I’ve been thinking about Newton’s third law of motion after recently revisiting it for my son’s science project: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is a consoling law, built upon certainty. But human lives seldom hold such hard consolations. The leaders we elect, the borders we erect, the violence we permit produce consequences that outlive the choices that set them in motion. Mothers understand something of this. To bring a life into the world is to initiate a sequence whose consequences can never be calculated or contained. Across Guernica’s August–September double issue, motherhood appears as place, inheritance, origin, and impossible return. The works gathered here cast a look upon the afterlives of history; they ask what follows from our most intimate and collective decisions.
In fiction, Naeem Murr’s Bye-Bye Palestine traces the complex entanglements of lives back to a historical rupture whose convulsions remain present in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. “Haifa became known as Um Al Gharib, Mother of the Stranger,” Murr writes. The name holds the story’s central contradiction: a city figured as mother to those made strangers within it. In Emmy Rossum’s Tether, motherhood becomes its own law of action and reaction. In a futuristic world, a daughter uses her heightened olfactory abilities to mark the boundary between herself and her mother. Following a matrilineal inheritance through scent, she attempts to trace her way back to her own beginnings. In Yukiko Tominaga’s The Little Corner of the Factory, a child discovers the many forms love can take, and the hurt and betrayals it can contain. In a small room inside a rental hot-towel factory, the youngster is initiated into a tenderness that will outlast the people who teach it to her.
In nonfiction J. Malcolm Garcia’s narrative reportage Last Fight tells the story of a man living in the wake of his brother’s death. Nazeer, an Afghan interpreter who served alongside US forces in Afghanistan, is detained by ICE and dies within twenty-four hours of entering custody. Garcia follows a chain of consequence stretching from the war in Afghanistan to the American immigration system, tracing the afterlife of a vote, and the distance between a choice made in a voting booth and the body upon which its force eventually lands.
In A Nation Wrestles with God, excerpted from A Nation Wrestles with God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands, Ilan Stavans traces America’s long and unsettled relationship with the idea of God. From the use of divine authority in the service of empire to God’s persistent presence in the nation’s literature, politics, vernacular, and imagination, Stavans traces how belief becomes another force with an afterlife. The gods a nation creates continue to shape the lives over which it assumes the right to “play God.”
In Guernica’s first foray into the encounter between artificial intelligence and human epistemology, Liane Strauss and an AI read Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” together. Moving between Dickinson, Monet’s Water Lilies, and the irresolvable problems literature allows us to inhabit, Strauss discovers that an AI can identify ambiguity but cannot experience the doubt that lends it its resonant weight. The first instalment in a three-part series, the essay is a reminder that human knowledge begins in uncertain spaces.
In interviews, The Insistence of Beauty brings poets Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal into a reciprocal conversation about their new collections, LION and Roma Roam, respectively. A question becomes an invitation to step beyond the stories assigned to us, and in this exchange, each poet turns that invitation toward the other. Here, imagination creates another kind of afterlife: the freedom to move beyond violence’s last account.
In the latest installment of Guernica’s Posthumanitarian interviews series, After Development, Russell Reed speaks with Bhutanese scholar Dasho Karma Ura about the intrinsic relationship between our individual choices and communal happiness. Critiquing the humanitarian regime’s presentism, Ura suggests that our individual well-being cannot be separated from the ecological futures our present choices are already creating.
In Global Spotlights this month, Nwanne Agwu’s Faint Lines maps identity through maternal and paternal lines, and asks what it means to belong to people who came before us. Published first in Isele Magazine, the narrative reimagines home not as where one comes from, but as a place where one is recognized and held with love.
Poetry in this issue enters the charged space where beauty and violence meet. In Tina Chang’s I’ve Gone to Look for America, Term One, Pistil/Pistol, and I’ve Gone to Look for America, Term Two, roses tangle in the brain; a peony becomes first a woman’s cheek and then a bullet; the pistil carries within it the sound of a pistol. Within these poems, the inherited past exerts its force upon the present, but the speaker answers by naming herself—lion, flower, weapon, and “little spark”—and turning that inheritance toward another future.
Priyanuj Mazumdar’s there’s this blurry photo of me & my sister with our eyes closed moves through two family photographs taken fifteen years apart, tracing the intimate afterlives of a house, a childhood, and a mother’s love. Here, motherhood is the force exerted quietly from the edges of the image, its effects carried forward in the child.
In Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi’s Tidings of the Broken Flood, rupture becomes movement. In Feranmi’s poem, force does not meet its opposite but changes form, folding back into itself and entering whatever comes next.
Across this double issue, actions exceed the moments in which they are performed. The force may not return equally, and it may not return from the direction we expect. But it returns, nonetheless: in the stranger who still calls the lost city “mother,” in the child following a scent toward home, in the man left to fight for the meaning of his brother’s life and death, in the river continuing beneath an ash-heavy dawn.
As humans, what we set in motion outlives us. So might what we set against it.
—Raaza Jamshed, Editor-in-Chief