The timid radicals are not terrorists: a parody of emancipatory movements

The writer, artist and activist Hamja Ahsan.Courted by Caja Negra publishing house

These are not good times to be shy.

None of them are, but these are less so: we are encouraged to create a personal brand, have a presence on social networks, exercise leadership, live experiences to the limit, express ourselves and show ourselves 24 hours a day, shine with our own light.

Be entrepreneurs of ourselves.

Etc.

A world in which noisy people, even though they are a minority, end up monopolizing public attention and power.

But there are dissidents who flee from extreme socialization and self-exposure, who are against verbosity and impudence, who fight against contemporary rush and suffocation.

They go beyond

mindfulness

and Orfidal to embark on political action.

They are the timid radicals.

This is what artist, writer and activist Hamja Ahsan (London, 42 years old) imagines in his book

Shy Radicals.

The anti-systemic politics of the introverted militant

(Caja Negra, translated by Alejo Ponce de León), where he exposes what a country founded by the timid for the timid would be like, far from those “noisy people.”

This literary artifact is not an essay, nor a novel, nor a narrative.

If he narrates, he does so in a different way: with a compilation of documents about the movement of the shy radicals, in which a parody is made, sometimes disconcerting, of emancipatory movements, identity politics, activism and revolutionary rhetoric.

For example, in its pages you can find the draft of the Constitution of the Shy People's Republic of Aspergistan, interviews with the movement's political prisoners, the programming of a shy film series, documents from the introverted student movement and even a pamphlet that raises funds for the silent cause: “Contribute to eliminate: The founding pillars of every extrovert-supremacist institution will fall,” he says.

In another section he makes a defense of the Sensitive White Man.

In the Constitution of Aspergistan, for example, the cessation of the occupation of political positions by extroverts is required.

“ Mainstream

life

has no place in Aspergistan.

All politics will be

underground

,” says article 8. By article 13, advertisements and the representation of candidates in elections are suppressed.

Neon lights and flashing lights are not permitted (art. 39).

In general, advertising is abolished.

Also (art. 16) “sirens, alarm bells or emergency calls” are prohibited.

The flag is not raised publicly, only by those “who wish to signal their need for silence, solitude and personal space” (art. 22).

The national anthem, very poetic, is the sound of a sea conch (art. 24).

Ahsan, a Briton of Bangladeshi origin, has been involved in the fight against Islamophobia, against the so-called War on Terrorism started by GW Bush or in solidarity with prisoners.

His brother, the poet Talha Ahsan, with Asperger syndrome, was extradited to the United States in 2012, after six years of preventive detention in the United Kingdom, accused of supporting Islamic terrorism on the internet, and there he was placed in maximum security prisons. , while a movement that considered him innocent called for his release.

That explosions, shootings, kidnappings is too loud for the timid radicals

Something of all this comes through in the work of Hamja Ahsan.

In one of his statements, the introvert organization assures that it is not a terrorist organization.

That explosions, shootings, kidnappings is too noisy for the timid radicals.

“Terrorism is in all cases Extroverted-Supremacist,” he concludes.

Theirs is resistance.

The radical timidist movement, something like the Black Panthers of the silent class, is also called

Introfada

and its allies include local public libraries, Quakers,

otakus or

hikikomori

(those young Japanese who lock themselves in their room).

They like small gardens.

Beneath all the ingenuity that this book displays, and the satirical vision it gives of political struggles and their internal quarrels (which we have seen so much and that we see so much), reading

Timid Radicals

leads us to a certain rejection of the noisy contemporary world , to perceive the need for more silence, intimacy and reflection.

Look for it in your bookstore

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