“Forget Maps”: Documenting Global Apartheid and Creating Novel Cartographies in Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret

In The Silent Minaret, South African–born writer Ishtiyaq Shukri links apartheid-era obsessions with classifying and immobilizing people with the anxieties of the post-9/11 world, where nations in the geopolitical West similarly attempt to categorize and restrict threatening “dark bodies.” Through connections between the trajectory and scholarly journey of Shukri’s protagonist, Issa, I examine the relationship between educating the public to be on the alert for signals that mark certain people as “threatening others,” the subsequent responses of suspicion, fear, and terror, and the consequences to the bearers of such marks as they are subjected to constant surveillance. Shukri’s “disappeared” narrator, who educates and politicizes his friends in absentia, raises questions that are especially pertinent in light of recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s ability to routinely reach into individuals’ private information. Issa’s disappearance gives him a location of agency; paradoxically, it also highlights the authority and power of the state.