Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 Written in Tamil by Jeyamohan, and translated into English by Priyamvada Ramkumar, these are stories of secular saints who burn with aram, or dharma. Even the religious ones among them are secular in the sense that their care and concern are for the people and animals of this world and not their own spirituality or the afterlife. Their idealism is enmeshed with their lived experience, both brought out so vividly through a passionate yet subtle art. Their stubbornness against adversity and opposition is informed by their knowledge of politics and literature. They give the lie to the idea that goodness is bland. It is, instead, a flaming sword. This is the first work by Jeyamohan that I've read, and I will be on the lookout for others. Please continue to translate him into English! 

  May 15, 2024: A night of readings to commemorate 76 years of the Nakba and to stand in solidarity with Palestine. Nakba Then and Now: Refuse Silence invites you to raise your voice, amplify the Palestinian struggle for freedom, and demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Nakba Day marks the devastation of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 through ethnic cleansing and expulsion of a majority of Palestinian people. Nakba Day is about resisting expulsion and erasure. Today, as we are witnessing another Nakba, the world is also rising up on every continent. This event is part of the Publishers for Palestine coalition's Exist, Resist, Return: A Week of Action for Nakba Day (May 14-21).  Reading by Aidah Masoud, Ibtisam Azem, Najla Said, Huda Fakhredinne, Maaza Mengiste, Valérie Gruhn, Mona Eltahawy, Sean Jacobs, Emna Zghal, Suha Araj, Mukoma wa Ngugi, Christina Dhanuja, Zohra Saed, Christopher Stone, Suneela Mubayi, Hafsa Kanjwal, Omar Berrada, Anna Arabindan Kesson, Jee Leong Koh,...

  "Similarly, the poem, for all its labour and craft, is merely one person's understanding of another, possibly misjudged, and one that arguably says more about the writer than the subject. And though this current of self-critique runs through the entire collection, this project of portraiture in verse (in which both interviewer and interviewee curate the details that are meant to present an entire life in short verse) seems too important for the poems to abandon. The subtitle of the collection, 'A Simple History of Singaporeans in America', speaks to this confident ambivalence. Together, the verse portraits form a history of a community, but they remain "simple" – snapshots of particular lives in a particular place. It is a documentary and poetic project with inherent limitations, but nonetheless worthwhile." Thanks, Kristina Tom, for this perceptive review of SAMPLE AND LOOP: A SIMPLE HISTORY OF SINGAPOREANS IN AMERICA. And thanks, Yong Shu Hoong, for ...