My YouTube algorithm is weighted heavily toward the silly things I usually consume: ASMR videos featuring paper sounds, knitting tutorials, French bulldogs being stupidly cute. But every now and again it throws me a curveball and is weirdly insistent that I respond. I must have seen the title, “The Case for Making Art When the World Is on Fire,” about 200 times before I clicked. When I finally watched it, I was very glad I did.
“The Case for Art” is a Ted Talk given by Amie McNee, a writer and sort of creativity guru who advocates for everyone to express themselves through art – defined very broadly – and resist the common cultural narrative that art is selfish, pointless or unproductive. “Creativity is our power to enact change,” she says, and is a balm against fear, anger and despair.
I was reminded of McNee’s video when I read Anna Badkhen’s latest collection of essays, “To See Beyond,” which she says in the preface is addressed to questions of how to love, dream and hope in a depraved world. The answer for Badkhen, as McNee, often comes to art, though as a former war correspondent, her conclusion is drawn from much grief. “How should we live with the potential collapse of our way of life, not knowing what awaits?” she writes. “Maybe the trick is to hold on to something that astonishes, that urges us into some unfathomable beyond, that sustains our faith in the possibility of sanctuary, relief, change for the better.” The book is full of the hard-won hope that can come only after prolonged engagement with loss, and will appeal to anyone who is struggling, at this particular moment, to find light shining through the cracks.
Badkhen, a Guggenheim fellow and current artist in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, grew up in the former Soviet Union and has published eight books of nonfiction that cover her experiences in Afghanistan, the African savannah and elsewhere. She’s seen much of the world and is privileged to call people in many countries friends. She draws on these people and places in her essays, which move from Mali to the American Great Plains to Tenerife, West Philadelphia and Senegal. She has a prodigious gift for finding links across cultures and languages, and her writing is lyrical and profound as she tackles topics such as war, genocide and environmental disaster with the insight and sensitivity of a poet.
In “Mythologizing Disaster,” she begins with the Lycian earthquake of 141 CE, a cataclysm that may have registered 10 on the Richter scale, and reshaped the coastline of what is now the Antalya region of Turkey. She visited the region with her family in 2023 and met up with relatives from Russia, seeing them for the first time post-Covid and after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The irony of a happy gathering on the site of such devastation was not lost on Badkhen. “How strange was it to punch into the GPS storied sites of an ancient catastrophe?” she asks. Not very, she says, as we’ve been turning disaster sites into tourist destinations for ages. Auschwitz, with its displays of children’s shoes and human hair, “both centers wickedness and reduces it to its attributes,” she writes. Substituting one thing for another, the shoes becoming a symbol of the girls and boys who once wore them, is at once a powerful metaphor as well as a paltry stand-in for the incalculable magnitude of 6 million killed. “How difficult we find it,” Badkhen says, “to honor each life on its own terms, to acknowledge it as precious and singular – to acknowledge that we are precious and singular, who have endured a multimillion-year-old history of fear and loss and despair and still remember how to mourn.” Because we cannot comprehend the fullness of every life lost to disaster, we must reduce and aggregate them. And in so doing, she says, we create a myth, a narrative of the horror so that we may make sense of it. But what sense can be made from an earthquake or a school shooting? That, I think Badkhen would say, is her point.
The title essay, “To See Beyond,” opens with the life of Cheikh Amadou Bamba, a Sufi saint and anticolonial activist from Senegal who founded the sacred city of Touba, now a site of yearly spiritual pilgrimage for 2 million people. Bamba lived the last 15 years of his life in house arrest in the town of Diourbel, and spent that time writing thousands of devotional verses and lengthy commentaries on Islamic law, Arabic literature and spiritual practice, as well as directing the Sufiist Mouride order, which he also founded. Badkhen travels to Diourbel to see the shrine that’s been built around his former prison because, she writes, she wants “to see a place where hope was born.”
It awes her that Bamba turned his place of confinement into a creative sanctuary and wellspring from which flowed his ideas on nonviolent resistance to French occupation of West Africa, and his hope for a new spiritual movement for Senegal. By walking on bare feet across the dirt floor of the place where Bamba “countered the degradation of the human spirit,” Badkhen feels revived, daring to see past the disasters of the present into what the future might hold. “Hope,” she says, “resides in the orbitofrontal cortex … located just above our eyes; it dictates how we see the world. I wonder if this is why, to envision a hoped-for beyond or to focus better on a hopeful wish or a prayer, we close our eyes, or look up.”
Making art in difficult times will not necessarily save the world, but it may save you and the ones around you. Death of hope is not just a tragedy; it’s akin to death of the human spirit. Badkhen’s essays do not shy away from discussing what is wrong in our world, but their power lies in how she looks for the light between the cracks, and points her eyes to the sky to see what may lie ahead. She doesn’t offer answers, but only gently encourages you to keep looking up.
Elizabeth Gonzalez James is the Porter Square Books writer in residence for adults and the author of the novels “Mona at Sea” and “The Bullet Swallower,” as well as the chapbook “Five Conversations About Peter Sellers.” Her stories and essays have appeared in The Idaho Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Rumpus, StorySouth, Pank and elsewhere, and have received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. Originally from South Texas, James lives with her family in Massachusetts.
A version of this story appeared originally on the Porter Square Review of Books. Buy “To See Beyond” from Porter Square Books.
