Written by Abu Arif
Some time ago, I created an archetype—Cardi A.
Cardi A is not a person. It is a collective pulse. A hive. A way of being that refuses collapse under the weight of the world’s messiness. Our hive insists on weaving other possibilities—however fragile, however unfinished, however further away from the utopian dream of a just world. Since then, the world is experiencing new kinds of violence. The kinds of violence that made me to accept the fact that some bodies are more important than others and there is nothing I can do to change that. Nothing.
One could argue that empires, by their very nature, behave as empires always have — there is nothing novel in that observation. A rejoinder, however, is that Western democracies’ simultaneous performance of moral virtue and systematic exercise of violence represents new information for a significant constituency of liberal internationalists who have long idealized these states. The emperor is naked. Yet historians will rightly caution that one’s belated recognition of structural violence does not render that violence historically novel. The cruelty is not new — only the audience’s awareness of it is.
The American president is doing what American empire requires – dead bodies, broken hearts, scared minds, wingless birds, blind crocodiles, hungry elephants and angry dragon.
Americans have elected a fascist yet continue to spend billions delegitimizing nationalist leaders on foreign soil by affixing to them the very same label. The Western intellectual class labors tirelessly to sustain the exceptionalist thesis — that the United States represents a categorically distinct political possibility, one more ethical, more advanced, more civilized than its alternatives. Meanwhile, the rest of us are consigned to memory work: excavating, documenting, and bearing to witness and live what the US empire has produced. Those who fail to adopt, or consciously reject, the American democratic imaginary do not simply face disagreement — they face consequence. The price of disbelief, or of refusal, is to live inside the architecture of American design. So I ask—carefully, but without apology:
Why ought I be angry by the exclusion of queers from a military apparatus capable of annihilating entire civilizations? If violence is not incidental but foundational to the institution itself, what precisely are my fellow queers in the USA demanding inclusion into? If whiteness constitutes the architecture of power, what does it mean when liberation is articulated as access to that architecture rather than its dismantling? And what does it signal when equality is reduced to the right to inherit domination — when the horizon of justice is redrawn as participation in the very structures that produce subjugation.
These are not comfortable questions. But to me discomfort is not the problem. Evasion is. So in this landscape—shifting, unstable, intellectually exhausting—how do we sustain ourselves?
How do we nourish the self without collapsing into guilt or performance?
How do we remain relational in a world that rewards detachment?
How do we live without seeking purity, but also without surrender?
I offer four threads. Not answers. Not openings or closing. They are threads in this darkness, I am holding and praying I don’t get lost in despair.
1. Paharchura — Sunil Gangopadhyay : A poem
The poem maps a life through its exchanges. A childhood island — enclosed, luminous, thick with butterflies — is traded for the expansiveness of a river in youth. It reads, at first, as gain: movement, curiosity, an opening world. But desire does not rest. A further exchange presents itself — the river for a mountain.
The mountain is not refuge. It is space for self transformation. A place of altitude and solitude where the self is no longer performed for an audience, where pride cannot sustain itself, and where forgiveness ceases to be gesture and becomes necessity.
When the poet says I want to lose, it is not romanticism. Clarity, the poem suggests, sometimes demands the surrender of what once organized meaning. Time, in this telling, is not merely passage. It is a slow rearrangement of longing.
2. O Mago Ma — Antora Chowdhury : A song
I return to this song from my childhood. I don’t know how many times I have listened to this song.
“Ma, tell me a different story. Enough of kings and queens.” This is not defiance for the sake of defiance. This is a child who has seen too much.
She has seen hunger take lives.
She has seen education exclude.
She has seen education fail the very people they claim to serve.
And when she asks why, she is told: “Grow up. You will understand later.” That deferral—later—is the lie. To those who carry survival in their bodies, who know what institutions refuse to name:
Your anger is not excess.
Your voice is not a threat.
Your refusal to be quiet is not a failure—it is a form of knowing.
The difficulty is not diagnosing the violence. The difficulty is letting go of the need to be seen as “good” by systems that were never built to recognize your fullness. Recognition of how we are treated by our oppressor is not liberation. And losing yourself trying to be legible to power is not victory. The work is staying whole and decide what fragments of our kintsugi heart we share.
3. Kakali Bhattacharya — Joy, Mentorship, and Refusal
There is no space of purity. The academy polices knowledge—who produces it, whose voice matters, what counts as legitimate. And yet, there are those who refuse containment without exhausting ourselves demanding to be seen. They saw us and just turned their faces – no amount of screaming will make them to see themselves.
Kakali Bhattacharya offers something deeper than critique. Through her Par/Desi decolonial framework, she asks us to confront not only external systems of coloniality, but the ways we have internalized them. Her S2S mentorship is not transactional program—it is relational, healing, and joyful. It does not ask you to become “better” within the system. It asks you to remain human despite messiness of humanity. Joy, here, is not lightness. It is rigor.
It is choosing to imagine otherwise while knowing there is no outside. It teaches you to be vulnerable without falling apart. It asks to look at maya kindly but go for Upaya – always.
4. Alok Das — Loving the Self as Resistance
Alok Das—a chosen name, a necessary name—writes from a place where visibility is never neutral. Their work reminds us that self-love is not indulgence—it is survival, and more than that, it is resistance. To love oneself fully, especially when the world is organized to deny that possibility, is not a soft act. It is the work we must do to give our energy for a different possibility. Alok Das invites us to write and refuse the quiet erasures that institutions demand in exchange for belonging.
So now that I have shown you the threads I am holding – what is next?
Cardi A does not turn away from pain. They sit with it, learn from it, remain accountable to it. But we must refuse to become only pain. When pain becomes identity, the oppressor no longer needs to impose the story—we begin to carry it ourself. So what happens to your story then?
Unwritten?
Unheard?
Paused in the name of survival?
Loving the self, is not the end goal for Cardi A. It is the condition that makes everything else possible. Perhaps you did not choose this journey or maybe you did – whatever the reason is, you are in it. So then—let’s sit in this darkness with the threads that brought us here. And if you have lost your threads – mine are here for you to sit with me… but quietly, please. My heart is broken. I am resting before walking again.
With love,
Arif
Critical Internationalization Studies Network 