In today’s political landscape, it is not uncommon for us to find ourselves wondering about the equal and just futures we were told we could look forward to as children, if only we followed rules and behaved in a ‘reasonable’ manner?  Written as a testimony to spectacular and insidious forms of state violence and supremacist ideologies, ‘What to do with Political Sadness and Other Essays on Death, Destruction and Hauntology‘ by Ghazala Jamil foregrounds violence, destruction and death as the principal instruments which define the exercise of power. 

The book brings together essays such as ‘Hauntology, or Ghosted Futures,’ ‘Contemplating Death and Politics,’ ‘Obituaries: Death in Media,’ ‘Suicide as Political Protest,’ ‘The Supremacist International,’ and ‘The Violence of ‘Reasonable’ Speech?’ Through these 19 essays on death, violence and the decimation of futures, the book refuses to treat the sadness produced by devastation as pathological, and offers a refreshingly radical perspective into the misery brought about by political turmoil.

Drawing upon political philosophy and social critique, Jamil seeks to recount the ideas that compensate for our reduced capacity to locate ourselves in the midst of our intertwined histories and layered geographies. Here, Jamil relies on the hauntology of Jacques Derrida to explain how the present is persistently haunted by futures once promised, but never realised. “It was just a matter of crossing logical epochs and stages of development to reach these futures,” she writes, “but these futures do not arrive.”

She highlights that in today’s India, the dream of a secular plural democracy haunts our increasingly exclusionary polity. To address this, she calls for us to think deliberately, critically and creatively about how to recover, defend and invent futures that are socially just, politically vibrant and ecologically sustainable. Imagining just and equitable futures, for Jamil, becomes important not only for the sake of the future, but because it is what will make our present come unstuck and not feel haunted.

What binds together the participants of conservatism on an international scale, from white supremacists to messianic Zionists, to Hindu ultranationalists aligned with the BJP in India? In other words, what do people who subscribe to conservative ideologies the world over have in common, across geographical boundaries? For Jamil, the answer to this question is located in a shared affective grammar of siege, grievance and exclusion, and what she calls a ‘circle of mutual instrumentalisation’ – a vicious cycle of supremacists trading labour, loyalty and legitimacy across borders. 

She terms this global structure the supremacist international. This, she argues, is built on something beyond mere elite conspiracy. The supremacist international, argues Jamil, operates through a mechanism that easily escapes the naked eye; it is, in fact, sustained by the active participation of ordinary people, such as voters, workers, students and devotees. She correctly identifies a central contradiction of our social conditions today – the poor end up becoming foot soldiers of the rich, enforcing a hierarchy that ultimately crushes them too.

“As a young person,” writes Jamil, “I recognised that sometimes political events made one feel like it was personal.” This feeling is something many of us can relate to. We are encouraged by socio-political forces to pathologise and not politicise this pain – our political sadness has become not only something to be avoided, but something to be corrected, she argues. This is how the political sadness we feel is construed as an individual mental health problem, as opposed to being seen as a normal response to political disarray. 

Image via Maktoob Media

This is further complicated by neoliberal capitalism, which has little patience for sadness. Remaining sad, our culture tells us, is unreasonable. Here, Jamil posits that political and personal life-worlds are distinct domains only analytically – political intrusions into our personal lives are carried forward over generations in the form of memories, trauma and inheritance. There is little in the personal realm, Jamil says, that is unaffected by the state or the preferences of the majority.

What, then, are we to do with our political sadness? First, we must stop looking at it as a disorder or pathology, says Jamil. Sadness, for her, is a “profound and ethical response to a disordered world.” To be sad in the world we live in today, Jamil argues, is the only sane response; the challenge before us is to experience our sadness, and to let it shape how we show up in the world. Political sadness, then, must not be seen as something we need to ‘get over’, but something we must endeavour to think with. 

Second, we must recognise the structural nature of political sadness, and to avoid reducing it to a personal failure. A whole industry now exists to help us manage our sadness – however, in the rush to cure the sadness of individuals, Jamil warns, the space to collectively mobilise political sadness is lost. Recognising political sadness, then, means rejecting induced amnesia and the fantasy of happiness without justice. Political sadness has the potential to genuinely connect people – to admit one’s sadness is to reopen the possibility of solidarity.

Finally, Jamil leaves us with a 7-point thesis: mourning is a political act, the future is a site of struggle, linear time is a colonial fiction, ghosted futures are not fully erased, the past is often the architecture of exclusion, the cancellation of futures is a material and political process, and radical hope is fidelity to a future deemed untenable.

Jamil’s book is incredibly relevant to us today. The current state of political affairs in India, without a doubt, is perhaps the most depressing it has been in a long while. Much of what we are seeing today – Hindutva groups beating up peaceful protesters, police officers brutally detaining innocent citizens, the government’s utter apathy towards rampant violence – are questions Jamil convincingly answers in her book. Her elegiac prose, timely arguments and refreshing originality make for an utterly compelling, and indeed, eye-opening read.

In today’s times, it is impossible to be unaffected by the state of political disarray the world over. Here, Jamil positions sadness as a natural response to political turmoil, not as an individual failure or pathology. Her work is a steadfast refusal to give into popular narratives that downplay political sadness. Jamil’s book does more than destigmatise political sadness – she positions it as not just a legitimate, but also an appropriate response to our political conditions. Sadness, then, is a form of resistance – to be politically sad is to refuse to believe the lie that things are fine. 

‘What to Do with Political Sadness And other Essays on Death, Destruction and Hauntology’ by Ghazala Jamil is published by Simon & Schuster India.