Author of To See Beyond
By Sarah Kloth
To See Beyond moves between war zones, climate catastrophe, and intimate personal memory. How did you decide what moments to bring into the essay form, and what to leave out?
AB: This book was born from an obligation to share knowledge. In West Africa I’ve heard elders say, “Knowledge is the only thing you can give away with losing any,” and in many philosophies there is an understanding that knowledge is not something we possess, it is something we are entrusted with in order to pass it on. I am fifty years old, and I am an immigrant, an exile, a former war correspondent, and a writer, and I have seen and learned a lot of things about the world that somehow connect in a way that makes sense to me, connect in a way that sometimes may seem like a warning, and sometimes like a comfort: the way empires rise and fall; the way we sacrifice girls for some imaginary collective wellbeing; the way we, humans, have survived all kinds of cataclysms up till now. On occasion, if I am lucky, these things connect into individual essays.
You connect historical atrocities like Auschwitz with present-day conflicts in places such as Ukraine and Mali. How did you navigate the responsibility of drawing those lines without flattening their differences?
AB: IWhen I teach young writers, I remind them to never approach human life in general terms. So it is our obligation as writers to respect each individual human life, in its individual context, whether that life is in 1940s Poland or Palestine or Iran or Ukraine today.
The idea of “microlove” feels central to the book. Where did that concept emerge from, and what does it look like in practice in a world shaped by large-scale suffering?
AB: A philosopher friend named Rick Werner taught me about microlove. “You find yourself next to a stranger on an airplane ride, have an intense conversation for a few hours, then go your separate ways,” he wrote me. “That’s microlove. It is far more common than we think. It feeds our well-being.” I am a high-functioning introvert, but I am also an exile, an immigrant, a professional trespasser, and I have made a habit of forging connections with strangers. Think of these as gossamer threads of intimacy we float behind us as we go our separate ways, the kinship that may be fleeting or undone in time but that nourishes us all the same, makes us feel in community.
There’s a recurring tension in the book between despair and beauty. Was that balance something you set out to explore, or something that revealed itself during writing?
AB: Our entire existence exists within this precarious balancing. Our penchant for atrocity and our capacity for care. Our violence and our art. And I think our capacity for wonder is what has sustained us over millennia. So when I find myself thinking of what we leave behind—the poisoned devastation of Gaza and southern Lebanon, scorched forests and submerged farmlands, almost one-fifth of our planet unlivable for humans, the predicted mass die-off of at least a million species, disintegrating factories and mines leeching poison into soil, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—in my mind, I try to tell my private beads of our aspirations: the ethereal Afrofuturism of Diébédo Francis Kéré’s architecture; the James Webb Space Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider; the artist Katie Paterson’s engagements with deep time and space; the iridescent Blue Mosque in Mazar-e-Sharif, the unflinching bronzes of Simone Leigh; biomedical research advances that will help save hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of lives; Carlo Rovelli’s playful physics; Alice Coltrane and Ablaye Cissoko; Wole Soyinka; Beethoven; Euripides; Jay Wright . . .
You write about language itself—its limits, its failures, and its possibilities. When did you first start questioning whether language can hold the scale of what you’ve witnessed?
AB: In Russian, my mother tongue, mourners say about a great misfortune nyet slov, “no words.” In 1939, the Soviet secret police arrested the poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s husband and daughter—he would be shot and she would spend sixteen years in the Gulag, but Tsvetaeva would know neither of these tragedies because she would hang herself a year later, two months after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Shortly before her suicide, she wrote, “My difficulty . . . is in the impossibility of my goal, for example, to use words to express a moan: nnh, nnh, nnh.” Why should our words make sense when the world around us does not? Post-Holocaust writers contended with the inadequacy of language by displacing it or displacing themselves within it: Elie Wiesel broke away from the German language and chose to write in French and English; Paul Celan broke the German language itself to unbesmirch it for poetry.
The book moves fluidly between autobiography, travel writing, and social commentary. Did you think of it as an essay collection from the beginning, or did the form emerge over time?
AB: This is my second collection of essays; my previous one, Bright Unbearable Reality, was longlisted for the National Book Award. I have published other nonfiction books, and I write fiction, too, but I like the essay form because it is fluid, because trial and error are inherent to it. After all, the name comes from the French verb for “to attempt.” Here I am, attempting to make sense of our nonsensical world. Really, at this time in the human existence on Earth, this form seems quite honest.
How do you approach writing about violence without either numbing the reader or overwhelming them?
AB: I don’t know what readers experience when they read my work. I am not sure it is my responsibility to know; honestly, I think my sole responsibility to the readers is to share what I know—what I believe is pertinent for us to survive this time as ethical creatures—in a way that is most honest, most precise, and most true. Perhaps I hold a greater responsibility to the people whose suffering I witness, people who have entrusted their stories to me: to tell their stories as accurately as I can. Yes, that’s my job. The other day I saw a photograph of an 11-year-old girl in Gaza next to her birthday cake; the cake, blue and white, had Feliz Aniversario piped in cream on top, in Spanish for some reason. The girl was very pretty, piercing blue eyes. She had no limbs: Israeli bomb took them. She was looking at the camera with a very peculiar facial expression: I couldn’t tell if she is smiling or holding back tears. If you are numb to this, this mundane fact of genocide, that’s on you. If you are overwhelmed, that means you have a beating heart.
You suggest that attention itself can be a form of resistance. What does that resistance look like for you as a writer in practice?
AB: Paying attention and using language with utmost precision.
Many of these essays feel deeply rooted in witnessing. How has your understanding of “bearing witness” changed over the course of your career?
AB: Hmm, maybe, after thirty years of doing this work, I am feeling the “bearing” part of it a little more acutely. Today, having been watching livestreamed genocide for nearly three years, having been watching videos and photographs of dismembered babies in Palestine and Lebanon and Iran on the daily basis while my government is either paying for or actively participating in the dismembering, the term “unbearable”—that adjective that often precedes the word “grief”—is often at the tip of my tongue. I also think of the line from Michael Herr’s Dispatches: “You were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did.” Today, everybody with a cellphone is a witness. Everybody is responsible.
What do you hope readers notice in their own lives after finishing this book—especially in the quieter, everyday moments?
AB: Radical hope. What the philosopher Jonathan Lear describes as anticipating “a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.” Hoping is a uniquely human experience—a projection that in the future something good will happen—and that projection is at the center of my book. Radical hope and radical love. So I hope my readers remember to hope against fascism, and love accordingly.
To See Beyond
Anna Badkhen
A globe-spanning essay collection on the human condition from the author James McBride calls “one of the most creative and important nonfiction writers in our era” Our hyper-informed digital era of climate catastrophe, historically unmatched migration, and genocide confronts us with a terrible conundrum: the pain and struggles of others are more visible than ever, yet hostility and loneliness persist. It often seems that we are on the edge of ruin, and hope, though necessary, is elusive. How can we reconcile ourselves to the world we have made? In To See Beyond, Anna Badkhen probes the ways we ward off despair as she imagines the language we need for survival. Through engagement with contemporary literature and stories of everyday encounters with people around the world, she brings us closer to understanding how we balance delight and grief, joy and hurt, and choose to embrace life as a form of resistance.
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Article originally Published in the Summer 2026 Issue.