Kashmir and the Sound of Silence | Sabia Rasool presents "The Blind Side"

Portside Review and 720 ABC Radio Perth are proud to invite you to a special lecture with Sabia Rasool, winner of the 2025 Human Rights Essay Prize, as she presents her award-winning essay “The Blind Side”.

Sabia Rasool is a writer, editor, and researcher from Kashmir. Her work explores the intersections of memory, visibility, and state violence, often through personal narrative, oral histories, and cultural critique. She is particularly interested in how people resist erasure through music, language, and everyday joy. Having worked across creative media, she is now focused on curating interdisciplinary narratives from Kashmir. She believes storytelling can serve as both an archive and an act of refusal.

In “The Blind Side,” Rasool turns her gaze to the ways Kashmiris live within a politics of selective vision: what is allowed to be seen, what is silenced, and what persists in lullabies, music, and fractured joy. Part memoir, part cultural history, and part political testimony, the essay examines how memory and resistance survive against state repression.

This lecture offers an opportunity to reflect on how stories confront silence, record memory, and open space for resistance.

Portside Review is a literary journal from the Indian Ocean published by Centre for Stories, dedicated to diverse voices, thoughtful storytelling, and writing that engages deeply with questions of justice.