Though Amitav Ghosh wrote the below passage as a response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Cen
Though Amitav Ghosh wrote the below passage as a response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, I always think of it during the times ‘epistemic violence’ hits so close to home. My thoughts and best wishes are with the people of Boston.Amitav Ghosh, in The Greatest Sorrow:“In one of its aspects terror represents an epistemic violence, a radical interruption in the procedures and protocols that give the world a semblance of comprehensibility. This is why it causes not just fear and anger but also long-lasting confusion and utterly disproportionate panic; it tears apart the stories through which individuals link their lives to a collective past and present. Everyday life would be impossible if we did not act upon certain assumptions about the future, near and distant— about the train we will catch tomorrow as well as the money we pay into our pensions. Not the least of the terror of a moment such as that of September 11 is that it reveals the future to be truly what it is: unknown, unpredictable, and utterly inscrutable. It is this epistemic upheaval that Michael Ondaatje and Agha Shahid Ali point to when they mourn the maps of our longings and our forty-day daydreams: the pure institution of poetry had led them to an awareness of this loss long before the world awakened to the knowledge that ‘nothing will be the same again.’ […] Yet the message itself was neither a presaging nor a prediction: it lay merely in the acknowledgement of the loss of a map. But to be aware of the death of a teleology is not to know of what will take its place. The truth is that on the morning of September 11, I had nothing to say to my children that had not been said in Michael Ondaatje’s poem ‘The Story’: With all the swerves of history I cannot imagine your future… I no longer guess a future. And do not know how we end nor where. Though I know a story about maps, for you.” -- source link
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