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When I see maps like these in Arundhati Roy’s books, my country of hundreds of millions of people, Bangladesh, is the only unnamed country. I have a visceral reaction to erasure of us in the revolution, independence, economies & environment of the subcontinent @haymarketbooks
As if our motherland isn’t disappearing underwater, books that immortalize our disappearance hurt in ways only folks from climate-devastated lands can understand. I hope you can correct this in future editions @haymarketbooks — I love your books and want us to be imagined here
This happens over and over again, because we are the ancestral feminine of South Asia, the mleccha, barbarian lands cast aside throughout the course of Brahminical expansion— this reifies the violence imprinted on our land and in our bodies.
This isn’t a “Map of India” it’s a map of South Asia, @haymarketbooks and it is a map that reifies hegemony, by what is named and what is unnamed.
Omit a country, omit women’s work: female prime ministers, a workforce of women who run the economy; the first S. Asian woman, @wasfia who climbed the 7 highest mountains — Everest et al— on each continent, a country that inspired microlending & protecting mother language rights
This is honestly why publishing has made me sick for the last year — they just don’t see us — and keep serving up India as the only reality. Whereas we know India exists precisely because of who is NOT INDIAN
This map also omits Bhutan, my other photo of a map in another Arundhati Roy book named Bhutan but still not Bangladesh.
