Bright Unbearable Reality

by Anna Badkhen

Called a “chronicler of a world on the move” by The New York Review of Books, Anna Badkhen seeks what separates and binds us at a time when one in seven people has left their birthplace, while a pandemic dictates the direst season of rupture in humankind’s remembering. Her new essay collection, Bright Unbearable Reality, addresses the human condition in the era of such unprecedented dislocation, contemplates the roles of memory and wonder in how we relate to one another, and asks how we can soberly and responsibly counter despair and continue to develop—or at least imagine—an emotional vocabulary against depravity.

Bright Unbearable Reality contains eleven essays set on four continents and united by a common thread of communion and longing. In “The Pandemic, Our Common Story,” which takes place in the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia, one of the locations where humankind originated, the onset of the global pandemic catches Badkhen mid-journey, researching human dispersal 160,000 years ago and migration in modern times. In “How to Read the Air,” set mostly in Philadelphia, Badkhen looks to the ancient Greeks for help pondering our need for certainty at a time of racist violence, political upheaval, and environmental cataclysm. “Ways of Seeing” and the title essay “Bright Unbearable Reality” wrestle with complications of distance and specifically the bird’s eye view—the relationship between physical distance, understanding, and engagement. “Landscape with Icarus” examines how and why children go missing, while “Dark Matter” explores how violence always takes us by surprise. The subject throughout the collection is bright unbearable reality itself, a translation of Greek enargeia, which, says the poet Alice Oswald, is “when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.”

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Travel

192 pages, Paperback

First published October 18, 2022

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three kinds of people tell us the future: prophets, scientists, and writers. One could argue that writers occupy the liminal space between the other two. The writer's impulse to draw connections, identify patterns, establish syllogisms... seems irrepressible, as if our neurons force us to make sense of all things, all the time. Like the bird-reading seers of ancient Greece, we cannot help ourselves.

From "How to Read the Air"

[Larry Massaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bright Unbearable Reality is a short, difficult book of essays, tied thematically and stylistically. It is difficult despite being, in many places, profoundly beautiful and moving.

All eleven essays in Bright Unbearable Reality are about migration, dislocation, displacement, or disruption of some kind. They’re about people—and animals—who have lost their homes, who often have nowhere to go, who get treated as refuse, as enemies, as invaders. Anna Badkhen, who was born in the Soviet Union and now lives in Philadelphia, and seems to have traveled everywhere, reminds us that, today, one in every seven people in the world is living in a place where he or she wasn’t born and didn’t grow up. Some, like her, are lucky, legal residents or even citizens in new homelands, in safer and more prosperous places. But so many more are refugees, despised and deported but still desperate to escape the poverty, the hopelessness, and often the violence of their birthplaces. People are displaced by climate change, by war and rebellion, by colonialism and economic exploitation.

These are dark topics, and much of Badkhen’s writing is about how much we avoid seeing the suffering of others, about how much we look away. In some respects we lack the capacity to fully assimilate or comprehend the scale of so much injustice and suffering.

But this isn’t a crushingly depressing book. Quite the contrary, it’s often lovely, even humorous, owing to Badkhen’s lyrical, graceful prose. Her essays are impressionistic and poetic, mixing reportage with reflection, with personal narrative, and with wonderful nature and landscape description. Here, for example, is the beginning of an essay called “Dark Matter,” from a time she spent in Texas:

There are no cattle on the ranch, though my landlady does have several cats. Beyond the wire fence is wilderness, high desert; wilderness inside the ranch, too. There are mule deer and white-tailed deer with translucent ears at dawn, a fox in the carport, a woodpecker metronoming the mesquite tree all day, mourning doves, owls by night. One morning, I leave open the door of my rental casita and a javelina walks in, walks out. Another morning, a blue grosbeak hurtles into the window glass, streaks to the ground, an indigo comet. I am on the other side of the window, at my desk; I run out, palm him, shush steady his heartbeat against my life line. The book I am writing is set on the Atlantic coast of Africa, and I tell the grosbeak about the sea on my page, the sea as blue as his mantle. In the desert it is quite normal to speak to birds.

Later in the same essay she uses an astronomical observatory as a clever metaphor for our difficulty in seeing life clearly:

Twenty-five miles northwest of the ranch, at the northern tip of the bolson, sits the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, one of the world's largest, with an aperture of thirty feet, designed specifically to decode light from stars and galaxies billions of light-years ago. Scientists who work on it study dark energy, the phenomenon of the accelerating universe—which is to say, why we are here and where we are going. They stare ten billion years back in space. From such an old sky they strain to gauge the meaning and mystery of life.

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope's mirror is always tilted at the same angle, fifty-five degrees above the horizon. Flaring from the new oil wells a few miles away extends directly into its target field, interferes with the darkness and the telescope's existential inquiry. Scientists have observed a fifty percent increase in light pollution since the drilling began. Our astronomical yearning and our astronomical desire for wealth collide in the desert.

A young woman technician repairs and replaces the composite mirrors on the big telescope. Her name is Katie. She must physically crawl into the iron lattice that supports the mirrors to exchange the ones that became smeared with bird feathers, bug splats, and bat guano overnight, when the telescope roof was open.

If Katie doesn't clean the mirrors, scientists may not know dark matter from bat shit.

Like some poets, Badkhen’s style is to juxtapose disparate phenomena and observations in an essay until some new meaning is revealed. Each text is contemplative, but it’s not always obvious where it’s going. When she is successful, as in “Landscape with Icarus”—in which she uses Breugel’s famous painting, and Auden’s poem about it, to make a point about poor young people and children trying to flee their homelands for a better life—Badkhen is truly powerful.

One thing marred my pleasure in this book, which, though very short, took me a long time to read. Badkhen seems to know a lot about geology, and about wildlife, and about linguistics, and about the geography and history of somewhat obscure places, like the Great Rift Valley in Africa, and the Ethiopian town of Lalibela, and she is very inclined to use technical or foreign terms without explaining or defining them. The result is that, if you are anywhere near as ignorant as I am, you will need your dictionary handy to read this book, and you will need to look things up on nearly every page. Here’s a partial list—really just a small fraction—of all the new terms I had to look up: Thalweg, Barchan, Marabout, Calque, Elotes, Haint blue, Chickory blue, Apophenia, Querencia, Ecotones, Javelina, Nopal, Bolson.
I was constantly putting the book down and picking up my phone to Google a word or place. Would it have killed her, I thought, to have provided brief, parenthetical definitions for some of these terms?

One of these terms, by the way—apophenia—is a perfect reference to Badkhen’s essential method or technique: the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.

[Ady · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a pretty good book of essays. I tend to enjoy narrative nonfiction (exploring a person’s thoughts) more than memoirs (exploring a person’s experiences). As per usual with compilations of essays or stories, some were better than others, but there was an overarching theme of just… appreciating humanity. I really liked this book. Nonfiction November is off to a pretty good start!

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anna Badkhen’s Bright, Unbearable Reality is a stunning exploration of grief, disconnection, and human migration. Through eleven linked essays, Badkhen searches for a better way of seeing and understanding our current anthropocene moment, marked by seemingly intolerable violence, loss, and uprootedness.

[Emily Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Initial reaction: Oh, ouch. Ouch ouch.

After some settling: So much of our lives is unbearable, and Badkhen illuminates this in the desert, in the legacy of human violence, and how right she is that we're somehow so surprised that this thing (violence) keeps happening.

[Meredith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Took me a very long time to finish this. I found the writing style to be tedious and the themes repetitive without progression - probably should’ve just DNF’d 2 months ago

[Anja Sebunya · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work truly merits the words: incandescent writing. It continuously sent shivers down my back as she scaffolds truths into a terrifying and completely true and authentic climax. Anna Badkhen alternates lyrical, passionate, angry and deeply wise into a mix of essays that addresses some of the most important crisis facing our species and planet.

I asked myself whether it resonated so much because I have spent in some of the places and come to the same conclusions? I think it is so much more than that as she taps into the deeply universal from a micro hyper local setting which is such a talent.

The exquisite ending left me in total and complete awe:

"It begins on the other side of the Atlantic, on the continent where, as far as we know, everything human began, our love and our violence and our dreaming and our music. It begins as the slightest tremolo, a capillary ripple, not a song but a hint of a song, a song being born. It is being born right here before me, on a night terrace in a colonial city built mostly on water, built maybe even of water, a vanishing city that the rising ocean is slowly licking back into the waves even as the song unravels above the unraveling coastline like the gill net the city's fishers unfurl in the sea to comb the waves for fish.
Like Alexander's fallen metropolis, the city has two names.

The Wolof call it Ndar, the name it had before the French invaded it, renamed it Saint-Louis, and turned it into the capital of French West African colonies, from which they cargoed people to the New World. Maybe the ancestors of the Tulsa trumpet player, too, had fished this coastline, maybe the grandfathers of the people whose two-toned abengs urgenced rebellion in the Blue Mountains, too, had sung on these shores.

Two men are casting their voices into the night, a baritone and a falsetto. Their set begins with a song that, in turn, begins with the Shahada, the foundational recitation of faith. Most people in Ndar are Suff, and Sufi Muslims believe that music can help you achieve proximity to God, that the ultimate truth can be found in the obliteration of the self through high mystical ecstasy, and that mystical ecstasy may be achieved through song. Ceremonial purposes. The men hang the diaphanous net of their song in the dark where it coruscates, glitters. It is like holding your breath, like holding a bird in your hand. Over the terrace in Ndar a full moon rises, a seawall yields to the surf's embouchure, and I understand."

[Matthew Schreiner · Rating 2 out of 5]

I spent a good long while agonizing over what to say about this book, but I decided to keep it simple. There are three pervasive things I disliked about this work, and two I liked about it.

Compliments:
1. Her choice in subject matter was daunting and important, and I applaud her for taking it on in the first place. Migration and the COVID crisis are difficult issues to discuss and play into each other well.
2. Her references and source material varied in a really fun way- she went from statistics from two years ago to greek mythology in the blink of an eye.

Issues:
1. Every single essay somehow gave off the vibe of “dictionary.com defines ___ as ____.” The way she used evidence felt as though she needed meat for her meandering. It was weak and a bit annoying.
2. This book’s theming was bleakly repetitive- though the author will try to convince you that each section was its own essay with its own subject, I couldn’t help but feel that there was nothing new to discuss by the end of the first essay. Furthermore, her choice in theming was bloated- she talked about COVID, wanderers, travel, war, and “the modern age” as if they were their own subjects AND also somehow the same image- I couldn’t parse out her point in connecting these besides a mild “damn it sucks that people have to go through stuff, right?” And that isn’t to knock her points about trafficking and displacement- she was clearly correct there! Just not persuasively, interestingly, or uniquely so.
3. This book’s writing style was exhausting. I would have DNFd if I had brought ANYTHING else with me to the beach but I forgot a backup book :(


All in all, I just think this book was uninspired. Not wrong. Not evil. Just not worth the time when practically any alternative on the subject could give you more.

[Jason]

Book of essays about migration (specifically migration under duress, more often than not climate related which is more often than not colonialism related) in the 21st century. I would classify this as a mushroom book, one of those works that really tries to get you to see the world in a grain of sand. She zooms in and zooms out, travels back and forth in time, forcing you to look at a global crisis in dozens of different ways, after most of us have taken it as a given. Really poetic and mind/heart expanding stuff.

total side note, sort of unrelated to the quality of the book, but there is some bits in here about COVID that make me think.. idk if we’re far enough removed from it to have interesting takes on it, it feels like we as a culture are still finding the words to synthesize everything we’re feeling but end up just like, reliving and redescribing the trauma. You can’t talk about what she talks about without touching on the global event that forced our collective (non-?)migration into our own homes and sedentary lifestyles. But it just feels like sometimes that we’re reflecting on something that never had a definitive ending, just the vaccines and a slow inching towards whatever we will settle for as normalcy.

[Andi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written book that tackles the question of belonging and the concept of home; who is "othered" and who is included; what people endure to find a place in this world. This is a book you can't just read once - there are too many points of light to capture at one time.

[ashleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic collection! my favorite that i've read so far

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anxious now to read more of this writer. The essays combine to tell the experience of migrants today and historically. There is beauty in the writing as well, even where there was historical suffering. The other day I heard Pico Iyer recite an old Persian saying, something about Paradise being more often achieved through suffering.

[Amanda Lichtenstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read "Bright Unbearable Reality" on a plane to and from Europe and it was oddly comforting to read a set of essays so bent on forging a new vocabulary for the phenomenon of collective dislocation. "What kind of reality are we creating," Badkhen asks, "that we cannot bear it." This question frames the rest of the linked essays that often read more like poetic hallucinations than fully formed nuggets of comprehension. Badkhen stitches a new reality using the fragments of the minutia of felt experiences while traveling the world as a reporter, and she often hovers just above the line of coherence where she eloquently traffics in poetics — which I love. The prose gushes with pathos. But there are definitely moments of ramble, moment of wandering off the cliff into the clouds, that make me want to call out to Badkhen and ask her to return to her readers. I doubt she'd listen because the prose is also rebellious in a way. She doesn't care if understanding gets distorted in the passage — and perhaps that's the point, for the reader, too, to experience the world as a fragmented and incoherent landscape void of any logic but the need to move and keep moving. Throughout these essays, Badkhen riffs on one statistic that haunts her (and should haunt all of us) — that one out of seven people has left their birthplace, that there are an estimated one billion migrants living on the earth right now, and a quarter has passed political borders. This thread gets woven into all her disjointed meditations — or what she calls "broken synapses." My favorite essay in this collection is "Once I Took a Weeklong Walk in the Sahara," which sets up another set of questions that also help frame the rest of the book, questions on place, memory, and belonging. She writes into the "aesthetic of the fragment," she "chronicles the heartbreak," describes how the desert "meddles with time." All of this gorgeous language sends readers into an alphabetic trance that sends you outside the boundaries and rules of narrative nonfiction. There are moments when I felt that Badkhen asked the reader to assume too much about her as a person — never explained how she ended up in one place or another so I had to imagined she operates in a privileged world where travel to insecure, conflict-dense places does not phase her even though she alludes to children waiting for her at home. As someone used to a certain level of detail to anchor personal prose, I found this both liberating and kind of infuriating. I also found some of the vocabulary to be beyond reach (must admit) and therefore disruptive — again, perhaps that was her point and creates a tension that holds throughout the entire collection. It has the effect of knocking you out of the boat of the sentence and needing to find a way back into it to keep flowing through the prose. Overall, I found this book to be refreshingly alarming, a wholly new language for the despair, disconnect and heartache that define the world's experience with migration and globalized change.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book of essays I was reminded of creations that are about the act of creation. The observer shows us scenes from the world and leaves us to draw our own conclusions, without comment. Badkhen references many of these works in this book: Auden's poem "Musee des Beaux Artes," Bruegel's "Flight to Jerusalem," photographs of atrocities. When I notice that, in a book, I I feel two pulls - on the one hand, toward the material, if it is fascinating enough, and on the other hand, to the mind behind the gaze. In this case, the material was fine enough, a dizzying trip around the world showing experience with places and people I will never know. But in this book I can't stop speculating about the observer, a journalist, I assume, who never, except coyly, reveals herself enough to satisfy me. When she describes a picture of her as a child, or her concern about her family, I wonder about about her own longing for her home and childhood, about her own migration and quasi-exile, about whatever it is about her that sent her to war zones and to make friends on the coast of Sudan (I think it was Sudan). Who is the "we" traveling with her in Ethiopia? It's as though she takes no responsibility for what she reports. "Here you go, here's the mess. Pass the salt?"
Two other things: migration and exile bring about the great works of art and force understanding, adaptation, and constantly shifting community. In catastrophe there is also fecundity. It's an ever developing world we live in. James Joyce was an exile - if he had stayed in his country and spoken his language, he would not have written Ulysses (which might be a crap book but you know what I mean), and she wouldn't have written her own work if she had not left home.
Finally, she is Russian. Jewish, but Russian. There is a fascinating essay about nostalgia, specifically Russian nostalgia that I will link to if I can find it, which emphasizes that it is a looking backward at a romanticized past because it is so hard to tolerate the present or conceive of the future. I think that's why I am so focused on the observer and wondering what anxiety leads her to fixate on the present and suffer from her past (if you'll allow that suffering is a kind of romanticizing in a Russian sort of way).
As for me, my attention is as hungry as hers - to roam and see and observe and witness. And we are so, so limited that it is disheartening to even try to mirror back more than just what we see. When people get it right, though, it is so, so satisfying. Thanks to Auden. Now go read the whole poem.

[Correy Baldwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a book. A difficult one—often relentlessly heavy and full of grief and sorrow, shot with moments of beauty. Heavy, searching, clear-eyed and unflinching, poetic; its view both immense and intimate.

"Why do we keep wanting to call something by another’s name? Why refuse to address head-on the two experiences that pinnacle our humanness, violence and astonishment, why find circuitous ways to describe them; why not behold and marvel at what is before us on its own terms, just as it is; what avarice within us makes us plow right through the miraculous, or past it, without pause, makes us insatiable?" (p. 169)

"How to take a clear-eyed view of the world’s complexities, how to grasp the world in its totality of dignity and shame? Can we hold all of it, grief and beauty and the rest, the way the world already does? On this hyper-informed planet, how do we not lose intimacy with one another? What does it mean to look past the mirror, to choose to see something truly other than what has become comfortable? To make a deliberate effort to see the world in a grain of sand requires a level of curiosity that supersedes the confines of our prejudice and fear." (p. 83)

[Liza_lo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't always love Badkhen's essay collection but her beautiful writing voice carried me through and made this a worthy read.

Written roughly between 2016 and 2020 Badkhen's essays are a mix of reportage and a wondrous gaze at the way humans find to torture and hurt each other. At her best she mixes three or so themes together blending them in a distinct way and tying myth, art, and modern news together in a way that feels unique. I felt this especially in the title essay Bright Unbearable Reality in which Badkhen begins by examining the bird's eye view in art and then goes on to talk about climate migration and how drone footage of these human disasters removes viewer from subject.

Another standout was the essay Ways of Seeing, a criticism of Olga Tokarczuk's novel Flights in which Badkhen compares the rarefied elite travel of the characters to the mass migrations she has witnessed through her work.

[Edward Champion · Rating 2 out of 5]

This dreadfully superficial and joyless book should be called NOT VERY BRIGHT UNBEARABLE ESSAYIST. When I came across the sentence "I have spent my life documenting the world's inequities" -- this after not reading much more than a disappointing essay on walking and countless Anne Carson knockoff pieces that were little more than Google dumps -- I had to laugh over the narcissism. Really, Miss Badkhen? YOU are the Messiah? Your writing is more valuable than working in a soup kitchen or managing a food relief delivery to Africa? I think not. If I wanted to listen to some annoying white woman blinkered by and hopped up on her own privilege, I know a number of cafes in the Upper East Side that inspire suicidal social tableaux. I can't believe you folks have praised this moron, who is about as far from Rebecca Solnit and Kate Zambreno in her professed "thinking" as you have made her out to be. In ten years, nobody will care about this opportunist.

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favourite kinds of books -- meditative essays that focus on an event in the author's experience and then zoom out to make connections to larger world phenomena. These work best when the connections are imaginative, when the author is well read, and when the prose is elegant -- all of which are true here. Anna Badkhen's focus -- on human migration, on environmental degradation, and on the worldwide effect of the pandemic -- is topical and fresh, but she also ties her observations into the deepest histories of humanities. The effect is both familiar and mind expanding.

[Tamara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Badkhen documents her realitites by highlighting the micro pardons and connections the macro seems to take away from it. She has written stories from the corners of the world we refuse to bring to the table to entice honest dialogue over the existential and real human crises. Her words give individual environments and persons a stage to say 'it is so' and deals with moments between the melancholy and madness around topics such as refugees, migration, war, poverty, famine and abuse. By capturing the beauty around the revolt or anguish, she makes sure she never diminishes what's ahead for the company she spends time in.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like any book of connected stories, real or true or completely made up, some of the essays resonated more than others. The Geronimo story was particularly compelling. Her use of language is often unique but sometimes, particularly in the first entry; incorporates inaccessible verbiage I found annoying. Even context didn’t help. Don’t make me look up words—it’s distracting and detracts from the pleasure of the read. Otherwise largely well done.

[Olga Zilberbourg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wide-ranging and contemplative, I found these essays particularly touching when they were personal -- I love the experience of trying to piece together a woman's life from the crumbs of autobiographic information interspersed in her work. I am very conscious that when I do this, I'm reading against the grain, against the writer's intention with this piece -- but I find this mental exercise necessary to hold the frequently devastating information that she brings us.

[Priya · Rating 2 out of 5]

The entire time I just wished I were reading Solnit or Sebald instead. Almost as boring as hearing someone recount their dreams. Actually it was worse, because you know what to expect with recounted dreams and you can tune it all out and nod here and there. With the book I really tried to find some narrative thread or semblance of cohesion. There were some interesting details but not enough to carry it beyond two stars.

[Paul Narvaez · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Badkhen writes in an idiosyncratic, poetic way and at times, seems to have access to an encyclopaedic knowledge base. I like all that. This books is about chiefly, migrations. Migrations of people, birds, ideas, disease, wars and disaster. It gets a little samey after a time, but I think I liked most the essays which described her experiences in Ethiopia when the Covid-19 pandemic first manifested itself.

[Chloe Sproule · Rating 2 out of 5]

For such lofty goals, said a whole lotta nothing. Came off completely out of touch and reductionist. Her writing style also really bothered me, leaning too heavily on sentence fragments, gimmicky rhetorical questions, and the work of other authors (Anne Carson said that..., Alice Oswald said this... etc). Disappointed, at least it was a short read. I wouldn't have finished it otherwise.

[Michaela · Rating 5 out of 5]

She has a way of viewing the world and humanity and then describing it with her lush language that draws the reader into the author's mind. I particularly appreciated How to Read the Air. I learned a little about pre-history. And mourned the prophecy that forced immigrants may rise from one billion worldwide and that by 2070 3.5 billion, half the world's population, may live in unlivable zones.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved how diverse this book was. It covered migration and stories of travel and home across the world. I had to look up a lot of the places to get exact geography, and this author is INTELLIGENT. There was so much that I searched up while reading. My favorite essay was Forgiving the Unforgivable.

[Shane Skelcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of essays reminded me of John Green’s Anthropocene reviewed. Badkhen has a way with words that I always find captivating. Not really sure what to expect going in, but I’m glad I read it.

[truedeceiver · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an ARC from work. It’s so good. I’m in awe of this writer.

[Christine Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting for sure. It's almost like all these different bits and pieces that when you get to the end of everything, you have to step back, and then, finally, there's the full picture.

[KBiagioli · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF