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Skye Arundhati Thomas
Skye Arundhati Thomas is co-editor of The White Review.

Articles Available Online


Interview with Bani Abidi

Interview

Issue No. 33

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Interview

Issue No. 33

In the three-minute short Mangoes (1999) by Berlin-based Pakistani artist Bani Abidi, two women sit next to each other on a white table, each with...

Art Review

February 2019

Simryn Gill, Soft Tissue

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Art Review

February 2019

I walked into Simryn Gill’s exhibition SOFT TISSUE at Jhaveri Contemporary on one of the worst days of an...

What they’ll know of us in future years: the large interiors of our suburban homes were designed by others & lacking in the slightest trace of individual taste Were cavernous & costly & sterile, mausoleums to the fashion of the moment Lives were lived in them, but not so they’d disturb the silk cushions on the crushed velvet settees The air in them was still & muted & old, as if marked by a recent death Outside, away from the cul-de-sacs, the highways would buzz with traffic, particularly during the morning rush hour & the tired evening commute Whizzing along, motion is a green forest bordering the sharp bends in the road To fly, they’d take themselves to airports, with even more cavernous spaces and roofs that were wavy with no feeling in them, but were said to imitate the topography of the land When not running panicked, people would saunter in them, tourists of their own lives Indifference & consumption like musack, everywhere Once in the air, mall-life was brought to them, tranquillised at 25,000 feet with sunlight scintillating off polished airplane wings Night was chain hotels with fake everything Looking through a hotel window at a mass-produced, urban morning, you could see the way highways would wind in and out of gas stations and signage, like some long, slow-dying hope But thanks for giving us another Lolita, concupiscent in the buff, hot for her Humbert Humbert And for all the road-trip emotions, the different shadings of feeling as the car nosed through the countryside (or was it the past?), under tree-limbs dappled with sunlight or into stricken suburban streets Thanks for showing the poignancy of airport parking-lots The poignancy of missing people; arrivals; departures    

Contributor

February 2018

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Contributor

February 2018

Skye Arundhati Thomas is co-editor of The White Review.

Bani Abidi & Naeem Mohaiemen, I wish to let you fall out of my hands (Chapter 1)

Art Review

February 2018

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Art Review

February 2018

Loneliness is mostly narrative. It also has an aesthetic: an empty tableau in which the lonely act is performed. In Naeem Mohaiemen’s Tripoli Cancelled...
The characters in We That Are Young reside at ‘The Farm’ – a sprawling house in New Delhi complete with its own topiary of fat peacocks, bulbous pink flowers with English names, Fendi furniture, and a room in which it snows at the press of a button It’s not far removed from reality – Antilla, the world’s first billion-dollar residence for a single family of four, is a 40-storey building that towers over the suburbs of South Mumbai, replete with a staff of over 600 people, its own electrical power grid, ten-storey parking for a collection of unusable vintage cars, and a room, of course, where it snows on demand In dialogue with Shakespeare’s King Lear, Taneja’s debut novel explores the lives of a family that owns a multinational conglomerate, ‘The Company’, to which each character’s fate (and inheritance) is inextricably tied We have our patriarch, the Lear figure, Devraj; his three daughters Sita, Radha and Gargi; and his right-hand man Ranjit’s two sons, Jeet and Jivan The embarrassment of riches makes for an irresistible, if outlandish, setting; Taneja vividly indulges our intrigue in the way the rich conduct their daily lives, letting her words ooze out their luxury – filthy, yet so desirable After a particularly gruesome scene in which Radha administers the plucking out of a man’s eyes, she steps back into her suite and calls for a pot of first flush Assam, and rose macaroons   A reinterpretation of Shakespeare is the perfect postcolonial conquest: he remains the epitome of the Western canon, patriarchal, and repeatedly failing to include representations of the ‘other’ without recourse to parody Mainstream appropriations of Shakespeare in South Asia, such as Bollywood filmmaker Vishal Bharadwaj’s trilogy Maqbool (Macbeth), Omkara (Othello), and Haider (Hamlet), have generally taken us to rural settings, wherein tragedy is relegated to a matter of the lower castes Taneja, a Shakespearean academic and human rights activist, eschews such stereotypes, and goes straight for the jugular: the innate hypocrisy of the Indian class and caste system ‘It’s not about land, it’s about money,’ states the first line of the book, taking
Preti Taneja’s ‘We That Are Young’

Book Review

October 2017

Skye Arundhati Thomas


READ NEXT

feature

March 2013

Heroines

Kate Zambreno

feature

March 2013

I am beginning to realise that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking...

Prize Entry

April 2016

Oögenesis

Karina Lickorish Quinn

Prize Entry

April 2016

After her daughter had – for the third time, no less – laid her eggs in the fruit bowl,...

poetry

June 2011

Malcolm Starke Died Today

Kit Buchan

poetry

June 2011

Malcolm Starke died today who rang us most nights so late that it could only be him. He’d been...

 

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