This is my newsletter: Azania Patel
I have recently been having a hard time defining myself. How am I a scholar in residence, if I find myself thousands of miles away from my University? How am I a writer if all the words I have managed to purge on to a blinking Word Document have found themselves crumpled into the digital Recycle Bin? How am I in mourning if the moment of grief hasn’t made itself manifest yet? How am I a person, when much like a cat I find myself sprawled on a couch under the uncomfortable afternoon sun, parched but too drained to move?
I suppose, a year from the first weekend in ‘lockdown’, we are all wary, blurred at the edges, versions of the people we used to be, or rather wanted to be. It is a peculiar anniversary to mark, since the best word I have found to describe the past year has been ‘liminal’. The liminal is by nature ephemeral, a period or place of transition- an airport, a corridor, the brief moment in a ritual, the second before the ghee drips into the yagna. The liminal is not meant to be an abode- and yet it has become one.
As the romantic poet Blake put it - ‘In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, there are doors’, and we have found ourselves kicking and scratching, though most of times in a stoical haze with our back against these doors.
Six lockdowns, three quarantines spread over two countries, many many doors and continual existential dread later, I find myself saying to you, Hey… I’m Azania- and this is my ode to our collective perseverance in unprecedented (I know, I hate this word as much as you) liminality.
What does one do with liminality? In an odd occult corner of Instagram - the page @everyday_magic provides an answer.
Calling it the between of the inevitability and agony of an unknowable now, the liminal is why humans reach for magic. It’s quite a poetic notion, to see a stifling threshold as the place for potential to bloom, for grief to become art and for the void to become a port for change to emerge from. Everyday Magic ends with a reassurance - within the liminal - the ‘sometimes ugly, but always beautiful truth’ persits.
We are not alone in this uncertain place.
Read...
‘In my mind are all the halls, the endless procession of them, the intricate pathways. When this world becomes too much for me, when I grow tired of the noise and the dirt and the people, I close my eyes and I name a particular vestibule to myself; then I name a hall.’
(Piransei, Sussana Clarke)
If you’ve grown up in an Abrahamic faith (as I have), you learn that the world was created with worlds. In the isolating times that these past months have been, I turned to the childhood comfort of fantasy novels. Of these, Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi has been a standout favourite. A curious, intricate book - with a narrator who exists in many ways out of joint with time and memory- its world of endless passages is a resonant and comforting metaphor for the end-of-COVID times I hope we find ourselves soon in.
While we manifest the optimism for better days, we may not have truly allowed ourselves to mourn. To grieve all the lives, moments, celebrations and emotions that have become mere statistics. In order to comfort ourselves, it is necessary to process these- in the past few weeks as I have tried to wrap my mind around a personal grief, Megan Devine’s ‘It’s OK That You’re Not OK’ has been a quiet comfort. Subverting a culture that sees grief as a problem to be solved, it comes as the best sort of self-help texts.
In the same vein - ‘WomanPrayers’ curated by Mary Ford-Grabowsky is a lovely collection of the ways in which women have expressed faith and resilience. A non-religious text, it draws from across the globe in its litany to a sense of divinity in all forms.
Sound/Smell/Taste
?autoplay=true : ‘Abhi na Jao Chod kar/ Ki Dil abhi Bhara Nahi’ because in times where days stretch out and the loved/love/lover feels out of reach- what is more comforting than Asha Bhosle and Mohamad Rafi crooning ‘Don’t leave me just yet/ My heart hasn’t had its fill of you’
https://www.orbitinghumancircus.com/podcasts/#season1 : A world of surrealism, an unreliable narrator and some of the most detailed audio drama productions - The Orbiting Human Circus is both a distraction and a fascination.
https://downshiftology.com/recipes/shakshuka/ : Comfort sounds aside, there is something truly wholesome about this bright dish on your plate, spooned with a slice of garlic buttered sourdough that can just about fill the liminal void in your core.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-recreate-family-recipes : On that note of food for the soul, this one is a great reminder that not all that is lost is gone forever.
See
Gurvinder Singh’s ‘Khanaur’ (Bitter Chestnut) for the scenic Bir-Billing, honest coming-of-age and the potential of uncertainty
Akbar Padamsee’s ‘Metascapes’, one of the pioneers of Indian Modern painting, Padamsee’s metascapes are an exploration of worlds that used to be, are and can be.
The Good Advice Cupcake, for when you just need an extremely aggressive pink cupcake to tell you it believes in you!
And finally - see…. You- Might be cringey, might be uncomfortable - but going back to the magic and untapped potential of the liminal- take a moment and look at yourself. Not in the pixels of a zoom screen or the reflection on the black of your phone, but in the mirror. Look into your eyes, close enough to count the pores on the tip of your nose. See yourself in the moment- you’ve made it so far, you’re here. And that counts for a lot. You deserve to hold yourself gently and find your center in the forever shifting orb that our world is. You’re almost at the end of this long corridor, you’re a moment from boarding the metaphoric flight.
The last dregs of the liminal space are cruel, but remember:
You’re not alone in this uncertain place.
Azania Imtiaz Patel
reassuring and comforting. thank you for sharing! <3