I recently read an interview with Durba Mitra, a feminist historian at Harvard, on her new book The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism. The book recounts how, in the years following the UN’s International Women’s Year in 1975, women from the decolonising world began articulating an intellectual tradition that challenged colonialism, patriarchy and authoritarianism not as a queue of grievances but as a single interlocking system of power. Theirs was not Western liberal feminism translated into darker complexion, it was a different diagnosis altogether, and therefore demanded different remedies.
And then, gradually, in the way these things happen when they are put to work rather than when they are crushed, their vocabulary was digested. Development agencies, UN frameworks and gender-and-development programmes absorbed their language while quietly excreting the structure of thought that had given it meaning.
Or, to employ a different metaphor, the architecture they had designed was progressively renovated by institutions that retained the facade while altering the load-bearing walls. The Future That Was is an attempt to recover the women who conceived that architecture from a particular kind of disappearance: not forgetting, which would at least be honest, but the subtler process by which a radical vision survives only after its foundations are buried and built over.
Reading this, I found myself thinking about Elissar. A few days earlier, a friend had been telling me about the musical she is writing. Her subject is the founder of Qart Hadasht, the city Rome would later call Carthage, known to most, if at all, by her Greek name, Dido; known to herself, as Elissar or whatever name her own people spoke before their language became a scholarly reconstruction and their archives ash.
The conceit my friend has chosen is deceptively simple. The curtain rises not on Elissar’s flight from Tyre nor the founding of her city, but on her funeral. Only then does the story begin. From that point onward, the audience retraces the path that led there, watching each decision accumulate toward an ending whose significance it already understands, even as the characters remain oblivious to it.
There is something profoundly unsettling about that reversal. Ordinarily we experience life from within, moving uncertainly toward an ending we cannot see. History, by contrast, is almost always encountered in reverse. We know how Carthage ends. We know how revolutions end. We know, or think we know, what becomes of the slogans, the manifestos, the founding acts, the roads taken in youth and then mythologised by people who were not there. Looking backwards, necessity begins to masquerade as inevitability. We mistake outcomes for destinies and forget that, for those living them, every ending was once merely one possibility among many.
Consider what we actually know about Elissar, which is considerably less than one might expect for a figure of such historical and literary consequence. The surviving accounts come almost entirely from future adversaries of her people: Greek and Roman historians who recorded her story after Carthage had been annihilated, its libraries destroyed or dispersed, its population enslaved or scattered, its fields allegedly salted into permanent sterility. Even that last image, the salting of the earth, has become one of those historical details whose symbolic usefulness has outlived the evidence for it. Carthage is the sort of civilization that reaches us through the sentences of others. The city lost; the victors’ metaphors endured.
The narrative preserved in Justin’s epitome of Pompeius Trogus gives us the outline of something remarkable: a Tyrian princess whose brother, Pygmalion, murdered her husband Acerbas to seize the treasury and consolidate his power; who escaped with followers, ships, and what remained of the fortune; who landed on the North African coast and negotiated for land; who, in the famous ox-hide story, cut the hide into strips to claim more territory than the local ruler had imagined offering; and who founded a city that would become, for several centuries, the dominant power of the western Mediterranean. There are variants and uncertainties, as there always are when legend and history are braided around a missing archive.
Some traditions suggest that the father named both children as heirs and that Elissar’s claim was not merely sentimental but dynastic. What survives officially of Tyre’s succession gives us Pygmalion as king. The co-regency, if there was one, is missing. The absence may mean nothing. It may mean everything.
Virgil creates an account of a different personage. He gives Elissar to Aeneas, as Dido, a woman who loves a Trojan hero and curses him when he leaves, because she is useful to the epic he is composing. Augustus required a mythic prehistory for Rome, and Rome required a memory of Carthage that made its own wars appear not merely strategic but fated. Dido’s dying curse, calling down an unnamed avenger upon the race of Aeneas, served that purpose with impeccable economy. Virgil’s Roman readers understood immediately that the avenger was Hannibal. Her death provided the emotional origin story for a geopolitical rivalry. Carthage’s founder was drafted into the service of her conquerors’ mythology, not because Virgil misunderstood her but because he understood exactly what he needed her for. The fact that she is genuinely moving in the Aeneid, that readers have wept for her across two thousand years, does not alter what she was recruited to do. It rather proves the point.
In the older tradition, Aeneas does not appear. Elissar’s death there is a political act. The local chieftain Iarbas, from whom she had obtained the land on which Carthage stood, demands that she marry him or face war. The demand is not merely conjugal ; it is jurisdictional. It is a claim upon the city through the body of its founder. If she accepts, Carthage survives by surrendering its sovereignty. If she refuses, the city she has built may be destroyed before it can defend itself. She tells her people she needs time to prepare a ceremony in honour of her dead husband. She builds a pyre. She climbs it. She kills herself.
The conventional telling draws our attention to the woman as wife and away from her as queen, inviting us to read a constitutional crisis as a private tragedy. But the actor here is not contending with romantic despair. This is someone, who happens to be a woman, confronted with two unacceptable choices who invents a third one that neither party had offered. She preserves the city by removing the pretext for its destruction. She preserves her fidelity to Acerbas by refusing to replace him. She preserves, perhaps, her own authority by refusing to let her body become the instrument through which the city is absorbed into another man’s sovereignty.
Now whether we should call this courage or its opposite is a question the sources decline to answer, and one I cannot settle for myself. I only know that Virgil’s version is the ancient equivalent of the Harlequin romance. A woman dies because a man leaves her. Never mind the rather more pressing matter of preserving a city founded by exiles who had entrusted their lives, their fortunes and their future to you.
That deflation is what linked her, in my mind, to Mitra’s women. Women act. Later systems explain what their actions meant. A founder becomes a lover. A political death becomes a romantic one. A body that refused incorporation is incorporated into the literature of the power that destroyed the city she founded. Mitra’s Third World feminists did not face the same fate, but they faced a recognisable mechanism. They produced a way of understanding power, only to watch its language become available to institutions that did not share its original commitments. Their terms survived. The grammar changed.
This is where the title of Mitra’s book begins to burn rather than merely describe. The future that was. Not the future that failed, which would be sad enough, nor the future that never came, which would be merely elegiac. The future that was suggests something more difficult: a future that existed as an intellectual and political possibility before being converted into a past. The women she studies were not simply defeated by patriarchal authoritarianism. They were, in a sense, succeeded by institutions that learned to speak in their language while meaning something else. To be forgotten is one fate. To be preserved under altered terms may be worse, because it allows the world to congratulate itself on remembering while ensuring that what is remembered no longer threatens it.
Several weeks earlier, on a flight home, I had watched Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation, a documentary about Jack Kerouac and the generations of seekers who have followed in his wake. The film moves between archival Kerouac and an array of inheritors: actors who rode motorcycles across America after reading the book, a fashion designer who credits the Beats for his Dior collections, a cultural critic who wonders what the road might have looked like with James Baldwin in the passenger seat. Each of them has taken something from Kerouac and made it mean what they needed it to mean. The film treats this as evidence of his reach. The possibility that it is also a description of what destroyed him is not one the documentary finds it necessary to explore.
The man who wrote the great American hymn to motion spent the final decade of his life watching strangers appropriate that hymn for purposes he found baffling and, eventually, contemptible. He drank against it. He appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line in 1968, inebriated and raging at a hippie musician for building a career on tearing things down. He had become the reluctant saint of a movement whose politics, aesthetics and self-congratulation he increasingly despised. He moved back in with his mother in Florida. He died at forty-seven from internal haemorrhaging brought on by cirrhosis.
The common explanation is that Kerouac could not handle success. This may not be entirely wrong, but it is too small. Plenty of people cannot handle success. What seems more interesting is to explore why? His success placed him in the position of being interpreted by his adherents in a way that made repudiation impossible. Every objection he made was folded back into the myth. If he complained about the hippies, that merely proved he was complicated. If he drank, it became tragic evidence of his intensity. If he recoiled from the counterculture, the recoil could be treated as another scene in the drama of the prophet undone by the movement he inspired. There are forms of admiration from which no escape is possible because they metabolise objection as confirmation.
The film is itself an example of what it cannot see. The admirers it assembles are building on Kerouac’s story, extending it into their own lives, using it as a framework for their own searches. The myth that escaped him in his lifetime continues to escape him in ours. He would have hated the film, almost certainly, which the film would probably find touching. That is the cruel genius of canonisation. It can turn resistance into texture. It can transform disgust into pathos. It can make even the subject’s refusal of the story into one of the story’s most charming features.
What connects Mitra’s women, Elissar and Kerouac is not tragedy exactly, and not simply the corruption of ideals by institutions, which is the obvious reading and too consoling to be accurate. In each case, a foundational act generated an alluring story that became, over time, separable from the person or people who originated it, and into which others stepped to build what they required; with a large enough audience’s approval. Elissar’s founding of Carthage escaped into Rome’s origin mythology. Third World feminism’s intellectual tradition escaped into the bureaucratic vocabulary of international development. Kerouac’s search escaped into a counterculture he regarded as a misreading, and then into a documentary that treats his objections as one of his more poignant contradictions. The authors were not simply defeated. They were succeeded. Something was built on what they built, without their consent, and the something bore their name while serving other purposes.
One sees this pattern with such frequency that it begins to feel less like betrayal than like a structural feature of human life. It is perhaps especially visible in founding stories, because founding stories are always written twice: once by those who make the crossing, raise the walls, declare the covenant or plant the flag, and again by those who inherit the result and need it to mean something. A people fleeing violence can become a power that administers violence. A movement formed against domination can acquire the habits of domination once it has territory, law and archives. A critique of empire can become an institution that grades the empire’s former subjects against administrative indicators.
This is not hypocrisy in the simple sense. It is more disturbing than hypocrisy, because what supplants the founder’s story is not a betrayal that fails but a betrayal that succeeds. The institution functions. The myth travels. The city stands. It is precisely because Carthage prospered, because development agencies expanded their reach, because a generation found themselves in Kerouac’s book, that the founders became unnecessary to what they had founded. Dispensability is the reward for having built something that lasts.
This is where today’s political soul-searching becomes unavoidable. American settlers pushing westward, Israeli communities describing themselves through the language of return and survival, Phoenician colonists negotiating with Amazigh chieftains for a coastal hill in what is now Tunisia: these are not equivalent cases, and any argument that depends on treating them as equivalent should be distrusted. But they do share a formal problem.
Arrival must be narrated as necessity. Occupation must be translated into destiny, refuge, providence, reclamation or law. The people who arrive must tell a story in which their presence is justified, and the story almost always becomes more coherent as the people displaced by it become less audible. What begins as a solution to one people’s vulnerability can become the source of another’s. The solution does not fail because it is insincere. It fails because it succeeds well enough to acquire power.
Elissar’s death, in the older version, is therefore not an antique curiosity but a political grammar still intelligible to us. She stands at the hinge between refuge and sovereignty. Her body is the point at which a city’s survival is to be converted into another man’s authority. The demand made of her is not merely to marry but to ratify, with her person, a settlement in which the founding act is absorbed into a pre-existing power. Her suicide refuses the translation. It is a terrible refusal, and perhaps not one we should admire too quickly. Yet it exposes something that later, softer versions obscure: the founder’s body and the city’s sovereignty were not separate problems. The politics entered through intimacy, as it so often does.
The friend writing the musical is working through what Elissar’s life and death meant, what it says about a woman who built a world that eventually outran her authority over it. One might wonder, without any unkindness, whether she is also working through something closer to home: what it means to be someone’s daughter, someone’s heir, someone whose future has been narrated by people with their own interests in how that story ends. Elissar, after all, was also that. She refounded herself. Whether the musical will clarify what Elissar’s story actually was, or whether it will become the most recent vehicle by which her story is made to mean something other than itself, is a question opening night alone will not resolve. It may not even be the right question. Perhaps retelling is never a recovery of the original so much as an admission that the original can no longer defend itself.
I found myself thinking of this again, improbably, in relation to peptides. Everyone appears to be taking something now, or considering taking something, or consulting someone who knows which protocol everyone else is taking. The language is familiar: optimization, recovery, longevity, performance, biomarkers, sleep architecture, inflammation, metabolic flexibility. I am not immune to the appeal. Quite the opposite. And the appeal is not unfounded. People are sleeping better, recovering faster, moving through their days with an energy they had quietly stopped expecting. The interventions are working, which is the problem, or at least the beginning of it.
Because when something works, the question of what it is working at the expense of becomes harder to ask and easier to dismiss. Who decided what counts as improvement? Which measurements are being privileged, and which forms of deterioration have been made difficult to see because they fall outside the selected dashboard? If energy improves but anxiety worsens, if recovery accelerates but sleep becomes dependent on a stack of interventions, if longevity becomes a project so elaborate that life itself is reorganised around its extension, what exactly has been optimised? Quantification is not the opposite of ideology. It is often ideology’s most efficient costume, because once a value has been converted into a metric it can pretend to have escaped argument. The founders of this particular movement, whoever they were, would recognise the trajectory.
This is not an argument against peptides, any more than Mitra’s book is an argument against reports, or the story of Elissar an argument against settlement or Kerouac’s ruin an argument against travel. It is an argument against allowing an intervention to become sovereign over the problem it was meant to address. The most dangerous solutions are not the ones that fail. Failure is instructive and often clarifying. The dangerous ones are those that work well enough to be inherited, abstracted, systematised and repurposed until the original need disappears beneath the procedures created to meet it. At that point the solution remains, sometimes in impressive institutional form, but the question it was meant to answer has moved elsewhere.
By this point an unwelcome figure had begun appearing at the back of the room. He was not in Mitra’s interview. He was absent from the legends of Carthage. Kerouac circled him, borrowed from him, drifted near him and then retreated into Catholic grief, American rage and alcohol. He has little to say about peptides, though one suspects he would understand the craving they answer. The Buddha does not enter this argument as a solution. He enters as an irritation.
His irritation lies in the fact that he does not ask whether the road, the city, the movement, the institution or the protocol has been properly designed. He asks what in us keeps demanding that any of them finally hold. The world changes, the self changes, the object of desire changes, and yet we insist on building as though the thing built could secure us against alteration. That does not mean one should build nothing. The cheap version of Buddhism, the one dismissed by those who require enemies more than interlocutors, imagines detachment as withdrawal and compassion as sedation. The harder version asks what it would mean to act without needing the action to become a monument to the actor.
I am not sure I believe this. Or rather, I believe it intermittently, which may be the only honest way I believe anything that competes with my instincts. Camus would say to build anyway, to recognise the absurdity of the enterprise and persist without appeal. Nietzsche would say that the hunger to create, to impose form, to make something of the chaos, is not a mistake but the very sign of life. The Buddha, standing quietly behind both of them, would ask whether their answers still leave the self intact as the hidden beneficiary of the drama. None of them has resolved for me the problem of what to do when your ideas are institutionalised, your story is drafted into someone else’s epic, or your myth turns up in a documentary making thoughtful remarks about the American spirit.
Elissar was, in some traditions, deified after her death. The people of Carthage worshipped the founder as a goddess, or perhaps later identified her with Tanit, for as long as the city endured. The city endured until 146 BCE, when Rome burned it. After that, the goddess, the city, the records and the library disappeared together, while Virgil’s Dido survived. The curse survived. Hannibal survived as Rome’s nightmare and later as history’s admired enemy. What did not survive was Elissar’s own account of what she had made, why she made it, and whether dying upon the pyre was an escape, a refusal, a sacrifice or the last act of sovereignty available to her.
Perhaps every solution that matters is destined to escape in this way. It enters the world to answer one problem and is inherited by people trying to solve another. That may not be failure, exactly. It may be the only form of survival history permits. Still, I cannot shake the unease that something essential is lost when an idea remains legible only after its foundations have been infilled, when a city survives only through the literature of its destroyers, when a road remains open only because the man who paved it has become one more landmark beside it. We keep building anyway, which may be courage, vanity, delusion, necessity or merely habit. The Buddha waits at the back of the room, neither applauding nor condemning, while the rest of us continue arguing about whether a foundation has been betrayed because another structure stands above it, or whether this is what foundations were always for.
