Making room for better futures

Can political events wound us as intimately as private loss? This book explores that question, ending not on an optimistic note, but with an acceptance that we must keep making room for better future

What to Do with Political Sadness: And other Essays on Death, Destruction and Hauntology

By Ghazala Jamil

Published by Yoda Press and Simon & Schuster India

232 pages ₹499

 Ghazala Jamil gives a name to the pit that settles in the stomach every morning, and to the numbness in the bones with which we carry on through the day. She calls it Political Sadness. But what happens when grief becomes a way of knowing politics? In What to Do with Political Sadness: And Other Essays on Death, Destruction and Hauntology, Ms Jamil begins with the unsettling recognition that political events can wound us as intimately as private loss. The personal is never quite sealed off from the political, while the private can become a place where political memory is rehearsed and collective subjectivity sustained. Sadness, thus, is not just what politics leaves behind. It is a way of registering what has been destroyed, what was promised and what we are being asked to accept as normal.

 

 

Ms Jamil refuses the injunction to overcome it — to be brave, productive, well-adjusted. Sometimes, she writes, there is no hopeful arc to perform; sometimes one needs to give in to sadness and nurse one’s wounds. Yet she does not leave sadness in the private realm. She asks us to trace the structures that made it possible, and to recognise in the refusal to feel “fine” a refusal to accept the world as it is. To be politically sad, in Ms Jamil’s telling, is to remain capable of being wounded by injustice and, therefore, to remain capable of resisting its normalisation.

 

Some of the things we grieve in political life have never happened. They are the futures we were promised, or came to believe were possible, and then watched them recede. Ms Jamil is interested in this particular kind of loss. She asks us to think about the futures that remain possible but have been pushed aside by what appears probable, by political betrayal, cultural inertia, and the forces that make the present seem inevitable. A future can, therefore, be lost before it arrives. It can be foreclosed without ever having been fully lived, leaving behind the strange grief of mourning something that existed only as a possibility. This is where hauntology enters Ms Jamil’s account.

 

These futures persist as ghosts. Political sadness, in this sense, is also an attachment to what the present has failed to become. Ms Jamil asks us to sit with that attachment and to consider what it means to keep mourning a future that has been damaged, betrayed or foreclosed, rather than allowing its loss to become inevitable.

 

Ms Jamil launches a laser-sharp critique of liberalism and liberal politics, particularly their ability to present themselves through the language of modernity, civility, and rationality while narrowing the field of what can be politically imagined. She captures this through the figure of the “man of a mild affect”, an archetype of the contemporary liberal op-ed writer whose cultivated weariness allows him to describe catastrophe without ever being unsettled by it. He acknowledges injustice, gestures towards material constraints and then retreats into pragmatism, historical inevitability and the supposedly delicate limits of what is possible.

 

The result is a politics in which the existing order acquires the appearance of common sense. Radical demands become naïve, structural transformation becomes reckless, and those who ask for too much are made to seem politically immature. What makes this critique so forceful is Ms Jamil’s attention to style as politics.

 

The measured tone, the performance of expertise, the insistence on civility and the invocation of reason all help establish the boundaries of legitimate dissent. Liberalism need not openly defend the powerful when it can make meaningful challenges to power appear unreasonable, impractical, or impossible.

 

The book ends, then, where its sadness has been leading us all along, towards the question of what remains possible. In the “Epilogue, A Manifesto for Futures Thinking”, Ms Jamil declines to surrender the future to the forces that have increasingly enclosed it, from capital and authoritarianism to ecological devastation and algorithmic surveillance. The future, she reminds us, is neither neutral nor inevitable. It is shaped by what we remember, what we refuse and what we are still able to imagine together. This gives political sadness a strange yet powerful generative force. To mourn a world that has been damaged is also to remember that it could have been otherwise. To grieve a lost future is to remain attached to the possibility that another future can still be made.

 

Perhaps this is what Ms Jamil ultimately asks of us, not optimism in the face of catastrophe, but the courage to remain attached to possibility, to hope that a different, softer future is possible. Her manifesto does not promise that a better future will arrive. Rather it asks us to keep making room for them. To imagine otherwise, in a time that insists there is no alternative, may itself be an act of resistance.

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The reviewer is a researcher and writer