Content note: corpse desecration, genocide, graphic descriptions of violence, intergenerational trauma, racism

Publication alert! “Chaos Itself Is an Order” has been printed in Fourth Genre 23.2.

I’ve been writing and refining this piece since the 2019 Tamil Resistance and Resilience in the Face of Genocide photo exhibit, and Fourth Genre is one of my top-tier dream publications, so I’m thrilled it’s found a home there.

This excerpt from the piece:

It’s always in the wake of ghosts, after the atrocities are done, as the skeletal remains continue to be found, that we pore over the evidence in the hopes of addressing the unspeakable. Pictures of ordinary objects are imbued with extraordinary violence and trauma. A doorway opens into an abyss that could swallow you whole. Teddy bears and dolls lie as discarded or amputated as their owners might be, as a Tamil person’s arm with a chunk missing from it, or as a Tamil person’s legs with one gone below a keloided stump of knee. This isn’t a gallery show where the aesthetics matter so much as it is a collective need to remember. It is nearly impossible to remember when remembrance itself is hindered by the state. Ten years before this, Tamil people in Sri Lanka bore these horrors directly, and today others’ eyes bear it with mine. We endure it because we must.

Read it at Fourth Genre or download proofs as a PDF (cite the final publication only).