Meet the mothers caring for Ukraine's most vulnerable children.
One summer day in 2022, Varvara, an autistic 6-year-old girl from Ukraine, approached her mother Oksana while she was on the phone with the police. Oksana, now 39, was inquiring about her husband Maksim, a Ukrainian soldier who had been reported dead, but whose body still hadn’t been found.
“Mom,” Varvara said, “I know that dad is already in heaven.” She pointed toward the sky.
It was at this moment that Oksana realized her daughter was not like other children. “Varvara somehow understood that her father had been killed while he was defending Kharkiv from the Russian troops,” Oksana says, tears streaming down her face. “I never told her the truth; she only knew that her daddy moved to a faraway place… But she understands everything.”
Like Oksana, thousands of mothers in Ukraine are raising their children alone as a direct result of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. Although the number of war widows has not officially been confirmed by Ukrainian authorities, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a statement last February that over 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the war began in 2022. As the fighting continues, it is mostly women who care for the country’s children. Some of these women live on the frontlines and use their own bodies to shield their toddlers from Russian attacks. Others have to safeguard children and teenagers who suffer from post-traumatic stress, developed after witnessing and experiencing atrocities during the war. Others, like Oksana, have to take care of children in increasingly difficult circumstances, managing their households and earning a living while grieving for their dead husbands, or else worrying about those alive but still fighting.
Disabled children are particularly vulnerable during war, in part because they are unable to access the same resources normally available for their ensured safety and care. On the frontline or under Russian occupation, that means that they might not have access to a hospital or needed medications, let alone specialists or therapy, as deteriorating mental health is a widespread issue in war-torn countries. Beyond that, being in the epicenter of the fighting makes children more vulnerable to PTSD and shock, as well as to physical injuries, which can further impact their mental state.
According to UN Women, of the 14.6 million people needing humanitarian assistance in Ukraine in 2024, 8 million were women—many of them single mothers, the elderly, or victims of gender-based violence. A large number of these women take care of children and loved ones with disabilities. The Centre for Sustainable Peace and Democratic Development reports that over 3 million persons with disabilities currently live in Ukraine—but this estimate almost definitely falls short of the actual numbers, and will likely continue to increase due to war-related injuries.
Of those, 1.8 million people with disabilities are already in need of humanitarian aid because of the war, a number that will also likely only increase. But where resources have fallen short, mothers across the country have singlehandedly done everything in their power to fill the gap.
Defending Ukraine Since Day One
The city of Kharkiv, where Oksana and Varvara live, was among the first to be invaded by Russian troops following the start of the war on February 24, 2022, in what Russian President Vladimir Putin called “a special military operation.” To this day, Kharkiv remains one of the most dangerous cities in Ukraine, and is regularly hit by both airstrikes and artillery.
“My husband, who has been in the Ukrainian army since 2015, told me he was going to fight immediately after Kharkiv was invaded,” Oksana says. She was left alone with their two daughters: Varvara, now nine, and Sofiia, 17. Her husband Maksim never came back; and even after he was confirmed dead, Oksana shares, it took ten months to find his body.
“It was hell,” Oksana tells me. “I am still taking antidepressants.”
Varvara, who was diagnosed on the autism spectrum at the age of three, has also become increasingly fearful as the war has unfolded. “Whenever she sees dead or injured persons, she says in her own words: ‘A bad boy has been shooting,’” Oksana says. Still, she says it has been difficult for them both. “Whenever the sirens sound, Varvara is extremely stressed—much more than a [neurotypical] child. She experiences panic several times a day.”
Oksana and her daughters, Varvara (top) and Sofiia (right). (Photo courtesy of Oksana.)
Luckily, Varvara is sociable and likes going to school, which is often her only source of joy—and a great source of comfort for her mother. In the suburbs of Kharkiv, Varvara attends classes at a specialized institution, where a local humanitarian organization recently built a bomb shelter specially tailored for children with disabilities, with heating, restrooms, and a library. Disabled children like Varvara—who are extremely afraid of air raids—can spend their entire days there peacefully.
Alyona Budagovska, a communication officer for People in Need, the NGO that constructed the bunker, tells The Conversationalist that families with disabled children in Ukraine face extraordinary challenges. For example, many parents cannot carry their children to safety during air raids, and standard public shelters are often inaccessible or too far away. In some cases, children are left behind out of fear or desperation, including children who are bed-bound or too heavy to be carried.
“In the context of war, children with disabilities are among the most vulnerable, yet often the most overlooked. Many of them attend specialized schools that lack the most basic protection against missile attacks,” Budagovska says. “Building shelters in [these] schools is about more than concrete walls—it’s about dignity and inclusion.”
Oksana feels relieved that her daughter likes school, and that her two daughters get along well. Yet, she says, it is still difficult being left without her husband, who she says knew Varvara best. “My daughters love each other very much and that makes me happy, but it doesn’t replace my husband,” she says. While her loving family is a source of resilience, both she and her daughters continue to be affected by grief.
Mothers On the Frontline
Oksana’s experience is far from singular. In frontline towns and villages across Ukraine, thousands of single mothers also raise their children without any support, despite the incredible risks. According to UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, there are currently 1.9 million children in need inside the country. But prior to the war, Ukraine already had one of the highest rates of child institutionalization in the world, and the highest in Europe. Of these children, UNICEF reports nearly half of them were disabled. Now, the agency reports that 16 children are killed or injured in Ukraine on average every week.
Denys, a 7-year old boy from the Kherson region, is one of the survivors of such frontline attacks—together with his mother, Iuliia, 25, who also suffers from heavy injuries. Both of them were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and are overcoming psychological hardships, facing the challenge of healing both physically and mentally in the aftermath of their attack.
In late April, I meet them in their home village only a few miles away from Kherson, currently the most dangerous city in Ukraine. Upon entering their home, I learn that a Russian drone has shattered a local house just three hours before my arrival. These FPV (first person view) drone attacks and artillery strikes continue on a daily basis—and can be heard as I conduct interviews.
Iuliia is still in shock after the morning attack, and cries relentlessly during our conversation, while Denys is silent, hiding in another room.
“My husband died on the frontline in Kherson shortly after the war broke out,” Iuliia says. “Up until that point, we lived just like everyone else: We had jobs, we worked on a farm, we had our daily worries… Then, everything turned upside down.”
Iuliia and her son, still grieving their loss, had continued living in the destroyed village, even as artillery strikes became more and more frequent. But one night, everything changed.
She and Denys were sleeping in their house—each in a different room—when they awoke to a loud sound. Then, came the shock and the chaos: a Russian missile had hit their home, reducing it to ruins.
Iuliia and her son were lucky in their misfortune: They both survived, but suffered severe concussions, head trauma, and PTSD. Iuliia, who was closer to the explosion, also sustained skin wounds and severe damage to her inner ear.
“The ambulance immediately took us to the nearest hospital,” Iuliia recalls, shuddering at the memory. “We spent several days there. They gave us injections, syrups, medicines, and we underwent various procedures.”
Once Iuliia and Denys were released from the hospital, they also needed to find a safe place to stay. “Our house has been turned into ruins; there is no roof, and the walls are broken,” she tells me. “I literally had to go back and dig out some of our basic personal belongings from the [rubble].”
The pair decided to live, temporarily, with Iuliia’s sister. But their first night there quickly turned into a nightmare. “As we were falling asleep, a rocket hit the property right next to my sister’s house, with shrapnel hitting our walls,” Iuliia tells me, crying. Following that night, she says she suffered a breakdown.
“If I could somehow force myself to function before [the second attack], I really can’t now,” Iuliia tells me. “I have severe PTSD and need to rest and consult a psychologist. I am constantly short of breath, my hands are shaking, my vision is going black.”
But Iuliia tells me she has no savings, and nowhere to go. While Denys is sometimes cared for by their family and friends in the village, she says she has lost hope for a better future. She still suffers from earaches, tinnitus, dizziness, hypervigilance, flashbacks, and frequent blackouts. Denys, she says, is seeing several doctors and a therapist, and is in need of rehabilitation. While he is healing well from his physical injuries, there are multiple layers of trauma that he needs to talk through with a psychologist, especially due to his young age: losing his father as a toddler; losing his home in a bombardment; witnessing his mother and family members injured and suffering.
Iuliia cries whenever she talks about her son. “Denys is everything to me,” she says. “Children heal faster from some wounds; he recovered from his concussion faster than I did. At age seven, he is stronger than I am at 25.” Like many other mothers in Ukraine, she is facing the impossible challenge of remaining calm and composed in front of her child, despite facing deep physical and psychological wounds herself. But taking care of an injured child while suffering from PTSD and her own injuries, in a village hit by drones every day, is one of the most difficult things she has ever had to endure. Her only recourse, she says, has been to reach out to the very few humanitarian NGOs operating where she lives.
Giles Duley, the UN Global Advocate for Persons with Disability in Conflict and CEO of Legacy of War Foundation, which provides aid to people on the frontlines, tells me that in conflict, the most marginalized and vulnerable members of society are often forgotten or ignored. “The elderly, single parent families, and those living with disability are at far higher risk from collapsing healthcare systems, displacement, and lack of social services—in Ukraine we have seen those with disabilities unable to evacuate frontline areas; vital medical facilities targeted by Russian [forces]; and vulnerable communities left without healthcare,” he says.
“The war has also exacerbated previously existing inequalities, with disproportionate effects on older women and single mothers,” he adds.
Surviving Occupation with a Disability
Olena, 54, has felt the weight of this inequality as a single mother to a disabled child. She and her son, Misha, 12, come from Mykhailo-Laryne, a small village near Mykolaiv in the south of Ukraine that was occupied between late February and November in 2022. Her ex-husband, Misha’s father, lives in a different town, and is unable to help support their child financially, in part because of the distance, and in part because of the war.
Olena’s son Misha has an intellectual disability, and she believes he is likely also on the autism spectrum—but she has been unable to take him to a psychiatrist since the war broke out. Traveling, even to neighboring Mykolaiv, is too expensive for her, and while their village was occupied, it was “absolutely unthinkable,” she says.
Olena and her son, Misha. (Photo courtesy of Sara Cincurova.)
Olena currently works as a school assistant for a disabled girl at a local school—but with her single salary and prices skyrocketing since the outbreak of the war, she frequently struggles to buy food, she says. As a school assistant, she earns approximately $88 USD a month at most—but her salary is often cut down significantly, as it largely depends on the number of hours she works per week.
Apart from this severe financial hardship, what Olena suffers from the most is when she sees the inhabitants of her village mock and hurt her Misha, who is her only child.
“People have this narrow-minded mentality in our village… They often used to make fun of Misha, calling him [slurs],” Olena says with pain in her eyes. But Misha is a talented and sensitive boy, she adds. “He is kind, curious, and a patriot. He loves cooking, he is always cheerful.”
Olena is currently receiving humanitarian aid from a local NGO, Voices of Children. The organization works with a wide range of children—including those with disabilities and/or on the autism spectrum. Olha Yerokhina, a Communication Manager for the organization, tells me that whenever a family with a neurodivergent child asks for help, “We listen, we try to understand the need, and even if we can’t provide specialized support in-house, we do our best to refer [the family] to trusted professionals or partner organizations.”
The NGO also supports Ukrainian mothers just like Olena. “[Mothers] are often overwhelmed and left to navigate [the] complex reality alone,” Yerokhina says.
At the end of the interview, Olena recalls the one—and perhaps only—positive aspect that the war has had on her and her son. “People are now more accepting of Misha’s disability,” she says. “During the occupation, many have reconsidered their values and their priorities.”
“They now make less fun of Misha and accept he is a human being, and treat him with more love.”
[post_title] => Motherhood on the Frontlines
[post_excerpt] => Meet the mothers caring for Ukraine's most vulnerable children.
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We don't just need more women in office. We need a culture shift.
I once believed that the presence of a female leader signaled real progress—a sign that gender equality had taken root. As a girl growing up in China, I watched with admiration as women like President Tsai Ing-wen in Taiwan and President Park Geun-hye in South Korea rose to the highest offices in their respective countries. Their success seemed to promise a future in which women’s voices would be equally heard, equally respected—that perhaps women might finally be seen as equals.
But as I began to study gender and politics more deeply, particularly across East and Southeast Asia, that initial optimism gave way to unease. Representation alone, I realized, does not guarantee change. Even more alarmingly, the symbolic presence of women in power can obscure the systemic barriers that continue to shape—and often silence—most women’s participation in political life.
Globally, this problem has proven surmountable. In Scandinavia, gender quotas and institutional reforms have helped elevate women to between 40% and 50% of parliamentary seats, reflecting not only a shift in numbers but a broader cultural embrace of women as political leaders. Similar gender quotas in Mexico—which elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, last year—have led to women making up 50% of seats in congress, after gender parity was enshrined in the country’s constitution in 2014.
In contrast, however, East and Southeast Asian democracies continue to lag behind—not only in representation, but in the structural support needed to close the gender gap. Japan, for example, despite being one of the world’s largest economies, has seen little progress in this area. Women occupy roughly 16% of seats in the national legislature—a statistic that reveals not just electoral imbalance, but deeper societal expectations about leadership, gender roles, and public legitimacy. As of April of this year, the percentage of women who hold parliamentary seats in India (13.8%), Cambodia (13.6%), Malaysia (13.5%), Sri Lanka (9.8%), and Bhutan (4.3%) remains even lower. And in China, there have been no women in the politburo since 2022, something the United Nations has flagged as a matter of great concern.
So, are women truly gaining power in Asia, or are they simply there to make politics look more gender equal?
Analyzing data from the Asian Barometer Survey suggests the reason women’s political participation remains low in Asia is as much a numbers problem as it is a cultural one. Founded in 1971, the ABS is a cross-national survey that aims to gather “public opinion data on issues such as political values, democracy, governance, human security, and economic reforms.” In a 2020 academic paper from the University of Edinburgh’s Dr. Sarah Liu, one surprising finding from the 2010–2012 survey was how the gender of the interviewer affected women’s answers. Faced with female researchers, women opened up about their political beliefs. With male interviewers, many of them hesitated. This suggests a much deeper problem with Asia’s gender divide, rooted in women feeling both uncomfortable with and unwelcome in politics.
Across many societies, not just in Asia, politics is still seen as a man’s domain, where women are expected to support, not lead. But in East and Southeast Asia, where traditional gender roles continue to shape public and private life, this attitude is amplified. Even in modern cities, women are constantly told that politics is not their space. For me, it wasn’t that anyone said I couldn’t be a leader when I was growing up—it was that no one ever expected me to be one. And when women are constantly told that something isn’t an option for them, it makes sense that, eventually, they might actually start to believe it.
When women do step forward to lead, they also face a very different kind of scrutiny to their male peers. Their private lives are often judged more harshly than their professional ones, and given as much attention, if not more. When Tsai Ing-wen became Taiwan’s first female president, critics focused on the fact that she was unmarried—as if being single made her unfit to lead. But when it comes to unmarried male leaders, no one ever even thinks to question it.
The media frequently contributes to this double standard. I remember watching coverage of Shoko Kawata, a 33-year-old woman who became the youngest female city mayor in Japanese history after winning her election in Yawata, Kyoto Prefecture in 2023. I was furious that the story’s focus was not on what she’d said in her speech, but on what she was wearing. Other reports also emphasized her love of tea ceremony and traditional kimono attire—while barely mentioning her actual policy goals. Her agenda had been reduced to its aesthetics: her clothes were that day’s headline news, while her policies went overlooked.
Even within political institutions, this bias persists. In Japan, a young Tokyo assemblywoman was once heckled by her male colleagues while speaking about the need for better childcare policies. This incident occurred in 2014, when Ayaka Shiomura, a member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, was addressing how the government might better support mothers in light of Japan’s drastically decreasing birth rate. During her speech, several male lawmakers interrupted her with sexist remarks such as “Go and get married!” and “Can you even have children?” One of them, Akihiro Suzuki, later admitted to the heckling and publicly apologized. But the incident sparked widespread outrage, and served as another stark reminder of the entrenched gender bias in even the most formal of political spaces.
Fueling all this is the deeper issue that women are still expected to prioritize the family above all. This problem isn’t singular to Asia, but nonetheless, it feels especially pervasive here: Even in the public sphere, women are still trapped in private expectations. When a woman chooses public service, some see it as a betrayal of her “real” duty. The media asks, “Can she have it all?”—a question they’d never ask of a man, and one that has never been asked of a father.
These attitudes don’t just make the job harder. They make women question whether the space was ever meant for them. And in many ways, it still isn’t—something that keeps women out of politics, and keeps everyone, regardless of gender, chained to the status quo.
Yet, despite persistent challenges, women politicians in Asia have continued to make remarkable strides. President Tsai and President Park both shattered historical barriers to ascend to the highest levels of national leadership in their respective countries, proving that women are more than capable of leading. They also both drove meaningful social and economic change during their terms—even in systems not designed for them.
As the first woman president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen and her administration actively pushed for gender-equal policies, earning Taiwan the top spot in Asia—and one of the highest rankings globally—for gender equality. One particularly meaningful initiative was an amendment requiring companies with more than 100 employees to provide childcare facilities—helping to ease the burden on working mothers. Tsai also supported policies that loosened loan restrictions for women entrepreneurs and promoted female participation in the economy as a path to structural change.
Beyond legislation, she repeatedly called for dismantling gender stereotypes and encouraged women to participate in public life—raising both the visibility and legitimacy of women in leadership. Under her eight-year tenure, Taiwan’s economy grew steadily, with an average annual GDP growth rate of 3.15%, and even reached 6.6% in 2021—a rare achievement during global economic uncertainty.
Park Geun-hye’s presidency, meanwhile, offered a different but equally important approach to leadership. While her administration made more modest progress on gender-specific reforms, it recognized the challenges faced by working mothers and proposed expanding childcare services to support female employment. More broadly, Park’s role as a woman navigating a traditionally male-dominated political landscape was also deeply symbolic.
Under her leadership, South Korea expanded its global economic footprint by signing free trade agreements with 52 countries, including China and Vietnam—bolstering South Korea’s export markets and international competitiveness. These policy efforts, though not always framed through a gender lens, reflected a broader vision of national growth, with women as increasingly visible participants.
Tsai and Park’s contributions—each shaped by their own context—highlight the transformative power and potential of women’s leadership. For millions of women across Asia, seeing them in positions of power—on television, in parliament, in international headlines—continues to deliver an enduring message: women belong here. And their presence alone continues to inspire others to imagine what is possible when women are no longer the exception.
Change won’t come overnight. Cultural shifts take time. But every honest conversation, every woman who speaks up, every moment of resistance matters—so hopefully, one day, girls growing up in East or Southeast Asia will see women in power and think: “That could be me.” Not because it’s rare, but because it’s normal.
To achieve this, we don’t just need more women in office. We need political systems that respect their leadership, media that reports on their work—not their wardrobe—and societies that stop measuring women by outdated standards. We need women in Asia to not just be seen in politics, but truly heard.
[post_title] => When Will Women in Asia Be Seen as Leaders—Not Exceptions?
[post_excerpt] => We don't just need more women in office. We need a culture shift.
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It begins with a panicked message on Bluesky in October 2024. Someone is messaging me with a link to a fundraiser and stilted English that reads as though it came from a bad translation app. The picture on her GoFundMe shows a young woman with a pale face and shocking green eyes.
It’s been seven months since the borders of Gaza were sealed. She says she is in Zeitoun, a pocket of north Gaza under siege. I respond in colloquial Arabic, to see if this person can even speak the language, to see if she is real. I ask her for a WhatsApp number. She gives me one. It starts with +972.
She is real. Her name is Hayat. She, along with her husband and children, did not flee south as the siege on north Gaza tightened. Where to go? she says.
Hayat is pregnant. Eventually she will give birth—by c-section, without anesthesia—to a little girl with blue-green eyes as brilliant as her own. She names her Fatima. Now, I have a namesake in Gaza.
I meet Mohamed next. A farmer and a teacher, he has lost his sheep and rabbits, but even living in al-Mawasi refugee camp, he persists in growing plants and crops in a little garden by his shelter so there may be something fresh to eat amid the siege. Al-Mawasi, a cruelly named “safe zone,” has witnessed regular attacks and bombardments since Mohamed arrived there in March 2024.
This same siege today, almost three months since all aid to Gaza has been cut off, has driven people to famine. The cost of flour, if you can find it, careens wildly, swinging from an already farcical $100 USD to an impossible $700 USD. The bread bakeries have shut down. The World Central Kitchen says its warehouses are bare. Children have been dying of malnutrition and under bombs all at once, like fish in an increasingly shrinking barrel. To quote a DC pundit, “The war in Gaza is not really that different than other wars.” A beat. “Well, except I guess they can’t run away.”
My keeping a bunny as a pet amuses Mohamed. One day, he shares a story about missing his animals, and a farmer in Texas donates $500 to his fundraising campaign. Mohamed is saving every penny for his eventual evacuation from Gaza, now a distant hope. Meanwhile, the cost to survive continues its inhumane inflationary spiral. Funds meant for escape are now hoarded for food, any food, which is becoming harder and harder to find.
After Hayat and Mohamed, I meet Obada. Obada is a lawyer with three children. He considers his youngest, Zain, a gift from God, as his other two children required medical intervention to exist. Zain did not. On Eid, Obada shares a photo of Zain in his little white thobe, a dignified and serious garment for adults that is adorable on a baby.
The calls for help swirl thick and fast—other families realize they can build lifelines beyond the walls of Gaza, that someone, anyone, is willing to hear out their agony. There are Naser and Amal, with their children Rolan and Omar. Naser currently lies in one of Gaza’s last functioning hospitals with a breathing obstruction, and needs surgery. I try to help them a little. Rolan sends me a thank you photo: a young girl of seven, sitting on a pile of rubble against a blue sky, holding a sign that reads, “My love for you (heart) Fatima Ayub.”
Before Israel sealed the Rafah crossing with Egypt in March 2024, it cost $5000 USD per adult, and $2500 USD per child, to organize an evacuation from Gaza. Those figures, as extortionate as they were, are meaningless now. No one can leave, and if they do, it will be as part of the deliberate depopulation of the strip. Yet, as my friends in Gaza keep telling me, nothing is left. Virtually no school, clinic, hospital, or mosque in Gaza has been left standing. Gaza has been bombed more heavily than London, Dresden, and Hamburg in World War II, combined. Children keep arriving in the few remaining hospitals with bullets in their heads.
I meet multiple Ahmads. There is Original Ahmad, who braved the migration boat passage under Israeli gunfire to escape Gaza to Europe—but is distraught because his mother and the rest of his family are still in the north. There’s Child Ahmad, who returned to Gaza to marry his lifelong sweetheart Samar, and was trapped when the war came. There’s Other Ahmed, whose siblings are all frantically trying to survive in a tent. Then, comes Another Ahmad, who shares a photo of himself in the rain, barefoot with already too-thin legs.
There is Suad, who is only 24, and mother to a little boy, Omar. She’s taken to calling me mom, having lost her own mother before the war. I have no maternal experience, but try to hear her story. Among the most common injuries in Gaza unrelated to war wounds are burns—made worse by so many people cooking on unsafe, open fires. She shows me a bad burn that needs medical treatment. Her little boy has broken his leg, an ordinary childhood tragedy compounded infinitely by the horror.
I meet Malak and Maali, who are sisters. Maali is disabled and needs a new wheelchair and special care. Malak labors hard on an unwelcome internet and on an unforgiving planet to help her sister retain her life and dignity.
Then comes Majd, 17, only just a child himself. Still, he shoulders the responsibility of trying to help his sisters and mother survive. He feels he has no choice.
Moataz is a shy and kind young man whose beloved father is ailing from kidney disease. Moataz doesn’t understand online fundraising, doesn’t understand social media, doesn’t understand this bizarre dystopia where he talks to a woman on the other side of the planet to try and outmaneuver a siege of biblical proportions.
Rumors circulate in the aftermath of hostage Edan Alexander’s release that food aid will be permitted to enter Gaza. So far, these are only rumors. The siege grinds on. The ground invasion begins in earnest. An Israeli MK tells the world, “Last night, almost 100 Gazans were killed. And the question you asked me just now had nothing to do with Gaza. Do you know why? Because it doesn’t interest anyone. Everyone has gotten used to [the fact] that [we can] kill 100 Gazans in one night during a war and nobody cares in the world.”
Does anyone care? Does caring matter?
Hayat, too, has burned herself. She tells me a pack of diapers for baby Fatima costs $70.
Still, no aid comes.
Obada sends me photos of his dear friend, killed just last night with his wife and baby daughter. “My heart hurts, Fatima,” he tells me. “With his baby in his arms. He was only married a year.”
Still, no aid comes.
A friend asks me if I can help Hanadi, a still-young woman with eight children. I give what I can.
Still, no aid comes.
Even good news comes tainted. Naser is out of the hospital, but now, his neighborhood in Khan Younis is under evacuation orders following the latest assault. He decides not to evacuate. “I’m tired,” he tells me. “Rolan came to me crying asking why we are staying when everyone else is fleeing. It cut my heart.”
Child Ahmad, meanwhile, is fleeing, also pushed into al-Mawasi. He says he will not be online so much. When I do not hear from him for a day, I worry. I think of the al-Hol concentration camp for some 55,000 wives and children of ISIS fighters in Syria.
The US undertakes a farcical “aid delivery attempt,” under the eye of mercenaries who take selfies against a backdrop of starving Palestinians. The effort is about as successful as the floating pier to deliver aid that sank into the sea, a perfect grotesque metaphor, almost as perfect as letting children die while hundreds of thousands of tons of food rots within sight.
Now that the ghastly end game for Gaza has been laid bare, this is what we—the Western world—have done to the Palestinians. When will it end? my friends ask me. How much more can we be expected to take? they ask. Until when? they ask.
It is May 28, 2025. I have no answers for anyone.
—
If readers wish to help any of these or other families trying to survive in Gaza, they may contact the author on Signal at fatimaayub.01 or by email at fsayub@gmail.com.
[post_title] => To Live and Die in Gaza
[post_excerpt] => Stories from my friends still trying to survive.
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On modern wealth's bland aesthetics, the reopening of the Frick, and the meaning behind our Gilded Age nostalgia.
Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersection of art and capital with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.
In his recent New York Times article, “Beige is the Color of Money,” Guy Trebay explored the prevalence of muted palettes in the homes and playgrounds of the rich around the world, from St. Moritz to the Sun Valley. “In past eras,” Trebay writes, “the wealthy tended to attire themselves in the richest of colors: indigo, crimson, the purple of nobilities and kings. We are no longer in that era. These days, the hue preferred by the richest people on earth is that most bland and mousy of non-colors — beige.” Trebay argues this shift has come to the fore during a populist moment, as the “rich hunker down in khaki camouflage.” He posits that being clad in “the anodyne colors of baby food, tea cookies or screensavers: latte, oatmeal, cream, butterscotch, café au lait” signals the notion of wealth in reserve, not something to be flaunted before the frothing fury of the masses. Trebay quotes Alessandro Sartori, the artistic director of Ermenegildo Zegna, as saying, “The ultrawealthy don’t want to show off, and beige colors are good in that sense…This class of people is super discreet and doesn’t want to be seen.”
This is bullshit. Rather, I would argue, beige is a marker of how they want to be seen. And unsurprisingly, compared to its colorful predecessors, it’s a hell of a lot less interesting to look at. Aspirational wealth, now the color of barf, is especially barfy. Intriguingly, it also seems to have sparked a bit of unexpected nostalgia for when the rich spent their money on batshit, exhilarating displays of filthy lucre, rather than on a $30,000 Loro Piana cardigan that makes both the wool it is made of and the person wearing it look like a virgin.
After a five-year renovation, a temple of that sort of old-school, jewel-toned ostentation has reopened on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, at the base of the Museum Mile: The Frick Collection. Ever since it reopened to the public on April 17, the museum has been so booked solid that the only way to get in on a given day is to cough up $90 for a membership. The line snaking around the block indicates this is no deterrent whatsoever. Boasting a hundred-foot-long gallery covered in the most sensual green velvet wallpaper the nation of France could produce, illuminated by a skylight that runs the entire length of the room, the Frick is the pinnacle of everything modern wealth is not. I confess I could lose an afternoon staring at its emerald walls alone, never mind the Corots, Turners, Goyas, and El Grecos that line them.
The Frick is a civilized place: There are no cameras or children allowed. Renovation aside, it is also a museum deliberately out of pace with the modern world. True to its namesake, Henry Clay Frick was a top-tier robber baron: coal and coke magnate, business partner to Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, union-buster extraordinaire. His taste reflects it. If money could buy it in 1906, his mansion on the prime corner of 70th Street and Fifth Avenue probably has it. A gargantuan Rembrandt self-portrait? Check! An entryway made of ten tons of Breccia Aurora Blue marble leading to an indoor fountain? Check! An Aeolian pipe organ? Check! Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More? Check! A Fragonard room and a Boucher room? Check, check! (Randy Baroque artists always travel best in pairs.)
Despite occupying such a rarefied niche, both tourists and locals continue to flock to the Frick in droves, celebrating the extraordinarily beautiful shit one rich person managed to buy and keep in his freakishly expensive piece of real estate. However, in our oligarch-besotted cultural moment, it does make me wonder why this is the kind of blue-blooded wealth we red-blooded Americans seem to be so nostalgic for.
For starters, the blood in America isn’t truly blue. For all one might say about Old New York Society—from Mrs. Astor’s ballroom to Edith Wharton—we can all agree old money isn’t so old on our side of the pond. No; the Frick, then, isn’t a temple of old wealth, but a bastion of what American rich used to be perceived as. Think of Scrooge McDuck back-stroking through his ducats; Daddy Warbucks tap-dancing; Mr. Potter scowling in his boardroom; Prince Akeem before his Randy Watson Brooklyn drag; or, most simply, Donald Trump himself, who, as Fran Lebowitz put it, “is a poor man’s idea of a rich man.”
One need not do a deep read of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalismto know that ever since a raggedy pack of religious extremists dropped anchor at Plymouth Rock in 1620, this country’s inhabitants have had some fucked up ideas about wealth. Notably, New England’s Calvinist pilgrims subscribed to the doctrine of predestination: they believed God knew from the jump whether you were going to heaven or to hell—free will and the quaint American myth of bootstraps be damned. The Pilgrims also believed that God showed favor by showering wealth and good fortune upon His “elect,” and that God’s elect demonstrated their status through a lifetime of righteousness and upstanding behavior. This has quite certainly set a tone that persists well into 2025: Americans are desperate people who have deluded themselves into thinking they can become respectable. And that, to us, means rich.
To this day, American “blue-bloods” claim descent from Mayflower stock, as did Henry Clay Frick. This tenuous—one might even say aspirational—connection is reflected in his art collection, and his proclivity for the Dutch masters, who painted the Calvinist aristocracy. The Mayflower itself was funded by Dutch Calvinists, the upper class of what was then the richest country in the world. Like the uber wealthy of today, the Calvinist elite showed their wealth in what they thought were subtle ways. They also did not not want to be seen. Rather, they wanted to be perceived as favored by God but in control of themselves—and, undoubtedly, of others (all that Bible study did little to put them off the slave trade). Like the Beige Hordes on the slopes of Courchevel today, they also preferred monotone—albeit darker hues. Simultaneously, they wore the richest fabrics, lace, and stonking pearls, all studiously catalogued in paintings eventually collected by the likes of Henry Clay Frick. Although scholarship speaks to the “restraint” in this era of fashion, I doubt a starving man in 17th-century Amsterdam would have perceived much holding back in the sumptuous, candlelit banquet tables groaning with all manner of fish, fowl, fruit, flower, crystal, and silver depicted in countless Dutch still lifes—and now hung on the Frick’s emerald green walls. Four hundred years later, I wonder if those glorious spreads were allowed to rot or wilt in the studio.
Curiously, given the beige miasma, much ink has also been spilled about the “New Gilded Age,” and how big, loud 80s bling is back—supply-side shoulder pads and caviar. At first blush, this may seem like a contradiction, but one must remember it's a nerd version of such bling of yore, a taste memorably summed up in Rebecca Shaw’s Guardian headline, “I Knew One Day I’d Have to Watch Powerful Men Burn the World Down, I Just Didn’t Expect Them to Be Such Losers.” Yes, Zuck got his MAGA makeover and is sporting chains and Balenciaga—so much for the de rigueur Prius and Uniqlo hoodie from HBO's Silicon Valley. But Zuck’s Maui Ewok-chic hideaway has nothing on Henry Clay Frick's Fifth Avenue digs, and offers nothing new to wealth’s aesthetics but cheap imitation. Henry Clay Frick brought Old World Wealth over to the New to demonstrate his own preeminence. Grandeur and history were entirely the point. For Zuck and his billionaire brethren, there largely isn’t one.
In an interview with comedian Dan Rosen for his Middlebrow podcast, “cyberethnographer” Ruby Thelot discussed why he believes the tech elite don't collect art: “A lot of my friends in tech in SF, besides maybe video games, are not interested in being an audience to culture that is not about them…When I am in front of the painting over there…I need to accept that I am not the center of the activity. I need to understand something else, right? I’m not optimizing myself. When you run you can beat your time. Either I like the painting or I don’t like the painting. There isn’t a clear metric around it.” Of course, Henry Clay Frick is at the center of his art, as long as his museum-mansion bears his name: he bought it and, because of his immense wealth, we get to see it all in one place. (Tellingly, his favorite painting he bought was said to be Goya’s “The Forge” which depicted the metalworking that made him a rich man.) But the Beige Bros lack the ability to see it this way, or with any nuance. Similarly, this framework also explains why the splashiest art commission Zuck has made was a seven-foot sculpture of his wife, a monstrosity brought into this world by Daniel Arsham, famed for luxury brand collaborations and toy cars.
In the same interview, Thelot talks about how the culture is poorer when an audience for the arts is not cultivated from a young age and the world is run by engineers who live to work and order food to their desks on DoorDash. He implies that the striving goals of such a class of workers are simply optimization of the mind, the body, and, of course, the bank account. He sees it as a “tragedy” that they cannot tell a Monet apart from a Manet. He pins the blame on the death of liberal arts education and core curriculums.
Whatever the cause, today’s drip simply isn’t the same. The Old Masters art market has crashed. Dead is the notion of owning old, expensive booty from empires of yore that require knowledge of craft and scholarship to appreciate. The Frick is a jaw-dropping floorshow of exactly that, and a testament to its staying power when compared to the bling of today. After all, what would a Tech Bro museum look like? Would it have its own crypto currency? Would it boast a ketamine-fueled gala on the playa at Burning Man? Or would it simply be a subtly textured, puckered ecru circle of hell underneath Satan’s frozen asshole in the Divine Comedy? (Full disclosure, that is exactly how I imagine the playa at Burning Man.)
Anyone with a smartphone is treated to breathless news coverage of the rich: lavish events and vacations and jewels. But before rockets and megayachts (and make no mistake, Henry Clay Frick owned a steamship and the 19th-century equivalent of a rocket: a private rail car), the rich collected the booty handed down (read: stolen) from one empire to the newly ascendant one. They valued provenance, because they believed it placed them squarely in its lineage. It became their own heritage, like the family trees we Americans are so short on. To own a Roman mosaic or bust was to embody a bit of Caesar. This narrative of empire is today the backbone of most major museums, a correlation that is a pet topic of mine. It is also exactly why the Frick feels so familiar and so august: it’s like a mini museum in which one God-fearing, union-busting man lived, an experience we can microdose ourselves by walking through it.
Of course, the art of the rich still crowds the walls of museums. Just as surely, that art reflects the power of certain dealers, just as it always has. Joseph Duveen, who famously said, "Europe had a great deal of art, and America had a great deal of money," was the famed dealer to the robber barons in the Gilded Age. He maintained four separate accounts for Henry Clay Frick alone. In New York City right now, four major museum retrospectives feature contemporary artists represented by a single blue-chip gallery, Hauser and Wirth. The rich and their servants still do a great deal to shape our notions of culture and refinement. But that 19th-century robber baron wealth is what built US museums and spread the seductive, Calvinist lie that a world where the rich were stewards of nice things was a world where the rich maybe deserved to have those nice things. Sometimes, the rich even shared them with the plebes, usually after they died out of noblesse oblige,or simply hating their kids.
Nostalgia for the Gilded Age is nostalgia for a world order that perhaps kept us down, but at least made a little bit of sense (if you squinted hard enough at the Dutch still life). Today, we have Kaws at every art fair and Katy Perry dismayingly back from space in one piece. TikTok is rife with alleged “home improvements” that destroy historic homes in pursuit of a Kardashian aesthetic that somehow manages to be both spare and maximalist. Rebecca Shaw was right: today’s rich are cringe. Beige, however, is not a matter of seeking inconspicuousness; it is a part of the cultural poverty that plagues our ruling class, whose libraries go no further than A for Ayn Rand. Beige is the color of a desert of ideas, as well as what the earth will look like once the billionaire class has destroyed it. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether or not one considers the hue ostentatious. Mark Twain, who coined the term “Gilded Age,” once wrote, “The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.” After all, it also doesn’t matter what someone is wearing when you’re under their boot. But that won’t stop me from renewing my Frick membership (or—full disclosure—borrowing my mom’s).
[post_title] => Robber Barons vs. Beige Bros
[post_excerpt] => On the reopening of the Frick, modern wealth's bland aesthetics, and the meaning behind our Gilded Age nostalgia.
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One would hope that something that happens so frequently would be discussed. But overwhelmingly, it’s not—until, as I learned, you join the miscarriage club yourself.
For an LA storytelling show in 2009, I wrote and performed an essay called “The Cinderella Instinct,” a piece detailing that cut-and-run gut feeling nearly every woman in her 20s cultivates from continuously escaping predatory men. Easing the audience in with the softball line, “Every man is a potential rapist,” I launched into stories detailing the many times I’d quite literally run away from an uncomfortable situation with a possible predator—from hopping out of a convertible at a rolling stop in Hollywood to sprinting from a shirtless Frenchman through a deserted, deeply unsavory part of Nice.
At the essay’s conclusion, I reflected on how, while I’d escaped potential assault throughout my life so far, 1 in 6 women do not—including some of my best friends, and my sister, whose story I shared with her permission. Perhaps my “luck” was partly because my stories had involved strangers, whereas assault has always been more likely to occur from someone you know, as it had with my loved ones. “So who that I know is the real potential rapist?” I’d written in the original essay. “Is it you?”
Granted, they made me cut that final line in my performance, deeming it a bit too much truth telling for a comedy night. Because of this, it wasn’t until some handful of years later, with the advent of #metoo, that I thought we might finally be ready to address the question—and that things might start to shift.
Reader, we did not cleanse the world of rape culture. But, at least, we began to talk about it, and to me, that felt like progress.
A decade on, I’d survived the end of my twenties, and spent most of my thirties setting the stage for a deeply healthy marriage (pro-tip: couple’s therapy while dating!). Then, I fell face first into yet another hidden gem of womanhood—a very different pile of bullshit our culture has encouraged women to shovel through in silence.
I had a miscarriage.
While there’s been a slow thaw towards openly talking about miscarriage thanks to social media, the word itself still contains an air of old-timey superstition and precious shame in most everyday contexts, something I would quickly learn in the aftermath of my own. Even now, chatting with friends or neighbors, I’ve found the word “miscarriage” invokes an involuntary wince, in both myself and others, because it’s just not something we talk about in a casual way.
Meanwhile, in a medical setting, doctors will bluntly inform you of how wildly common miscarriage is, ending 1 in 4 pregnancies, mostly in the first trimester and often before you’ve even realized you’re pregnant. One would hope that something that happens that frequently would be—I don’t know—discussed? But overwhelmingly, it’s not—until, as I learned, you join the miscarriage club yourself.
I’m not going to get into the public political discourse on pregnancy here—that would require several books, not an article. But with the trend of states legislating a stranglehold on women’s reproductive rights, it feels more important than ever to have open, candid, and clear conversations about the reality of pregnancy—including potential miscarriage. And that means sharing our stories, no matter how uncomfortable, so that we have a realistic, informed, and nuanced view on the many things becoming pregnant can entail.
So, here’s mine.
I’ve never felt the clicking of my biological clock, but after blissfully devoting my 30s to self-producing edgy physical theater with my co-performer-turned-husband, I realized if we wanted to procreate, we’d better get a move on. So, we survived a global pandemic, got married, and had a year’s worth of unprotected sex—until one day, just like I learned, I peed on a stick and found out I was pregnant. Like magic!
As an information-seeking, newly pregnant woman of advanced maternal age, I’d already worked hard to mentally prepare myself for possible miscarriage. I knew the 1-in-4 statistic, how spontaneous miscarriages are very normal, and that they’re often chromosomal and don’t mean anything negative about a couple’s ability to have children. Still, in the early days of my pregnancy, my mind raced, mapping out the ticking 40-week time bomb of our life. To me, my pregnancy was real the minute that pee stick said so; and I took any advice I could find, whether from doctor friends or the internet, avoiding deli meat and sushi, abstaining from alcohol and Advil, and quitting my nighttime melatonin. At the same time, I tried to hold the simultaneous truth that this pregnancy could be nothing—that I could be one of the unlucky ones—trying to temper my own anticipation until enough time had passed to make it “real.”
To make matters worse, I’d found out I was pregnant a few weeks before my husband and I were scheduled to shoot pick-ups in Los Angeles for the film adaptation of one of our aforementioned edgy plays. I was dismayed to learn the doctor wouldn’t see me until I was 8 weeks pregnant—right when we were out of town—because of the prevalence of miscarriage in the first trimester. As she explained, it wouldn’t make sense for them to see me until the pregnancy was really viable, so they scheduled my check-up for when I would return to New York, at the top of week 11.
Lacking a doctor’s guidance, I felt like I needed a master’s in philosophy and a zen Buddhist practice just to navigate the mindfuckery of early pregnancy. This potential baby was both alive and not at the same time. It was Schrödinger’s Cat, but in my womb. During this time, I also had several experiences where I'd cautiously divulge to a trusted friend that I was in my first trimester—always sharing that I knew I was "not supposed to tell anyone." But nearly every time I offered that caveat, people would actuallyshush me—as if uttering the word "miscarriage" while pregnant would invite it in. They insisted that if I believed things were okay, they would be; and as time continued to pass, I grew more confident that they were right, that I could trust my pregnancy was real. My cautious internal caveat of “I could miscarry” began to lose its footing. In my mind, Schrödinger’s baby was alive.
Back in New York, my husband and I excitedly went to our doctor’s appointment. The vibe was immediately optimistic and pleasant: We’d just made it to week 11, and after having a discussion about all the nightmare things we’d have to monitor for the next 30-odd weeks, things felt pretty real. Then, we got around to the ultrasound. At first, the doctor couldn’t really “find” the pregnancy visually. Which... seemed bad. Then, once she did, she noted that it looked closer to 7 weeks, not 11.
The vibe shifted.
The doctor asked about the timing—could we have mistaken the date of conception? In response, I showed her my overachieving honor student psychopathic period tracking data, and her expression changed. Suddenly, the life-changing timeline that had taken shape over the past weeks started to crumble. The following week’s nuchal translucency, done at week 12, was changed to a "dating sonogram.” Later, in my patient notes, I saw it was actually to check viability: No heartbeat had been detected.
While I was too blindsided to think clearly, my husband luckily had the presence of mind to ask what all of this actually meant. Finally, the doctor explained how the sonogram was to confirm if this was an "abnormal pregnancy." If it was, we'd discuss next steps of how to "remove" it, and we'd be able to "try again" basically right away.
Since this was a Friday appointment, we would have to wait an agonizing weekend before getting official answers at Monday’s sonogram. During two endless days of a new, unwelcome brand of uncertainty, I sat in my paradigm’s reversal, going from 95% sure I was pregnant to 95% sure I was not. In this purgatory, I tried to catch up to a new reality while still occupying the old truths I’d come to accept. Like a prayer or superstitious tick, I kept avoiding lox, soft cheese, and alcohol when we went out to eat, but I also cried for hours in anticipatory mourning.
That Monday, the doctor confirmed I had, in fact, miscarried a couple of weeks prior. Turns out there's a thing called a "missed abortion," where you miscarry but it doesn't actually leave your body, and you still feel totally fine. I’d always thought miscarriages were marked by cramping and bleeding and a big event—but no, mine was just straight chilling in my body for weeks, something I found horribly disturbing, but is medically normal. (Yet another thing no one talks about, and something I only learned of after it had happened to me.)
Going through the psychological whiplash of accepting that I was no longer pregnant felt even harder given all those hushed conversations that had preceded it. I felt like this pain was something no one wanted to hear about, or talk about—that I wasn’t allowed to talk about it. But then, something surprising started happening. The minute I would get over the fear of divulging my story—and the fear of making other people feel uncomfortable, sad, or awkward by being truthful about what I’d been through—all of these other stories began emerging around me. Women I’d known for years began privately sharing their own experiences with me—how they’d miscarried both before and after carrying successful pregnancies, how they’d had to endure D&Cs during IVF, how they had held the image of their future child in their heart and had struggled to let it go. Once I learned just how many women around me had carried the same pain, the powerful loneliness around my miscarriage fell away. And while feeling grateful for the empathy and support these shared stories gave me, I also felt sorrow that I’d never heard them before—that these women only now felt like it was safe or acceptable to share them with me because I’d gone through it, too.
It was also through hearing about other women’s experiences that I learned, in at least one respect, I’d been very lucky. One small silver lining of my story was the team of spectacular women doctors who saw me through my miscarriage as quickly and empathetically as possible—something a doctor friend informed me is "very unusual for OBs." They worked to get me seen within the week of my sonogram, and upon noting my distress, the doctor doing my D&C worked to fit me in at the hospital the next day so I could go under anesthesia. When I thanked her for all her efforts—knowing how glacially slow the medical world usually works—she simply said, "1 in 4 of us have been there, we know how important it is to get past this as quickly as possible so you can heal." That same empathy was echoed by virtually every woman who saw me through my care, from both of my doctors to the receptionists booking my appointments to the nurses in the hospital. (Weill Cornell… Thank you.)
Still, it took me nearly a year to feel well enough to write about any of it. This is partly because I had to grapple with my own internalized conceptions of what a miscarriage “means,” even while knowing intellectually that it does not “mean” anything. I was raised on a German workhorse ethic, believing anything I put my mind to I can make happen, so a “failed” pregnancy did not fit into my sense of self. Plus, navigating the term “infertility”—which suddenly gets slapped on you medically after miscarriage—has been far from easy, especially in a culture that seems obsessed with women’s reproductive viability, and how many years past the age of thirty they dare to age.
But as I’ve worked to come to grips with these many things that lie beyond my control, I hope that sharing my story can help start some necessary conversations. That maybe my sharing will help someone feel a little less alone in the same way so many women helped me feel a little less alone, too.
I won’t sugarcoat it: Miscarriage sucks. It’s sad. And no one likes talking about sad shit. But based on my own experience, I think we need to talk about it. Because when we don’t—when we carry it alone, when we shush the possibility of its existence—we give it unnecessary weight. So many others are carrying this, have carried it—and it shouldn’t feel so heavy. But to make that possible, we need to catch up culturally to the reality of miscarriage medically: It’s normal. Often, it’s your body resetting from a pregnancy that was not ready to cook. Whatever the root reason, it’s not a failure. It’s just another one of those things that happens.
When we stigmatize miscarriage by refusing to talk about it or treating it as a tragedy, we’re setting women up to feel isolated and broken, to feel like they’ve failed. I’ve found that, by talking about my own miscarriage openly, without hesitation, I’ve helped redefine what it means to me personally: It’s not a failure, and no one is to blame. It’s just another one of many steps along the road, a moment of sadness I’ve endured and moved beyond. It can feel tragic, but it is not a tragedy. It is normal. You’re normal. And if you need to feel sad, just know: There is a whole world of women out there sharing the weight of this with you, whether you realize it or not.
~
Author's Note: I’ve referred to people who can get pregnant in this essay as “women,” as it is a deeply personal story, written from my perspective as a woman. However, with so much rampant transphobia in culture and politics right now, I want to make clear that people beyond the traditional gender binary can get pregnant, and can also experience miscarriage—and I emphatically believe they should be included in this conversation.
[post_title] => We Need to Talk About Our Miscarriages
[post_excerpt] => One would hope something so common would be discussed. But overwhelmingly, it's not—until you join the miscarriage club yourself.
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[post_modified] => 2025-05-20 20:16:15
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How a company in Kanpur is giving India's flower waste a second life.
It’s a sweltering April afternoon in Bhaunti village, about an hour’s drive from the heart of Kanpur, India. Inside a large hall, shaded from the harsh sun, the air is thick with the scent of marigold and rose. Groups of women, dressed in bright cotton sarees and salwar suits, work with quiet concentration. Some sit in circles, carefully sorting flower offerings collected from nearby temples; others pluck delicate petals with practiced hands. At one end, a few women lift heavy tubs of freshly washed blooms, carrying them outside to spread on large sheets, where the sun will slowly draw out their moisture, preparing them for the next stage of transformation.
Inside the factory, 38-year-old Preity Mishra moves with quiet efficiency, neatly packing incense boxes with an ease that comes from years of practice. She first joined the factory seven years ago, after unexpectedly losing her previous job, where she had worked for nine long years. At first, Preity admits, she was hesitant. Preity, along with the other women, works for Phool, a company that converts flower waste into incense sticks, cones, essential oils, and dyes. “I thought it would be dirty work,” she recalls, brushing a speck of sandalwood dust from her sleeve. But her perspective quickly changed once she learned where the flowers came from. “When I found out the waste came from temples, I began to see it differently,” she says. “These flowers are sacred and offered in prayer. It felt like I was giving them a second life, which is noble work.”
Preity Mishra inspecting a box of incense sticks.
The story of Phool traces back to 2016, when Ankit Agarwal, a computer engineer turned entrepreneur, accompanied a visiting friend on a trip to Kanpur’s ghats along the Ganga River. It was the time of Makar Sankranti, an Indian festival marked by ritual river dips. Though the water appeared visibly polluted, devotees continued to bathe as part of the tradition. “My friend began asking me questions about the purity of the water, why people still took dips despite the pollution,” Ankit recalls. “I realized I didn’t have the answers. In the meantime, a huge tractor of flower waste came and was dumped into the river.”
That moment planted the first seed of what would eventually become Phool, which means “flower” in Hindi. “I returned to my job, but I couldn’t focus. I was working, but I wasn’t content,” Ankit says, sitting in his office in Kanpur. “I eventually quit and came back to research how this flower waste could be reduced or stopped entirely from polluting our rivers.”
India, with its countless festivals and year-round celebrations, generates a significant amount of solid waste, including an estimated 800 million tons of flower waste per year. As many of these flowers are grown using pesticides and insecticides, when this floral waste is dumped into water bodies, it begins to decay, producing a foul odor and contributing to serious water pollution—much like what Ankit and his friend witnessed in the Ganga River.
After he returned home to Kanpur, Ankit began crunching the numbers, calculating how many temples were in the region, how much flower waste was generated daily, and the scale at which it was being dumped. The results were staggering. According to government data, there are about 108,000 temples and mosques in India where flowers are offered every day, before being dumped in landfills or bodies of water, contributing significantly to the country’s water pollution and ecological damage.
A worker scatters flower petals on a plastic sheet to help them dry.
Ankit began reaching out to temples, hoping to convince them to hand over their floral waste so that it might have a second life. “It was difficult to convince them,” he says. “Flowers offered at temples hold deep religious significance, so naturally, there was hesitation.” The temples weren’t resistant out of indifference, but an abundance of caution. “They were sincere in their concerns,” Ankit acknowledges. “They wanted to know why I wanted the flowers and what exactly I intended to do with them.”
Once Ankit succeeded in securing the flower waste, he spent the next several months immersed in research, exploring different ways the discarded blooms could be transformed into something meaningful. “I spent around eight months studying how this waste could be turned into compost or used in other sustainable ways,” he says. Then, he had a breakthrough. “Incense sticks are usually made from charcoal,” he recalls thinking. “Why not try making them from temple flower waste instead?”
Ankit and his co-founder, Prateek Kumar, began operating out of IIT Kanpur, slowly putting their idea into action. Every day, Ankit would ride his two-wheeler to find a daily-wage laborer to help with tasks like sorting flower waste and basic processing. But the pair struggled to find reliable help—a new worker would show up each day, and rarely would anyone return, even when Ankit personally asked them to come back. It became clear that if the project was to grow, they needed a more stable workforce.
Then, by chance, a woman came to their office one morning looking for work, and Ankit offered her a day’s job. As with many others, he asked her to return the next day—and to his surprise, she did.
A group of women rolling incense sticks by hand.
While they worked side by side, he started a conversation. Could she come regularly? Could she help bring in other women like her? She readily agreed. “It would be better to come here and work with flowers,” she told him, “than to go to seven or eight homes every morning to clean toilets. Even then, we don’t always get paid—just some leftover food or old clothes.”
Ankit was struck by her words. The next day, they visited nearby neighborhoods together, and soon, 35 women had joined the initiative. He trained them, helped them get their Aadhaar cards for the first time, assisted them in opening bank accounts, and taught them how to use mobile phones—all small but powerful steps toward economic empowerment and independence.
“It wasn’t easy at all,” Ankit says. “But we conducted a three-day workshop to teach them the basics. I didn’t want them to remain stuck in the informal sector. I wanted to bring them into the formal workforce, with dignity, stability, and skill.”
A worker monitors one of the factory's machines.
This commitment is fundamental to Phool’s success, and remains an important part of their work culture. “When we established the company, one thing was clear: There would be transparency. That’s why you’ll see there are no walls in the office—just glass partitions to divide the teams,” Ankit explains. “We also made a conscious decision to ensure that the women working with us have a clear path to grow. That’s why we move them from sorting to incense stick making, and then to packaging—so they not only feel a sense of progression but also develop leadership qualities in the process.”
Another important aspect, he shares, is supporting his employees in sending their children back to school. “We currently have 500 people working with us, and 490 of them are women,” Ankit says. “Around 60% of them have enrolled their children back in school. Our mission is to support all of them so that [over the next few years], 5,000 children return to classrooms. This is something we’re intentionally working on, even if we don’t speak about it publicly.”
As for the company itself, Ankit and his team remain dedicated to product innovation and exploring new possibilities with flower waste. Recently, the team even succeeded in creating sustainable “leather” from discarded flowers.
Workers dividing and sorting incense cones for packing.
Nachiket Kuntla, who heads the research and development division at Phool, believes this innovation could be a major breakthrough for the leather industry and the broader sustainable market. “We spent a good 7–8 years researching and experimenting with this idea,” says Nachiket. “We’ve now developed a product that is sustainable and matches leather in terms of texture, quality, and feel. We’ll be launching a pilot product in collaboration with a fashion brand by the end of this year.”
Phool’s journey is a reminder that sustainability doesn’t have to come at the cost of tradition—it can actually grow from it. What began as a simple act of questioning river pollution has now bloomed into a movement that empowers women, preserves faith, and protects the environment. As the world looks for other, cleaner ways forward, perhaps it’s time we ask ourselves: What else are we throwing away that could bloom again?
[post_title] => The Sacred Cycle
[post_excerpt] => How a company in Kanpur is giving India's flower waste a second life.
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How South Asian rappers are honoring the diaspora—and hip hop’s roots.
Four gunshots and the sound of a cash register: In her 2007 hit “Paper Planes,” British-Sri Lankan rapper and singer M.I.A. (a.k.a., Maya Arulpragasam) interpolated these sounds between sharp lyricism that satirized Western perceptions of third world immigrants and the xenophobia that became especially rampant after 9/11. Against all odds, the world couldn’t help rapping along.
Later, the song would be named one of the top five best of the decade by Rolling Stone, one of the most-streamed of the decade by Apple, and the greatest song by any 21st century woman+ by NPR. Its success was as much due to its catchy refrain as it was to its unexpected content, especially at the time: The song was arguably the first rap song from the South Asian diaspora to articulate the increasingly politicized identities of South Asian migrants and second-generation immigrants to a mainstream global audience.
While the artist behind the song has since become a somewhat controversial figure, the impact of “Paper Planes” remains. And nearly two decades later, rappers from all over the South Asian diaspora have become a testament to the increasing globalization of hip hop, a subculture rooted in resistance, and its power as a language of global protest.
Founded in the Bronx during the 1970s, hip hop was born as a form of expression and resistance in Black and Latino communities, and as a genre, it’s only grown exponentially since. Throughout the 80s, as production and sampling technology became more accessible, hip hop began gaining traction on a wider scale, and eventually, was no longer limited to live performance, thanks to the popularity of shows like Yo! MTV Raps. By the 90s, it had broken into the mainstream, due to the meteoric rise of MTV, BET’s Rap City, and albums like Public Enemy’s “Fear of the Black Planet” achieving commercial success. This mainstream eruption of hip hop also coincided with South Asian Americans using rap to articulate their own immigrant identity for the first time—and now, in the streaming age, the subgenre has only boomed.
Last August, South Indian rapper Hanumankind, who spent his early childhood in Houston, Texas, went viral for his roaring hit “Big Dawgs,” a song about defying cultural stereotypes. The music video, which has over 218 million views on YouTube, features riders on motorcycles zipping around a “well of death,” a spectacle common in Northern India—the video at times feeling like an homage to the stunt driving in the controversial but iconic music video for M.I.A.’s 2012 hit “Bad Girls.”
Hanumankind’s success is the most recognizable contemporary example of the popularity and success of hip hop from the Indian diaspora, a success that feels inherently political due to the thematic explorations of his music. “He's able to use hip hop commercially to make himself successful, while also drawing on cultural and religious symbols that make his identity very much part of Indian and Hindu culture,” says Dr. Mirali Bulaji, a professor in race, global media, and nationalism at the University of Pennsylvania and co-editor of the 2008 book Desi Rap: Hip Hop and South Asian America.
With the myriad of backgrounds and identities that South Asian diaspora rappers have, the politics that they intentionally or unintentionally convey is dependent on not only the lyrical content of their music, but the way they market themselves. This is something Hanumankind is clearly conscious of: His visuals draw on Indian and Hindu imagery, while his music style feels distinctly American (he has cited Texan rap group UGK as one of his biggest influences). But this approach isn’t unique to Hanumankind. For his album “The Long Goodbye,” for example, British-Pakistani rapper and actor Riz Ahmed (who goes by Riz MC) released a short film that played as metaphor for the wrought relationship between South Asian Muslims and the rise of the far right in Britain. Although the visuals and lyrical content of hip hop for the diaspora varies, the thread that connects the genre is the use of cultural and religious symbols to inspire representation as a means of empowerment in the face of oppression, both for commercial reasons and not.
In an essay for Desi Rap, filmmaker and activist Raesham Chopra Nijhon writes that hip hop became a place for the broader spectrum of South Asian identity because it facilitated an accurate image of a more nuanced community than what mainstream Western culture had fabricated. As a genre, it offered a way for the South Asian diaspora to illustrate the nuances of racialization and how white supremacy functions in contexts independent from the racial dynamics that exist between white and Black people. The charged lyricism and dynamic cadences also offered a new way for South Asians, specifically in the U.S., to articulate their identity outside of the Black and white paradigm.
“It was a generation of young people who truly were looking for some way to express their identity, their angst about being othered, and finding ways to communicate that they were explicitly American yet global at the same time,” Balaji says.
It was these elements, along with similarities in the syncopation of both Punjabi music and hip hop, that drew Punjabi Canadian Taj Bhangu, who goes by the name Lioness Kaur, to become a rapper. “When the West really looks at South Asian music, they really just see it in this really cliched way and I feel like hip hop's such a great art form for bridging those gaps,” says Bhangu. Defying these cliches, she believes, shouldn’t be wholly dependent on its visuals, but also the music itself.
In an Instagram caption promoting her latest single, “Long Lost Brother,” Bhangu writes she wanted to fuse South Asian sonics with hip hop in a way that wasn’t orientalist. For her, this led to both a blending of sounds and culture: Most of Bhangu’s music intersperses exuberant strings with twangy sitar. In “Long Lost Brother,” this sitar doubles as the cyclical rhythm she raps over while she details memories of her childhood, with nods to both her Sikh Punjabi and Canadian upbringings: “Eating McDonald's, Roseborough Centre / Adventures and pulling pranks / Pulling Biji′s old crutches out / From under the bed.”
In her song “Politics at Home,” Bhangu further details her experience living in a joint family home, something common amongst South Asian families. Throughout the song, Bhangu talks about the misogyny that many Indian Canadians witness growing up, and connects the struggle her mother’s family faced going back home to the “pind” (“the village” in Sikh) with issues of class and the neglect of certain areas due to government corruption: “The pind could be the hood at times / They grinded to make it here, only to return / Put their dreams in an urn / They yearned for their daughter, my mother.”
Watching one’s mother deal with the loneliness and helplessness of generational misogyny isn’t an experience unique to the South Asian diaspora, but rather, a ubiquitous one—which is part of why her music has found a broader audience. But for those within the diaspora, Bhangu’s music articulates that emotional isolation in a way that is uniquely familiar, combining the linguistics of Western hip hop with South Asian instrumentals.
We see this use of more traditional instrumentals as a tool for blending cultures across the genre, including use of the dhol and chenda drums, traditionally played at religious ceremonies and cultural gatherings to bring communities together. Their exhilarating reverberation and almost unadulterated pace resembles that of the rapid yet succinctly meaningful rhythms fundamental to hip hop. In this way, the steady bass intrinsic to the sounds of both genres incites an intoxicatingly invigorating and empowering feeling that can be and has been used to rally and mobilize movements, political or otherwise. (Something producer Timbaland clearly appreciated in the ‘90s and early aughts, when he sampled South Asian instrumentals in multiple chart-topping hits like Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” and The Game’s “Put You on the Game.”)
Of course, the South Asian diaspora isn’t homogenous, and South Asian hip hop isn’t either. It encapsulates countless subgenres, from the Punjabi hip hop that inspires Bhangu, which uses both the language and traditional instruments like the sitar and the dhol; to Desi hip hop, which encapsulates a combination of influences from the South Asian diaspora, including that of Indian Americans.
Hip hop also isn’t the first or only form of protest music within the diaspora. South Asian protest music can be traced back to the independence movement during British colonial rule across the continent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Stanford ethnomusicologist Anna Schultz, the kirtan, a call-and-response form of singing and chanting Hindu mantras, was crucial in prompting protests against British rule and leading to political reform. “Through performance, they [kirtan performers] use signs in finely attuned ways to bring politics and religion together so that they are just one tightly bound unit of meaning,” Schultz said in an interview with Stanford Arts.
What was once resistance against British colonial rule, however, eventually evolved into Hindu nationalism; and this evolution of revolutionary politics packaged into the commercialization of empowerment has not spared South Asian hip hop. For both genres of music, directly combating and even angering the systems that encourage whiteness, colonialism, and capitalism are central to their origins. But as contemporary identity politics prioritize the optics of representation, it's easy for rappers from marginalized communities to fall into the trap of using their art to partake in shallow representation politics rather than engage in the tangible interest of their communities.
The obfuscation of hip hop’s political roots isn’t unique to the South Asian diaspora; however, its rising popularity within the diaspora coincided with the broader genre more generally becoming an asset for the commodification of resistance politics, something that has affected South Asian rap and hip hop today.
Balaji notes that despite many South Asian activists and rappers proclaiming hip hop as their tool of resistance, many don’t seem to demonstrate it in action. Last September, for example, Hanumankind performed “Big Dawgs” at a venue in Long Island in which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was present, and was later pictured hugging him in front of the crowd. Modi has long been criticized for his Hindu nationalist statements and policies, barring Muslims from extensive citizenship and revoking the Kashmir region’s autonomous status.
While Hanumankind hasn’t been explicitly critical of Modi or his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in his 2021 single “Genghis,” the rapper, whose given name is Sooraj Cherukat, discusses the tribulations of street life in South India and attributes violence to the complicity of the Indian government: “But what you partying for? / We got issues in our nation 'cause there's parties at war / When our leaders aren't leading at the heart and core / And they tamper with evidence when you gon' file a report.”
Still, none of this has stopped South Asian rap’s momentum, or its resonance. The subgenre also feels especially powerful for many South Asians today because of its mainstream popularity—giving voice and a platform to a diaspora that has long suffered from intergenerational trauma amongst the many ramifications of whiteness and British imperialism. It’s also unlikely to die down any time soon. According to Business Insider, the rise of South Asian talent from all over the diaspora, and the increasingly popular mashup of South Asian artists making music over Western beats, can be credited in large part to the rise of platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Consequently, Balaji predicts the ever-increasing popularity of these streaming platforms, combined with the ability for anyone to create their own audiences on social media and the effects of migration on immigrant identities, will only lead to South Asian rap becoming an increasingly globalized genre.
“Artists in their respective countries are going to be able to articulate identities that are unique to their cultural and political circumstances,” says Balaji. We’re already seeing this today: Whether it’s Riz MC, Raja Kumari, or Yung Raja, rappers and artists across the diaspora are finding ways to honor their roots without straying from hip hop’s own.
Bhangu is one of these artists, merging the lyrical syncopation and metrical soul that is found in both hip hop and South Asian music, to give voice to being a Sikh Punjabi woman in Canada.
“I'm breaking a lot of barriers. As a girl, people don't really see that many female South Asian rappers, so it’s a shock for so many people,” she says. “But there are a lot of people who do support and dig deeper into the art and they feel heard.”
[post_title] => The Diverse Politics of Desi Hip Hop
[post_excerpt] => How South Asian rappers are honoring the diaspora—and hip hop’s roots.
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“Who are these people who are not seeing that our people are dying?”
Njeru municipality, located in Uganda's Buikwe district, is a scenic area where the River Nile flows out of Lake Victoria. While the locale attracts tourists, who go swimming, canoeing, and rafting in these waters, the region has also seen a drastic transformation in recent years, drawing large industries that provide employment opportunities for Uganda's young population. They often get work as machine operators or production workers, sorting and packaging at these factories. But while economically beneficial to some, these industries are also increasing pollution in the water, air, and environment—threatening the health of the region for tourists, youth workers, and long-time residents alike.
Since 2019, through the Uganda Investment Authority, the Ugandan government has allocated 956 acres of land for industries in Buikwe district as part of Vision 2040, an economic initiative that aims to transform Uganda into a modern and prosperous country within 30 years. But many locals suggest the government has fallen short in regulating these industries, leading to disastrous repercussions: It’s almost certain you’ll engage with some form of factory pollution in the region, via inhaling smog or coming into contact with the polluted water that flows into the Nile.
While Uganda’s 2019 National Environmental Act requires industries to treat their effluent before discharging it into water bodies, many businesses in the region do not comply. In Bujowali village, for example, the steel manufacturing company Pramukh Steel Limited releases wastewater into the Naava stream without proper treatment. Residents are concerned about the pollution, which affects their main water source, and consequently, their health.
On a warm day in March, the wet season fully underway, three women stand akimbo, atop a drainage channel being constructed across the marram road from Pramukh factory. In the channel, about a dozen men are hard at work lifting stones and mixing sand and cement while a supervisor hovers over them.
One of the women is Wazemba Annet Jackline, a resident of Bujowali village, and a local area councilor. “This is the only clean water stream we have in the village,” she says. “But now, we cannot take the water without boiling it first. It is no longer safe, it's contaminated.”
The steel company not only releases dust and sludge into the region’s water and air, but also mill scale, which pollutes the air with small particles that can be ingested by people and animals in close proximity to the factory. Residents have reported cases of illnesses such as diarrhea, cough, and flu. There are also some unconfirmed cases of cancer and allegations of animals dying due to the pollution. What’s more, the company’s factory also releases wastewater with a foul smell during the dry season, and even larger quantities mixed with fecal matter during the rainy season, which flows into the lower end of the stream.
In March this year, after a series of negotiations, Pramukh agreed to build the water drainage channel in response to complaints from Bujowali’s residents. Unfortunately, the construction materials they’ve used cannot withstand the water flow from the factory or the region’s heavy rains. Residents say this is the third time the channel is being constructed, with the same materials, after previous attempts have collapsed.
“They are reconstructing in the same place every day. The type of cement they are using will take time to set, yet this is a water-logged area,” says Jackline, who is a civil engineer by profession. “I’m asking them to reconsider the type of cement they are using. As much as they are looking at cutting costs, the cement type I’m suggesting only hydrates when it rains, and the mixture gets stronger instead of being washed away.”
Her pleas, however, fall on deaf ears as the workers continue with their work.
On the frontlines of the environmental fight in the region is Girls for Climate Action, an eco-feminist movement founded in Jinja district, advocating for climate justice and action in Buikwe. The organization has partnered with the community to address industrial pollution and promote sustainable practices under the campaign “Toa Uchafu,” a Swahili word meaning, “remove the garbage,” a call to end industrial water pollution in Buikwe.
The campaign highlights how the region’s industries are not complying with Uganda’s National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) standards, says Viola Kataike, the organization’s advocacy lead. “[They] pollute the different eco-systems that the community—especially women and girls—depend on for their livelihoods,” she adds.
The factories have also led to the displacement of some of the region’s long-time residents. Kataike cites an example of a woman she says is currently being forced to leave her land, where her late husband is buried. “She is crying out,” she says. “How is she going to move her husband’s remains because now the land supposedly belongs to the factory? It’s traumatic.”
Girls for Climate Action has also carried out a situational analysis of the pollution levels for existing industries in Buikwe, measuring contamination in the different natural water sources. According to Kataike, the results were revealing. “These industries have taken the opportunity to release their waste and effluents into River Nile, but of course channel it through the streams that the communities fetch water from.”
This pollution is also affecting the farming community throughout the Buikwe district. Farmers report crop damage, animal deaths, and health problems such as itchy eyes and skin, as well as inflamed skin that turns ashy after contact with the contaminated water.
At a community meeting held in March at the Mubeeya cultural site in Nyenga in Njeru municipality, farmers expressed distress at the pollution of the Mubeeya stream caused by the sugar, spirits, and plastics manufacturing company, GM Sugar. The farmers, most of whom are rice growers, raised a number of complaints.
“During the night, you can't sleep, the water stinks,” says 44-year-old Godfrey Walusimbi, a farmer who has spent his whole life in Buikwe. “You can't give your cattle the water, if they drink it, our cattle fall sick. I lost two goats.”
Some farmers also say their crops are being burnt up by the chemicals now contaminating the ground. “The acid in the soil has killed the soil fertility and crops are drying up in the garden,” Walusimbi says.
In the town of Njeru itself, which is centrally located in Buikwe, councilor Ibriata Clarke says that a factory located next to a secondary school has water trenches that run through the school’s playfield. She also says some representatives have tried to speak to factory management but are constantly being sent away. “We’ve been told not to complain about what the factories are doing to our people,” she says—but, she adds, “Who are these people who are not seeing that our people in Njeru municipality are dying?”
A Buikwe district officer who asked that they remain unnamed but whose role offers relevant insight, says they have carried out several tests, and there is proof that industrial chemicals have polluted the water, soil, and air in the locality. According to them, “While the recommended chemical oxygen demand in the water is 50, in Njeru, it is much higher, which is proof the water is polluted.” With residents reporting headaches, stomach pains, and skin reactions, the immediate solution, they say, is to stop using the water, concluding that it is corrosive.
However, they added that farmers who use agro chemicals and pesticides to kill weeds are also partially to blame. “During the rainy season, those chemicals sink into the sand and the water runs off into the streams,” they explain.
As environmental incidents continue to gain attention in the district, a court case between a local farmer, Allan John Ddamulira, and GM Sugar has come to underscore Buikwe’s industrial pollution problem.
Ddamulira claims that GM Sugar's discharge of toxic waste into the Kinywa water stream killed his fish and damaged his farm, which consisted of eight fishponds located on 10 acres. “Unknowingly to us, the water that was flowing through the stream that day had been polluted with molasses from the sugar factory,” he says. “So, we woke up to a fish kill. All the fish were floating, dead.”
In September 2022, Ddamulira registered a formal complaint with NEMA in Uganda’s capital city, Kampala.“Results comparing the stream water and the water from the ponds revealed there was an oxygen deficiency that resulted in the fish kill at the farm,” Ddamulira says.
Following their investigation, NEMA issued a stop order to GM Sugar to cease the company’s release of effluent into the stream, but Ddamulira says the order has never been respected. He has since taken GM Sugar to court, and has accused NEMA of withholding evidence that would be useful in his case.
In February 2024, through his lawyers, Ddadmulira wrote to NEMA requesting that the environmental authority share their findings with them, to be presented in court. But in a letter dated March 22, 2024, NEMA’s Executive Director, Barirega Akankwasah, stated that the matter was still under criminal investigation and consequently would not hand over copies of the technical expert report, stop order, or photographs taken at the site. He added that their refusal was protected by law. When contacted for comment, NEMA spokesperson Noame Karekaho responded, “Discussing the issue of GM Sugar and degradation of the environment are considered ‘subjudice.’”
GM Sugar’s Head of Legal has also denied Ddadmulira’s claims, saying the company has the latest technology from Germany handling its waste. “The company waste does not flow to the stream as the complainant claims. We usually take our waste to the Buikwe Industrial Park.” In court, Ddamulira produced a video of a GM Sugar vehicle pouring waste near the fish farm, disputing this was the case. However, GM Sugar argued that the “errant driver was asked by the villagers to release the waste into the road to allegedly reduce the dust which was about 15km from the fish pond.”
Still, Ddamulira fights on. “We need to pursue this case to get these people to understand that what they are doing is wrong and get justice for myself and many other farmers suffering because of this pollution,” he says. He claims he has lost 800m Uganda Shillings, or $218,000, as a result of the fish kill.
He also isn’t alone in this fight—and despite her frustrations, Kataike believes they are making an impact as community members increasingly voice their concerns. This is happening not just at meetings, but through peaceful protests and demands for action, including demands for more drainage channels. She adds, however, that not everyone has been supportive of their work: According to her, some community leaders are undermining their efforts by supporting the companies for selfish gains. “It’s a huge problem, especially with the small bribes that they give to a few leaders,” she says. “They also give false promises, offering positions to those who oppose them.”
Rather than slow their efforts, however, this has only further fueled them. Girls for Climate Action continues to raise awareness and empower the community to push the factories to adhere to the set environmental standards and to stop polluting, especially water sources. While Kataike expresses disappointment that the pollution persists, she promises their campaign against it will do the same. “If we don't act now, then when?” she asks. “Should we wait for the rest of the people to die, or should we support the community to create justice?”
[post_title] => One Ugandan Village's Fight Against Industrial Pollution
[post_excerpt] => “Who are these people who are not seeing that our people are dying?”
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Despite the threat of police violence and arrest, student-led protests against President Erdoğan and his ruling party continue across Turkey.
A wave of street demonstrations began rapidly taking over Turkey last month after a crowd of students at Istanbul University pushed back against, and ultimately overcame, a riot police barricade attempting to block their path. This feat was seen as a moment of encouragement and empowerment for a country that has long felt silenced by its current government, and has led to continued demonstrations across Turkey in the weeks since.
The students on March 19 were protesting the imprisonment of Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul’s current mayor, and the biggest rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the next presidential election. They were also protesting a court decision made the day prior that nullified İmamoğlu’s diploma, a controversial ruling that meant the mayor, a member of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, the CHP, would not be directly eligible for candidacy.
The ruling was taken as a major blow to democracy and rule of law both by his supporters and by the opposition, with the party’s chairman calling it a “black mark.” But it was only a foreshadowing. The next morning, İmamoğlu, along with some 100 people, including aides, business people, and other mayors of the metropolitan’s districts, were detained in their homes. İmamoğlu had been accused of corruption and terror for allegedly establishing an electoral alliance with the Kurds in previous mayoral elections.
The case against him was widely taken as politically-motivated—the law being utilized once again as a weapon to extend Erdoğan’s reign, and discourage and limit his critics. Many were also quick to call out the hypocrisy of the charges: President Erdoğan, founder of the ruling Justice and Development Party, the AKP, has himself been in talks with Turkey’s pro-Kurdish DEM Party to release Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, designated as a terror entity by Turkey and the U.S. alike.
In a handwritten note posted on Twitter/X while he was detained, İmamoğlu wrote, “My people will respond to those who steal the people’s will.”
Massive demonstrations immediately erupted across the country, in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, and tens of provinces, including Konya in central Turkey, a very conservative AKP stronghold. All were met with brutal police violence. At many of the protests, the riot police used tear gas, rubber ball rifles, and water cannons against the young protestors, many of whom had their faces covered to hide their identities, out of fear of losing their livelihoods.
For many, it was their first street demonstration. Many held various sizes of the Turkish flag, and banners—some humorous—expressing their resilience and upset.
Bülent Kılıç
On March 22, at the legal end of the mayor’s detention period, İmamoğlu and the CHP Chairman Özgür Özel both called for a demonstration at Sarachane, the metropolitan municipality’s headquarters in Istanbul’s historic Fatih district.
“The walls of fear have been overcome,” İmamoğlu said in his call, posted on Twitter/X—referencing a culture of fear that has been especially prevalent since 2015, when a war re-erupted with the PKK, and since 2016, when a U.S.-based Turkish cleric was accused of orchestrating a coup. Both paved the way for a more authoritarian environment, in which civil dissent would often be marginalized.
Hoping to deter protestors from attending the demonstration in Sarachane, the Interior Ministry imposed various travel restrictions in key provinces, including shutting down metro and bus stations to limit travel. But their efforts were unsuccessful. Hundreds of thousands surrounded the municipality in support of İmamoğlu, while many other demonstrators of various ages stood outside the courthouse in Caglayan, where the mayor’s hearing would be held throughout the night.
Ultimately, demonstrators were protesting what they believed to be an attack on Turkey’s democracy and core values. Facing a riot police barricade encircling the massive building, hundreds chanted, “Turkey is secular; it will remain secular,” and the famous Bertolt Brecht line: “All of us, or none!”
The court ruling came at early dawn: İmamoğlu and tens of aides were arrested for corruption, pending trial, which has since been postponed to July 11.
The decision drew masses more to the streets, mainly young people, many of whom viewed the ruling as an extension of Erdoğan’s corruption. For millions across the country, it was a drop too much following years of polarizing rhetoric and the criminalization of dissent in a crumbling economy.
“We are not here to support any political party,” Beyza Ozdemir, a 30-year-old screenwriter said in Sarachane, a day after the mayor was arrested. “I came because I want to defend my rights, my country; to stand against injustice. I’m here for the ruling government to resign.”
Alongside her friend, 27, Ozdemir explained that, like much of the population, they were just “surviving.” Under near-80 percent inflation, it has become nearly impossible to travel, own property, or make plans for the future in Turkey, something they blamed on Erdoğan and the AKP.
Other demonstrators said they were protesting for freedom of expression, justice, and in support of earthquake-proofing cities, following the devastating damage caused by the 2023 earthquake. Others said they were there because of the alarming femicide numbers, the destruction of nature, and the killing of strays in shelters. A majority said they came to protect the secular democracy entrusted to the Turkish youth by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey.
President Erdoğan, who’s been in the official power seat since 2003, called the demonstrations “a movement of violence” and “street terror.” But Beyza’s friend said that he felt like “a phoenix” standing among the crowds, chanting in solidarity, after years of being silenced following the massive 2013 Gezi Park protests against the same government, protests that were criminalized to the point of terror charges and a life sentence for a Turkish philanthropist, who is accused of undertaking an alleged organizational role.
Bülent Kılıç
Twelve years later, in Sarachane, the authorities would take similar, disproportionate measures once again. Caught on camera by photojournalists and protestors on the night of March 23, hundreds of riot police sprayed tear gas and fired heavy barrages of rubber balls directly at demonstrators, many of whom were just walking back to the metro at the end of the night.
Dozens of shoes were left behind by those who could flee. The next morning, members of the media, including internationally-acclaimed photojournalists, were detained on morning raids along with hundreds of young demonstrators, many of them university students.
All were accused of violating the law on meetings, and were imprisoned pending trial. Immediately, a public campaign to release them began, underlining that they were simply using their constitutional rights to protest. The campaign gained momentum on various social media and opposition platforms, which seems to have helped most of them to be freed, but with tens still imprisoned.
The protests continued. Following the last day of the mass gathering in Sarachane, on March 25, the CHP announced a demonstration in Maltepe, across the Bosphorus, the weekend following. They claimed 2.2 million people attended the event in solidarity.
The next day was the beginning of a government-imposed nine-day religious holiday, Eid al-Fitr, putting a temporary end to the mass demonstrations. In response, the opposition called for a day of nationwide mass boycott to curb the AKP’s economic hinge, by stopping consumption fully, a goal that was supported by many shops and restaurants, which all closed for the day.
Some actors who supported the boycott were removed from their roles in state-owned streaming platform Tabii, while Cem Yiğit Üzümoğlu, who stars as Mehmed the Conqueror in Netflix’s Rise of Empires: Ottoman, was briefly detained.
While the heat of the mass street demonstrations has since slowed down because of the break, boycotts against pro-government brands and the student-led protests have continued. This month, videos of demonstrations held by high school students from various provinces have also started circulating. In one, tens of riot police are stationed outside Vefa High School in Istanbul, where one student holds a banner reading, “Rights, Law, Justice!”
Many universities across the country have also continued to hold sit-ins and forums, calling for more demonstrations on campuses and in the streets. They continue to demand the release of the remaining imprisoned students, and to defend their right to constitutional welfare and secular democracy under new leadership.
Bülent Kılıç
On April 8, a “resistance and solidarity concert” was held in Kadikoy, attended mostly by university students, with hundreds of riot police standing by. While letters from imprisoned students were read aloud on stage, slogans against Erdoğan and his government were chanted throughout.
“Turkey has major problems of injustice and corruption. These come together and threaten our future,” Ayse, a 25-year-old student, who did not want to provide her last name, said. She’s about the same age as the AKP’s political power.
“Our fight will not end upon the students’ and İmamoğlu’s release, but when Turkey becomes a just and equal country, providing a bright future for its youth,” she said. “Though, they should be released because they were only practicing their constitutional rights.”
Despite the growing authoritarianism, Ayse said she feels more empowered than ever before, thanks to the crowds surrounding her.
[post_title] => "A Drop Too Much"
[post_excerpt] => Despite the threat of police violence and arrest, student-led protests against President Erdoğan and his ruling party continue across Turkey.
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Under Trump, the ideology is on the rise. But ultimately, eliminating eugenic beliefs from our shared society may require dismantling the United States itself.
In a moment when the experiment of the United States is teetering on the brink, the Trump administration is weaponizing deep-seated hatred of marginalized people to exacerbate ideological divides and deepen MAGA’s cult-like relationship with the president. A key component to this is their belief in and use of eugenics—the idea that it’s possible to create an ideal human by ≥eliminating “undesirable traits.” Meaningful resistance to Trump, then, requires a culture shift grounded in understanding the ideology’s history, the tech industry’s role in encouraging it, and the complicity of liberals and the left in conversations about whose life has value. It also means acknowledging just how deeply baked the ideology is into modern American culture.
Many people associate eugenics with the Nazis, comparing what’s happening in the United States today—the disappearing of immigrants without due process, the erasure of anything considered DEI, the destruction of archives—to the Nazi movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Nazi policy called for the extinction of unwanted communities via any means possible, including forced sterilization, social control, and, of course, “euthanasia” and mass murder. Yet in this pursuit of an improved “Aryan race,” the Nazis didn’t just want to populate the world with nondisabled blue-eyed blonds: They also viewed circumstantial, socially-mediated experiences such as criminality and poverty as genetic and therefore targets for elimination via breeding, an idea fundamental to the broader eugenics movement.
But the movement didn’t start there: The U.S.-based eugenics movement of the early 20th century was a tremendous influence on the Nazis, as was the work of British eugenicists such as Francis Galton and Julian Huxley. In the U.S., Charles Davenport, Henry Goddard, and many others aimed to “improve” humanity by fighting “dysgenic” influences, with prominent corporate foundations bankrolling their efforts. The normalization of American eugenics was also supported on a broader, sociocultural scale: Across the United States, laws encouraged marriage and children (for the right people), while simultaneously promoting the institutionalization and mass sterilization of disabled people, poor people, and Black, Indigenous people of color. “Better Babies” contests at county and state fairs promoted eugenic beliefs, alongside “fitter family” lectures and informational pamphlets.
The normalization of these policies across the U.S. has directly fed the rise of Trumpism, and the return of eugenics to the mainstream. The president’s support of this ideology is also explicit: Trump, throughout his campaigns and now in the White House (again), has made comments about “immigrant bloodlines,” implying Black and Brown immigrants are inherently animalistic, criminal, subhuman. This, despite the fact that Trump himself is the child of a Scottish immigrant, and the fact that he has been married to two immigrants himself—collectively, the mothers of four of his five children. The only difference, of course, is whiteness.
We’ve already seen Trump’s belief in race science—and eugenics more broadly—reflected in his administration’s actions so far. His Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, has proposed prioritizing funding for areas with higher marriage and birth rates, a directly eugenic project echoing the “marriage incentives” long promoted by the right. The administration is attempting to write trans people out of existence, both in the sense of stripping all references to the community from federal reporting, documents, and initiatives, and attacking transition care. And while abducting and trafficking people to high security foreign prisons without due process, Trump has simultaneously begun offering “golden visas” to more “desirable” (re: rich, white) immigrants to take their place, including offers of a “rapid pathway” to immigration for white South African farmers, whom he claims are subjects of “reverse racism.”
Enter the tech industry, whose belief that it’s superior to representative democracy isn’t anything new. Eugenics has always been a component of big tech ideology, and unsurprisingly, its cited goal of “human improvement” has only made this more explicit. The transhumanist movement in particular is rife with disablism, with disabled culture critic Anna Hamilton noting that under transhumanist frameworks “certain disabilities can, and should, be fixed for the good of humanity.” The biotech industry may be behind critical advancements, but these advancements have also come with complex implications: CRISPR, for example, makes it possible to edit the human genome, but has also allowed for tailoring embryos beyond targeting issues such as lethal fetal anomalies, and well into designer babies.
Silicon Valley is also obsessed with Great Replacement Theory—the idea that the “white race” is somehow under attack—a particular interest of the right. Musk is notably fixated on having as many (white) children as possible to do his part for the cause, seeding the world with what he describes as his superior genetics (often, allegedly, via IVF), with his daughter Vivian Wilson claiming that Musk and her mother Justine even engaged in prenatal sex selection. Fellow technocrat Mark Zuckerberg also longs for a “tribe” of children. The technofascism is on full display as a growing number of tech companies publicly move right, sometimes actively repudiating former progressive stances, while the billionaires who run them move to control the media and government.
Disabled people; Black, Indigenous people of color; low-income people; Jewish people; trans people; and others very familiar with navigating a hostile United States in undesirable bodies have been warning about this for a very long time. And while liberals and those on the left may think of eugenics as a rightwing ideology, it’s also baked into some of their attitudes, in part because eugenics is so core to U.S. culture. Recognizing that some lives are valued more than others, and the ways in which this interacts with liberal and left praxis, is challenging, especially with the external pressures of fascism and capitalism. But shying away from our own complicity in these systems only perpetuates them, and leaves some marginalized people feeling like perennially conditional members of these social movements and society at large.
This is on particular display for the disability community, which has repeatedly expressed concerns about being left out, and is tired of being told to wait its turn for liberation. This frustration is rooted in the community’s continued dehumanization, and a general sense that disabled lives are somehow more expendable than others, that disabled bodyminds do not have a role to play in the collective struggle. The long covid community, for example, as an active advocate for masking and other basic measures to prevent the spread of infectious disease, is increasingly shut out of theoretically left organizing spaces. Rhetoric in support of abortion raises the specter of a “disabled” fetus as grounds for ensuring continued access to reproductive health care. Conversations about medical aid in dying often revolve around the idea of being a “burden” on family members, or assumptions about quality of life that are rooted in solvable problems, for those with the money and the will to solve them. There is a sense that some disabled people are “unfit” for political struggle, and therefore “unfit” for existence—echoing the rejection of “the unfit” throughout the history of eugenics.
This isn’t just about disability, but about a larger lack of support for marginalized people in the midst of a project to eliminate them. This includes the sidelining of trans people at a time when they are under active assault; the prevalence of respectability politics for Black, Indigenous people of color; and the dehumanization of red states and their most marginalized residents—all of which highlight a willingness to leave some communities behind for factors entirely out of their control. The fundamental implication that life would be more convenient if these populations were to shut up, or simply not exist, is always bubbling below the surface.
Fighting eugenic influences requires challenging racism, disablism, and other discriminatory attitudes that are deeply woven into our society. It requires reckoning with the fact that class does not exist in a vacuum; and acknowledging that a person’s worth should not be dependent on their ability to “contribute to society” through capitalist exploitation. In many liberal and left spaces, this includes eliminating the anti-Blackness that pervades so many conversations, and learning the most basic foundations of disablism, starting with the continued treatment of disability as a medical issue rather than a social identity, and the assumption that disabled people want cures over full social inclusion. Antisemitism in liberal and left environments is also an enduring problem, as is resistance to conversations about how these spaces are falling short.
If it is possible to create some version of the United States that is not inherently morally bankrupt, fighting eugenics is essential, as is truly valuing marginalized people and making a robust case for their defense and inclusion at all costs. Change is possible. During the Occupy movement, for example, organizers fought—with varying degrees of success—for the application of gender and racial analysis to conversations about class. The Disability Working Group at the Democratic Socialists of America, and the increasing number of disability caucuses in other left and progressive organizations, shows that there is a growing understanding of disability’s role in the struggle. Solidarity is also on display in protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, itself a eugenic project, and one Trump very much supports.
Ultimately, eliminating eugenic beliefs from our shared society may require dismantling the United States itself. The first step in that project, however, must involve an engagement with the role of eugenics in political thought, and conscious efforts to acknowledge and make good on the harm done. In the midst of the current political climate, pulling at the threads of eugenics isn’t adjacent to fighting the political right: It’s essential. The nation was founded on a basis of white supremacy, which is now woven deeply through the nation’s legal and popular culture. Whether liberals and the left are willing to continue building momentum, let alone face up to the influence of eugenics on their political values, is an open question and one that needs to be decided quickly. Challenging eugenic influences on political ideology isn’t infighting or purity policing: It lies at the heart of an inclusive political movement that actually strives towards liberation for all.
[post_title] => The United States of Eugenics
[post_excerpt] => Under Trump, the ideology is on the rise. How do we finally dismantle it once and for all?
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The U.S. isn't the only country paying the price for his policy changes.
When Donald Trump returned to the presidency in 2025, one of his first actions was to reverse almost all of the climate commitments made by the Biden administration that preceded him. These actions included initiating a second withdrawal from the Paris Agreement—following his first withdrawal in 2017—and terminating multiple critical climate finance programs. The consequences of these decisions have already extended beyond U.S. borders, affecting vulnerable and developing nations while undermining international climate negotiations, scientific collaboration, and the urgently needed global transition to more sustainable economies.
Despite their minimal contributions to global emissions, developing countries disproportionately face the most severe climate impacts. They also depend on the countries that contribute most to emissions to pay their fair share when it comes to reducing them, of which the U.S. is one. Trump’s withdrawal of approximately $11 billion in annual U.S. climate finance, previously pledged by the Biden administration, has robbed these countries of vitally needed resources and is creating significant funding gaps for climate projects around the world, threatening regional and global climate objectives alike.
Unsurprisingly, this will affect developing nations the most, and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have become particularly vulnerable. Facing existential threats from sea level rise, intensifying hurricanes, and other climate-related disasters, these nations have been severely impacted by the Trump administration's withdrawal from the newly established Loss and Damage Fund, which Biden pledged $17.5 million to in 2022. Without adequate support for adaptation and recovery, island nations across the Caribbean and Pacific will be forced to confront heightened risks to critical infrastructure and economic stability; and ultimately, their very existence.
Another notable victim of Trump’s policy shift is the Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs)—multibillion-dollar agreements designed under the Biden administration to assist coal-dependent developing countries in transitioning to renewable energy. Trump's administration has abruptly canceled U.S. participation in JETPs with countries including Indonesia, South Africa, and Vietnam, creating uncertainty around the future of projects vital for reducing global carbon emissions and ensuring socially equitable transitions. Beyond their environmental importance, these partnerships were also structured to prioritize job creation and community support in regions historically dependent on fossil fuels.
Trump's policies have also significantly destabilized international climate negotiations at large. The second U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement has diminished diplomatic trust in the country and emboldened other nations to reconsider their own commitments to climate policy. During COP29 in 2024, the absence of U.S. leadership allowed fossil fuel-dependent nations to gain greater influence yet again, further complicating efforts to meet and strengthen global emissions reduction targets. This retreat was particularly damaging to trust among developing nations, who view it as a profound injustice that wealthy countries would abandon their commitments, despite bearing disproportionate responsibility for causing climate change in the first place.
The disengagement from climate science under the Trump administration carries equally troubling implications. Notably, U.S. scientists were absent from recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) meetings, depriving global climate research of critical American expertise and undermining the strength and legitimacy of the meetings’ scientific assessments. The deliberate sidelining of science under Trump weakens global responses precisely when robust scientific consensus is urgently needed to drive ambitious climate action. When combined with Trump’s massive cuts to science funding and federal grants, things are likely to only get worse.
Domestically, Trump’s policies are clashing even with Republican-held states that benefited economically from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed by Biden. The IRA provided significant support for clean industries, driving growth in historically marginalized communities. As a result, states like Texas and Florida attracted billions in investment for renewable energy and green manufacturing, resulting in the creation of thousands of jobs. The reversal of these policies threatens not only climate progress but also denies the tangible economic and social benefits that the clean energy transition has delivered to these communities—and to the U.S.’s bottom line.
The administration, meanwhile, has doubled down on its aggressive expansion of oil and gas extraction on federal lands, yet another concerning development, particularly as Trump continues to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). By fast-tracking drilling permits and relaxing environmental review processes, these policies prioritize short-term interests in fossil fuels over long-term climate stability. The increased extraction not only undermines global emissions reduction efforts but also exposes local communities—often lower-income and minority populations—to pollution risks and environmental degradation, further exacerbating climate injustice both domestically and abroad.
However, while the U.S. has faltered on its commitment to climate action, not every country has abandoned the fight—and the U.S.’s retreat has created space for alternative leadership to take its place in global climate governance. China, France, and the broader European Union have already moved to fill the vacuum, increasingly shaping international climate policy both at COP29 and beyond. This shift presents these nations with an opportunity to advance their strategic interests while growing their global influence, demonstrating the international community's continued commitment to climate action despite U.S. disengagement.
Still, as the global community races to limit global warming, the absence of American leadership and financial support is strongly felt. Trump's climate policy decisions transcend climate concerns, representing a serious regression in social and economic justice, particularly for the world's most vulnerable populations. Developing nations, especially the most climate-vulnerable ones, bear the disproportionate burden of these policy shifts as they struggle to adapt and transition in an unstable climate landscape.
These circumstances underscore a fundamental truth: Effective climate action requires not only environmental responsibility but also a commitment to global justice, equity, and shared prosperity. The current U.S. approach only undermines these principles at a time when solidarity and collective action are most urgently needed.
[post_title] => Who Trump's Climate Denialism is Really Hurting
[post_excerpt] => The U.S. isn't the only country paying the price for his policy changes.
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In immigrant families, sometimes your cousins can be your earliest friends.
“You don’t seem like an only child,” people often tell me after I reveal to them that I was raised without siblings. Unsure if this comment is a compliment or a backhanded remark, I usually shrug and reply with something like, “Well, I grew up with cousins…” But what I don’t often say is my cousins didn’t quite feel like siblings, either. They felt like something else.
The truth is I don’t have an unusual amount of cousins. Five first cousins in the U.S., and one in Estonia, who I’ve never met. A growing number of second cousins once removed (the children of my first cousins). And a scattered few second cousins twice or three times removed (my parents' cousins and their offspring, respectively). It’s my first cousins, though, that I’m closest with—in large part because, as is true for many immigrant families, they were also my first friends.
As new immigrants from the former Soviet Union, my parents relied on the built-in community of care provided by our extended family: an old-world-style network of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. But while the adults in my family did play a role in my Los Angeles upbringing, it was my cousins who did the majority of the caretaking.
Only seven years older than me, two of my cousins in particular were somewhere between my babysitters, part-time siblings, and friends. Together, we would spend long sun-soaked summer days playing outside my aunt and uncle’s apartment. We’d make up elaborate games based on movies we rented from Blockbuster or 20-20 Video, where an older cousin worked. Sometimes, we were the “karate family,” influenced by none other than The Karate Kid. In silent agreement, we’d transform into a group of vigilante karate enthusiasts, climbing parked cars and saving stray cats from danger; cats that my uncle would rescue and bring home from his job as an LAX cab driver. Sometimes we would write our own Nightmare Before Christmas-style songs, practice obsessively, and perform them for the whole family. OOOo spooky, oooo spooky….I see a big fat moon…in the skyyy….a very big fat mooon. Sometimes, we’d be aspiring horror film producers. We would borrow my dad’s precious camcorder and record over family home videos with our very own renditions of the Blair Witch Project, nostrils and all. We even made our own version of the movie Hocus Pocus, which we titled, “The Heart of a Little Girl.” I was the little girl.
Then, the sun would set and my aunt would come home from her job as a cashier at the local grocery store, and my mom and dad would pick me up after a day of English and bookkeeping classes at the community college; or after a day of driving rich kids around. And I would always, without fail, break into tears, grabbing onto the leg of one of my cousins as they would obediently lead me to the door.
Only other only-children can relate to the loneliness. The pit of despair that formed each time, as a child, you were plucked from a social event and brought back to your parents’ apartment where you were forced to find creative ways to entertain yourself. Before we had the internet (and even after), I would spend long hours talking to the bathroom mirror, pretending my reflection was someone else. When I was with my cousins, the loneliness disappeared. When I left them, it would come back heavier than before.
The research is shoddy, but it is believed there is a correlation between only-childness and loneliness. In fact, studies have found that, compared to adults who grew up with siblings, only children often become adults who have significantly less interaction with their relatives. This may be true for some onlies, but not for me. I still, to this day, have remained close to my cousins. Even the older ones who had no interest in me when I was a toddler and they were teenagers. The ones who acted more like older siblings than friends by simply ignoring me, or making fun of my unibrow because it would “build character.” The ones who drew sharpie tattoos on my favorite doll’s face in between shifts at the video store, and made up for it by buying me a coveted “Diana’s Parking Only: Keep Out” sign for my bedroom door. And I’m still close with the ones who played “karate family” with me, too.
Cousin in Russian translates directly to “once removed sibling”; but often, the term is just abbreviated to brother or sister. Same goes for other Eastern languages like Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, and Korean. This must have something to do with Western Individualism vs Eastern Collectivism. The cultural values placed on the community, rather than the individual, have slowly been eroded from Western society, leading to recent phenomena like the loneliness epidemic. But many immigrant families never fully abandon the cultures they came from, including mine—and ultimately, cousins have an important role to play in keeping it that way. They are role models. They are siblings. They are caretakers. They are friends. They preserve family traditions, like avoiding the aspic and playing Monopoly on Thanksgiving. They step in and help out when a family member is in the hospital; and when you get in a fight with your mom, they are one of the only people on earth that truly understands. Because that’s what families are for.
Of course, not every American family looks like mine. We are apparently in the middle of The Great Cousin Decline, coined by Faith Hill for The Atlantic. This is due to the usual suspects: U.S. population decline, women choosing to have children later in life, and parents having fewer children in general. As of 2022, about 55% of Americans live an hour away from their extended families, while highly educated Americans live even further. Immigrant families remain the exception. My own very American husband has little interaction with his cousins, mostly due to their geographical distance. But there is much to be lost in living apart. Hill reminds us that the often overlooked reason why cousins are especially important is that “they share something rare and invaluable: They know what it’s like to be part of the same particular family.” Growing up, that’s why the loneliness never stuck around too long: I always knew that my cousins were only a phone call away.
In the Oscar-nominated film A Real Pain (2024), a pair of cousins, Benji and David Kaplan, embark on a journey to Poland funded by their shared grandmother’s inheritance. It is meant to be a cathartic trip to both honor and witness where she came from and bear the weight of the concentration camp she survived. But the cousins could not be more different. David (played by the film’s writer-director, Jesse Eisenberg) chooses to settle into modern society and accept that life is suffering, while still doing what he can to enjoy it. Benji (played by Kieran Culkin, who won Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance) is the more nostalgic feeler, who cannot seem to settle down and process pain in a modern sense. He is overwhelmed by his grandmother’s loss, and, as it’s revealed later in the film, even tried to overdose on sleeping pills a few months before the trip. In Poland, Benji cannot stomach the juxtaposition of privileged American Jews riding first class on a train to tour concentration camps, and lashes out at the group. Eventually, David reaches his limit:
David Kaplan: ...I love him and I hate him and I wanna kill him... and I wanna be him, you know? And I feel, like, so stupid around him, you know, because he is so fucking cool and he just does not give a shit. And then... just, like, being here with him is just so fucking baffling to me, you know? It's just baffling, 'cause it's like: How did this guy come from the survivors of this place, you know?
Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, who studies kinship dynamics at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, tells Hill in an interview that, “Cousins are essentially peers who can stretch your assumptions—without as much fear of the relationship ending if debates get heated.” In A Real Pain, we watch this play out: Once inseparable as children, the two cousins have since drifted further and further apart. But the cousins are also connected by their shared ancestral trauma and their unique perspectives on how to survive in modern society despite its contradictions. No matter their differences, neither will ever abandon the other.
My own relationships with my cousins have shifted over the years. I’ve become closer to some and drifted apart from others. There are religious differences, socio-economic differences, and the fact that we are simply in different stages of life. But when times get tough, we always reconnect. Like when my second cousin was diagnosed with Leukemia at a young age and I would visit her at the children’s hospital, or when our maternal grandmother who survived WWII died a few months before the pandemic, or when the most recent wars in the region broke out.
Cousins have our backs. They are our built-in friends. And from an evolutionary perspective, they have a biological stake in our survival. Our cousins are our companions for all of life’s curveballs. And while sometimes, we don’t get along, like siblings, cousins share both our family secrets and genetics. They share our lives.
I recently got married in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator at the famed Little White Chapel. This wasn’t an elopement, although that was our original intent. Once we started telling our friends and family about our plan, however, some insisted on coming.
Our wedding happened this past January, in the wake of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires that almost burned down my high school and destroyed so many homes of friends and acquaintances, I’ve lost count. My cousin, who was supposed to make a speech at the wedding, was evacuated from her home the night before her flight to Las Vegas. In a last ditch effort, she ended up driving with her husband, young son, and mother-in-law with nothing but the clothes on their back to make it in time for my ceremony, like a true cousin, sister, or friend, or maybe, something even better.
[post_title] => First Friends, Once Removed
[post_excerpt] => In immigrant families, sometimes your cousins can be your earliest friends.
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