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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...

‘We possess nothing in this world other than the power to say “I” This is what we must yield up to God’ — Simone Weil   ‘God break down the door You won’t find the answers here Not the ones you came looking for’ — Nine Inch Nails   Photosensitivity warning: Many of the hyperlinks in this essay go to live videos, which feature a strobe light     I was 10 years old when The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails was released in 1994, and I listened to it more than any other record for the next six years, when everything I knew about myself was disintegrating and becoming unknowable It lives in my blood memory, the soundtrack to the most formative part of my life When I think of that time, my memories resonate with those songs, I can’t imagine myself without them, who I would have been Since then, twenty-five years, I regularly go through periods where the only thing I listen to for weeks, months at a time is Nine Inch Nails, and this locates me, returns me to myself When you love a band for more than half your life, something happens as their songs come to live in you, they echo through how you remember the past, and fortify how you are legible to yourself in the present   NIN was the first band that got me in trouble with grown-ups – for this, they have a special place in my heart that no other band will ever touch For Christmas vacation in 1996, when I was 12, I brought the Broken EP with me when I went to stay with my Catholic grandparents Broken was packaged in a cardboard ‘digipak’, so my grandmother, rather than struggle with a plastic jewel case, could open it like a book The lyrics were printed on the inside, though I was singing them aloud all the time too I think Grandma had the biggest problem with my favourite lyric – ‘Gotta listen to your big-time, hard-line, bad-luck, fist fuck’ – but there was enough offensive sentiment on that

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

Prize Entry

April 2015

Every Woman to the Rope

Joanna Quinn

Prize Entry

April 2015

My father believed the sea to be covetous: a pleading dog that would lap at you adoringly, sidling up...

fiction

November 2011

Sheepskin

Olivia Heal

fiction

November 2011

The first I noticed was your thumbnails, large, round and flat, like two plates. They were marked with yellowed...

Interview

February 2014

Interview with Patrick Keiller

David Anderson

Interview

February 2014

Patrick Keiller, an architect ‘diverted’ into making films, is principally known for his Robinson series, which began with  London (1994)...

 

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