Posts filed under 'oppression'

Announcing Our December Book Club Selection: The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer by Belal Fadl

December 31, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Here, language tells the truth without mitigation, even when that truth is ugly.

Upon the premiere of Youssef Chahine’s Cairo at Cannes, the Egyptian critics in attendance resented its unflinching portrayal of the city’s poverty and density, claiming it as a derogatory and inciting the film’s eventual ban. In The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer, author and screenwriter Belal Fadl takes a similarly undaunted look at the capital: its swarming underbelly, its suffocating divides, and its unrelenting pressures that bloom both tragedy and absurdity. Written in a captivating style that listens carefully to the city’s manifold ranges, Fadl is determined to pull back the curtains, putting a middle finger up to politeness or grandeur, and drawing instead on chaos, comedy, and linguistic richness to portrait a Cairo full of adrenaline, be it from laughter, thrill, or the sheer will to survive.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer by Belal Fadl, translated from the Arabic by Osama Hammad, DarArab, 2025

Belal Fadl’s The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer announces itself with a provocation and never retreats from it: “Whenever I tell my story, I say that what led me to live with Um Mimi were two Polish breasts with unparalleled nipples.” From this opening confession, the novel signals that nothing sacred will be protected from language, and nothing obscene will be softened for the reader’s comfort. But this is not bravado for its own sake—Fadl’s novel is built on a wager: that obscenity, vulgarity, and excess are not moral failures of language, but its most truthful registers when class humiliation, bodily precarity, and institutional contempt are the subject. To read The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi (or to be more accurate, to read it in translation) is therefore to confront an ethical question: how does a translator render a voice whose truth depends on its refusal to be clean?

The novel’s narrative arc is deceptively simple (almost cliché). It’s 1991, and a young man from Alexandria arrives in Cairo to study media at Cairo University, determined to escape an abusive father and a suffocating household. His grades win him admission, but his finances dictate his fate. Having endured a humiliating stay in a flat with “decent, pious, and religious young men who knew God and had learned the Quran by heart,” he is evicted for attending an R-rated film, and ends up renting a room in the ground-floor flat of Um Mimi, a retired madam, on a nameless lane known only as “the street behind Casino Isis.” READ MORE…

Unreliable Narrator, Unreliable Translator: Nicholas Glastonbury on Sener Ozmen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories

December 18, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

. . . if we can unmake or destabilize the novel, we might similarly destabilize the nation, which warrants or conscripts the novel.

The Competition of Unfinished Stories is one of those texts that would be classified as “untranslatable” by the more cynical amongst us. Aside from addressing the intricate language politics of Turkey—namely the oppression and marginalization of Kurdish—Sener Ozmen’s text is full of jokes, narrative tangles, loose ends, shapeshifting characters, and suspicious translators. As such, the English edition of the novel is a triumph, not only in Nicholas Glastonbury’s fluid and adventurous prose, but also in his own interjections that celebrate the original’s chaos and multiplicity. In this interview, he speaks on the challenges of translating the book, authorial authority, and language’s resistance to containment.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

Hilary Ilkay (HI): This is a challenging and strange book! How did you find out about it? Did you pitch it to a publisher, or was it pitched to you?

Nicholas Glastonbury (NG): I met Sener maybe six years ago. I was in Diyarbakır doing research for my PhD, and there was an organization trying to build an online platform for Kurdish literature, given all of the obstacles that it has in accessing foreign language audiences, and I did some work for them. I was aware of Sener’s work a little bit, but when I met him, I became really interested in it. He’s also a visual artist, so I became really interested in how he saw the world. He’s also written quite a few books; The Competition of Unfinished Stories is his second novel, and the title is what drew me in. After I read it, I thought, what is going on here? This is a crazy book. Then I began pitching it around, and it landed with Sandorf Passage, which I’m very happy about.

HI: I was delighted to discover Sener’s prolific artistic practice when I was reviewing the book. I wonder if you could say a little bit about how you see his practice as a visual artist influencing his writing. Do you see an interplay between his art and the way that he constructs stories and narratives?

NG: I think he’s really interested in the absurd. For example, there’s one photograph of his that comes to mind; it’s a group of men hoisting a flag up a flagpole, and they’re all wearing neck braces, and they’re unable to look up at the flag. There’s a tension between violence and nation, and the obligation to nation is very much an aspect of this novel.

He has another piece, a sequence of photographs of himself dressed as Superman. He takes off his cape and uses it as a prayer rug, and the title of the work is “Supermuslim.” He’s got a real sense of humor about things that are so heavy and serious.

There was another piece he did called “Road to Tate Modern,” which is him and another artist trying to make their way to London, to the museum. They do a kind of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza act, riding a horse and a donkey, asking shepherds around the Kurdish countryside where the Tate Modern is. And the shepherds say things like, oh, it’s just over the hill. . . So there’s a sense of the distance that Kurdish cultural production has to surmount in order to reach international audiences—of course conditioned by the violences of the nation-state—that comes through in both his writing and his visual work. I think the way that his approach to writing is shaped by his visual work is how he captures images. For example, in The Competition of Unfinished Stories, the image of Neil Armstrong on the prayer mat dying stands out to me, or all the scenes of Sertac masturbating. There’s a real sense of creating these absurd tableaus, and I think that’s probably influenced by how he sees and visualizes the world through his art.

HI: You have such an impressive and interesting portfolio of translations under your belt and I’m curious, given the scope of your work, what made Ozmen’s writing unique, or what stood out about the way that he wrote? And related to that, what was the biggest challenge in trying to render this unwieldy text into English? READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: The Competition of Unfinished Stories by Sener Ozmen

November 27, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

From a Turkish perspective, there is no Kurdistan . . . . Ozmen’s novel meditates on what this effacement does to someone’s subjectivity.

Dizzying, furious, scathing, and absurdist—artist and writer Sener Ozemen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories is a testament to an identity, region, and language under siege. The novel, with its many layered narratives, confronts the Turkish state’s enduring violence against its Kurdish minority, illustrating the psychic and physical fractures of oppression with intellectual complexity and emotional clarity. In attempting to disentangle the knot of selfhood from a merciless assimilating power and a growingly fragmentary everyday existence, Ozmen builds the architecture of fiction to its most veering heights, capturing all the threads of reality’s illusions, and thus resulting in one of contemporary fiction’s most vivid portraits of psychological dissolution—that which still never turns away from the need to express its truths.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

The Competition of Unfinished Stories by Sener Ozmen, translated from the Kurdish by Nicholas Glastonbury, Sandorf Passage, 2025

In her book Immemorial, Lauren Markham notes that “the feeling of grieving something that isn’t yet gone, and whose disappearance isn’t fully certain . . . is an eerie, off-putting one.” This liminality and its disquieting effect are what animates Sener Ozmen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories, deftly translated by Nicholas Glastonbury. This is not only the author’s debut in the Anglosphere, but one of the first works written in Kurdish’s northern Kurmancî dialect to receive an English translation.

Ozmen is a prolific Kurdish writer and multimedia visual artist, the author of numerous books of poetry, novels and short stories, criticism, and artist books. Across his written oeuvre and artistic practice, he has drawn attention to both the urgency and difficulty of speaking from a position of marginalization; The Competition of Unfinished Stories, originally published in Kurmancî as Pêşbaziya Çîrokên Neqediyayî in 2010 and translated into Turkish as Kifayetsiz Hikâyeler Müsabakası in 2015, follows in this spirit. The novel dramatizes—in a challenging and disorienting way—that the stories one tells are always co-authored and situated, demonstrating the interrelatedness and imbrication of the self. As Judith Butler observes in Giving an Account of Oneself, “When the ‘I’ seeks to give an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theorist.”  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Mountain Hut” by Dragana Kršenković Brković

October 28, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Andrew Hodges and Paula Gordon

"Who approached you in Paris?” he asked again, his tone flat, not giving anything away. “You met up with someone. Who?”

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a timely tale of intrigue, political paranoia, and mortality from Montenegrin writer Dragana Kršenković Brković, deftly translated by Andrew Hodges and Paula Gordon. In the hills just outside Titograd (now Podgorica), a doctor, Dušan, is held captive by three members of Yugoslavia’s secret police—three men who refuse to believe his relationship with a Czechoslovakian woman, Janika, is merely an innocent love affair. What follows is a story by turns fantastically surreal and punishingly spare; relief may await Dušan in his dreams, but in the real world the mindless, brittle cruelty of the state returns his every truth with a blow. Writes Andrew Hodges, “Brković’s style is literary and fantastical, mixing surreal scenes full of abstract, dreamlike imagery with everyday encounters. This imagery, which here draws on contrasts between peaceful forest scenes and a violent human (political) encounter, is woven in alongside reflections and emotions that point to the futility and alienating power of politics. “The Mountain Hut” blends dreamlike imagery with Slavic mythological themes and enduring cultural motifs, all viewed through the prism of a specific political moment—the fallout from socialist Yugoslavia’s split with the Stalinist block.” Read on!

Forest on a mountain outside of Titograd. October 1948: Three months after the Tito-Stalin Split.

The weak light of the battery lamp moved through the dark, in sync with the short man’s heavy, uneven strides. Occasionally the light reflected off the glassy surface of the October snowdrifts, which had arrived earlier than usual, and sometimes it penetrated the thick needles of pine and fir, their snow-covered crowns drooping. The feeble beam sank into the depths of the wood, creating a trembling play of slender, spindly, dark blue-black shadows.

The frost tightened its grip.

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What’s New in Translation: October 2025

October 13, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Dunsky, Liliana Torpey, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Regan Mies, Sofija Popovska, and Timothy Berge

New titles from Haiti, Argentina, the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Italy, Norway, Turkey, Mexico, Taiwan, Hungary, South Korea, and Latin America!

This month, we bring you thirteen reviews from thirteen countries: a poetry collection that reimagines friendships with long-gone revolutionaries, a tender and incisive rumination on disappearance, the latest novel on the inexplicability of love from a Nobel laureate, a story of Silicon Valley-fueled descent, a compilation of Latin American feminist thought, and much much more!

duels

Duels by Néhemy Dahomey, translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Timothy Berge

Néhémy Dahomey’s Duels is set in 1842, thirty-eight years after Haiti’s independence—a storied liberation that came through one of the largest slave uprisings in history. France withdrew, but issued an absurd debt of one hundred and fifty million francs. Paying off a debt while attempting to modernize a new country was a tough balancing act, so Haiti imposed high taxes on its citizens and forced them into unpaid labor.

Duels takes place in Böen, a small town in the Cul-de-Sac Plain that evaded a census for several years. As a result, no one in the town had fallen victim to the government’s schemes—until a local official decides that he needs laborers for a new project. From there on, in the context of freedom, economic entrapment, and postcolonial growing pains, the events of Duels unfold. Nathan H. Dize’s translation reads like a yarn spun out by an old relative with a deft deadpan humor, aptly navigating the tense shifts between past and present, and generating a sense of perpetuity for these characters and their stories. Here, the historical and the contemporary connect and blur. READ MORE…

“Vulnerable” Languages: An Interview with Jim Dingley and Petra Reid

July 20, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

The journey of working on this text has led me to look at the whole field of literary translation much more widely than I ever had before.

The translators of Alindarka’s Children, our May Book Club selection, had good reason to think of the text as an enormous challenge. Alherd Bacharevič’s subversive take on Hansel and Gretel is written in a musical tangle of two languages: Russian and Belarusian, addressing the conflict of Belarus’ languages in a powerful tale of intimidation, suppression, and  postcolonial linguistics. Now released in a brilliant medley of English and Scots, the Anglophone edition adds new dynamism to the politics and cultures at work, immersing the reader in the complexities of what language tells and what it holds back. In the following transcription of a live interview, translators Jim Dingley and Petra Reid discuss their process, the pitfalls of classifying a language as “vulnerable”, and the creative potentials of dissonance.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Daljinder Johal (DJ): What were your first impressions of Alindarka’s Children? And what did you consider when making your respective decisions to work on its translation? 

Jim Dingley (JD): Alindarka’s Children was published in 2014, I first read it in 2015, and my immediate reaction was: how on earth could anybody even begin to translate this? Then, when I was in Edinburgh with Petra, another Belarusian author began talking about this book with great enthusiasm. It suddenly occurred to me then that there is much being said about Scots being a language—distinct from English—and therefore a source of real national identity. With Scotland’s movement towards independence, it seemed to me that we could try to do something by contrasting English with Scots. I found working with Petra very rewarding as well, because she had an innate feeling for what we were trying to do, putting Scots up against “standard” English.

I think this adds a whole new dimension to the book, which is what any translator does when the process is not purely technical. You’re trying to get the sense of something. When you’re translating a book written in two languages, you can only get to the dynamic between them by introducing some realia from a country where another two languages are spoken. That’s why, in Alindarka’s Children, you feel as though you’re both in Scotland and Belarus at times.

Actually, I hope people experience some confusion with this book. It sounds very strange to say, but I think a lot of language is about dissimulation, confusion, leaving the reader to work it out at every stage.

Petra Reid (PR): Jim and I had very different experiences, because he speaks and writes Belarusian, while I have no knowledge of that language. So when I was reading the novel, I was reading Jim’s translation—that was the first time I’d heard of the novel or the author. In a way, I was reading it through Jim’s filter, and in that, it gained the context of a relationship between the English and the Belarusian.

I also came to it as a third party, as a Scot who doesn’t speak Scots—I was frank with everybody from the beginning, I warned them! I’ve got a strong accent, but I don’t speak Scots. The translation, and my work on it, is a personal explanation of my attitude towards Scots.

DJ: Could you expand on how that exploration went and what you got from it?

PR: What I like to do when I’m reading a translation is to try and imagine how the original sounds in my head, so even if you don’t have the exact vocabulary, you can approach the rhythm of it, and different nuances become available.

That’s what I found interesting about Jim’s translation; I was beginning to feel the Belarusian nuances through Jim. It was a two-way mirror, because Jim and I have our own dynamics in terms of how we speak English, and Jim has his own dynamic in terms of how he speaks Belarusian. It was a multidisciplinary, 3-D process, holding all these nuances in your head and trying to find a way to express that on the page. READ MORE…

Announcing Our June Book Club Selection: Alindarka’s Children by Alherd Bacharevič

June 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

Alindarka’s Children is a striking example of a writer’s role as witness and archivist. . .

A contemporary fable for the linguistic and cultural conflicts of post-Soviet Belarus, wherein the Belarusian language is at risk of being overwhelmed by the dominant Russian, Alherd Bakharevich’s Alindarka’s Children is a poignant and disturbing look into the myriad consequences of language suppression. Translated into both English and Scots, this multilingual novel is a vital testament to both the necessities and moral ambiguities of preservation, and a fascinating investigation of the intricate networks between expression and communication, adulthood and childhood, the public and the private. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Alindarka’s Children by Alherd Bacharevič, translated from the Belarusian by Petra Reid and Jim Dingley, New Directions, 2022

Alindarka’s Children is Alherd Bakharevich’s clever reworking of a classic parable, using a simple Hansel and Gretel-like premise to grapple with real-life tensions between language and power in Belarus. Despite being written from the perspective of children, the novel plumbs deeply into the subtle darknesses and psychologies of Belarusian society. The novel begins with Alicia and her brother Avi, interned in a forested camp where children are trained to forget their language through a malefic system. The two are rescued by their proud and defiant father, but eventually slip away on an adventure of their own. As they explore the woods, encountering a series of memorable characters—interpreted from the original fairy tale and its confectionary-packet house—we are led to explore a world of anxiety and obsession, within which the duo must fend for themselves to survive.

Set in Belarus, the novel’s original Belarusian and Russian is brilliantly translated into both Scots and English, with colloquial Belarusian rendered into the former, and the main body of the book written in the latter. The dominant state-approved language, of which the camp is desperately trying to instill, is ‘the Lingo’—one can presume that it stands for Russian. ‘The Leid,’ or the Belarusian language, is left to slowly slip from collective memory, with Father attempting to impede its eradication by secretly speaking it to Alicia—or really ‘Sia.’ As a result, she remains silent at school, having been taught at home that the Lingo, too, is a forbidden language. READ MORE…

Confronting Caste and Gender Hierarchy: On Gogu Shyamala’s Father May Be An Elephant and Mother A Small Basket, But…

April 7, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Suhasini Patni

Her work brings forth the daily, dignified lives of her people.

Father May Be An Elephant and Mother A Small Basket, But… by Gogu Shyamala, translated from the Telugu by Diia Rajan, Sashi Kumar, A. Suneetha, N. Manohar Reddy, R. Srivatsan, Gita Ramaswamy, Uma Bhrugubanda, P. Pavana, and Duggirala Vasanta, Tilted Axis Press, 2022.

To read Gogu Shyamala’s Father May Be an Elephant, a landmark collection of twelve Dalit feminist stories translated from Telugu, is to uncover the gaping absence of women in Dalit literature. Rarely are stories exploring the intersections between feminism and Dalit experience translated into English. First published by Navayana, an anti-caste indie press based in New Delhi, the seminal stories are now distributed through another radical small press, Tilted Axis.

In the title story, children play in balmy, wet weather, shrieking with happiness as the clouds part to reveal a rainbow. A young girl waits for Mother, who has been “weeding the paddy fields all day.” Born in a house where musty dampness is etched into the soot-covered walls, she is used to seeing her family slog for hours. While a thunderous rain pours outside, the family members soothe one another, consoling and rubbing each other’s overworked backs. Father has lived away in the city for almost a year to earn back the money he was wrongly accused of stealing by the patel, a person belonging to a non-subaltern caste. On the rainy day he comes back, a tender joy spreads among the “orphaned birds.”

In his absence, the family survived on thick gruel, but to celebrate his return, Mother buys a kilogram of meat with chili and salt to make curry. The children relish the meal, roasting the meat over woodfire, content with full bellies. But when Father asks his wife for money to buy toddy, he is informed it was all spent to prepare the feast. Angered by her response, Father “beat her like she was cattle,” not stopping despite the wailing of the kids. “We were scared that he might beat us too if we went near him,” worries the panic-stricken protagonist, helplessly watching this violence along with her siblings. Father is ultimately berated by his own mother, who reminds him that it was his wife who took care of everyone while he was away. The title is a popular idiom—despite the elephant-like prowess of the father, the woman is the reason a family survives.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 6, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Julia Sherwood, and Lucas Stewart

Our editors report from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Myanmar, and Hong Kong in this week's roundup of literary news!

“Braid your hair, my boys, with greener leaves / We still have verse among us.” In Adonis’ s long work, “Elegy for the Time at Hand,” the poet enchants with the perseverance of language and beauty throughout all things. This week, our editors from around the world bring news of writers weaving, observing, resisting, and changing the world around them. In the Czech Republic, poetry enjoys its moment in the spotlight. In Myanmar, the illegal regime continues to jail and silence its writers and poets. In Hong Kong, the young generation of writers prove their capabilities, and a new volume of poetry traces the current precarious politics. 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting for the Czech Republic

Czech poetry is enjoying something of a moment in the new millennium, says writer and translator Pavla Horáková in the latest installment of her series for Prague Radio International, Czech Books You Must Read, which presents two “poets of the everyday”—Petr Hruška and Milan Děžinský. As his collection, A Secret Life, translated by Nathan Fields, comes out from Blue Diode Publishing, Děžinský—who is also a translator and has introduced Czech readers to leading American poets such as Sharon Olds, Robert Lowell and James Wright—explains in this brief video (in English) how much it means to him that his own work has now found its way to Anglophone readers.

Both Děžinský and Hruška are past recipients of the Magnesia Litera Prize for poetry; this year, the award—the Czech Republic’s most prestigious—went to Pavel Novotný for his collection Zápisky z garsonky (Notes from a Bedsit). Another poet, Daniel Hradecký, bagged the prize in the prose category for Tři kapitoly (Three Chapters), an autofictional work described by one critic as “brimming with cynicism, causticity, alcohol and the existential  philosophy of those on the margins of society.” One of the five authors that Hradecký beat to the prize, Lucie Faulerová, had the consolation of being among the winners of the 2021 EU Prize for Literature, for her novel Smrtholka (The Deathmaiden). You can read an excerpt translated into English by Alex Zucker here. The winner of the 2021 Magnesia Litera Book of of the Year is veteran translator and emeritus professor of English literature Martin Hilský’s Shakespearova Anglie, Portréte doby (Shakespeare’s England. A Portrait of an Age), nominated in the non-fiction category. The jury praised this monumental work, which explores Elizabethan society in extraordinary detail and represents “the culmination of Hilský’s lifelong interest in the work of William Shakespeare and makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of Elizabethan culture.” READ MORE…

Recovering What Is Missing: In Conversation with C.J. Anderson-Wu

July 4, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Filip Noubel

The collective denial of victimhood is the reason why dictatorship lasts, the far-right exists, and inequality prevails.

Chieh-Jane Anderson-Wu (吳介禎) is a Taiwanese author, translator, and publisher of Taiwanese literature in translation. She is partly inspired by the white spots of Taiwan’s recent history, namely the White Terror, a forty-year period of martial law which began in 1949 and witnessed systematic repression within the nation, particularly targeting intellectuals. Pervasive censorship during the White Terror affected literature, but also the lives of many families at a time when secrecy and denial turned into a survival strategy for many. Anderson-Wu has written several works, including the story collection Impossible to Swallow and “Life Looked at From A Single Window,” and is currently working on a new novel.

Filip Noubel (FN): Today Taiwan is one of the freest societies in Asia, yet martial law only ended in 1987, almost forty years after it was first imposed. This period, known as the White Terror, witnessed tremendous political violence: over one hundred and fifty thousand people, including many intellectuals, were arrested, and several thousands were executed. It is also the theme of your collection of short stories called Impossible to Swallow. What has led you to find inspiration in this particular period of Taiwan’s history?

C.J. Anderson-Wu (C.J. A-W): There are several causes, but one of them is my sense of guilt. I did not understand it until I had written several stories. After the Formorsa Incident in 1979, posters of the so-called rebels were everywhere. I was a kid and really believed that they were bad people, that they should be arrested and put in jail. Years went by and as more historical materials were released after the abolishment of martial law, I gradually realized what lies we had lived in. I feel so grateful to those who never backed down and sacrificed so much for the freedom we are enjoying today, and resent my gullibility.

Another thing is that we never had transitional justice. We never had a Nuremberg Trial-type that conducted thorough investigation on what had really happened, why it happened, and who should be responsible. Thus we don’t know how we can prevent it from happening again. Today the past dictators are still worshipped, the days under authoritarian rules are still commemorated, and lies are still believed. I was shocked, in despair, and infuriated. How can people stay ignorant when all the evidence is presented in front of their eyes? How can people feel okay sacrificing the rights that were earned by blood, tears, and sweat?

READ MORE…