Anna Badkhen: To See Beyond
Globe-spanning journalist and essayist Anna Badkhen reads from her new collection, in conversation with writer Andrea Pitzer at Politics and Prose at The Wharf.
Why we picked this
Badkhen's books about Mali and Senegal stand apart from most Western writing about Africa because she stays long enough and pays attention carefully enough that the people she writes about have interiority rather than just circumstances.
Anna Badkhen has built one of the more distinctive bodies of work in contemporary American nonfiction through a practice of sustained, immersive reporting — staying in places long enough to understand them, rather than parachuting in to confirm existing narratives. Her books “Walking with Abel,” which followed a Fulani nomadic family across Mali’s Sahel, and “Fisherman’s Blues,” set in a Senegalese fishing village, are works of slow journalism that operate closer to literature than to reportage in their attention to individual life and sensory detail.
“To See Beyond” gathers essays that extend that vision across multiple geographies and time scales. The question that runs through her work — what it means to actually see, rather than observe from a distance — takes on different shapes in different contexts, but the concern is consistent: how does attention change what we know, and what do we owe to the people whose lives we are attending to?
Andrea Pitzer, whose own work spans literary nonfiction and investigative history, is a fitting conversation partner for a writer who operates at those same edges. Free at Politics and Prose’s Wharf location.