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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...

I’m screaming lying alone in this settlement     everything empty only emptiness sex – is a desert     evening coming home from work desiring on the shopfloor or in the machine or at some other labour of language feel it: there’s nothing there only a desert     coming home from work I’m writing a letter to the first boy why’d you deceive me, you know there’s nothing there nothing nothing only a desert     I’m in the desert alone and desire fades laying sex bare like vision like trembling on the horizon is the body of a dry old man this is my sex this is my future     hundreds of animals will come and hump me a tiger’s sperm leaps toward the clouds monkeys lick my clitoris but none of them will say: ‘sex is a desert’     in the garden of atavisms lifting my skirt, leaning on the barbed-wire fence barely discerning the face in the wilds of bloody tears I, weeping, will say: ‘look at what we were struggling for, marching naked past parliaments, penetrating with phalluses the offices of government no, there’s nothing there, sex is a desert’     I love you and your dead sex still moves me but when I love you I feel: only a desert     the smooth temple of marriage bathed in wine gone bad the raw looks of new lovers the embraces of boys, covered with feces, tears girls with black scars and bright dildos baring their breasts before the river of people dying     what were we struggling for? why all these poems?     the dying camp of peoples in the depths of the analyst you die with them, too, analyst, saying: ‘Desert’ because there is no hidden pleasure in the desert     only sand only heat masturbation and solitude     only womanhood only the desert     crowds of furious men, turning in their zinc coffins crowds of men fondling, flying on a varnished bomb the industry of depravity in space stations, the science of art in the bathhouse all for nothing, procreation is only part of the desert     Kathy, Kathy, wanking off death, I can’t see your face, there’s no dialogue, no strength to tell you how things stand for you, you’re not here, Kathy, the body has no identity in the bitter printed word     the rod in a thrown open bible, student marches little puddles of blood in a dark toilet, where my farewell lament addressed faded out to the dead students and their movement       with knives stuck in the hips with the tender kisses of events I want to say: here is the

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


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poetry

September 2012

Mainline Rail

Eleanor Rees

poetry

September 2012

Back-to-backs, some of the last, and always just below the view   a sunken tide of regular sound west...

feature

Issue No. 5

Choose Your Own Formalism

David Auerbach

feature

Issue No. 5

1. ALL SQUARES RESIDE IN THE HUMAN BREAST In 2007 game designer and Second Life CEO Rod Humble wrote...

feature

April 2017

Everywhere and Nowhere

Vahni Capildeo

feature

April 2017

Part of my reluctance to write on citizenship is that as a poet, a worker in delicate, would-be-truthful language,...

 

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