Top News

In Paul Valéry’s Eupalinos, as Brian Thill recounts, Socrates encounters an “obscure object, polished and white” on the seashore – an object whose origin he cannot trace and whose history refuses to settle. The shore, a collecting zone of fragments produced by the “eternal struggle” between land and sea, becomes, paradoxically, one of the most compelling ways in which human desire leaves its imprint on the world. The fragments do not serve as a useless remainder; they are also excess and surplus, something that leaks across the boundaries of the public and the private and quietly haunts everyday life.

The eternal struggle between the land and the sea is also the eternal tug between the two forces that dictate the theatre of life – eros and thanatos, and it is the exploration of this rebellious pairing of phenomenal life forces that predicates the action in and of Mohammed Hanif’s Rebel English Academy.

It is the night of the hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the “feudal despot in the clothes of an awami pseudo socialist”, and as the narrator (and later Sabiha Bano in the novel) reminds us, one is never sure when a current lived moment has already been marked for greatness except when examined...

Read more