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Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. FORUM 0. Media Type Media Type. Year Year. Collection Collection. Creator Creator. Language Language. Lil Durk Roy 06 King Von Feat. He moved to France when he was fifteen, went to high school, and lived in Marseille for a while.

These days, he is nominally based in Paris, though he spent the first few weeks of this year setting up a new studio in London, as an artist-in-residence at Gasworks. As those trajectories pass through revolutionary movements, civil wars, and other intractable conflicts, they splinter off toward partisans in Cuba and Algeria, patrons in China and the former Soviet Union, and financial backers in the Gulf.

Most of the works he has produced over the last eight years delve into the histories of colonization and decolonization. Each of them picks at the tangled relationship between a struggle for independence and the formation of identity, tests out the delicate balance between a desire for liberation and the longing for some sort of home which invariably becomes a kind of trap , and digs into tender notions of desire and time. Underlying these investigations is an inquisitive, childlike wonder, as Abonnenc falls headlong into fascinations with radical figures, revolutionary movements, and those moments in time, in a messed-up place, where something totally unbelievable suddenly seems possible.

But he also pushes past the wild details and colorful characters to ask critical questions: Why do some of the most tortured episodes in history provoke some of the most mind-blowing works of art, film, literature, music, and graphic design?

Do those works fictionalize history as it happens? When those works are revived, decades later, are they mistaken for real events? Which is more revealing, the glint of nostalgia that revolutionary relics produce or the experience of the search, measuring a distance that can never really be bridged? As of late January, he was lost in the transcripts of Portuguese soldiers who fought colonial wars in Africa. Talk to Abonnenc long enough and you start to see connections everywhere, like mesh over your eyes.

It all sounds incredible — research as a real and active pleasure — and yet you wonder how he finds the time or focus to get anything done. Between and , Abonnenc retraced the expeditions of a doomed nineteenth-century explorer to produce a suite of dazzling, deceptively decorative wall-size drawings, Paysages de Traite Slave-Trade Landscapes , and a series of haunting photographs called Terra Nullius , meaning land belonging to no one according to Roman law.

His starting point was a bound collection of Le Tour du Monde , a weekly travel journal launched in by Hachette in France. Famous explorers such as Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley were dispatched to the far corners of the globe and returned with tales of adventure in exotic, untouched lands.

A team of in-house engravers illustrated their stories for a public newly attuned to the aspirations of travel. The journal was wildly popular. None of the engravers had ever left France. Their illustrations were born of the imagination, and they were basically all the same, like Victorian wallpaper in varying patterns for Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Crevaux made four expeditions to French Guiana.

On his third, he studied botanical specimens, which were illustrated in Le Tour du Monde. On his fourth, he was clubbed to death by a group of fishermen suspicious of his intentions. For the exhibition Watchmen, Liars, Dreamers , installed in the Paris art space Le Plateau last fall, Abonnenc delved deep into the work of Julius Eastman, a largely forgotten American composer.

Eastman gave minimalism a pop twist and wrote three notable pieces for multiple pianos in the late s — Evil Nigger , Crazy Nigger , and Gay Guerrilla — before dropping out of the avant-garde music scene with a crack problem. He died in at the age of In an obituary for the Village Voice , the critic Kyle Gann noted, with regret, that Eastman was brilliant, and that most of his scores were lost. Abonnenc contacted the composer Mary Jane Leach, who spent seven years tracking down and compiling those scores, and invited her to give a lecture.

Abonnenc left two baby grand pianos in the venue for the duration of the show, and looped the recording of the concert. For another, more low-key performance piece, Abonnenc periodically recasts a reproduction of a ring he inherited from his great-grandfather and lost. He has no idea what it means, how his great-grandfather was involved in Counani, or whether the family lore that says he was a freemason is credible or not. True to his interest in copies and fakes, Abonnenc reproduces the ring over and over again, and gives it to other people to wear.

Every time he recasts it, the legibility of the engraving fades. Two years ago, Abonnenc decided to look for the six reels of an unfinished film that went missing in At the time, he had no idea whether the reels still existed.

The story he has pieced together so far is curiously inconsistent and maddeningly inconclusive, but somehow, the soft spots are also the most compelling. The film was called Guns for Banta , directed by Sarah Maldoror. For Maldoror, Algeria was the mother of the world. The director, Jean-Michel Arnold, initiated the first pan-African film festival in , and invited filmmakers from all over the world to present and defend their work.

This was relatively new. Algerian cinema had been synonymous with the revolutionary movement from the start. It developed through the mechanisms of the FLN, and almost all of the films produced in Algeria at the time dealt exclusively with the war of liberation. But for the FLN to support films made in and about liberation movements in Portuguese-speaking colonies was something of a stretch.

An Algerian technical crew joined Maldoror on location in Guinea-Bissau. Maldoror assembled a cast of non-actors and guerrilla fighters, and worked from a spare script about a young woman named Awa, who joins the resistance after a party member arrives in her village and frames the struggle in terms of land and bread.

She trains and fights and takes part in the ambush of four hundred Portuguese soldiers. When the colonial forces enact a bloody reprisal, she is killed. Or maybe there was a different ending. When it came time to edit the film, Maldoror clashed with the Algerian authorities whether directly or through her handlers is unclear.

She was doing Guns for Banta because she wanted to make the story of the liberation struggle known. But she also wanted to push a feminist point of view. Class split one way. Gender split another. Maldoror wanted creative control over her film. The Algerian government wanted the propaganda tool it had paid for. For Maldoror, she had lived the revolution, she had seen women carrying bombs on their backs, and she had the right to tell their story.

The Algerian police disagreed and seized the film. Maldoror left Algeria and stayed away for twenty years. Soon after, Maldoror completed her second feature, Sambizanga , this time with funding from France.

The critics anticipated great things to come. Her career has been beset by irksome squabbles over who has the right to speak for authentic African cinema the argument being that a French-Guadeloupian filmmaker does not and the perception that audiences have tired of films positioning radical poets, painters, and playwrights in the middle of revolutionary politics, rather than to the side.

A plan to make a documentary about Angela Davis fizzled. Her legacy as a militant filmmaker — mining the same terrain as Flora Gomes or, for a time, Chris Marker — has vanished. After the talk Abonnenc introduced himself to Maldoror and asked if he could see her documentary on Damas. They met and discussed this and other works. Now they are, in a way, friends. They talk often and visit museums together. Abonnenc has made a deal with Maldoror that if he finds the missing reels they will complete the film together.

But Abonnenc knows he is chasing a movie that may turn out to be a myth. Though he has interviewed Maldoror for hours on end, the fact is that forty years have passed. She remembers some sequences from the film but not others. The most obvious thing for Abonnenc to do would be to go to Algeria at once and find out if the film exists. Maybe he is gauging the distance; maybe he is building the fiction. I really wanted her to tell me the story. So the story is also about desire.

But it took time. I am not working on dead pictures or past facts. I am working with someone who is alive, and my relationship with her is the core of the work. Foreword to Guns for Banta is an installation of accumulated archival materials arranged around a slide show of still photographs with a voiceover narration.

The photographs, taken by war correspondents who were there when Maldoror was shooting her film, fill in for the missing reels, though gaps and holes remain. Some of the images come from other sources. We have so many pictures; we just have to find the places to search, and to ask, what can we say about all these movements now?

I wanted everything to blur. There are so many things to connect, so many places and points of view. The cause they fought for — hers as much as it was theirs — never really crystallized in the just or equitable society they were so committed to creating.

Instead, revolutionary struggles gave rise to civil wars, appalling exploitation, and a politics of cynicism. To meet Maldoror and sift through her memories is a rare occasion to revive the potential of that utopian moment as someone lived it. But there is also the risk that the moment itself will crumble as soon as it is exposed.

The museum was founded by the French colonial government back in and named after French soldier and archeologist Louis Demaeght. Little changed when Algeria declared its independence from France in The result, Zabana Inshallah , currently in progress, is not so much a documentary as a videographic intervention in the process of remaking the museum, an exploration of the legacy of colonial power as evidenced by its stylistic impositions.

Perdices paid special attention to the archeological wing of the museum, which was being redesigned by the Brazilian architect Gustavo Santos, who had devised a radical, non-hierarchical exhibition scheme. The artist filmed conservationists at work while, in the same room, laborers hired to clear out the space deinstalled and dismantled antiquities. Perdices was struck by the crude, rough handling of objects that one would normally see locked in vitrines and climate-controlled environments; it appeared as if symbolic acts of destruction had permeated the museum.

Perdices heightens the destructive energy and dramatizes what was otherwise a casual act, elevating it to the level of performance art, or even a kind of vernacular institutional critique.

Zabana Inshallah provides a real glimpse of what has mostly been imagined in art: the museum in ruins. The walls are cluttered with facsimiles of Western masterworks. There are no original works here, only models evincing the classical rules of form, composition, and proportion, to be emulated by young Algerian students.

One photograph pinned to a wall shows a student in three-quarter view, suggesting that Algerian subjects willfully inhabit these roles.

The history of art, and its consumption in Algeria, seem to follow directly from these depictions. Even in the process of reinterpretation and reevaluation, the legacy of imperialism weighs heavily.

The colonial project and its multiple legacies are reflected in the preservation of each artifact, the reordering of each relic, and the shattering of each pedestal. One day in the winter of , Dorothee Paulmann received a telephone call at her home office in Trier, Germany. Paulmann had recently abandoned a career as a triathlete to become a sports agent, specializing in East African runners; the previous year one of her clients, a thirty-three-year old Kenyan runner named Edith Masai, had won the bronze medal at the World Cross Country Championship.

The caller was Leonard Mucheru, a year-old long-distance runner from Kenya, seeking her services. There was one condition: Mucheru would have to renounce his Kenyan citizenship and become Bahraini. As Paulmann tells it, Mucheru agreed without hesitation and flew to Bahrain with the Moroccans. He filled out the necessary paperwork, changed his name to Mushir Salem Jawher, and settled into his new arrangement. Mucheru returned to Trier to train with Paulmann for the Asian Indoor Athletics Championship in Tehran, where he won the meter race.

The delicacy of these dealings was such that, in exchange for Kenyan assistance, Qatar agreed to construct a professional stadium with a running track in the Rift Valley, where most athletes practice on improvised dirt trails. But as time passed and the stadium remained merely notional, Kenya accused Qatar of chicanery. Qatar blamed Kenyan corruption and bureaucratic infighting for the delay. In , relations nose-dived when Kenyan Olympic Committee president and former track star Kipchoge Keino barred a newly Qatari runner, year-old Saif Saaeed Shaheen, from competing in the Athens games the next year.

Until that August, Shaheen had been Stephen Cherono. He was not well-known in Kenya, where there is such a surfeit of world-class runners that few qualify for the national team. But then he started winning races. In a surprise victory at the World Championships in Athletics, held in Paris that spring, Shaheen broke the world record for the 3,meter steeplechase. After crossing the finish line he fell to his knees and began to cross himself, but an official rushed to stop him; he then took a Qatari flag, wrapped it around his shoulders, and ran a victory lap; when he stepped up to the podium he forgot his new name and had to check the scoreboard.

His brother, a runner on the Kenyan team, finished fifth in the same race, and refused to congratulate him. Most athletes who become Qatari citizens do not actually reside in the country and, despite their Arabized names, are not acculturated. This includes Saif Saeed Assaad, formerly Angel Popov, a Bulgarian weightlifter one of eight ex-Bulgarians on team Qatar who won the emirate a bronze medal in the Olympics.

Zhu Chen, a Chinese chess grandmaster who represents Qatar in the World Chess Federation, is a rare exception — she married a local chess grandmaster. Of course, Qatar is not unique in recruiting players from beyond its borders. Second-tier American basketball players serve on teams across the globe. The situation of the Kenyan runners is more acute in part because Kenya does not allow for dual citizenship.

In most countries, sports are still perceived by fans and government officials if not by athletes as something like the auto industry in America: an ideal realm that should be kept 63 apart from the economic shifts wrought by globalization. The Olympics are the last redoubt of the nation-state — or, at least, they profit immensely from being marketed as such.

Much like modern war, modern sport is undertaken by a marginalized group for the benefit of a powerful elite. But even war, which was the initial model and impetus for the Olympics, is no longer fought exclusively among nations, or for a cause assigned to, rather than chosen by, the combatants.

Perhaps we should blame this situation on the diminishing purity of sport: for most of human history, the hallmark of international athletic competition has not been patriotism but the sublimation of violence.

The Olympics was originally accompanied by a cessation of all hostilities between nations, and the hope that it might temper those hostilities. Good Strife nurtured desires for wealth and fame; Bad Strife was a destroyer of lives and property. Good Strife urged creative industry, stirring the energies of emulation.

And yet the battlefield is never far from the track. He finished in two hours and thirteen minutes, winning the race and becoming the first Arab athlete to compete in Israel. He became a man without a country, spending two months in Nairobi trying to convince the government to take him back. He should have known. Later that year Kenya agreed to take him back. And in he successfully defended his title, winning the Tiberias Marathon, this time as Leonard Mucheru.

Since the s, Khordadian has built up a dance and exercise and dance-as-exercise career that has made him the most famous Iranian mail-order entertainer on earth, beloved for his camp renditions of everything from Iranian folk dance to Arabian belly dance to American jazzercise.

He has been called the King of Iranian dance. His costumes are sparkly, and come in many colors. His hips appear to be made of Jell-O.

Night after night on Jaam-e-Jam, Tanin, and Iran TV, Khordadian — sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by attractive, largely mute backup dancers — has taught Iranians and curious others to move their hips, roll their shoulders, and shimmy their hair the Khordadian Way.

It was the age of the videotape, and celebrity was in the offing for a number of exercise gurus, including Richard Simmons. Persian Dance was released by Pars Video, a San Fernando Valley—based clearinghouse for Iranian music and film — to this day, a prime source for misty royalist remembrances, avant-garde classics, and… exercise videos.

In Persian Dance today easily accessible on YouTube Khordadian looks a bit like a muscly referee in his pin-striped workout shirt and figure-hugging Lycra. A team of three women and two men, also in extra-tight workout gear, joins him. Together, they reflect a healthy mix of people — including one woman with an almost distracting pair of buttocks. All shoulders start to shimmy, and Khordadian snaps his fingers exuberantly, Iranian-style.

By , most every middle-class family in Iran had a copy. Khordadian emerged as an unlikely Minister of Happiness. Mohammad Khordadian was born in Nezam Abad, a roughish part of South Tehran known for its fierce neighborhood rivalries and frequent knife fights. His mother, less inspired, did everything she could to abort him. She walked around carrying heavy blankets, ate terribly, and grew more and more depressed. She even threw herself off the roof a number of times.

Nothing worked. He was born February 21, At thirteen, he joined the Boy Scouts, and it was as a Boy Scout that he made his stage debut, dressing up as a Hawaiian dancer for a visit by the Minister of Education, wriggling his straw skirt this way and that. The minister, his teachers, and his fellow scouts were stunned. A star was born. From there, Khordadian pursued dance by various means — bluffing his way into the Ramsar Youth Camp, joining a folklore troupe, dancing at the prestigious Roodaki Opera House.

At the opera house he met an English woman, a ballerina named Jane, and they married. It was just about then that the Iranian Revolution began gathering force, and the couple packed up and headed for London. They danced for a while at a nightclub in Kensington called Club Iran. After a while they packed again and joined the great migration to Tehrangeles, where they split, seemingly amicably.

In May , a strange headline emerged from the wire services. Still, he was recognized nearly everywhere he went, and people constantly asked him to dance. Who was he to refuse a crowd? When Khordadian was leaving the country weeks later, he was arrested. Curiously, his barely abashed homosexuality did not come up.

On July 7, , Khordadian was convicted on all charges. But can you dance salsa? He refused each offer for fear the authorities would punish his family back in Iran, and his quietude provoked a variety of responses, some of them quite mean-hearted. Homeless and depressed, he wandered the City of Angels.

I felt I had no true friends in America. You see, after twenty-three years, I had gotten my love, which was Iran. And then I suddenly lost it. The interrogations started all over again. So he left Iran for a third time, now to Dubai, a nearby city with its own sizable Iranian community. In Dubai, Khordadian settled into a routine, performing at nightclubs and weddings.

He also opened an Iranian-themed nightclub with a cowboy motif called Cochino. But running a nightclub was not, he decided, the life for him, and Cochino shut down in Today Khordadian divides his time between Dubai and Los Angeles.

Though he is no longer quite so limber — knee problems and a pair of slipped discs have slowed down his frenetic routine — he is if anything more famous than ever. The contestants are young Iranians raised abroad who want to pursue a career in dance. But Khordadian still dreams big about the future. Even now, he is preparing a theatrical play, scheduled to debut in Dubai during the Iranian New Year.

The production, Ezdevaj Mashkouk Suspicious Marriage , involves a young man who pretends he is married, with children and even a babysitter to support, in hopes of getting money from his wealthy uncle. As part of the farce, the young man, played by Khordadian, dresses up as the babysitter.

One thing leads to another, of course, and the uncle unwittingly falls in love with his nephew in the form of the babysitter. You can imagine the rest. He assures me he leads a normal life.

I live my life. I go to the gym. Sometimes I come out unshaved. And though his dancing career is all but over, he goes to great lengths to maintain his trim physique. Mostly, he is ready to tell the world his story. Now fifty-four, the King of Iranian Dance wants to put it all out there — his childhood in Iran, his thoughts about the revolution, the cabarets and health clubs and nightclubs in London and Los Angeles and Dubai; his videos, his stardom, his implants, and more.

He might just be right about that. My Tokyo girlhood transpired in not-so-splendid isolation. Exercise was our father demanding that we fetch a Sidney Bechet album from a pile of records, or yet another book from his bedroom at the other end of our vast, lugubrious house, which had once been the German embassy. Exercise was the accretion of small filial resentments at our thoroughly tedious enslavement.

There were two such sports, and I loved them both: the three-legged race and the stilts. In the first, there were red or white cloths that secured my ankle to that of a friend. The two of us would have to take the first step together on our Siamese leg and every subsequent one on opposite feet. My partner was Olivia, a British girl with curly chestnut hair, enflamed cheeks on a milky complexion, crimson lips, and thick glasses; she was almost as awkward as I.

But with our ankles bound we were a formidable composite running machine. We won the Three-Legged Race that day, cheered on mostly by nuns. Our classmates considered this particular race beneath contempt. One gangly Belgian nun ran alongside to measure our progress, her skirts hoisted up, her veil flying behind her. Both games were, it seems to me now, embodiments of the Buddhist doctrine of interdependence.

A table, say, in order to be a table, requires all the molecules of which it is composed; space to fill with its presence; a floor on which to rest; and, finally, the name, table. Racing on stilts, my interdependent collaboration was with a pair of inanimate objects.

I placed my right foot on the ledge attached to the side of a tall wooden pole while holding it at shoulder height with my right hand; then, having found my balance, I swung my left leg up and placed my left foot on the opposite pole, which I held steady before setting off, making my strides as long as possible.

This race, too, I won every time. A Buddhist might say that was a gross definition of interdependence. It is, no doubt, a mildly handicapped one. The ministries and towers of Dafna are festively lit lemon yellow and maroon, while a giant disco ball hangs suspended over Palm Tree Island.

One thousand feet above the street a high-def billboard reflects seamlessly onto the glass surface of the Commercial Bank building: a live feed from an Asian Cup football match, in progress not five kilometers away. Qatar is building a sports utopia in anticipation of the World Cup. There are also the graduates of the ASPIRE Academy for Sports Excellence, which provides locals and foreigners with training in sailing, soccer, squash, table tennis, tennis, fencing, rowing, rock-climbing, and golf.

Nada Zeidan: I always wanted to be a nurse, ever since I was a child. I was born in Lebanon, you know; we left when I was four years old, during the war. I remember the day we left, actually — I remember getting an injection, and the nurse helping me prepare for it.

But my father pushed me and helped me get what I wanted. SAM: Was it hard for you to adjust to your new life in Qatar at such a young age? NZ: The main difficulty for me was the language. I still remember being reprimanded by the teacher the very first day of first grade.

She thought I was refusing her. That was when I realized that there was more than one Arabic. That was really hard. But I loved being here right away; we left Lebanon during the war and Qatar was a peaceful place where the people were friendly.

SAM: And yet you love to drive race cars! When I go hiking in Jordan or Lebanon, I like the mountains. I like suffering in the mountains. NZ: You know, I think about this all the time. Why do I want this? Where does it come from? So many things go back to childhood. I think it might come from Lebanon again, from having to leave suddenly. I know that when I finished secondary school, what I wanted more than anything was to join the army.

To be ready for anything! I was just a student, but I knew I would need to be able to handle a gun, to protect myself. This same sense fueled my interest in nursing, of course. When I was doing my studies at Qatar University I tried to argue that we nurses should get the same training as soldiers. So we can be ready. I went to a shooting club to learn how to use firearms.

And at the club I discovered archery. Archery is the sport our religion encourages most, you know, for both girls and boys. And it requires more physical strength and more concentration than shooting guns. NZ: I am! In nursing school, as soon as I could, I started working in the operating theater. In the operating room you have to have an instinct about what the surgeon is going to need next, because one small mistake can change everything. You try to be prepared for what might happen.

NZ: Oh yes. Do you know this guy? My sister gets angry at the way they drive — she shouts at them — but for me, I say, Go ahead.

I have to be careful, logical. SAM: Do they ever give you trouble? NZ: I do. But actually the women are the worst. When they see me they always try to race me. I remember this one woman — I think she had a blue Peugeot — she was really crazy. NZ: There are so many negative discussions about me in the Arabic media! I do these things to challenge myself as a woman, and to challenge their ideas of what women are, too. People are always sure the son is doing right and the daughter is doing wrong.

My parents are good, thank God, but they have to listen to people talk about it all the time. Thank God for Sheikha Mozah. I think I helped open the door for the next generation, too. We women who go first are the ones who have to suffer. I wonder what you think about girls who act and dress like boys — you know, the boyahs? Of course, first of all, in our religion this is unacceptable.

From the outside, I see they are two different persons. I mean, all of us are different people, with and without abayya. But this is extreme. I mean, I challenge this idea all the time by doing sports, but I never ever think of myself as a boy. There were two girls I was teaching and I could tell they were boyahs. How they walk. These girls need to be guided, from childhood: What is halal?

What is haram? But then, enough. Leave them alone and God will protect them. My last big race was five years ago. Then I had to stop to prepare for the Asian Games and then I suffered an injury, and it takes so long to get psychologically prepared to get behind the wheel again.

But I want to do everything! SAM: Do you ever have problems with the heat here? Do you have to do heat prep or anything? I spent nearly six years training for the Asian Games, shooting arrows in the summer. NZ: Nada? What is Nada? But I guess, in a word, Nada… tries. The Scoville rating measures the presence of capsaicin, a compound that binds with pain receptors ordinarily triggered by heat and abrasion. The news was delicious, and not just as a pick-me-up for a nation still hungry for global recognition.

It seemed, oddly enough, like redress for a still-smarting historical wrong. For it was the colonial invasion of chili peppers — capsicum chilis from South America — that upstaged Indian black pepper Piper nigrum , once the hottest commodity on the planet and the crown jewel of the spice trade.

We Indians had welcomed chilis graciously, of course. And now, at last, Indian nature and five hundred years of nurture had won out, in the form of a local cultivar, Capsicum frutescens var. Nagahari , aka Tezpur chili. These findings were met by consternation and disbelief, especially among the small but vociferous tribe of chiliheads, aficionados driven as much by masochistic machismo as by culinary concerns, most of whom reside in the United States and England.

Skeptical chiliologists insinuated that the Indian research was flawed. Actually, Capsicum chinense is not Chinese. All chili pepper species derive from South or Central America; the term chili comes from the Nahuatl Chi-li.

Apparently the Aztecs had a glyph for it, too. But the nomenclature of chiliology is littered with geographical confusions and nonsequiturs that go directly back to the origins of the New World — Columbus sailing west to find the Indies and pepper and stumbling upon the Americas and chilis instead. His first taste came in , among the Taino.

Peculiarly, although the European colonization of the world was driven in large part by the craze for Indian Indian pepper, until very recently the taste for chilis was largely reserved for the colonized, not the colonizer. And it should be said that not every use to which the colonized put the chili was excellent. The fruits of the capsicum family have certain innate punitive possibilities, as the Aztecs themselves recognized. A famous illustration in the sixteenth century Codex Mendoza depicts a father disciplining his son by holding him over a fire of smoking chili peppers.

Chili powder is often used by police in our country — and in fact in several third-world countries — to extract confession from criminals. It may be introduced in the mouth, nose, anus, urethra, or vagina to torture a suspect and extract confession from him.

It is said that during emergency in India in , chilies were used as a means of torture by introducing them in rectum! This process was known as Hyderabadi Goli… Finally, in our country, chili powder is often introduced in the vagina as a punishment for infidelity. Back then our security forces believed the hottest chilis in the country came from Andhra Pradesh, the capital of which is Hyderabad. But Indian law enforcement has come a long way since then. In fact, the boffins at the Defense Research Laboratories had been researching ways to create a less lethal tear gas.

No less piquant, but literally less lethal — less likely to accidentally kill those exposed to it. Like latter-day Columbuses, they did not quite know what they had done. When in fact, they had conquered the world. That February Guinness World Records certified that the hottest chili in the world was, in fact, the Naga Jolokia pepper, which the Indian scientists had called the Tezpur chili.

Predictably, the Indian chili was only accepted in the West after it had been domesticated. Guinness World Records cites his research. As you can probably tell, this burns me up a bit. I discovered the Naga Jolokia some twenty-five years ago on my first trip to the northeast, when I ordered a dish of egg curry and asked for extra chili. It was delicious, but within minutes my mouth and scalp were on fire.

I experienced a dramatic bout of gustatory sweating and a temporary loss of hearing. I still remember it — and the jar of nougat candies that saved me.

I have since acquired a taste for the chili, though I administer it with caution. In the Indian Defense Research Development Organization announced the development of Naga Jolokia—based chili grenades for counter-insurgency operations. Back in Assam, a sweet-faced thirty-year-old housewife and mother named Anadita Dutta Tamuly took on celebrity British chef Gordon Ramsay in a special televised competition, consuming fifty-one Naga Jolokia chilis in just under two minutes.

A weeping Ramsay left the field after a single bite, while Tamuly proceeded to rub the seeds of another twenty-five chilis in her eyes without shedding a tear. What, exactly, is a sport?

Might it be a TV show? Might it be a play? To become a choral work is not the usual. What was that whole thing like that it got adapted in that way. David: I mean, it was extraordinary. And the book is written, is narrated by first person plural group of men generation, basically, who passed away from AIDS looking down at the current generation.

So it was a learning curve for a lot of us, but did. And then they hired Josh, the composer, and he just ran with it. And I chose not to hear anything while it was being made, I wanted to show up there and just see it for the first time there knowing that I would be sobbing the whole time, which I was.

I mean, I love, love, love the movie and TV adaptations of my work. Jeff: The final story in this collection, to me, I think is the most powerful and as I was preparing to talk to you and kind of re-read this, it took on even more I think important at the time that we live in right now. How can we overcome that a little bit? David: I mean, I think librarians and booksellers are the most resourceful people I know. And so they will find a way to get the word out about books.

But I mean, the reason I wrote the piece was…I mean, it was twofold. It was because I work, as you said, in my day job as a publisher, I get to see sort of the industry from a different vantage point.

For this in particular it was the 40th anniversary of The Freedom To Read Foundation, which I encourage all of you to support because they are among the greatest defenders of books when they are challenged or when censorship is attempted. And so the families who basically defended the books and librarians who defended the books in the community actually came to the event. And so specifically it was me wanting to show them that what they did really matter not just for their community, but really for thousands if not millions of kids and adults that they would never meet.

So it is an outlier. But again, when I was making the mixtape that is this book, that absolutely felt like the great place to end it with gratitude, because I think that is always a great place to end. David: I know like chose one. I mean, I love…I tell the story of how my parents met, which I love that story.

I probably proofread it twice. I sent it out to my friends. And then I completely forgot about it. And how do you navigate that? And it means something differently to me now than it did when I was putting the book together. There are stories in here that follow that trajectory. David: This is not putting it down in any way. It was not by design. But for whatever reason, that was the part that I was writing about the most. Again, there are some stories in here that are deliberately that way, again, the one where I talk about how my parents met is an echo.

But for most of them, and with my novels as well. But I do think there are plenty of other aspects of love to explore. Jeff: You have what sounds like a wonderful job to me, where part of it is really crafting the books and the authors of the future. And what are some of the practicalities that are in that?

David: I love I mean, I started at scholastic when I was 19, I had been there ever since which is many years. It is so vital to have people writing authentic stories and putting them out in the world.

And again, I think most authors, if not all authors believe this. But luckily, because of my double life, I do have the day job where I can commission and empower and promote authors who are doing that.

And the PUSH imprint, which again is nearing its 20th anniversary, which is crazy, again, started about just finding we wanted a whole new generation of YA authors and finding all first time authors and getting their voices out there.

I mean, lately, most of the authors who are on there are queer voices, which I think is fantastic. I think in when I started the body of Queer YA Literature, not very wide, it was extremely white, it was extremely male. And so it has been amazing over the past, especially over the past decade to see us becoming more and more inclusive and intersectional and again, being able to present to the world, all of these different authors, rather than having the hubris of thinking that I could write any of these stories myself, because I could not.

Can you really separate them? David: I mean, strangely, I can. I mean, I always say that I was an editor for 10 years before I really became a novelist. And I think that was a good decade to build the wall between the two parts of my brain, I mean, and it goes also to my writing, just the way that I write. So I think luckily, because I am that kind of writer. It certainly makes it easier to put the walls up.

But then I do think, I mean, the part that I am conscious of is I get to see firsthand how important these books are, and what effect they can have. And certainly, that inspires me to no end. And that pride, and that certainly affects what I do as a writer.

Jeff: Looking at some of our questions from the audience. What is it that you find so compelling about characters in that age group? David: I love I mean, I think it is the origin story of adulthood.

I think that I love a finite amount of time, just sort of try to see how people form who they are. Like, it seems like it was so much longer than it really was, and especially in retrospect. And so I love just informing that. And again, I think, for me, the grand themes of my writing are about how we become who we become, and how we connect to other people, and then how we learn empathy.

And I think, looking at the teen years specifically for that. But I think YA, does it much more. Jeff: Cheryl has a question about co-writing, and how that works for you. Because it could seem like a challenge at times for those who have given a shot at the collaboration thing.

David: I mean, I love it. Obviously, I collaborate with so many people now. But no, it is…I love it. I know how to play well with others. So I love it. But I will say again, just to make clear my process. The alternating chapters part is key, because that means that each of us has a piece of the book that is ours. And we still have control over our own chapters.

Even though we have no control over the whole story. Do you think you could actually co-write with somebody who plotted? David: Well, the funny part is I actually inadvertently did. I just wanna run with it. So we wrote this book, again, we did it going back and forth. And so basically, the book is about them helping each other and basically unlocking just the whole pride community around themselves. I write it at the beginning, I have an outline that I sort of stick to.

But I never in a million years from with the enthusiasm with which she was sending chapters back to me in a linear fashion, it never occurred to me that this was not how she usually did.