Unveiling Hidden Realities: Anna Badkhen’s To See Beyond Challenges Perception and Truth
In many ways this reveals the project of the book: to look at the precariousness of the modern world and find deep and lasting connections in the relationships we forge both because of and in spite of the hazards we encounter. The imagined world and the actual one, in a Badkhen essay, must find their uneasy equilibrium.
Badkhen often manages her artful balances by threading literature and literary reading through essays about war and war-torn countries, about climate change, about immigration and migration. Perhaps I’m showing my rather nerdy heart to admit how I admired how these literary references interlaced with actual circumstances enhanced my understanding of both. She writes about the war in central Mali while calling on Soviet folklorist Vladimir Propp, sharing, as if by personal incantation: “The story begins when the hero absents herself from home.”
