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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

The tyrant’s sickest triumph is to make his subjects watchful The landscape of Nick Makoha’s first collection – an abstracted, mythologised yet sometimes bitingly concrete version of Amin’s Uganda – has been scarred by tyranny, to the extent that it adopts the vigilant gaze of its population ‘The stones on the riverbank have seen you’, announces the first line of ‘A Crocodile Eats the Sun’: ‘A praying mantis skating along blue mud / knows your secret’ These might be ironically deflected internalisations, but the point is serious: if you can get rivers and insect life to do your surveillance then martial law becomes superfluous, almost, and self-sustaining Watchmen are important characters in Kingdom of Gravity, taking their place alongside informers and collaborators in the network of acolytes who make a violent world go round ‘Watchmen’ intimates the allure of life on the right side of the tyrant’s law A ringleader (‘the one who Gaddafi knew’) ‘picks up a sheep in the soft grass and tears it apart by the ribs’ His followers lean into the spectacle:   By now all the herders and huntsmen have a gleam in their eyes and have stripped down All their sighs are of victory I am one of them, my hand carrying coals to set up fires   But spectacle is by its nature open to interpretation, and watchfulness can quickly turn to paranoia, seeking meaning where there might be none The men pass round the sheep’s heart:   Those who could see better than hear, read too much into the gesture Some of them let off a few rounds, using whatever their palms and feet could find as drums   In a world of danger and shifting circumstances, sight has to compensate for failures in hearing Hearing is a vulnerable sense, perhaps too close in a warzone to its empathetic relative, listening Seeing, on the other hand, is summary and acquisitive It scans the horizon, makes a snap judgement, and fires off ‘a few rounds’ to be sure   The ‘I’ that strafes through this collection mutates with the settings, striking notes of

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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feature

December 2016

Wildness of the Day

Orlando Reade

feature

December 2016

One day in late 2011, waiting outside Green Park station, my gaze was drawn to an unexpected sight. Earlier...

feature

July 2014

The Fast, the Furious and the Power of Frivolity

Orlando Whitfield

feature

July 2014

The six chapters that comprise the Fast & Furious franchise thus far (a seventh is due for release in...

poetry

May 2012

Monopoly (after Ashbery)

Sarah Howe

poetry

May 2012

I keep everything until the moment it’s needed. I am the glint in your bank manager’s eye. I never...

 

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