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Aaron Peck
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Articles Available Online


The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s ‘An Inventory of Losses’

Book Review

January 2021

Aaron Peck

Book Review

January 2021

Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion. The soft clay tablets...

Book Review

May 2018

Harry Mathews’s ‘The Solitary Twin’

Aaron Peck

Book Review

May 2018

Imagine a small fishing village on the edge of the world. Its inhabitants are progressive and content. The surroundings...

THE TRAITOR WHO IS THE WRITER   This is an essay about writing and trauma   This is an essay about violence: of men, of armies, of women, of relationships, of gossip and memory, of having to remember and having to testify   This essay is an exercise in intimacy It questions why women on the margins have to trade in our trauma for the chance to be heard   This essay in an exercise in trust I have never discussed my writing – writing as life, as living, as central to my existence and my identity – with any of the men in my personal life I feel vulnerable enough giving them my love, giving them the pleasure of my body, giving them the power to reject me from one night to the next I discuss my writing with those who know me only as a writer: my agent, my editors, and most of all, my readers That is why I bring this essay to you: to show you where some of my writing comes from   This essay is the story of how I grew up vicariously involved in the armed struggle for Tamil self-determination This essay is the testimony of what I learned as I listened to other women share their stories of trauma   This is an essay about three women: a Tamil Tigress, a Tamil Tiger’s wife, and me       MY STORY   When did my identification with Tamil nationalism begin?   Perhaps it began when I was a newborn baby, barely a few weeks old, and my father was asked to resign from his job as a Tamil teacher at a school in Choolaimedu, Chennai He remembers the day vividly: 31 October, 1984, the day India’s Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated by her bodyguards Why was his resignation demanded? My father taught Tamil at the Lalchand Milapchand Dadha Senior Secondary School, a private school run by a Hindi-speaking Jain management He had crossed the point of no return by politicising his teenage students and taking them along to protest demonstrations I heard this story repeatedly over my childhood, and remain convinced that when people are punished for their beliefs, it

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Gloria

fiction

May 2017

Aaron Peck

fiction

May 2017

Bernard, whenever he thought of Geoffrey, would remember his gait on the afternoon of their first meeting. Geoffrey walked with the confidence of a...

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Art

January 2012

Interview with Ryan Gander

Timothée Chaillou

Art

January 2012

London-based conceptual artist Ryan Gander masters the art of storytelling through an immensely complex yet subtly coherent body of...

fiction

November 2016

Somnoproxy

Stuart Evers

fiction

November 2016

The day’s third hotel suite faced westwards across the harbour, its picture window looking down over the boats and...

feature

February 2014

Another Way of Thinking

Scott Esposito

feature

February 2014

I. There is no substitute for that moment when a book places into our mind thoughts we recognise as our...

 

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