-unnecessary) quote from the final chapter of Prayers, from one of the ficâs multiple fourth-wall breaches, this one explicitly addressing both the character of Maedhros, a gay Muslim man in postcolonial India, as well as the attritional impact of global Anglophone prize cultures on ânational literaturesâ, explaining the structure of the story and touching on the reading-practice I talk about in this post, this cold, dismissive flattening based on the readerâs refusal to comprehend the unfamiliar. Emphasis obviously made just for this excerpt:
Humanity has tried many times, with fanfare and floodlights, to hold the great white shark within glass walls. When a young female was placed in the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, its keepers marvelled for a day, two days, then watched as she rammed herself against the tank walls, snout bloodied and refusing food until her body yielded to exhaustion. In San Diego, one was found dead within two weeks. More recently, in a public aquarium, a six-foot juvenile circling its tank like a condemned spirit, colliding with the corners until its skin peeled raw, was released after months only to die on the way back to the sea. Each attempt ended the same: a slow unravelling, a remarkable animalâs vast strength curdling inward, its shimmering blue-mapped body drifting in a pale echo of the life denied to them.
I do not deny they are vicious creatures. But it is not viciousness that makes it impossible for them to survive in the aquarium. The old fables and new films, the man-eater, the blood-frothed wave, the lurking fin, have all mistaken the matter entirely. The thing that kills the great white shark in captivity is the billowing cage: the narrowing circle of water, no current to guide their gills, the confiscation of the horizon. In captivity they turned to self-excoriation, scraping themselves to ribbons on the glass, starving in protest, dragging their bodies into stillness. As if potential had been so thoroughly written into their marrow that the denial of it was a kind of murder. What we mistake for noble resilience is in fact the beginning of a long derangement. A creature built to know the endless universe, driven into madness by the closing-in of incomprehensible walls.
And so we, in our hunger for marvels, have reduced an oceanic immensity to an ornament, a sole symbolic bangle on a slender wrist, a riddle turned spectacle. In that act of enclosure, the essential vastness of the creature is stripped away, its thousand-mile wanderings and salt-scored pilgrimages compressed into a parody of itself in a ghost story projected on glass.
What is offered to the crowd is no shark but the space where a shark once was: a wonder gutted and repackaged, its enforced silence masquerading as our unspoken understanding even as a scream writhes in every bubble.
As we behold the captive great white shark, Arwen, we do naught but applaud its absence in our lives, gild the blade which vanquished its truth, and heave a sigh of relief for the barrier between ourselves and the beast. We build shrines to the wonders we swallow whole. We raise gardens tomorrow from the cities we raze today.
But perhaps there is light on the horizon for humanity. Perhaps one day, we will learn how to keep the great white shark in a cage. And in turn, maybe it will learn how to rasp itself down for the onlooker and pace circles into borrowed water, each turn narrower, each wall closer than the last. What is witnessed is not the beast but its mutilation, a spectre stripped of horizon and turned inward on itself, a hollow spectacle mistaken for a radiant life.
The tank allows for neither possibility nor invention, and so the tale of the great white shark contracts into a pattern of bruises, the persistence of a body against limits it was never meant to know. The water becomes a neverending sentence, telling the story of a ruin that can only end in its own undoing. I wanted to be a writer, Arwen. I have always wanted to be a writer. You know that. You have always known that. And yet anything I ever write will only ever be an un-writing of the things other people have already written of me. Even my letters to you.
It is amazing, now that I think of it, what desperation can do to a story.
One thing that deeply irritates me is the way some American leftists talk about U.S veterans and imperial violence, because beneath all the Marxist language there is often this unspoken assumption that the rest of the world is supposed to emotionally process American empire in a way that is convenient for Americans. It's specifically the discourse surrounding the tactical necessity of American military veterans and it represents a profound distortion of both historical Marxist theory and contemporary material realities.
This argument typically manifests as a defense of U.S. service members against the "unprincipled" or "moralistic" anger of Global South populations, who are frequently chastised for alienating a demographic that American leftists claim will provide vital "military expertise" when "the revolution" inevitably arrives.
The argument usually goes something like this:
1. Veterans are working class.
2. Lenin argued communists must organize among soldiers.
3. Therefore hostility toward U.S veterans is politically immature, âmoralistic,â or anti-materialist" and "un-marxist" because soldiers can become revolutionary subjects and their military expertise will be necessary âwhen the revolution comes.â
To legitimize this position, chauvinistic elements within the Western left frequently weaponize Vladimir Leninâs writings on the radicalization of Tsarist soldiers during the Russian Revolution. However, this theoretical transposition collapses under rigorous analysis, relying on a false equivalence that ignores the vastly different class structures, material incentives, and geopolitical positions of the 20th-century Russian conscript versus the 21st-century American volunteer soldier.
âWhen Lenin wrote about the necessity of agitating among Tsarist soldiers, he was analyzing a peasant army composed of millions of intensely exploited, involuntarily conscripted laborers who were being meat-grinded in a catastrophic imperialist war. For the Tsarist soldier, "peace, land, and bread" were immediate, existential class demands that aligned perfectly with the Bolshevik platform. The Tsarist soldier was not a beneficiary of empire; he was its victim, forced at gunpoint to die for a monarchy that denied his family basic agrarian rights.
This distinction matters enormously.
Leninâs argument was not:
âsoldiers are inherently progressive.â
Nor was it:
âcolonized people must suppress hostility toward occupying forces.â
Nor even:
âall criticism of soldiers alienates the masses.â
The Bolshevik position was that communist movements cannot afford to abandon armed sections of the population entirely to reactionary politics, especially during periods where state legitimacy is weakening.
âIn stark contrast, the contemporary U.S. military is a highly professionalized, all-volunteer force that functions as the enforcement arm of global capital. The American soldier is not a peasant conscript but a contractual employee of the imperial core. While the "poverty draft" is often cited to argue that enlistment is entirely coercive, this framing obscures the specific class character of the U.S. veteran. Enlistment in the U.S. military is fundamentally an investment in upward class mobility within the imperial system. It is a transaction where individuals trade a period of service to the empire in exchange for a highly coveted bundle of social democracy: guaranteed healthcare, fully funded higher education, housing subsidies, and preferential hiring in state apparatuses.
âConsequently, the political consciousness of the American veteran class is not defined by revolutionary potential, but by a perpetual cycle of grievance rooted in unfulfilled imperial promises. The material reality of the veteran experience is a chronic struggle against the bureaucratic failures of the state; such as the inefficiencies of the Department of Veterans Affairs, rather than an awakening to the systemic evils of imperialism. Their radicalism, when it exists, is almost exclusively reactionary. Veterans in the U.S are disproportionately represented within policing institutions, border enforcement, private military contracting, nationalist movements, and right-wing formations. So even when veterans become disillusioned, that disillusionment does not automatically produce anti-imperial consciousness; it is an anger that the state has broken its contract with them, demanding the compensation they feel they rightfully earned by subjugating the Global South. This grievance-based politics does not threaten the capitalist state; it is entirely siphoned back into the existing political apparatus. The veteran class is ritualistically invoked every four years by both bourgeois political parties as a symbolic prop to legitimize American nationalism, promised reform, and then promptly discarded until the next election cycle. Their primary collective orientation is the preservation of their unique benefits, which are directly funded by the value extracted from the very Global South populations American leftists order us not to alienate.
âFurthermore, the leftist claim that the domestic movement requires the "military expertise" of veterans for a looming revolution is a fantasy untethered from material conditions.
What revolution exactly?
Where is this revolution supposed to occur?
Under what conditions?
Emerging from what mass base?
Against what degree of state legitimacy?
Following what economic rupture?
With what organizational infrastructure?
With what relationship to organized labor, racialized surplus populations, migrants, or the global south?
Under what conceivable circumstances is a synchronized, armed proletarian uprising manifesting within the heavily militarized, heavily surveilled heart of the global hegemon?
The United States lacks both the vanguard organization and the broad-based class consciousness required to orchestrate a structural overthrow of capital. By centering the veteran as an indispensable tactical asset, American leftists reveal a deeply romanticized, militaristic understanding of revolutionary change that prioritizes combat aesthetics over actual mass organizing.
âThe ultimate irony of this position lies in its profound historical and ongoing betrayal of internationalism. The very "military expertise" that Western leftists fetishize is a euphemism for the operational knowledge acquired by executing counter-insurgency warfare, drone strikes, and resource theft across the Global South. The American veteran class is expertly trained not to launch revolutions, but to systematically crush them wherever they emerge in the periphery. To demand that victims of U.S. imperialism suppress their rage under the guise of "Marxist discipline" so that Western leftists can hoard imperial managers for a hypothetical domestic uprising is a textbook display of social-chauvinism. It subordinates the real, material suffering of the global proletariat to the theoretical convenience of leftists residing safely within the metropole.
