Unveiling Hidden Realities: Anna Badkhen’s To See Beyond Challenges Perception and Truth
Badkhen writes in the tradition of Montaigne, not the Montaigne of the academy but the original one, for whom the essay, as a form, is both restless and reaching, the self its instrument of inquiry. Badkhen’s essays illuminate literature through the personal, offering stories that function, if not quite as archetypes, then as parables of the modern world: the displacement, the longing, the difficulty of belonging anywhere completely.
Her most ambitious essay, “The Sermon on Mount Gurugu,” brings all of these forces to bear at once, weaving the impossible plights of migrants against the backdrop of environmental ruin, such as the Rohingya people clearing forest wood for shelter as they flee Myanmar, or the mostly Black migrants squatting in caves on Mount Gurugu, a 2,953-foot mountain in Morocco from which these hopefuls can see Spain, which is to say the potential for a better life. Drawing on Ávila Laurel’s novel of these specific migrants’ plights, Badkhen artfully pulls apart the ongoing struggle of people in conflict with the natural world. It comes to a head in the Laurel novel when migrants hunt and eat Barbary macaques, a protected monkey that lives on Mount Gurugu, for which police imprison these migrants:
