Notes on Texts

My text for Human Archipelago is an archive of reading and communication around the idea of hospitality, migration, and kinship, and I wanted its rhythm to be indebted to a host of voices. – Teju Cole

6. Excerpt from Mahmoud Darwish, trans. “If I Were Another” from The Butterfly’s Burden, trans. Fady Joudah (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007). Copyright © 2007 Mahmoud Darwish. Translation copyright © 2007 Fady Joudah. Reproduced with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

13. Excerpt from John Berger, Here is Where We Meet: A Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2005). Copyright © 2005 John Berger. Reproduced with the permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

15. Zeresenay Ermias Testfatsion: Samy Magdy and Amy Forliti, “Eritrean US detainee kills himself at Egyptian airport,” Associated Press, June 9, 2018. “Whether the mask is labeled fascism…” From Simone Weil, “Reflections on War,” 1933, from Formative Writings: 19291941 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). Copyright © 1987 the University of Massachusetts Press

18. “What kind of times are these...” Adrienne Rich, “What Kind of Times Are These” in Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995 (New York: Norton, 1995)

22. “Everything will be taken away.” From Adrian Piper, “Everything #3” (2003)

24. “The face is what forbids us to kill.” From Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 1995), 86

28. Conversation with Louise Erdrich, Minneapolis, 2018

29. “But, courage! Go on...” Personal communication with John Berger, 2016

31. Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez: Nicole Chavez, “She came to the US for a better life. Shortly after her arrival, she was killed,” CNN, May 30, 2018. “The soil overturned...” From Miguel Ángel Asturias, “Punishment of Profundities” in Asturia’s Clearvigil in Spring: A Mayan Myth, trans. Robert W. Lebling (Scotts Valley: CreateSpace, 2012 [1965])

35. “Dear God, please help the homeless and infirm who live on the streets.” Chapel of St. Kolumba, Cologne, January 2018

37. Literaturhaus, Stuttgart, June 2018

39. Māori proverb used as an inscription in a painting by Ralph Hotere (1972)

41. “Many people–many nations...” Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 9

42. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2

43. “Down through the ages walking on the Emmaus Road...” Reproduced with the kind permission of Joy Kogawa.

46. John Coltrane, A Love Supreme, 1965.

47. “Zoê... bios...” Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 1998).

50. John Donne, “Meditation XVII,” 1624

52. Korematsu vs. United States (1944), dissent by Judge Robert Jackson.

53. In Paris, June 2018

54. Kate Brown, “‘Black People Figured Out How to Make Culture in Freefall’: Arthur Jafa on the Creative Power of Melancholy,” Artnet News, February 21, 2018

57. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008)

59. Martin Buber, “I and Thou” in The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings, ed. Asher D. Biemann (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 183

60. “So walk on water...” Seamus Heaney, “The Gravel Walks” in The Spirit Level (London: Faber and Faber, 1996); “I credit poetry...” Seamus Heaney, Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 12 (© The Nobel Foundation, 1995); “It had to do with a sense...” interview with The Harvard Crimson, 2008

61. Homer, The Odyssey, op. cit., 203

63. Ibid, 248

64. Hebrews 13:2

65. Homer, The Odyssey, op. cit., 334

66. From “powaqqatsi,” Godfrey Reggio’s Hopi neologism, used as the title of the second film in his Qatsi trilogy

67. “It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat.” From Tomas Tranströmer, “After a Death,” in The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations, trans. Robert Bly (New York: HarperCollins, 2004)

71. The refrain “in real time” is indebted to Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazal “Ghazal.”

74. Homer, The Odyssey, op. cit., 361–62

75. See the Prophet Ezekiel’s gloss on this—“Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy”—the “daughters,” in this case, referring to the men of Sodom, who are allegorized into the feminine. It is a story about inhospitability.

76. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities trans. Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Minneapolis: Indiana University Press, 1980), 86. Copyright © 1980, Indiana University Press. Reproduced with the permission of Indiana University Press.

77. Joseph Margulies, “I Have Questions for Gina Haspel,” Time, March 14, 2018

80. Shakespeare, “Sonnet LXV”

82. Ahed Tamimi (b. 2001) lives in the West Bank village of Nabi Salih; and she and her family members have been arrested and imprisoned several times for protesting the Occupation. In 2018, Tamimi served several months in an Israeli prison for slapping an Israeli soldier.

83. Homer, The Odyssey, op. cit., 285

84. Walker Evans, Many Are Called, introduction by James Agee (New Haven: Yale University Press [1966], 2004)

86. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters, op. cit., 19

90. “Like anybody, I would like to have a long life...” Martin Luther King, Jr., speech delivered in Memphis on April 3, 1968.

91. Avianca AV 20, New York JFK to Bogotá El Dorado, April 2018.

94. Daniel Victor, “A Woman Said She Saw Burglars. They Were Just Black Airbnb Guests,” New York Times, May 8, 2018

95. Katie Jane Fernelius, “A Duke University VP Walked Into the Campus Joe Van Gogh, Heard a Rap Song, Demanded That the Employees Be Fired,” Indy Week, May 8, 2018

97. Christina Caron, “A Black Yale Student Was Napping, and a White Student Called the Police,” New York Times, May 9, 2018. With thanks to Lolade Siyonbola.

100. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2

102. Ibid.

103. Two echoes: Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and Wisława Szymborska’s “Some People.”

104. Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 38.