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‘—eruption—as they were starting to climb—steps—to the Kannon-dō Temple. The village (Kamahara), population : 600 at the time,—500 perished—those who hadn’t taken refuge in the temple. Kamahara was—20km from Mt. Asama. Kita-Asama is closer, within 10km. 1783—200 years ago—destroyed on the eighth day of the seventh month—‘Chestnut can warp or crack while it’s drying—but once that’s settled down it’s a strong wood—’’

‘It was the only sound but the sound of the sea coming in the open window and filling the room—full of sound that sounds like the sea but is something else, your blood running in your veins—an uneasy sense of dwindling, weighing nothing—There’s no use defying whatever orthodoxy your culture has adopted. You just end up as a witch. I realise now that that is really why I got married: better to marry than to burn.’

‘Around me I see once youthful women reduced to filaments of their selves by their early thirties, exhausted by the effort it takes to live here—They don’t want to come back if they can help it—a move back to Mauritius could make financial sense, given the costs of childcare abroad. But—more exorbitant,—intolerable, is the island’s rapacious misogyny—jobs they’ve been offered here are not something we can aspire to—’

‘—we know what it is to be defined in cost ratios—balance sheets—assigned some arbitrary notion of worth ascribed to our ‘productivity’. Yet when it comes to—‘standard of living’—we don’t hesitate to treat others the way our own ancestors were treated—as long as we don’t have to look—be reminded of what the heavily exploited body looks like. We’ve mythologised our ancestors—We live in ‘smart cities’—‘technology hub’’

‘So here I am, Your Honour—I know it’s late. I should have—could have done it sooner. I was very confused, you must understand. I was in a daze. I trusted the world around me because that was the one I had always lived in, a world without the confines of a canton. I’ve been naïve, unthinking, ineffectual—I’ve landed where I was supposed to land—It’s all here, with us, —Later, we can say goodbye, grazie, and leave.’

‘Just like some goddamn sitcom. Everything about (them) was exactly like some goddamn sitcom. Waiting—just like a soap opera. Everything the same as it was for everybody else, the same things happening over and over and over—all petty—trivial—& you couldn’t ever get free. It clung to you, held on, pinioned you. Like the dream she used to have of the room with wallpaper that caught and stuck to you, the Velcro dream.’

‘Poor Polyphemus, my daughter says. But Polyphemus is a monster, he says. Odysseus is the monster, she says. Odysseus is the greatest hero of civilisation, he replies. Cretino, I think to myself—she knows what I’m thinking—because she grins at me—Wasn’t he a woman trafficker, Odysseus? (she says) A woman trafficker? he asks. Yes, a person who kidnaps & sells women. That sort of thing didn’t exist back then, he says.’

‘—the time we’re living in does not follow a linear path but exists, rather, in an ever-present contemporaneity, where everything is in the here & now, a time frame where what has taken place, takes place, and will take place co-exist. Except that we are blind and cannot see, & in order to save ourselves, we forget, we think we are the only thing—present and important but we are—no more than the produce of the tree—’

‘—in Le Malaise Créole—Creoles experienced ‘both fragmentation & hybridisation, such that three hundred years later, Creoles are a people of mixed African, Indian, Chinese & European heritage.’ I think about who we are & where we’ve come from—I think about the kinds of machinations involved—The confidence of the sugar companies, who know they can just pay lawyers to defer the case until her money runs out for good.’

‘—a twisted paradox—Nevada, Alaska & New Mexico—to prepare for annihilating the enemy, or to prepare for your own annihilation—by launching an up-front act of self-sabotage, so you can personally feel the blow to your flesh, the depth of the wound, the shape of the scar—poetic horror—stretching relentlessly—terrified birds—camera always films from a distance, a cowardly voyeur—tempers reality—anaesthetises the gaze.’

‘King, queen, rook, knight—bishop. All capable of undoing—movement—correcting a mistake. Only the pawn’s advance is irreversible. Only—pawn is condemned to move ever forward—never looking back—the only pieces with a spirit of solidarity—weak &—often threatened, among themselves they form a colony—a siphonophore whose organs absorb the shocks of the game—All for one & one for all. El pueblo unido jamás será vencido—’

‘—ceaselessly producing goods like a colony of untiring ants. In the swathes of cropland between factories, farmers—rice in their harvesters—pomelo—like grapefruit but more aromatic—He knew Ernesto would stand with (them)—An entry from Ernesto’s Cuban memoir flashed in (his) mind—an abrupt desire to visit—where Muhammad Ali trained—Matsu must have been—human 1000 years ago before ending up as protector of the ocean—’

‘But—if there was an—earthquake that reduced the whole city—to rubble, how would you feel if your house was the only one that didn’t collapse or burn down? Imagine a wasteland—only your house left standing—& you, not only alive, but with a roof over your head—everything unscathed. It would be unbearable. Could you recover from something like that? People make it through a disaster believing they—just lucky, right?’

‘—He has bleached himself into oblivion—There are several common narratives of the taking—An illiterate widow signs acres of land to corrupt notaries, who promise that her progeny will be taken care of. Families are chased out of their homes—With time, these sugar companies consolidated—turned into conglomerates—They now dominate the private sector. Sugar—worth next to nothing now—& has to be monetised differently.’

‘‘Since when have you ever believed in an afterlife?’ Knowing what we do today, this attack—seems—foolish—cruel—But does it make sense to measure the actions of people back then by the standards of today? How can we understand (what) everyone must have felt—being confronted with the fact that their species might become extinct? No matter what—he has to make sure the kids survive—What could be more obvious than that?’

‘All the men—work on the boats—Why not just stay here and pick tea? He—says, I want to see the world—In the Malacca Strait, they stop—wait—ashore—the revelry in multiple languages—buys a postcard—a few lines to say he’s okay—After mailing, (he) wanders around Hock Teik Cheng Sin Temple. Lanterns hand on both sides—some speaking Hokkien—some speaking Cantonese—‘may every breath you take go smoothly.’’

‘—photographs render their subjects mute—as if the moment the aperture clicks open it swallows not just—light, but every decibel in the vicinity. People & places—sentenced to eternity in a sonic vacuum—The silence is all-consuming, emphatic—the sort of ontological silence we associate with immortality—man was shot through the heart—Los Angeles, California—We don’t never forget—better known to the world as Malcolm X.’

‘Coincidence? The biographers ask. Coincidence, of course, they say in answer to their own question. Poverty has a smell—a viscous vapour that penetrates the amygdala through the olfactory bulb & never leaves the mind; a fragrant memory that serves as a deterrent against Alzheimer’s. The stench of squalor is inescapable in the Chicago shelter—winter of 1943—The radio won’t stop playing ‘I Had The Craziest Dream,’’

‘There has always been a principled vanguard minority ready to sacrifice—The—sacrifice is what propels history forward—The hero never gets to savour—The spoils go to the cold, calculating cowards, safe & warm in the rearguard. It’s drizzling as he stands for the tribunal—The hierarchy speaks of the common good, and to tell that tale, they need you—And the game, which you now see was never your game, will carry on.’

‘The Great Exchange—prompted a collective tendency to seek out the comforting—familiar—fried chicken cutlets—bubble tea—Some people claimed—visions from Lord Guan, Wang Ye—goddess Matsu, instructing them to establish temples—There was an explosion of all things from physical—to spiritual solace—‘I come from a country that he would—call a ‘shithole.’ In the end, Hemingway shot himself. Ahmed decided to go on living—’

‘—she says Vietnamese is—food with a profound history. ‘Love my food, you’ve also got to love my culture.’ At first I think—Desperation, pain, shame, fear, bodies buried in oceans / unmarked graves in other people’s countries—these are your branding apparatus? ‘People don’t listen to stories unless they can eat them or feel them or wear them—I don’t want anywhere to feel like home. I don’t want to anchor like that.’’

‘—ordinary people who, in banding together, end up perpetrating—evil greater than anything their petty prejudices—might otherwise have instigated. Coming from a genuine storyteller, this would be a poignant tale. Coming from an honest one, it would teach—something meaningful. Either way—that story still needs an ending—The jungle was conscious—Although she had no proof—believed—the jungle had killed the colonists—’

‘What would happen if this unknown country—were to become the centre of world power? It was not what I wanted—I did not wish to see Joseon values &—culture conquer the world—a ruling class forever made of men like (them). Some worlds are fated to die—My destination : the sea—In 1932—Honolulu—every thirty-one years I shed my skin—in every language I know. I no longer even feel like I am from Joseon.’

‘—carved into the wall a Chinese poem in regulated verse that compared its author to the—poet Qu Yuan. The idea was unoriginal, but it was a good poem—Until now, (they) had been the most wasteful carnivores in the world—To understand what I mean—you need to understand the Joseon writing system—I had assumed that all men could read eonmun—write love letters—But—in fact he simply could not read the script.’

‘—combinatorial madness—wild yet extremely precise negotiation—to generate a sentient being—emerges—innumerable particles, right? Staying alive was a form of treason, yes, but I found it impossible not to keep trying. ‘I never lie. That’s why I find those who do so loathsome—It’s hard to believe, but we found you so attractive when we first met—& now look—if you can stand the sight—Who said that life was priceless?’’

‘Everyone—had a flashlight—candles—at hand—you never knew when the power was going to cut out—adrift—infinite blackness—in a city of unreliable electricity—living in Havana was enough to turn anyone into an inventor—He’d often seen people standing motionless by the side of the road—Bodies hitting the ground, reminding everyone else how long it had been since they’d heard the—thwack of meat against a chopping board.’

‘1842—Joseon? That is where I was born—small, peninsular country between China and Japan—a Japanese colony at the beginning—Who knows what its fate will be—I wish I could tell you more—I left the country 100 years ago—It was amazing that we did not starve to death—before the difficulties began—Many of the books were handwritten copies—a sixty-volume novel—& other old tales—left behind—passed through the Qing Empire.’

‘Sometimes I wonder whether I hold the language as sacrosanct—language of the sublime—my sublime—that I won’t tamper with, won’t attempt. That may change. My son—borrows from—three languages to express himself—A fourth & fifth language—be budding—sings along to old Hindi & Mauritian Bhojpuri songs—I wonder if he’ll end up choosing one language over another. I hope he won’t feel like he has to. This is how it starts.’

‘The past found him—through a stranger’s story—spun—into the vortex of his own—history. So much of the past works like that—vortex-like. ‘The past shapes the present,’ they teach—in schools—Shapes? Infiltrates more like, imbues, infuses, it is invisible this past, it is gas—odourless, colourless chemical agent bouncing around in the lungs, crackling in the spaces between us, in the air the culture breathes in, out.’

‘As soon as you were inside you sensed a change in the air—fragrance of wood and books —‘If you remember it that well, it must have been well built.’ The evening light, tinged with red, shone on the crown of the tree behind him. I saw the shadow of a bird fly across it—From somewhere overhead I heard the song of a gray thrush—Could the blackbird have changed its coloring bit by bit until, after many generations—’