PIIA
MUSTAMÄKI
GUEST EDITORIAL
Do cities have souls? We feel as if they do because we see cities as living organisms, feeling as strongly about them as we do about people: we love some of them passionately, while we loathe and fear others. Some are off-putting, while some others make us feel safe. Some evoke tenderness, some oppress, and sometimes our home cities change and start alienating us, as happened to Rúnar Helgi Vignisson’s Reykjavik and Charlson Ong’s Manila. But where do we locate a city’s soul? In a detail we love about it and hence it’s the city’s soul for us, in its collective beating heart, or in the city’s opposing characteristics of “goodness and suffering,” as James Ragan puts it?
City writing as a term is as elusive as a city’s soul. This collection of poetry, essays and short fiction about cities around the world – Lagos, Dakar, Reykjavik, Paris, Rome, Nicosia, Lahore, Kathmandu, Delhi, Varanasi, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Manila, Hanoi, Jakarta, Sydney, Los Angeles, New York, Toronto – does not provide a clear definition for either. But it maps the kinds of diversions cities – whether our homes or travel destinations – provoke as they stage the mundane alongside desire and violence, morphed into being by history, inequalities and movements of people. These diversions disclose cities as beautiful but unfair. They provide belonging, shelter or slaps in the face. They treat men and women differently, as they do people of color and those who have less than others. But what they do all have in common is the ability to conjure up the writer’s imagination.
From Charles Bernstein’s desolate Brooklyn Park to Nathalie Handal’s Rome apartment where green muslin gives way to passion, to Anand Thakore’s Constantinople at the eve of the Turkish conquest where a courtesan prays for mercy for herself and for those who have scorned her, the poetry in this collection captures moments in cities that are undeniably soulful. But cities can be soul crushing, too: Philip McLaren’s fictionalized true story “Black Cul-de-sac” reveals the murderous dead-end Sydney can mean to Aboriginal Australians, Tim Tomlinson’s short story “Sir” a domestic worker’s plight in Hong Kong and Manila, and Sally Breen’s “Embassy” the soulless expat luxury in Hanoi.
In their essays, Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka wrestles with his sometimes nemesis, sometimes soulmate city of Lagos, Vagneux Yann with Varanasi’s tangible holiness, Neelam Hanif with the soul-searching Lahore inspires, and Ravi Shankar with envy for Nicosians’ passion for their city despite or because of its troubled history. In “The Night Driver,” Pratik editor Yuyutsu Sharma takes a Kathmandu taxi that reveals both corruption and deities in the post-earthquake cityscape, while in “She Stares at Me,” Dakar’s Museum of Black Civilizations compels me to look at the legacies of colonization in the eye. The photography chosen by Tadej Žnidarčič echoes the issue’s global scope and the diversions its cities instigate, whether the pandemic’s effects in NYC or Dhaka, weightlifting at a Bangkok cemetery, nighttime street scenes in Kampala, or the quieter side of the megacity of Chennai, captured by Julie Williams-Krishnan.
Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah describes the aim of
cosmopolitanism as us “getting used to one another.” In today’s fragmented
world, it’s the city where this can happen, where people of all walks of life
make homes, work, pray, fight, love and wander the same streets, miraculously
more often in harmony than not. This collection bears witness to how in the end
the city doesn't only spark creativity but, as Teju Cole puts it, “might be our
greatest invention.”
Photos by Julie Willaims-Krishnan, Tadej-Znidarcic, Imran Ahmed & Samsun-Helal
Piia Mustamäki is a Finn, a New Yorker and an
academic wanderluster, currently located in Abu Dhabi, where she teaches at
NYU’s Writing Program. A Fulbright scholar, she has a PhD in English Literature
from Rutgers University and her research interests include travel narratives,
global south urbanism and gender and postcolonial studies. Her travel writing
and essays have appeared in Meridian: The APWT Drunken Boat Anthology of New
Writing, Literary Traveler, Memoir Magazine, Panorama: Journal of Travel, Place
and Nature, among others. Piia has traveled to more than 120 countries.
web: www.1001worlds.com.
Also
Available on Amazon & Flipkart
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Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0D9B5Q85J?ref=myi_title_dp
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India: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D9B5Q85J?ref=myi_title_dp
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