No Homage to Rojava
At the end of the 1990s, the PKK were ejected from Syria, and Ocalan was abducted by the state forces of Turkey. He has been imprisoned there ever since, the only inmate in the prison on Imrali Island, in the Sea of Marmara. During his incarceration, Ocalan’s thought developed considerably. He had begun as an orthodox Marxist-Leninist and led the PKK along these lines. In captivity, Ocalan meditated on the immense flaws in Soviet-style socialism as well as neoliberal capitalism, and sought other routes and options for his movement.
By Ben Granger.
Mice 1961 & Prison Mars
Stacey Levine’s debut novel Dra— suggested an Eastern European absurdist detained in the equally gray environs of the Pacific Northwest. Its mordant surrealism, and that of early short masterpieces like “Sausage,” bled into the later novels. With Frances Johnson and in particular Mice 1961, however, an inversion took place in which the worlds that seemed projections of the single protagonist’s anxieties, or at least the proscribed communities Levine utilizes as her canvas, went on to counter-project their mass neuroses and inane theories onto the lives of the poor main characters, whose aims are by contrast simple-hearted. Those characters display their spiritual and physical deformities like scars made by the jabs of boorish neighbors from whom they yearn to escape.
Alvin Lu reviews Mice 1961 by Stacey Levine and Prison Mars by Lauren Fairbanks.