(Parentheses) Review

In our months of conversation, artist Tarik Ahlip and I kept returning to the idea of imprisonment. In Sri Lanka, where I write from, Bogambara, a maximum-security prison established in 1876 by the British administration, was closed in 2014, with the explicit aim of developing it into a “Cultural Park”. In February 2026, I visited the prison with the hopes of seeing it in its original reputation of stone walls of colonial architecture—it was also recommended to the public as a site of “sightseeing”. 

I wake up to the warmth of Lou’s hand on my face. I open my eyes and see Lou reaching out her hands, smiling. She seems to be in a good mood. I softly plant a kiss on her forehead, then stand up with her strapped to my chest. See the sun set, the day is ending. I look ahead—the mountainous terrain stretches out in front of me, with the open sky sitting behind.
'Okay. Time to head home.'

“My name is Abra. My name is Abra. I had almost forgotten that; the naming of things lost its importance here, with no one to hear them named.” So begins Gaining Ground, the newly reissued novel by Canadian writer Joan Barfoot. Gaining Ground was initially published as Abra in Canada in 1978 and it is being reissued by Faber in the United Kingdom this month. When the book came out it …

On a long walk, I wander into a solo show of the artist Pierette Bloch. 

The main room has a long wall text that I mostly skim ... something about the repetition and rhythm within her practice resembling time within music. 

Across the room, I see a piece covered in short marks of rich black ink. 

In the block next door to me lives a man with scars running up from either side of his mouth, a violently extended smile. His top-floor flat was once home to a pack of black and white cats he got as kittens, or perhaps bred, but once the cats became old or bold enough, they escaped from their balcony, down to freedom in the concrete streets of East London below. 

When I was 12, or 13 or 14 I had a Joan Baez record. I had about 20-30 records then in my collection. Some were given to me, from my grandfather, and maybe my cousin, who I considered an expert of music at that time (she was a Beatles fan), and some I bought with my own  money, earned from dog sitting, baby sitting and handing out flyers for a nearby second hand store, that paid me too little to stand for hours in the street …

Shortly after Hurricane Melissa, my aunt calls to tell me everyone’s roof caved in. The magnitude of this causes me to elide grammar in my retelling: surely I should write everyone’s roof has caved in, roof should likely be in its plural ‘roofs’, the tense of the sentence is both present and past. And of course it wasn’t necessarily ‘everyone’; she was referring to her own home …

I’ve been accused of being insincere. In March, I had a Paris love affair. The shooting of Braquâge (une évasion) caused Jacques Rivette to have a nervous breakdown. Shot in June 1975, but only released in 1978, the film, a western set in Paris about a jewel thief and her sales girl accomplice whose title combines the words braquage (robbery) and âge (age), was intended to be the third filmed and fifth released in a quintology of films Rivette called Scènes de la Vie Parallèle …