Unveiling Hidden Realities: Anna Badkhen’s To See Beyond Challenges Perception and Truth
Badkhen writes from no fixed shore. It’s a book of essays that examines what it means to be human during global crises, including climate change, war, displacement, and migration. Her narrative stance is, by turns, expat, immigrant, migrant, as well as war correspondent, literary scholar, and from what can only be described as her unique vantage point, which leans both emotionally expansive and somewhat erudite.
Her subject categories blur and overlap as she traverses a wide range of topics, often featuring other migrants, immigrants, and expats. She shifts between climate change to existential crisis, from the political to the deeply private, moving between subjects with the ease of a child doing flips in water, weightless, unconcerned with the surface. To See Beyond inhabits instability not as a problem to be solved but as a vantage point, a way of seeing that only the unmoored can manage. In Badkhen’s collection, we experience the vastness of her prose as if translating between languages—an argument, in itself, for why each subject matters.
