Rachel > Recent Status Updates

"He threaded us like a suture in and out of Besźel and Ul Qoma." When looking at this text from a social justice lens, it romanticizes the importance of returning to the status quo, even if it's a status quo maintained through fear and intimidation.

"That is what foreigners rarely understand. A Besź dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an [Ul Qoman] house without breach. But pass through Cupola Hall and she or he might leave Besźel, and [...] come back to exactly (corporeally) where they had been, but in another country, a tourist, [...] to a street that shared the latitude-longitude of their own address, a street they had never visited before."

"In typical political cliché, unificationists were split on many axes. [...] They had been accused of furtively propagandizing among refugees and new immigrants with limited expertise at seeing and unseating, at being in one particular city. The activists wanted to weaponize such urban uncertainty."

"In the morning trains ran on a raised line metres from my window. They were not in my city. I did not, of course, but I could have stared into the carriages--they were quite that close--and caught the eyes of foreign travellers. [...] In Beszél it was a quiet area, but the streets were crowded with those elsewhere. I unsaw them, but it took time to pick past them all."