I CALL IT THE THIRD WORLD BECAUSE NONE OF ITS other names do justice to it. Third World, like the third eye, is another kind of knowing. Sure, we can call it “developing countries,” we can call it “emerging economies,” we can call it the postcolonial world, we can call it the Global South. (But Australia?) If we were being absolutely honest, wouldn’t we just call it the exploited world? Still—the irresistible knowingness of “Third World.” How extra it is. How it propels you beyond primaries and binaries. The audacity of its unwieldy internal rhyme. Its elasticity that has made space for so many meanings, from varying degrees of nonalignment to varying shades of melanin. The way these meanings are piled one on top of the other, like its buildings, the Internet café on top of the hardware shop on top of the supermarket. The überness of its cities, the way they sprawl from year to year, their centers constantly shifting, changing downtowns as if they were shoes. Those enormous roundabouts, often dreamed up by some long-forgotten colonial planner; the way traffic will pause at a red light, like a wild beast stilling itself before a pounce. The streets without WALK signs where you have to collect a crowd and find a momentary imagined community before you cross them. All the things that are sold on sidewalks: cheap toys, pirated books, phone chargers, flowers. All the forms of transportation that have evolved to fill in the gaps: cycle rickshaws, scooter taxis, autos, dolla vans, tuk-tuks, TikTok. All the broken languages that are spoken at its petrol stations and junctions, where slang passes from one tongue to another like a communion. The back alleys of its cities and towns, where backgammon games and drug deals and export-surplus shops and revolution planning hang out side by side. The stubbornness of its villages, where ancestral eyebrows regard plastic-wrapped vegetables and other forms of modernity skeptically. The way its people, in Addis and Phnom Penh and Delhi, can fix anything mechanical with some glue and a wire and five minutes, making development sustainable before sustainable was plastic-wrapped into Sustainable. The Third World is a world of koans and contradictions where there is no god but there is god. A world so small that so many of us carry it around everywhere, rolling its borders out like a paratha/porotta/farata/palata/buss-up-shut. A world so big we don’t have to go back where we came from because we are already there. We learn to look for it wherever we go; we recognize its chaos and its creativity in the bad neighborhoods and banlieues and inner cities and overcrowded public schools and projects and the wrong side of the tracks in the First World countries we have migrated to, even when those countries keep shrugging and laughing about First World problems, as if no one outside the United States or Europe or Canada has ever had to choose between two different kinds of moisturizers or wines or fonts or whatever. To speak of the Third World is to bring it into being, piled on top of the other worlds but out of reach, almost invisible, blurred by traffic fumes and a bad reputation, except to those of us who grew up t/here. It’s not offensive to me. How can it be, when my soul is a Third World country? Its nasty women, bad hombres, and shitholes are dear to me. Third World Third World Third World.