Shelf I & II
Psychology & Power
Shame, codependency, people-pleasing, distraction, and the avoidance of self-knowledge. What the mind does to protect itself, and what that protection costs.
The Keeper
About Saipher Zureti
My name is Saipher Zureti. I am a visual artist and writer. All of the calligraphy in my essays is my original artwork, created specifically for the writing it accompanies.
Black Radical Reflections is a body of philosophical essays on manipulation, identity, psychology, and the systems that shape how we see ourselves and each other. The essays build on each other deliberately. Each one extends, complicates, or deepens what came before, because these subjects cannot be understood in isolation from one another.
This site is the archive of that work: 23 essays, roughly 88,954 words, kept in order and kept whole. New writing appears on Substack first and is filed here once it is finished.
You write for yourself, and you share for your people.
The Calligraphy
Every Essay Opens With a Hand
Each essay is introduced by a piece of original calligraphy and the passage it renders: Arabic, Chinese, Amharic, Tibetan, Urdu. Ibn Khaldun, Confucius, Laozi, Fanon, Darwish, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. The quote is not decoration. It is the argument in compressed form, and the essay is the unpacking of it.
The artwork is reproduced here at full width, exactly as it appears at the head of each piece.
Apparatus
The Shelves
Shelf III
Race & History
Black consciousness and its engineered replacements; internalized racism, inherited history, and what a people are taught to forget about themselves.
Shelf IV & V
Language, Craft & Criticism
Writing as thinking. The colonizer’s language, code-switching, audience, and who is permitted to write.