Life Finds a Way

The Atmosphere

The violence in the pahars, its diffuse yet palpable nature, cannot be reduced to a single texture or tonality, such as bodily harm caused by cross-border shelling or the collapsing of one’s home during an earthquake. Its locations are multiple; its convergence is manifold: in the body, subjectivity, and sociality. I have found that violence—as seepage and deluge—can be thought of as a chronic, lingering intensity, an immense ethereal concentration. Abrar, a resident of the pahars, whom I frequently turn to in this book, remarked: “The air may be fresh here, but it is also very heavy.”

To elaborate on this heaviness, I focus on everyday saturations, the enveloping and atmospheric properties of violence, “not semiosis, not meaning, not structure, not apparatus, but the felt, visceral, immediate, sensed, embodied, excessive.”⁹ I consider the atmosphere as an emplacing arrangement to appreciate life’s textures and tonalities, the encompassing feel and mood of life therein. A local word for the atmosphere is mahaul. How does attention to the mahaul enrich the ethnography of violence and repair?

The atmosphere is a poignant mode of attention. According to Ben Anderson, it holds “a series of opposites—presence and absence, materiality and ideality, definite and indefinite, singularity and generality—in a relation of tension.”¹⁰ To attend to the atmosphere “is to learn to be affected by the ambiguities of affect/emotion, by that which is determinate and indeterminate, present and absent, singular and vague.”¹¹ Put differently, the atmosphere is an “affective ontology of excess,”¹² which “absorbs the excess of affect, mops around its contingent leakage, tidies up anything that can go differently.”¹³ Its “up-in-the air quality … defies our desire for conceptual integrity and resists our usual models of causality.”¹⁴

Attention to the atmosphere can allow us to get at the heart of violence, “its mereological fabric that significantly exceeds the realm of (aesthetic) perception”¹⁵ as “something distributed yet palpable,” an immersion that, despite registering on sensing bodies, remains “diffuse, in the air, ethereal.”¹⁶ Timothy Cooper suggests that the atmosphere can give “expression to different thresholds of intensity and change, such as the ambient contours of ethical orientation.”¹⁷ An attentiveness to the mahaul provides an opening to foreground the capriciousness of moral thresholds, as opposed to presenting a life of fixed ethical positions.

Dora Zhang believes that we do not yet fully recognize and attend to the importance of atmospheres as social and political phenomena in everyday life.¹⁸ Literature on the atmosphere tends to undertheorize people’s modes of engagement with the atmospheric, a thought echoed by Steven Brown and colleagues.¹⁹ Atmospheres, ubiquitous sites of affective charge, play an important role in opening political horizons: “For all their seeming haziness, atmospheres have real effects. They alter the kinds of things that can be said in a space, the kinds of actions that are thinkable, and the modes of sociality that are possible.”²⁰ An attentiveness to the atmospheric enables us to recognize nonstatist ways of being political. Angharad C. Stephens and colleagues agree: “Engaging politics through affects and atmospherics brings different collectives into view, beyond the nation-state.”²¹

Rich vocabulary for considering atmosphere is provided by Afro-pessimism literature, which asserts that the Black body in duress is coterminous with slavery. Christina Sharpe’s elaboration of the weather is particularly useful. Sharpe writes that “slavery suffuses our present-day environment in an afterlife called the weather”²² and that “antiblackness is as pervasive as climate.”²³ She continues, “The weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is anti-black.”²⁴ Sharpe’s reference to the saturation of the contemporary with violence (antiblackness) and its weather-like pervasiveness—which Kristen Simmons, in relation to Indigenous bodies, terms “settler atmospherics”²⁵—provides a rich tapestry to think through the violence in the pahars.

The inescapability of this violence is described by Frank Wilderson III. Building on Saidiya Hartman’s work on fugitive justice,²⁶ he writes that a (Black) radical agenda “emanates from a condition of suffering for which there is no imaginable strategy for redress—no narrative of redemption” and that this precise quality makes such an agenda terrifying.²⁷ Sharpe considers what we must know in navigating environments where there is a continual propulsion toward Black death. She proposes an atmospheric metaphor: “The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies.”²⁸ Simmons pushes this further: “What would it take for individuals to reconceptualize the embeddedness in which we all already are with and have the potential to be for—to stage the grounds for a collective reimagining, a conspiration, an atmospheric otherwise?”²⁹

Sharpe’s work presses me to think further about the relation of violence with time. She and her contemporaries suggest that violence is not historicity as such but an ongoing duration of oppression, diminishment, and annihilation “that sets the tone for an affective being-in-the-world.”³⁰ This enables us to consider violence in the pahars as “sustained affective texture,”³¹ an “embodied affectivity,”³² as saturation,³³ slow accumulation,³⁴ envelopment,³⁵ and lingering intensity.³⁶

Architects invest time and energy in creating the desired feeling of infrastructure. They manipulate the feel of space.³⁷ The pahars as topographical features are fundamentally architectural. They are spatial conditions; they enable specific atmospheres. As I show in the following chapters, the violence in the pahars “seem[s] to fill the space with a certain tone of feeling like a haze,”³⁸ like a “sort of spirit that floats around.”³⁹ People would often say to me: “The atmosphere of the pahars is such” (yahan ka mahaul hi aisa hai).

A Fleshy Theory of Repair

What does it then mean to live with/in dystopia as dailiness? Lauren Berlant reminds us that violence is not necessarily episodes of “stuckness”;⁴⁰ it can open subjects to “a new habitation of history”⁴¹ instead of simply letting life wilt and die. Its chronic, lingering intensity settles as “a social state,” serving as a “situation of emergence.”⁴² The durationality of violence, its hiatus and epistemological crisis, hint the chronic as something always on the cusp, a life on the line, an interruption experienced not in the form of waiting but in the very conflict, refusal, and reconciliation with the quotidian and one’s finitude. The chronic is emergent abandonment, marked by unexceptional indeterminacy, “where everyday efforts don’t align with a teleology of progressive betterment.”⁴³ The chronic beckons an investigation of chronology—temporality and sequence, and the chronotope—time and space, which give life-making its distinctive and circuitous character.

Yasmeen Arif argues for life through the lens of life—not death.⁴⁴ She notes that dying has been overemphasized in contemporary understandings of biopolitics. But what about the forms of life configured in the wake of violence—or afterlives? How can the question of life “in all its incessant living and dying, be posed as a query of the social?”⁴⁵ What more can be said about those “subtle arts of repair by which rich and robust lives are sustained against the weight of centrifugal odds”?⁴⁶

Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies have a legacy of endurance. Mimi Sheller recalls how “antislavery, anticolonial, antiplantation survival strategies were crucial to surviving plantation enslavement and undermining colonialism, and they remain crucial to surviving the Anthropocene in the future.”⁴⁷ She adds, “The coloniality of climate calls for attention to repair, care, and reparations.”⁴⁸

In the following chapters, I focus on how people keep their daily intact, reclaim a sense of self, and transform the social in a web of relations.⁴⁹ Central to these efforts is foregrounding the demands and expectations people place on themselves and on each other. By this, I mean the incremental and/or radical adjustments made as inflections to the social and in anticipation of worlds to come. I try to make visible the labor of working through to regain a sense of wholeness, “reconnecting of parts of self that have been disconnected—parts of self, and self to others.”⁵⁰

The joy and exhaustion of maintaining and extending life despite breathtaking diminishment and world annihilation form the heart of this book. This endeavor includes “combat breathing,” as suggested by Frantz Fanon; that is, the complete depletion of one’s energies simply to continue living.⁵¹ As well as more fugitive exchanges of air that enunciate a life that is “exorbitant, capacious, and fundamentally, social” yet still structured by violence.⁵² Repair is affective labor and, hence, as Deborah A. Thomas points out, “unobligated to the teleologies of liberalism.”⁵³ Savannah Shange takes us further: repair work is abolitionist—it disrupts liberal teleologies altogether.⁵⁴ Repair encapsulates the willful defiance of the logics of the colonial present. It is whatever and everything that is needed to carry on living; it is the opportunity for the flow of life.

Repair is more than a simple fix or restoration. French-Algerian artist Kader Attia understands repair as constant and evolving: “an endless process of intellectual, cultural, and political adjustments.”⁵⁵ The work of repair is thoughtful, thought-out, processual but also “messy, elaborate, layered.”⁵⁶ It involves material and philological risk-taking; its animacy is marked by “viral proliferation” rather than grammatical predictability.⁵⁷ This includes the smallest of gestures that convey regard for one another. By this, I mean those delicate acts that unfold not only in the adjustment and crafting of moral spaces within existing socialities but in the creation of new socialities altogether, which may even transcend the limits of the world. These shifting relations are also sites of making assertions and advancing political claims instrumental for improving one’s conditions or further anchoring one’s position in an otherwise inconsistent, contradictory, fraught, and fragile sociality. Repair work is the absorption of the extraordinary into common instantiation in the many different attempts to carry on living.

Repair is heterogeneously situated. It is the working and reworking of the disappointments of the world as is. It is imperfect striving as much as bold forms of self-advocacy. Without appreciating the capaciousness of repair, we risk reducing repair work to something rote and automatic, like putting something familiar back together. This leads to not only a false reduction of life’s labor but also an arrogance that life can be put back together. What about all those too-common situations where there was never an equitable, egalitarian, and even social to begin with?

Resisting the impulse to dictate how to be in the world, I try to capture how else to be in the world: how to live with collapse, not knowing what is on the other side—the beautiful, but also the cruddy. This involves the enormous task of lifting those forms of life that are at odds with “dominant, and dominating, modes of being,”⁵⁸ focusing on spaces of dissolution, opening, and potentiality where life emerges unexpectedly.

No stable or coherent vantage point can be assumed from which a theory of repair can be imagined—because no such vantage point exists. I approach repair as a conceptual container in which these different considerations are placed at any moment. Tonino Griffero and Marco Tedeschini remind us that in an atmospheric approach, it is “not the body that we see in the mirror but the one we feel.”⁵⁹ Knowledge-making is the work of feeling—“Feeling is necessary for thinking; there is no thinking that is not feeling.”⁶⁰ Sara Ahmed writes: “Theory itself is often assumed to be abstract: something is more theoretical the more abstract it is, the more it is abstracted from everyday life. To abstract is to drag away, detach, pull away, or divert. We might then have to drag theory back, to bring theory back to life.”⁶¹ A theory of repair must be a “theory in the flesh”⁶² that speaks to and from life, encompassing the density of the affective, affected, felt, and intuited. After all, feeling is theory, needed for arriving at the “moral affective heart” of matters as “we feel our histories as well as think them.”⁶³ How else will we push past the gatekeepers of knowledge?

Flourishing

Kevin Quashie asks, “What would it mean to consider black aliveness, especially given how readily—and literally—blackness is indexed to death?”⁶⁴ To indeed behold such aliveness, he argues, a different world must be imagined that surpasses the “everywhere and everyway” of death.⁶⁵ To do so, we have to begin somewhere else; aliveness “cannot be mapped in the syntax of Western norms.” Quashie continues that “there is no end to the condition of coloniality and captivity—no end, but there is life in the midst and aftermath of those interminable conditions.”⁶⁶ I am also interested in aliveness in the pahars, the “quality of being, a term of habitat, a manner and aesthetic, a feeling—or many of them, circuits in an atmosphere. Like breath.”⁶⁷

An aesthetics of aliveness is one of flourishing. How does life flourish in the pahars, and why is life there not described in such terms? I suspect this failure lies in our inherited modes of adjudicating knowledge and our hegemonic yearnings for ascertaining the “correct” way of being in the world. These imperial desires must be disrupted; otherwise, the changing world will appear as is: stuck, static, irrefutable.

Lauren Berlant asks why there are so few words for flourishing:

For example, in a crisis culture, we’re so excited about gaming the difference between zero and one that flourishing somehow gets bracketed. Survival looks like a triumph, and that’s a terrible thing. I want flourishing. But what do I mean by flourishing anyway? What are all of the synonyms I know for flourishing? There aren’t that many. Isn’t that interesting? The phrase you use is an increase in joy. But an increase of joy might not feel like increase. It might feel like relief, it might feel like I can be a mass of incoherent things and not be defeated by that.⁶⁸

One can think of flourishing as an “illuminating aspirational framework.”⁶⁹ It is an activity, not a state; it is “doing well … not the result of doing well; a life, not the reward of a life.”⁷⁰ Flourishing is a project of striving to be—intensely normative,⁷¹ offering no singular determinate view of a good life.⁷² I have come to understand flourishing as the ethical and moral risks people take in their daily life that carry political and existential stakes and offer clues on the aesthetics and poetics of desirous futures and wanting pasts and presents.

The notion of flourishing in the Western canon can be traced partially to Aristotle’s treatment of ethics. Pertinent to this worldview is his discussion on eudaimonia, which roughly translates as happiness, excellence—or flourishing.⁷³ Aristotle considered flourishing as the ultimate human endeavor and a way to center ethics within the constraints in which people live. An Aristotelian treatment of ethics, as Bryan Turner explains, displaces the “Kantian legacy in the Enlightenment notions of autonomy and agency which were predicated on the idea of abstractly constituted human subjects whose ideas and behavior were independent of the cultural and social contexts in which they occurred.”⁷⁴ Saba Mahmood reminds us that to illuminate flourishing, we must be willing to “parochialize” our political certitude and leave open the possibility that our analysis may come to complicate the vision of human flourishing that we may dearly hold.⁷⁵ This “self-displacement” is a necessary ethic for engaging with “alternative visions of political life, social well-being, and human flourishing—without necessarily advocating them—as affording positions from which to see things in a new light.”⁷⁶ Irene McMullin wonders: “What does human life lived well look like?”⁷⁷ I pursue this question in the book.

The Verve and Joy of Living

To bring these discussions closer to the pahars, I locate flourishing within the more familiar heuristic of mazaa—the verve and joy of a life ontologically well lived. Mazaa in Urdu can mean pleasure or joy. Jonathan Anjaria and Ulka Anjaria describe mazaa as sensuous, which draws us to life’s viscerality and exerts an embodied pull on us.⁷⁸ Mazaa’s unwieldy and seductive properties may generate other ways of knowing, analyzing, critiquing, and developing a different relationship with texts and the people we write about/with. They explain: “Dwelling in mazaa does not mean ignoring inequalities, violence, or power, but finding new ways of writing about the forms of life that thrive even in times of crisis. It also means illuminating how pleasure can generate new communities and political possibilities as well as new understandings of the role of the critic in social analysis.”⁷⁹ Capturing mazaa requires an attention to detail, life’s excess, which can refuse “the scholar’s desire to sum up, reduce, and synthesize—academic practices which unintentionally foreclose the irreducibility of experience, subsuming it instead to a theoretical frame likely established in advance.”⁸⁰

In my pursuit of capturing the mazaa of life in the pahars, I have not forgotten Paul Harrison’s advice to resist “the seductive coercion in the invitation to affirm life”⁸¹ and Chris Philo’s suggestion to also attune to what “diminishes the human, cribs and confines it [life], curtails or destroys its capacities, silencing its affective grip, banishing its involvements.”⁸² Concurrent to mazaa, I pay attention to the exhaustion, weariness, fatigue, and steady endurance of life in the pahars—or what Kathleen Stewart has termed “ordinary affects,” scenes of liveness and exhaustion.⁸³ Eleanor Wilkinson and Iliana Ortega-Alcázar offer a reparative reading of weariness as a “potential retreat from the relentless drive to move forward,” a form of dissent,⁸⁴ an affective state with political promise,⁸⁵ a repair and restoration “regardless of whether or not it leads to eventual rebound.”⁸⁶ In his essay “The Exhausted,” Gilles Deleuze suggests that exhaustion is fundamental to creating new subjects: it is only once all possibilities have been exhausted that something genuinely new can come about.⁸⁷ A creative life, whether of refusal or resistance, can come about only through exhaustion.

Kashmir of the Pahars

For most of its contemporary history, Kashmir has remained fixed in the organizing imaginations of South Asia, reduced to a matter of contestation between Pakistan and India. Both countries claim the region in its entirety and have fought three wars over it. Parts of it also lie within China. Javaid, a Kashmiri headmaster, stated while organizing a debating competition that he wants his students to come together on Kashmir outside of “India’s impure claws, Pakistan’s overbearing bureaucracy, and China’s giant stature” (Bharat kay napak panjay, Pakistan ki intizamiya, aur China jaisa pehlwan).

Fortunately, a growing body of literature has reignited conversations on Kashmir’s sovereignty, along with calls for greater rights and freedoms for its people.⁸⁹ These writings center state-based violence to bring into view the rampant violations routinely inflicted on Kashmiri bodies. A sizable portion of this literature is situated in Indian-administered Kashmir, particularly the Kashmir valley, where human rights violations by the Indian military are rampant and Kashmiri voices of resistance are also the loudest. This literature, however, has had the unintended consequence of considering Kashmir only in valley-centric and primarily urban terms, leaving out the pahars, where this book is set. Second, while commendable in their dedication to Kashmiri life, many of these writings unintentionally foreclose the Kashmiri people in a perpetual dialectic between subjugation and subjugator, as contained by the vocabularies of agency, resistance, and resilience. Linda Nixon reminds us, “Not all stories need to be resistant or resurgent to be true.”⁹⁰ How can we think about those moments when people are not actively resisting systems of oppression?

I am interested in moral and ethical striving in the pahars that does not lend itself only in relation to state-based violence or directional responses to it. I am looking to reveal those other investments in life, which also poignantly convey moral presence. In our haste to continually return to the geopolitical with Kashmir, what else has been lost and given up? I respond by foregrounding the labor of life within everyday chronicity in the pahars, where violence constitutes the very atmosphere.

Speculative A/Geographies

Kashmir, as a political and philosophical project, and as an element of South Asia outside the framework of containment, is a challenge to an area studies model that draws on fixed and territorial notions of the nation-state.⁹¹ Katherine McKittrick believes that philosophical attention is needed on present cartographic rules not only because they unjustly reify human hierarchies in place but because these rules are alterable and there exists a terrain through which different stories can be told.⁹² Arguably, Kashmir’s colonial present is “as much the result of a historical process as it is of a permanent denial of the opportunity to become a different political space.”⁹³ But as McKittrick reminds us, cartographic rules are indeed contestable, and different seizures of geography are possible—where, for example, Kashmiri bodies move freely, unencumbered by military check posts, barbed wire, and borderlines.⁹⁴

Like India, Pakistan claims Kashmir entirely as its own. This is reflected in the country’s most recent “political map,” launched in 2020.⁹⁵ Pakistan’s cartographical reading of the former princely state is an interesting departure from its claim on the region, as it leaves the outer (northeast) edges of Kashmir “ostentatiously unbounded—an astounding rebuttal of the universal dependence of national maps on borders.”⁹⁶ The new map retains from previous iterations the following text on Kashmir: “Disputed Territory—Final Status to Be Decided in Line with Relevant UNSC [United Nations Security Council] Resolutions.”⁹⁷

What alternative stories can be told about Kashmir? I take us to the pahars currently under Pakistan’s control; these form the region of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) and extend into the country’s north. However, this is not the map I wish to draw, nor do I desire to locate the pahars in line with their colonial inheritance. The pahars are where profound rurality meets extreme topography, where borders make the least sense. The pahars violate the LoC that separates Pakistan-administered Kashmir from Indian-administered Kashmir; they also violate Pakistan’s internal borders that separate AJK from Northern Pakistan. Lateef, whose village is in a province adjacent to AJK but not quite in it, quipped: “What is the difference between us [in Northern Pakistan] and those in Kashmir? Nothing! My forefathers migrated to these pahars to escape the zalim (cruel) Dogra rulers.⁹⁸ We have lived here ever since. But this doesn’t mean I am not Kashmiri. I am from here and there.”

I attempt a discursive repair from a history of intellectual disaster and epistemic violence in ethnographies on Kashmir, and I hold in tension existing works on the region. In the chapters that follow, I posit Kashmir as a conglomeration of movement, intensity, and affect, as expanse and grounded territory—a Kashmir of multitudes. I try to locate Kashmir outside of its contemporary placement (both geographically and epistemologically), just like the pahars, which, at whim, boldly violate the markings of nation-states. This is a response to Martin Sökefeld’s earlier call on Kashmir to “take a look at the margins, and also from the margins,”⁹⁹ with the caveat that the fact of dwelling in the pahars disrupts the binary of center/margin altogether. My position is in line with bell hooks’s suggestion to accept the margin as the creative center; in this case, the pahars form the heart of Kashmir, not its peripheries.¹⁰⁰ In her work on the earthquake in Haiti, Gina Athena Ulysse argues that new or different narratives are important, not only because they rectify, rebut, or nuance history but because they shape the ability to imagine new relationships altogether.¹⁰¹

Borderlands

The pahars are a microcosm of border-making practices, which the pahari people experience daily. This includes a lack of infrastructure and public transport, which disconnects residents from the rest of the country and from each other; poor essential services, such as healthcare, which only just separates life from death; and unemployment, which propels young men to the cities, bordering them off from their homes and families. Numerous military and police checkpoints dot the mountains, marking a maze of national, provincial, and territorial borders and a range of difficult-to-access “sensitive regions.” Residents must prove their identity to pass these check posts or risk getting denied entry into their community; those lacking official documentation face harassment. Jennifer Shoaff terms these state-led practices of containment, control, and regulation “borders within borders.” These describe the overlapping sites of power, such as border crossings, checkpoints, arrests, harassment, and the microsurveillance of public life.¹⁰² I add to this the very tangible border separating the pahari people from myself, in terms of urbanity, education, class, and mobility, which is typical of the separations between those from the plains versus those from the pahars. The LoC is not the only border that residents must negotiate in the everyday, though that weighs heavily.

The pahars do not simply connote territorial limits or political barriers but conceptual differences.¹⁰³ They are borderlands, not only because of their location but what they open. Gloria Anzaldúa frames the borderland as that which is most susceptible to hybridity.¹⁰⁴ Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson believe that the borderland is a place of contradictions, where people are politically active and change occurs.¹⁰⁵ Rather than “dismissing them as insignificant, marginal zones, thin slivers of land between stable places,”¹⁰⁶ borderlands are the frontiers of knowledge that enable the questioning of political and social organization and hegemonic normativity.

The pahars are affective resources that emplace people. Life therein—pahari modes of life—are vital sources of flourishing. Pahari life awards crucial entry points for reimagining these expansive mountainscapes and their forced placement within the nation-state. This provides an opportunity to approach the pahars outside their geopolitical boundedness, as a conglomeration of lived landscapes and situated intimacies stitched together by heterogeneous movement and flow. The pahars provide openings to circumvent the normative truths of the nation-state as the only valid complement to life and politics. They bring into view the pahari people’s daily struggles for political self-designation, self-description, and subjectivity and their frustration of the very essence of Pakistani citizenship. All this is a reminder that it is not enough to consider Kashmir in valley-centric terms alone, that the notion of “Kashmir” is expansive and multiple, and that the language of center and periphery remains lacking.

Yarimar Bonilla suggests that it is worth exploring what a decolonial notion of sovereignty, rather than only a postcolonial one, might mean.¹⁰⁷ Drawing from Gauri Viswanathan’s work, Steven Salaita asserts that “decolonization isn’t simply a matter of expunging an occupying power, but of subverting the regimes of order it imposes on the world.”¹⁰⁸ My attempts to think of Kashmir and its continuity with Northern Pakistan through its pahars, as expanse, territorially and theoretically, are part and parcel of the epistemic disobedience I aim to nurture in the book.

By way of the pahars, I build on scholarship that questions how the boundaries of political possibility are circumscribed and policed. This is not simply a book on Kashmir or Northern Pakistan but rather about the pahars that straddle the two. My stance is not a naive wishing away of borders and their demarcations or a closing of oneself to their material implications. This is a reparative move to illuminate the interconnectivity of landscape, ecology, life. I honor the melding of the pahars. In embracing them, I search for analytical and philological opportunities to push the nation-state to the margins of analysis. The pahars offer breathing room to write freely and courageously on Kashmir.

Moods of Arrival

The word theory arises from the Greek root theōría, meaning seeing, looking, observing. What about feeling? Sara Ahmed cautions that the atmosphere is not simply “received” but is also contingent on our processes of reading and the very moods of our arrival.¹⁰⁹ My entry into the pahars was uneventful. I slipped past the various security checkpoints without raising any alarms. Since I “look” and “act” Pakistani, the border, provincial, or military police did not deem my entry suspicious; a routine inspection of my identity documents was sufficient. Most likely, they assumed I was an urban tourist. Or perhaps noting the bottled water in the back of my vehicle—a bougie international nongovernmental organization (NGO) worker from Islamabad (Pakistan’s capital city).

I have worked in the region since 2014 as a researcher and, before this, as an aid worker. My host organizations, who have been active here for over a decade, vouched for me. They provided me with logistical support and generous advice on doing this work. With their help, I put together a group of young people willing to work with me as research assistants and collaborators.

Our very first task was to secure a vehicle that could withstand the rough pahari roads. We found an old beat-up jeep (with no seat belts), which over time proved its reliability. Its owner laughed when I expressed a desire for functioning seat belts: “Sir ji!¹¹⁰ No one wears those here! They are dangerous! When a car is about to swerve into a ravine, you want to be free to jump!” On a later occasion, when we were heading back to Islamabad in another car (one with seat belts), Aurangzeb, the driver, noting that I had mine fastened, exclaimed: “Omer bhai (brother), the belt is so constraining, I can’t breathe in it, it’s just like the state.”

We drove to the nearest Bata Shoes to purchase hiking boots on our first day. Even Aurangzeb wanted them. He felt that the numerous times he would be hitting the brakes at every bend of the pahari roads would surely grind down his slippers. Next, despite my companions’ concerns, I drew a list of “vulnerabilities” that could help us identify potential research interlocutors. Elizabeth Marino and A. J. Faas suggest that vulnerability as a lens of engagement “can perpetuate violence—epistemic, semiotic, and material” by concealing the genius of people’s lives as well as the systems that create vulnerabilities in the first place.¹¹¹ To identify the vulnerable, they continue, is not just a process of essentializing but can erase “nested and contested sites of struggle for different visions of utopian futures, for contrasting articulations of what constitutes risk, and for diverse cultural logics of the good.”¹¹² However, back then, the language of vulnerability, as instrumentalized in disaster literature, was the most prominent tool in my conceptual repertoire. This was the remnant of my past training and professional identity as a humanitarian. In that line of work, the most vulnerable are actively parsed out, often using a meager checklist to respond to constructed narratives of resource constraint, triage, and impact. I am also reminded of Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice—the harms we commit against each other in our capacity as “a knower.”¹¹³ Fricker elaborates the idea of hermeneutical injustice as our “collective hermeneutical impoverishment.”¹¹⁴ She is referring to our insufficient epistemic resources that prevent us from recognizing the content, form, and context of the lives of others, rendering them unintelligible, unimportant, inconsequential.

When I approached villagers to review my hastily drafted list and provide suggestions on whom to speak with, I was met with a potent mix of ridicule, disappointment, and defiance. They felt it was impossible and even unnecessary to define anyone in this way. They suggested more nuance and a consideration of the very nature of people’s grounding in the village itself to appreciate their embeddedness or lack thereof. Others felt that I had no right to demand such a reduction of life. “What are you attempting?” they asked. “Are you looking to ration people’s stories and experiences, like the NGOs ration aid?” Abdul, a headmaster, suggested that I slow down: “First, learn to feel.”

Learning to Feel

Feeling is a mode of attention. In her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde writes: “I feel, therefore I can be free.”¹¹⁵ Katherine McKittrick adds, “Knowing is feeling is knowing.”¹¹⁶ It quickly became apparent that I needed to engage with people on their terms. Any preset conceptual tools I possessed were perhaps better left behind. I let go of the list. This was the freedom I needed to do this work—the work of feeling.

Slowly, people warmed up to me. The initial conversations were the most awkward. It took numerous cups of chai (tea), hours of sheepish small talk, countless clumsy questions, and false starts before the awkwardness paved the way for something else. As my circulation in the pahars increased, I went from a stranger to a spectacle. I elaborate on this transformation in the next chapter. Abrar confessed: “When I first saw you, I thought, who is this ajuba (oddball)? Does he speak Urdu? How will he survive in the pahars? What will we talk about?”

My initial impulse was to document people’s experiences of the earthquake and floods. But they spoke very little about these spectacular events—I also did not insist. Instead, our conversations revolved around more heartful stories, such as those of the betrayal of a close friend, the roub (fear and hold) of the military, or just the sheer boredom of being young and lonely in the pahars. Stories are never just stories. “Even the most ‘simple’ of stories,” Paul Cobley reminds us, “is embedded in a network of relations that is sometimes astounding in its complexity.”¹¹⁷ Within these unassuming details lay breathtaking clues on how people grapple with the afterlives of disaster; how they sustain themselves; find nourishment, breath, and breathing.

The affective and its minutiae—the slippage of relations, the withering of friendships, the slights, and grudges, life’s growing pains—point to the multiple forms of violence that foreground life in the pahars; it is not just the earthquake or floods. While these disasters were substantial events, they did not encapsulate the entirety of people’s experiences nor represent the full range of the violence at play. They were just another blow in a longue durée of violations, diminishment, and dehumanization. Disasters are cascading forms of violence; they are part of ongoing chronicity, where large and small events fold into each other. It is opening oneself to each other that accounts for how relationships slip, fall, and possibly reconstitute.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten remind us, “Study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.… The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.”¹¹⁸ My time in the pahars looked no different. “Fieldwork” took the form of conversations around the fire and in the kitchen; circulating in the landscape and getting lost; incurring bodily injury; foraging, cooking, and eating together; accepting each other’s vulnerabilities and imperfections; receiving and giving gifts; sharing and keeping secrets; offering assistance and also asking for help; and, of course, percolating in each other’s words and worlds. I have tried to locate my ethnographic incursions in what Richa Nagar calls a “praxis without guarantees,”¹¹⁹ a politics “that roots itself in and through radical vulnerability, with the hopes of opening up spaces for negotiating the ethics of how we come to tell the stories we tell.”¹²⁰

Rules of Engagement

I have developed curious entanglements with people in the pahars. They hold power to terrify me, frustrate me, reduce me to tears, make me happy, confuse me, and make me doubt my convictions and commitments. They demand my help, offer me assistance when possible, and tolerate me in their homes and kitchens. At the same time, they consider it okay to ridicule my lack of physical fitness, fear of spiders, or the “uselessness” of my research in ways that are sufficiently pointed but rarely hurtful. In most cases, my interlocutors have extended gestures of kindness and friendship as long as I am willing to learn their rules of engagement. They have insisted on kinds of tellings that are counterintuitive to what I have been taught to notice—they point at directions, things, events for which I have no tools. This led to a rather lengthy period of adjustment, where my ethnographic intrusions took a variety of shapes and forms to receive the kinds of telling my interlocutors insisted upon. This adjustment process resulted in much heartbreak, loss of direction, self-doubt, and humility. I hold on to these valuable feelings to this day.

As the book will show, my interlocutors are not securely placed. The protective guarantees of the state, community, or even the family rarely hold for them. Some of them have permanent disabilities, are very alone and elderly, or are “beyond” the age of marriage.¹²¹ They inspire anxiety in those around them simply because they do not adhere to the same rules by which I/we/you have come to know the world. Their demands and expectations are “out of this world” in terms of the sheer magnitude of the material and philological risks they are compelled to undertake. At the same time, I want to be careful not to cast my interlocutors as exceptional, to wrongfully imply that since they are “so far out there,” they are analytically unimportant and irrelevant to more centrally situated life projects. Their hypervulnerabilities (exclusions on steroids) offer a unique view of sociality, one that remains unfazed by the readily available (and analytically insufficient) categories of family, community, or sovereignty.

Their karwi baatein (bitter, inconvenient truths that sting) encourage me to disentangle power relations, decode social hierarchies, and notice discord and fragmentation in places that otherwise appear beautifully put together. While their modes of inhabiting the world are practical, humble, materially grounded—they are exceptionally sophisticated in their theoretical offerings and raise urgent concerns that far exceed my conceptual repertoire. Naisargi Dave reminds us that the normative “is that which is allowed to be and remain in contradiction without existential consequence.”¹²² The inconsistencies of my interlocutors matter because they refuse the world as is.

Assembling, Weaving, Braiding

What if nonnormativity is taken as the only stable sensibility, and theory becomes a project of feeling from such a location? I am not interested in advancing a grand theory of repair or replacing one interpretive category with another but rather in illuminating the grammar of concepts itself. Accepting the subject as always “contingent and indefinite”¹²³ and yearning for a fleshier theory of repair from the standpoint of a radically unfixing position, I have opted for assemblage as theory and praxis.

Jasbir Puar describes assemblage as an “affective conglomeration,” a “series of dispersed but mutually implicated and messy networks” that draw together “enunciation and dissolution, causality and effect, organic and nonorganic forces.”¹²⁴ Assemblage connotes interconnectivity in unbounded iteration, conditions of coalescing where “entities, particles, and elements come together, flow, break apart, interface, skim over each other, are never stable, but are defined through their continual interface, not as objects meeting but as multiplicities emerging from interactions.”¹²⁵ Assemblage refers to increment in the “dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections,” for “there are no points or positions.… There are only lines.”¹²⁶

Assemblage welcomes an emergent gathering of subjectivities, positions, and trajectories, offering an ontological framework for diving into the fluidity, connectivity, and multiplicity of what I am trying to gather as the work of repair. Tavia Nyong’o adds: “Assemblage points us toward not just things but to velocities, not just to objects but to affects, not just to perceptible detritus but to the imperceptible play of forces that bring them into contact, fusion, and fission.”¹²⁷

I have chosen the work of weaving and braiding. Gina Athena Ulysse offers the concept of rasanblaj (compilation or gathering in Haitian Kreyòl).¹²⁸ Taking inspiration from M. Jacqui Alexander’s assertion that colonialism is about fragmentation and dismemberment,¹²⁹ Ulysse identifies the experimental and polysemic reassembly of fragments to “integrate an historically split subject or fractured being of empire” as our most urgent task.¹³⁰ Ulysse describes rasanblaj as an “organizing principle of sorts”;¹³¹ the “assembly, compilation, enlisting, regrouping (of ideas, things, people, spirits).”¹³² She writes: “So with unequivocal evidence that the past and the future exist in the present, rasanblaj not only presupposes intent (an awareness of self/position/agenda) and method but also offers possibilities for other modalities and narratives.… Rasanblaj demands that we consider and confront the limited scope of segregated frameworks to explore what remains excluded in this landscape that is scorched yet full of life, riddled with inequities and dangerous and haunting memories.”¹³³ Rasanblaj invokes life’s dailyness—living with hunger, desire, betrayal, fulfillment “embodied viscerally in the structural.”¹³⁴

My pursuit of a theory of repair is an attempt to clear the obstacles—material, philological, conceptual—for a grammar of life to emerge. My task is to gather breath and breathing amid overwhelming suffocation in atmospheres of collapse. Sara Ahmed writes that to struggle means to aspire. The Latin root for aspiration is “to breathe.” And the struggle for a bearable life is to “have spaces to breathe … with breath comes imagination. With breath comes possibility.”¹³⁵

Illumination

What does it mean to put breath back into the body? How can we think alongside those who are being suffocated? What does it mean to put oneself on the line? Ronak Kapadia argues that to remain accountable to those marked by violence, more sensuous and affective ways of knowing are needed.¹³⁸ To do so, he writes, we must demand a stranger calculus, an “insurgent aesthetic” that “makes sensuous what has been ghosted.”¹³⁹ A conceptual and attitudinal shift; a closer look is needed at the “quality of the light” of our illuminations. Audre Lorde writes: “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.”¹⁴⁰

I experiment with both content and form. Through a blending of theoretical and ethnographic textures—affective swirls—the book is organized as a series of interconnected scenes. These are framing devices through which specific aspects of the feeling world are rendered palpable. They foreground life’s unruly excessiveness as “additive and accretive,”¹⁴¹ drawing attention to life’s seams even at its seamlessness to pull us into a mode of attachment where a relationship to everyone and everything is that of deeply felt care. Amid the pitter-patter of the everyday, the scenes force us to hold extraordinary violence and ordinary concerns in the same breath, offering a “meditation on how we live in the suspense between the ordinary and extraordinary.”¹⁴² They need not be read in order; their numbering does not suggest sequence but implies multiplicity and proliferation.

A scene is an insistence on finding relation—another way of connecting text: self with text, text with text. A scene is a thought, an idea, an incomplete illustration. It is a unit of conflict: “It is the account of an effort to attain a goal despite opposition. Its structure is (1) goal (2) conflict (3) disaster.”¹⁴³ A scene is a unit of time. It is unbroken flow;¹⁴⁴ a unit of event. As fraught reenactments of desire, scenes support the unhinging of teleological time and the impossible knowledge of relationality itself. They bring into focus the question of curation when the author, much like the director of a film, yells, “Action! Cut!”

Several auxiliary transgressions accompany the scenes. Poetic, visual, and narrative interludes offer to take the reader’s pulse as modest efforts of accountability. They interrupt the organizing arguments of the book and, through fragments and autotheory, provide a fuller sense of the broader entanglements that counter the story’s linearity and tug at its seams. The interludes encourage multiple appraisals of the book’s offerings and discovery of what is said and, reading between the lines, what is left unspoken.

Like text, images are sites of interpretive struggle. They offer an arc of their own. I have left many of them untitled. In some instances, additional context is provided. Labels and descriptions are cautiously approached as this is not a museum where lives are displayed like artifacts. Instead, the photographs contribute to sensuous knowing: “an intimate and proximal practice, a mimetic form of analysis”;¹⁴⁵ the convergence of the hepatic and erotic;¹⁴⁶ where analysis becomes “touching, not mastering.”¹⁴⁷ The images insist on being engaged obliquely through another register—that of listening.

Tina Campt asks: What does it mean to listen to images? She suggests that listening to images means opening oneself to the many ways pictures make contact.¹⁴⁸ Photographs are haptic objects, meant not only to be seen but also to be touched, handed from one person to the other. “Touching them, leafing through them, giving them to people, sending them to other folks, framing them, displaying them—those are not just encounters of vision or sight.”¹⁴⁹ The encounter is also sonic. Some images register at “a quiet frequency that is not the silent.” They convey “the softly buzzing tension of colonialism, the low hum of resistance and subversion, and the anticipation and performance of a future that has yet to happen.”¹⁵⁰

The scenes are also interspersed with brief mediations on cooking and eating. These convey an investment in life, the joy and verve of living—life’s pleasures and mazaa, which are all too often bracketed. Food—its preparation, tasting, sharing—displays the care and attention one brings upon themselves and others. Eating adds to sensuous knowing; otherwise, we risk writing tasteless ethnographies disconnected from the worlds we seek to portray.¹⁵¹

Gestures of Care

The various analytical devices—scenes, photographs, interludes—counter the parsimony of interpretation. They present layers of the ordinary as ubiquitous sites of affective charge. They assist in apprehending the atmosphere as emplaced affect while referring to life’s elemental nature. My aim here is to create a delay within which we may dwell in the affective legacies of violence, in how life sustains itself, even flourishes, and in the modes of feelings engendered. Keeping in check the impulse to represent, evaluate, analyze, and intervene, my approach enables a focus on atmospheres and their attendant moods. Emergent, reparative, and aesthetic modes of writing invigorate and hone modes of attention that sustain feeling. This is an attempt to restore affect as a limitless possibility, not another term of interpretive foreclosure. How, then, to write about the experience of atmospheres without naming an atmosphere as one single and coherent thing?¹⁵²

The book is born out of analytical restraint; it is likely a difficult read. Indeterminacy and inconsistency are embraced as method to arrive at the present as durative, the past as malleable, and the future as unstable. Only then can life’s insistences as folded into its inconsistencies be glimpsed. I do not seek to sustain a singular narrative; my arguments are kaleidoscopic and elliptical. I weave texture, color, pattern. My offerings are burdensome for I do not provide instructions for landing or guidance on how these stories should be read. The book is a collection of wounds, heartbeats, and heartaches. It is the culmination of bruises, blisters, and chafed thighs. The words are born out of sweat, tears, and breathlessness. I write for the reader who chooses living, laughter, and learning and is “willing to abduct one’s self from home and be self-surpassing.”¹⁵³ Those who seek comfort in inherited knowledge—“normopaths” as Félix Guattari puts it¹⁵⁴—will find the text frustrating. I imagine the reader as enchanted. Less a “sovereign, studious mind, a still body traveling outward to an abstract exterior, then returning for quiet, structured reflection,” but someone who is enthralled and possessed.¹⁵⁵ Atmospheric Violence is a book on flourishing. It advances radical and incremental engagements through heartwork, which is a commitment of another kind. Heartwork encapsulates the labor and attention (fieldwork + homework) that must be nurtured to see and feel the intensities of others. Heartwork is extraneous endeavor; the lives of others should not be so easily consumable. It is work on top of work—heartwork is hard work.

Dear reader, I ask certain work of you. I rely on your generosity. The book’s structure and flow ask for pause—and intentionally so. The reader is encouraged to develop another relationship to narrative, one that is not based on linearity, and to give up control. Engaging on these terms is an opportunity to renegotiate one’s expectations from scholarly text. Different benchmarks for adjudicating knowledge are suggested to reimagine modes of knowing, feeling, and telling that unsettle the comforts of established canons and what constitutes worthwhile knowledge. Through these ethical and aesthetic commitments, I have tried to hold us accountable—to each other, to the text, and to the book’s protagonists.

It is important to maintain these curvatures; otherwise, reading risks becoming just another rote, automatic, and colonial mode of arrival. The scenes and accompanying forms work as aesthetic and redemptive devices for accommodating life instead of as weapons for declaring sovereignty over life. Atmospheric Violence is what pulls into focus when we refuse to reduce writing to its instrumentality. Content and form are intimately linked; my conceptual goals are intertwined with how these stories are assembled. Lisa Stevenson reminds us: “Looking away from our interlocutors to register something other than conceptual closure or the violence-that-is-done-through-concepts” is ultimately “a gesture of care.”¹⁵⁶

Weeds, Wildflowers, and the Weather

In the following pages, I pay attention to life’s weeds¹⁵⁷ and wildflowers¹⁵⁸—and the weather. I show the intertwining of violence and living, how violence seeps into the fissures of everyday life, and the material and existential practices of repair that emerge. Emerging forms of life are contestations between differing epistemic and political visions: Which futures are imagined and aspired to? Which pathways are rendered visible? These are the questions that run throughout the text.

I have found that attention to life’s ethical investments suggests an “elliptical life”¹⁵⁹ that shrugs at futural communal promises, a new sort of sociality altogether which represents forms of life in the durative present, “not a world that retreats from the social but that exists elliptically, in proximity but not in community.”¹⁶⁰ How to find language on the future which is not just a rote regurgitation of a “better life”? What to make of a present where people do not enjoy “a progressive telos nor a radical political vision to orient their efforts and offer hope of meaningful futures”?¹⁶¹

To answer these questions, I focus on not only what is lost and destroyed but what remains standing and is sustained, rejecting what Eve Tuck calls “damage-centered research.”¹⁶² This has meant paying attention to life’s pulse, its waxing and waning rhythms, the harvest moon as well as the winter moon. It has meant paying attention to life’s ambiance, its milieus: worlds infused with the intensities and affects of one’s subjectivities and the journeys taken through the milieus to find breath and breathing. Attention to breathing “trains us to focus on exchanges between bodies and milieus,” Jean-Thomas Tremblay notes.¹⁶³

A Note on Language

I use the term pahars to allude to the mountainous region spanning Kashmir and Northern Pakistan and deploy its adjective form, pahari (of the mountains), to describe its people and life therein. My conversations in the pahars often took place in Urdu (the national language of Pakistan)—the language of (colonial) power but not the pahars. I grew up speaking Urdu at home. The common language of the mountains is, in fact, Pahari.

Pahari is a transitional language between Hindko and Punjabi. It can be considered a cognate term for the various dialects spoken within the mountainous terrain. Because of its similarity to Punjabi, a language spoken in my maternal grandparents’ home, which I never formally learned but was surrounded by, I can mostly understand Pahari but cannot converse in it. Hence, while people spoke to me in whatever language they felt comfortable in, I almost always responded in Urdu. Sensing my lack of ease with Pahari and constant use of Urdu, many would politely switch to Urdu halfway; others would continue in Pahari, and some would use a mix of both. A few would even throw in some English. I took these as subtle actions to make me feel comfortable and included. I have come to understand language—the use of Urdu cum Punjabi cum Pahari cum English—as a sort of negotiation and a welcoming gesture. But language is slippery. I do not want to underestimate the trauma of imposed languages and what it means not to have your vernacular recognized or respected. After much thought, I have opted to use Urdu translations and transliterations as a reminder of the distance that separates me from the pahari people. The dissonance can never be muted, only calmed.

A Fire-Loving Anthropology

The reader will note my frequent use of the collective we despite Cathy Peppers’s warnings of the deceptions of a false consensus.¹⁶⁴ This is not the liberal we; I often find myself outside the terms of liberal adjudication, willingly or unwillingly. By this, I mean the inherited schemas of legibility that validate or invalidate ideas, aspirations, dreams—people. It has taken me all this time to realize that it is entirely possible to create our own ethos of adjudication: what are the standards we want to be held against? The we of anthropology has an ambivalent presence, notes Zoe Todd.¹⁶⁵ It can be an act of kinship—“we are here for each other.” Or it can be an act of violence—“we are the same, hence what you have to say is not important.” Likewise, interrogating the we is a question of accountability. Sameena Mulla writes, “Our responsibility to ourselves and to others begins with a commitment to … appreciating the collectivities with whom a ‘we’ is formed.”¹⁶⁶

Our sense of we is not a natural given. Sylvia Wynter argues that stories shape our understanding of we.¹⁶⁷ Stories can determine whose life is worthy, who is expendable, who is human. They shape our response to the world; they open and close the landscape of imaginative possibilities, breathing and compressing it. Since stories have life-and-death stakes, Wynter insists that it is crucial to recognize that we are the authors of these stories and collectively emerge from them. Stories can change—so can our sense of we.

My invocation of we is a call for community. It is an invitation to hold anthropology accountable for its legacies of harm toward Black, Brown, Queer, and Indigenous bodies in favor of what Elizabeth Chin calls a fire-loving “pyrophytic anthropology.”¹⁶⁸ A fire-loving anthropology is one that chooses the life-giving gifts of flame “as its love, its kin, its relation.”¹⁶⁹ An anthropology that seeks ethical relations over disciplinary certitude as it sets ablaze routes to empire. This is where the epistemologically messy are embraced and those who wear their hearts on their sleeves are accepted as kin. Lines between storytellers, poets, anthropologists, educators, agitators are blurred to reset the labels of “creative,” “decolonial,” or “experimental” as default burn marks. A fire-loving anthropology pines for living, laughter, learning—its pyromania makes room for what does not fit or is not permitted to fit, so we all breathe easy.

In 2008, five years into the US invasion of Iraq, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, a relatively unknown Iraqi journalist, came into the international spotlight for throwing his shoes at President George W. Bush at a press conference in Baghdad. In quick succession, he hurled both his loafers at the leader of the free world, shouting: “This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people—you dog! This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq.”¹ The act of protest was caught on camera, and the world watched.

There were calls throughout the Middle East to place his shoes in a museum. Instead, American and Iraqi forces destroyed them, and al-Zaidi was imprisoned for assaulting a foreign head of state.

A few years later, I am seated in a masjid (mosque) surrounded by anxious villagers. I am a humanitarian worker, this is a community hearing, and I am being taken to task. People are furious. They tell me that the relief coming into their communities is too little, too slow, too late.

Amid the volley of testimony, an elderly man, dressed in tattered clothing, flings his shoe at me. He does not say anything; the shoe does all the talking. While Bush ducked and dodged his assailant, I welcomed mine, who hit me smack in the face.

Sometimes, I think a lot about the shoe. Other times, I don’t think too much about the shoe.