Global Art Forum 6

TL; DR Some Medium Stories

by Emily Dische-Becker Tom Francis Kai Friese Kristine Khouri Hussein Omar Nicholas Sautin Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Michael C. Vazquez (Ed.)

Global Art Forum_6

With texts by Emily Dische-Becker, Tom Francis, Kai Friese, Kristine Khouri, Hussein Omar, Nicholas Sautin, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

TL; DR Some Medium Stories

Edited by Michael C. Vazquez Designed by UBIK Printed at Raidy Printing Group in an edition of 1000 TL; DR: Some Medium Stories was commissioned by Global Art Forum_6,

“The Medium of Media,” which took place at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (March 18-19, 2012) and Art Dubai (March 21-24, 2012) Global Art Forum_6 Director Shumon Basar Global Art Forum was founded by Art Dubai in 2007. The sixth edition is co-presented by the Dubai Culture & Arts Authority (Dubai Culture) in partnership with Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (Qatar Museums Authority) © The Authors, Art Dubai, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (Qatar Museums Authority)

GLOBAL ART FORUM_6

CONTENTS Introduction 5 Tom Francis 6 Television Without Pity Emily Dische-Becker 12 Only Refresh Kai Friese 24 Memoir of a Map Kristine Khouri 34 Definitively Non-Verifiable Speech Girls Hussein Omar 42 FBFFs Nicholas Sautin 50 Atrocity Exhibitionism Kaelen Wilson-Goldie 56 Postscript

INTRODUCTION Marshall McLuhan, whose aphorisms and explorations inspire this year’s Global Art Forum, developed his pioneering ideas about communication, rhetoric, and the medium of media while working on a doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe, a sixteenth-century English satirist, playwright, and erotic poet whose primary medium was the pamphlet.

As Douglas Coupland observes in his biography Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan, situating Nashe required a massive study of rhetoric, from the Greeks to the Renaissance. Over the course of the work, Coupland notes, McLuhan became “interested in the manner in which different types of written and oral speech have affected the life of civilizations. This interest then morphed into a broader subject: the influence of all kinds of communications media on individual consciousness, and how those individual changes might collectively change society.”

The seven essays in this booklet consider contemporary communications media and individual consciousnesses. You will encounter Syrian state–sympathizers stalking anti-Assad activists on Facebook; learn life lessons from Afghan satellite television; consider the material immateriality of gossip as an archival source; and consort with grave rubbers and virtual genealogists. You might find yourself debating the abuse of human rights videos on YouTube, or the machinations of mapmakers, or the use value of gratuitous insult. In this homage to the pamphlet, hopefully, you will lose yourself for a moment, despite — or perhaps because of — the marriage of media, old and new.

So: some medium stories. Not quite long enough for an essay, but too long for a blog post. (Hence the title, which alludes to our favorite recent Internet abbreviation.)

— Shumon Basar and Michael C. Vazquez

5

TELEVISION WITHOUT PITY Afghanistan by Satellite

by Tom Francis

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It should go without saying that Afghans love TV. And yet there is a tendency to imagine the citizens of a putatively failed state like Afghanistan as decidedly premodern. In lighter moments, Afghans enjoy watching buzkashi, an equine sport inherited from fifteenthcentury Timurids that combines polo and capture-thesheep-carcass, or perhaps composing ghazal-couplets in Arcadian pomegranate orchards. (A related perspective allows Afghans a kind of truncated modernity that ends with the mysterious 1979 death of Ahmad Zahir, the well-connected crooner who left behind a lipstickcovered Volkswagen Beetle and a sizeable back catalog of Johnny Cash covers.) To the National Geographic reader, Afghans are a “conservative people.” They are said to prefer the “traditional arts and leisure pastimes”: carpet weaving, calligraphy, beard growing. Not for Afghans the mindless pleasure of late-night action flicks, nor the schlock- and celebrity-addled media culture of the West.

I should confess that I shared this sentiment, in some vague underthought way, until I arrived in Kabul and discovered that many an Afghan would happily trade their kites for a Red Dwarf box set. (My former colleague Ihsanullah loved that British sci-fi show, having watched it growing up in Peshawar.) Afghans watch TV indiscriminately: newscasts, foreign films, and (whatever the Dari is for) telenovelas. The obvious explanation for this is probably the right one: even just owning a TV set was illegal under the Taliban. For all the spectacular mismanagement of the Afghan economy since 2001, there is a growing middle class in the country 7

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with easy access to inexpensive Chinese TVs in Kabuli bazaars. Fly into the capital from Dubai or Delhi, moreover, and chances are that at least one of the kohleyed passengers in your midst will be carting a man-sized duty-free flatscreen TV. By now, even the most remote villages are likely to have at least one set thereabouts. I once watched an episode of Setara-e Afghan, the local equivalent of American Idol, in a streamside mill with half a roof that was ten miles from the nearest town (half a roof being all you need to mount a satellite dish).

When the portly kid with the crooked glasses who was that year’s frontrunner had finished his performance, my miller host, a bi-toothed Uzbek man, revealed to me that he didn’t normally choose to watch Afghan channels over the (illicitly obtained) Iranian ones he could pick up in this remote corner of northwestern Afghanistan.

But that year the judges on Setara had admitted a female contestant, and she was causing quite the stir; at one point, she had even indulged in the briefest of coquettish shimmies to go along with her song. My new friend’s near-toothless grin said it all: Afghans love TV.

this would go on for six months, so long as we furnished the windowless basement of the house with a satellite television so that she could watch her shows on the various Tolo channels.

• • • My colleague Nadia had one condition. We would live in the house with the polyester shag rugs and no running water. She would meet every day with the Women’s Shura to try and draw out of them stories of their hardscrabble lives in the refugee communities of Pakistan and Iran.

She would teach me and my colleagues the names of draft animals and land plots in Farsi and Pashto. All 8

Tolo is the television arm of the Moby Media Group, Afghanistan’s largest media company, and Tolo is how I got my TV fix in Afghanistan. In fact, if all TV shows, from the silliest sitcoms to the most stultified newscasts, play a part in the making and systematizing of realities — airbrushed and aspirational realities, yes, but also deep, weird underbellies of the real — then it was Tolo that gave me access to Afghan places and mindscapes that I could never hope to find, even or especially by traveling the country and talking to people. On Tolo I learned what makes a political figure risible just by observing which traits were exaggerated for satirical effect, while also getting fashion forecasts. (After one show, my Afghan friends predicted that shiny lamé suits — the same ones worn by the Tolo newscasters — would soon be taken up by the metropolitan youth. It came to pass.) I learned where much of contemporary Afghan homoeroticism comes from (Bollywood B-movies, as it happens), and also that a show about torturing terrorists, many of them Muslim, the better to keep America safe — Fox’s 24 — is nonetheless one of the most popular shows in this almost exclusively Muslim country. ( Jack Bauer’s little Islamophobic indiscretion is more than offset by his other upstanding qualities.) Of course, even as the modest moves of the Setara girl were generating a firestorm of inter-Afghan invective re: the morality of 9

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female dancing, Tolo was screening a daylong tribute to the late, lamented Michael Jackson.

It’s hard to figure how, if at all, these things stack up in the minds of impressionable young Afghans, already comparatively disadvantaged and subject to repeated high-voltage pulmonary shocks, courtesy of the international community and its USAID subsidiaries. I do know that it’s all in the mix, and that future Afghan realities are very much up for grabs. If after Karzai, Afghanistan is taken over by a cabal of gold-suited, moonwalking dandies, let’s just say: you’ve been warned.

Most evenings, my colleagues and I would crank up the generator, sit down on the floor, and tune in to our favorite Turkestani shows. By “our favorite,” I actually mean Nadia’s. I hated Setara — I watched two full seasons of the show, and there wasn’t a single contestant who could sing on key — but Nadia was a remote control dominatrix, and she outweighed me by a hundred pounds.

Her second-favorite show was Kasuati Zindagi Kay, an Indian soap dubbed into Dari that seemed to have been very influential on her worldview: men with beards were gentle and nice; men with silver hair and/or mustaches were conniving and evil; true love was an illusion, except when it transpired between good young boys and their FBDs — father’s brother’s daughters. What I loved about Kasuati, on the other hand, was the sheer improbable fact of a show that employed multiple casts of identicallooking people to populate its fourteen hundred episodes.

As far as I can tell, it never stops filming — but maybe 10

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that’s par for the Indian soap opera course?

Contrast Kasuati, a histrionic yet saccharine portrait of life among India’s upper crust at some unspecified point in history, with the Turkish soap Five Sisters, a weirdly apt and plodding view onto middle-class life in the Anatolian heartland (also on Tolo), and you get some idea of how Afghan worldviews are being shaped through television. Tolo is often accused of corrupting the morals of Afghans by screening such shows alongside its political satire and reportage. (Whether news reporting can rightly be criticized as corrupting morals is, of course, a conversation that only “special” countries can have.) I don’t dispute this charge for a second — the suits of the Tolo newscasters are eyesores, to say the least, and it cannot possibly be healthy to live the lifestyle of the ardent Kasuati fan, logging hour after hour of couch time. But nations need their TV slobs and pop culture enthusiasts as much as their swashbuckling heroes — if only to make the achievements of their buzkashi all-stars, their over-performing cricket team, and their Kandahari poets that much more laudable. Afghanistan should be no exception. Spawn a VH1 to Tolo’s MTV, say I. Just vet the singers before letting them on Setara? Please?

Those tin-eared wails will stay with me ’til I die.

I blame Nadia.

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ONLY REFRESH Syria, “the Hamra Left,” and Anti-Social Networking

by Emily Dische-Becker

1. Promises, Promises Beirut today feels an awful lot like a province of Syria, like Aleppo or Damascus, one of those quiescent urban centers that the regime touts as evidence of the prevailing normalcy. Beirut hasn’t joined the revolution, yet. Considering the carnage occurring nearby, it seems eerily calm. The cafés in Hamra are filled with the usual suspects, but they are unusually quiet as they hack away at their laptops. The erstwhile unity of the activists and intellectuals that comprise what might be called the Hamra Left has frayed over the uprising just an hour away. But here the fighting rages, with little to no consequence, on Facebook.

The divisions are recent. Until last March, the Hamra Left was united by its opposition to American neoimperialist designs and to Israeli aggression; in practice that meant aligning oneself with Hezbollah, the most effective proponents of resistance in Lebanon. This was how I met R---, a young Syrian blogger, photographer, and pro-Palestine activist living in Beirut. That was four years ago. Before we became friends, I had seen photos of her on Facebook at a rally in Beirut’s southern suburbs, celebrating the return of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. The photos showed her amid a sea of friends and yellow flags, in an album entitled, “With Hezbollah, a promise is a promise.”

Today, the Hamra Left is particularly divided on the question of Hezbollah’s defense of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and R---, once a habitué of the Hamra cafés,

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equally outspoken in her support for Syrian and Palestinian rights, is languishing in a Damascus prison.

This travesty, too, is being broadcast on my Facebook newsfeed. R--- is only fifty-five-odd nautical miles from Hamra, but the only thing we can do is declare our solidarity and pick fights with her — our — former friends, the comrades who don’t support her struggle.

the people. Social media afforded us a sense of real-time participation and proximity. Anyone still posting kitten videos or playing Farmville was filtered out via the hide button.

2. The Fire Next Door Journalistic and scholarly interest in social media and the Arab uprisings has tended to skew in a predictable manner. Amid roiling discontent with western-backed “moderate” autocrats and incredible acts of bravery by young people collectively written off as apathetic, western media was fixated on the organizational use of Facebook and Twitter by revolutionaries and activists.

Less attention has been paid to Facebook’s crucial function as a tool for passive observation in countries woefully excluded from the revolutionary unrest.

Jan 28 D--NO TO WORK! JUST REFRESH! In Beirut, banished from the headlines by its revolutionary inertia, people flocked to Facebook to cheer from the sidelines. When the uprising began in Tunisia, Facebook activity among my friends increased tenfold. When the unrest engulfed Egypt, tracking updates from Tahrir Square took precedence over work, meals, and chores, uniting the denizens of my newsfeed, all of us rooting for 14

E--is in total fucking awe that people can still organize even when the internet is down, that spontaneous acts of solidarity still exist, that social fabric can heal, and that denial is not a river in Egypt, but a crisis room in DC full of misanthropic unimaginative suits who have missed the fucking boat (again). You suck. No matter what happens, I don’t ever want to wake up in 2010 again. Now back to packing.

When Mubarak fell, swept out of power by thundering street protests, my newsfeed reflected a unanimous euphoria. Most of us had never seriously imagined a revolution happening in our lifetimes. Suddenly anything seemed possible. There were glimmerings of revolt in Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Algeria. But why limit ourselves to the obvious? Who should be overthrown next? This was the best game. Israel! No, fuck it — Saudi Arabia.

No, Syria! Syria? No way.

3. Five of your friends liked “selective empathy” Improbably, impossibly, no thanks to us, Syria was indeed next. In mid-March, following the arrest and torture of a group of teenagers for scrawling the people want to overthrow the regime — the rallying cry of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt — on a wall in the southern town of 15

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Dera’a, protests were met with brutal repression. At first, it seemed like it would wind down right away. Surely Assad was a wilier politician than Mubarak or Ben Ali; he would deploy some combination of repression and promised reforms to put an end to this. But the Syrian protesters refused to back down. They took to the streets in Baniyas and Douma, Idlib and Hama, Rastan and Dour ez-Zouq and Homs, facing down bullets and mass arrest.

provided the illusion of proximity, but rather a concrete feeling of helplessness. And, soon after, divisiveness.

A week or two into the uprising, K---, a Syrian journalist whose acquaintance I’d made only days earlier in Damascus, had his Facebook profile hijacked by government bots, who began blanketing my newsfeed with Baathist slogans like some regime-friendly social media demon. Before long, our friends were circulating a rumor that K--- had been arrested, urging everyone to de-friend him ASAP — not to shield ourselves from the deluge of crude propaganda, but to protect the identity of his acquaintances. Later we received reliable information that K--- had gone into hiding, having been summoned repeatedly by state security.

[M--- likes this.]

But apart from the hack-job on K---’s account, my newsfeed offered only a cautious trickle of Syria-related updates and videos those first few weeks. A handful of acquaintances posted videos of corpses littering the streets in Dera’a, or a statue of Hafez al Assad being demolished by angry crowds. It was nothing like the electrified response to events in Egypt or Tunisia. As events unfolded an hour away, Facebook no longer 16

E--There appear to be (as far as I can tell from my balcony) dozens of people running down Hamra Street chanting and waving pictures of Bashar al Assad, chanting “bi rouh, bi dam, nefdik ya Bashar” (with our blood and our souls, we sacrifice for you, oh Bashar)

O--Tell them the Syrian ministry of Interior does not allow running.

T--This is when you throw boiling oil (or water if you’re feeling nice today) from your balcony.

L--so i heard right!! i was like no there is no way with all these killings that am hearing this.

M--no actually they were lebanese demonstrators asking to swap bashar with some of our lebanese politicians E--I think it’s pretty regrettable to see anyone cheering for repression while people are being massacred or to make excuses for what the Syrian regime is doing. Any calculations that necessitate apologizing for, belittling or ignoring this reality lack humanity.

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M--Do you mean that pro bashar demonstrators in hamra and damascus lack humanity?? Are you telling me that we know better what they should want or ask for?

Every syrian I know wants freedom and reforms but wants bashar to stay.. and yes in a more selfish way, the enemy of my enemy is my friend! I am not shy to say it.. sorrrrry!

4. Sticks and Stones In May, a handful of activist friends in Hamra tried to stage a candlelight vigil in memory of Syrian demonstrators murdered by the regime. Word went out on Facebook.

But a large group of regime-supporters had seen the event invitation, and they swamped the vigil, drowning out the demonstrators with chants of “Liquidate the traitors!” Still larger events were organized in ensuing weeks, with the Lebanese army stepping in to separate pro-uprising protesters from their more numerous and fervent counterparts. At one of these, men crossed the army line and took photographs of demonstrators on our side. A few days later, walking down Makdissi Street in Hamra with a friend, we passed a coffee cart manned by young members of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP). One of them pointed at us and loudly informed the others that we had taken part in the demonstration.

Other friends reported similar incidents. Soon some of the solidarity event organizers began to receive threats on Facebook. There was talk of a “list” of activists who were going to be beaten up, or worse.

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I had just left Beirut for the US when they made good on these threats. In late July, activists sent out an email calling for a demonstration that evening outside the Syrian embassy. Previous demonstrations had been announced on Facebook; it was hoped that by using this slightly more archaic medium, the pro-regime thugs could be avoided. It didn’t work. The protestors were vastly outnumbered by a group of heavyset mustachioed men wielding belts, chains, chairs, and knives, and at least two people were hospitalized with serious injuries, one of them a close friend of mine. Attempts to file a report at a nearby police station were rebuffed — “We can’t do anything,” the officer on duty said. My friend B--- wrote me later, on chat: “I expected that we would be attacked but not with the intention to kill.”

On Facebook, some members of the SSNP vociferously denied their party’s involvement, invoking their camaraderie with the injured, with whom they had marched shoulder-to-shoulder only months before. But on discussion threads, screen-captured and circulated among revolution sympathizers, other SSNP members boasted about the beatings they’d administered.

And so the battle returned to the virtual realm, as the deaths next door mounted into the thousands, as a growing number of friends and friends of friends in Syria were arrested and tortured and — if lucky — released.

After the embassy incident, N--- and I spent two days embroiled in an argument with Z---, a member of the SSNP. N--- was a young activist who had launched a 19

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Facebook petition to boycott commercial establishments owned by SSNP members in Hamra. But Z---, who had gone to my injured friend’s Facebook wall, wishing him a swift recovery, denied that his party had attacked anyone. When N--- challenged him — there were many witnesses, and those damning screencaps — Z--- hurled denunciations against the activists: they worked for USAID and loved the Star of David. They were liars trying to harm the party. N---, he wrote ominously, had made a big mistake.

are tearing each other to pieces on my newsfeed, accusing each other of naivety, hypocrisy, double standards, abandoning the Palestinian cause, encouraging foreign meddling, and treason. I waste hours every day embroiled in arguments, copy-pasting threads from Facebook into email for people who have de-friended someone whose wall still rages with virtual battles. Whenever I manage to tear myself away from Facebook long enough to complete some other task, I end up doing hours of rancorous catch-up later.

A few weeks later, in a hotel room in northern Lebanon, N--- killed himself. According to the suicide note he posted on Facebook, he had been planning “to break from my prison” for three years, and had been awaiting the “perfect moment.” Some of his friends claimed that he had been receiving almost daily threats from the SSNP, insinuating a connection with N---’s decision to end his young life.

And yet it’s impossible to glean anything conclusive about what is happening in Syria. Depending on whose Facebook profile I peruse, the death count has surpassed six thousand civilians and army defectors slain by regime forces; or a fraction of that, the figures having been wildly inflated by irresponsible western media outlets and NGOs courting foreign military intervention. A poll shows that the regime still enjoys the support of a slim majority of Syrians. That Syrians mostly oppose the regime. That Syria will soon be free, secular, and democratic due to the courage and perseverance of its people. That Palestine will soon be lost without the Syrian regime’s support for Hezbollah. That the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafists, or Al Qaeda will soon seize power in Syria with the blessing of the US, Israel, and their client regimes in the Gulf. That the Arab Spring is a giant conspiracy to defang the axis of resistance.. That Syrian revolutionaries deserve our support as much as Egyptians, Tunisians, and Bahrainis, struggling against US-backed regimes. That the Syrian revolutionaries are

I recently returned to re-read the exchange between Z---, N---, and me; comments by the deceased had disappeared when his profile was “memorialized” — a sacred rite of Facebook death. All that was left were the disjointed ramblings of the SSNP thug — and my futile protests that his party ought to re-think its kneejerk support for a murderous dictator.

5. The Fog of Online Acrimony Since July, there have been no anti-Assad demonstrations in Hamra. Instead, my former friends and political allies 20

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pawns of the Americans.

A--Arguing with White Men is painless compared to debating these Arab lefties who keep insisting they can be anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist and seek “freedom” from tyranny simultaneously. They seem to envisage a post-Assad utopia where democracy-lovers usher in a resistance-seeking political system that will liberate the entire region.

In Beirut, the body count remains comparably low. A few broken bones. Dozens de-friended in the virtual realm; others with restricted access, based on the mere hunch that their silence indicates some latent sympathy for the regime; and many, many others, with whom one avoids any discussion of Syria, but whose Facebook updates arouse revulsion. The futile rancor and polarization contribute nothing to the ever-bloodier course of events in Syria. And yet somehow one feels that by taking a position, by knowing where others stand and by accepting that our previous alliances and friendships may not survive this chapter of the ongoing revolutions, we are making a sacrifice — sacrificing the comfort of unity, on principle.

In the meantime, our circles grow smaller and smaller, as the de-friending and the “hiding” of unpleasant views grind on. Forty of your friends recently changed their profile picture: It’s a photo of R---, who has been arrested by the regime again, with whom you were sitting in a café in Hamra not so very long ago.

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In Houston I met film-makers producing films for audiences of no more than six. The point was that they would reach the right audience in the right way with the right message.

— Edmund Snow Carpenter, They Became What They Beheld (1970) 23

Borders are the most imaginary of all territories. But then, people are imaginative. India today shares borders with six other states. Seven, if you believe in Tibet. Eleven, if you count the stretches of water that divide the Indian archipelagos from the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Sumatra. Twelve, if you accept India’s wishful image of an undivided Kashmir stretching up to Afghanistan. But that’s another story.

MEMOIR OF A MAP

The Schizophrenic Cartographer and the Empire of Man

by Kai Friese

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This one begins with a map on the title page of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was 1972, and the Britannica still had India flanked by W. PAKISTAN and E. PAKISTAN. But this map had passed through Indian customs, and it bore the stamps. East Pakistan had been obliterated by three hysterical impressions of red ink and rubber: BANGLADESH BANGLADESH BANGLADESH. India had just fought a war to put this new nation on the map.

This particular map had been lovingly mutilated. A patch of black ink obliterated some cartographic offense in the Arabian Sea; slammed with some precision across the subcontinent’s midriff was the bureaucracy’s damning conclusion: “The external boundaries of India as depicted in the map are neither correct nor authentic.” The same red stamp had then bounced its way across the title pages of all twenty-three volumes, just in case, from A–Anstey to Vietnam–Zworykin. And in volume 12, I discovered, the first six paragraphs of “India” had been inked out, line by line. I’d always hoped that one day the ink might flake off or fade away. Every few years I return to my parents’ 25

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library to gauge time’s progress. The shelves began to sag, the encyclopedia lost its luxurious aroma, and the spine of the atlas cracked and had to be taped down. But the black ink still gleams like a scab on the onionskin.

• • • We all make our own geographies, but not on maps of our own choosing. There is a map I would choose, though.

It’s called an egocentric map. The term describes an antique but enduring cartographic technique known as azimuthal equidistant projection. It was developed by the Arab mathematician and traveler Al-Biruni, a visitor to India a thousand years ago; it’s still used for aeronautical navigation. On an egocentric map one’s location is represented as a central point surrounded by the rest of the world. Imagine holding down your location on a globe, then peeling and stretching it out in a circle around that point. Distances from any point on the globe to the center are accurately represented, but the map also has its own peculiar distortions. The antipode of your location, i.e., the point halfway round the earth from you, becomes the outer perimeter, the boundary of the map. I live in New Delhi, so my egocentric map furls out to a circle representing a point off the coast of Chile. Such a map has many virtues. It works; its distortions are obvious; and it acknowledges other maps, since every location demands its own egocentric projection. It’s a traveler’s map — it changes as you move. It makes nonsense of borders. It also gives Delhi a pleasant maritime horizon.

But the city that I call home has maps of its own. There’s 26

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an enduringly popular snatch of Delhi doggerel that mocks the unfortunate eighteenth-century Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II, who was tortured and blinded by one of his palace eunuchs in 1788. Shah Alam means “lord of the world”; the rhyme, “Saltanat-e-Shah Alam Az Dilli ta Palam,” translates to the realm of Shah Alam stretches from Delhi to Palam, which is to say, from Delhi to a small village on the outskirts of Delhi, where Indira Gandhi International Airport now stands. A British cartographer of the day put it more dryly. “Sometimes the Empire of Delhi was confined within the proper limits of the province of that name,” wrote James Rennell in his Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan (1788).

Memoir of a Map. I love that title, but it’s not quite what you might imagine. Rennell was the first surveyor general of the British East India Company’s possessions, and his crowning achievement was his map of Hindoostan, covering four separate sheets — representing, it was said, an area one and a half times the size of Europe. The accompanying Memoir was a convention of the time, an encyclopedic treatise dealing with every possible matter of colonial interest in the country. But Rennell was also given to idiosyncratic digressions, some of which do live up to the promise of the title. And so the Memoir is something between autocartography and cartobiography, a record of the superimposed selves of the cartographer, the city, the country, and the border.

Rennell was a geometer in the original sense of the word.

He measured his world, literally, with a cumbersome chain 27

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measure. And then he began to draw a country upon it.

Not the enervated country of the Mughals: “I shall not attempt to trace the various fluctuations of boundary that took place in this empire,” he wrote in disgust. Instead he set out to “improve the geography” of the subcontinent with a sharp and unambiguous circumference of his own. In the process he gave a virtuoso demonstration of territorial expansion by cartographic sleight of hand. He begins with the territories of three powers, namely, the British and two native princes. Then, with a flourish, he describes how these three powers are rendered as one on the map: Since the state of mutual protection and dependency subsisting between them, blends their respective territories into one mass, in the view of foreign politics… the common frontier of these confederated powers, should be considered as belonging to one state, and of course be distinguished by one common colour; if properly considered, they are a part of the mass united under the great description THE BRITISH POSSESSIONS AND ALLIANCES. Therefore, this mass of territory has its exterior frontier… marked by a continuous RED line…

By this method the whole frontier appears in a geographical view, like that of a single state; which as we have said before, is virtually the case.

The red line would describe many fluctuations of its own over the next two hundred years, most of them outward, 28

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all of them bloody. In 1893, when it reached Afghanistan, it became the Durand Line. Where it lapped at Tibet it was the McMahon Line of 1914. Retreating through East and West Pakistan in 1947 it became the Radcliffe Line. It flinched again in 1962, when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army breached the Himalayas. To this day, desiccated stretches writhe redly through the snows of Kashmir, Ladakh, and Arunachal Pradesh. The “Cease Fire Line,” the “Line of Control,” the “Line of Actual Control,” the “Zero Line.” Ten thousand crooked miles surrounding the Empire of Delhi.

• • • Borders do strange things to bodies. I once watched a macabre ritual in the aftermath of a skirmish on the border between India and Pakistan. A couple of soldiers were very carefully sorting out the personal effects of their fallen comrades and their enemies. White down jackets and pants, heavy mountain boots, thick blankets, and all sorts of high-altitude gear were spread around them to dry. A blood-soaked t-shirt was held up and examined.

“That’s Mahesh’s,” one of the soldiers said quietly. Then he put it away. Everything was savagely torn, caked in blood and feathers. I knew no man of sound mind could have done this. It had to be a monster.

• • • There was once a mad poet of territory called Karl Haushofer, the “Father of Geopolitics.” In 1927 he 29

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published a book called Grenzen (Borders) in which he speaks of an “Organic State” born of the spiritual interaction between human beings and territory. It has “Organic Frontiers,” which are not mere lines but living, breathing bodies. The Organic State must keep expanding its frontiers until they include the whole world. There’s a complex typology of the border; depending on the state of the State, it toggles between Frontiers of Balance, Attack, Maneuver, Defense, Decay, and my personal favorite, the Frontier of Apathy.

Haushofer also developed the concept of Lebensraum — living space, breathing room — a term originally coined in 1901 by his mentor the Darwinist geographer Friedrich Ratzel. In 1924 a student of Haushofer’s introduced him to a friend who was serving a term in Landsberg Prison, whiling away the hours by writing an autobiography. Understandably, perhaps, the prisoner, one Adolf Hitler, was interested in Lebensraum, and he gratefully received a copy of Ratzel’s book. Maybe it was then that Hitler crawled out of his psychic carapace. Karl Haushofer didn’t recognize the Führer until it was too late. Haushofer had a Jewish wife, and the theorist of Lebensraum wound up in Dachau.

But the father of geopolitics had a son, Albrecht, and he was a geographer, too. Albrecht Haushofer eventually fell in with the German opposition. In 1944, after a group of generals failed to assassinate Hitler, Albrecht was arrested and imprisoned in Berlin’s Moabit Jail, charged with treason. While he waited for death, he began to 30

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write a cycle of poems. The Moabiter Sonette are terse but expansive meditations on the acceptance of fate and the joys of a life well spent. Of travel, music, and a classical education. Of loyalty and guilt. One of them is about his father. It ends: Mein Vater hat das Siegel aufgebrochen.

Den Hauch des Bösen hat er nicht gesehen.

Der Damon ließer in die Welt entwehn.

My father broke the seal.

He did not see the rising breath of evil.

He released the demon into the world.

On April 23, 1945, when the Russians were already within the perimeter of Berlin, Albrecht Haushofer was released by the prison authorities. The empire of the Third Reich was now confined to a few pockets of the city, but Haushofer only made it as far as the prison gates.

There were monsters on the prowl. Scattered bands of Wehrwölfen — Hitler Youth, Gestapo officers, and SS men — ranged through the debris of their capital. They seized the young geographer, marched him to an empty lot, and shot him through the nape of the neck. Three weeks later, Haushofer’s body was found by his younger brother, his hand clutching his breast pocket. Inside were five sheets of paper, inscribed with the eighty-two poems for which he is best remembered. His father, Karl, survived Dachau. And then one day, he took a walk in the woods. And killed himself.

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• • • One day, a while ago, I found the exact antipode of the egocentric map. It’s described in a book by the psychoanalyst Anthony Storr. He says: “A patient of mine used to represent himself by drawing a circle expanding until it included the whole world, so that he and the whole world would finally be indistinguishable.

He was a schizophrenic who was quite incompetent to deal with the world in fact.”

I recognize this impulse. I know this man. The schizophrenic cartographer lives in all the great capitals of the world. And his eyes are full of maps.

Reaching the maximum audience may be the last thing one wants to achieve.

— Edmund Snow Carpenter, They Became What They Beheld (1970) 32

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Gossip is the opposite of theory.

— Brian Eno

She told me he was close friends with the director of the museum at the time, and everyone knew he was a mediocre artist, but that that friendship had gotten him that solo show. Of course he won’t admit it, but everyone knows. But don’t quote me.

— Anonymous

DEFINITIVELY NON-VERIFIABLE SPEECH GIRLS

Gossip and/as Historical Research

by Kristine Khouri

No, no, the meeting was in Jordan, actually, not Syria.

There were five of us, plus the priest and the goats next door. Oh, and the caretaker of the monastery. Seven humans and two dozen goats. For the record. The caretaker was from Egypt, I think? Yes. Because there was a discussion about the… uprising or revolution or whatever, and he said his family was fine.

Why the monastery? Well, it was a sacred space. A safe space. Neutral ground. Which was welcome. You might say we needed fresh air and time outside of the city, away from everyone and everything. The idea was describe our respective research projects and discuss some of the issues and maybe obstacles we were coming across in our work.

Each of us is investigating the history of visual art in the Arab world, looking at individual artists or exhibitions or cultural scenes in Amman or Beirut or Baghdad or Cairo or Damascus or… all of the above.

What brought us together, too, was a certain uncanny remove from our subjects — all of us were researching things that had happened mostly before we were born.

This almost seems to be an occupational hazard in investigating the history of art in the Middle East: so

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many of the principals are dead or in exile; so many works are destroyed or missing or locked away in storage; so many stories are lost or lodged in the minds of people who, for a thousand and one reasons, have complex relations to their pasts, with memories overlaid by trauma, war, and depression or colored by self-interest. So much of what we do is try to ferret out information, to find the person with access to the painting or the document or the archive or the story — or who knows someone who knows someone who does.

The meeting was definitely productive. There was something cathartic about talking about our sources.

Some of them were the same people; many of them had some kind of connection to one another, and a lot of what we did was map the jealousies, paranoia, and affinities that linked our sources and our subjects. We talked about different kinds of source materials, and about dealing with gaps or faulty memories or emotional responses, let alone competing agendas. Part of what we engaged in, in a sense, was fact-checking.

But some things do not rise to the level of fact. Some things feel more like conspiracies. There’s a moment in doing this kind of work when a source raises an eyebrow and tells you not to show this document to anyone, or leans in and whispers something under her breath. You know that moment, right? They always lean in. Turn the recorder off; you didn’t hear it from me. Sometimes they’ll look askance at the notebook that you’ve been scribbling away at, so you put it away and look composed and try 36

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to make your mind like a sponge. That’s my favorite. We all rush home and try to remember everything — the words said, the odd phrase, the meaningful glance — and frantically get it down. Sometimes you can’t for the life of you imagine why this information is confidential, but every once in a while that off-the-record tidbit is the critical information that shifts the hypothesis or solves the riddle.

Honestly, quite a bit of what we did those three days was gossip about gossip. We even came up with a name for it, to distinguish it as an archival material: definitively non-verifiable speech. So cumbersome, but so clear.

Sometimes there is no checking a fact, no way to evaluate a statement or claim. You are left with a residuum of information, an orphan, an ethical problem. And yet also, sometimes, a key.

••• So she was on the fence about whether to go find his psychiatrist from the Seventies. He’s still alive, apparently, and since we still don’t really know why the artist committed suicide — I mean, the temptation is really strong. Yes, of course it seems weird!

But maybe enough time has elapsed? Someone else said because it was so long ago and because there’s so little information about that period, it was worth a shot. She can worry about how to source psychological gossip later. She has plenty to think about, anyway — he had a lot of lovers, which everyone knew, but no one ever talks about. And maybe it’s relevant?

— Anonymous

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Gossip can be exhilarating. It can also be exhausting.

Leaving aside the vagaries of memory, it’s inevitable that much of the best gossip we hear is tendered by self-interested actors — people whose living depends on remembering a certain version of history, who have a vested interest in promoting their own roles or those of their partners or lovers or friends or artists. The more you learn this way, the more you have to second-guess the source. Why are they telling me this? What story do they want me to come away with? What are they not telling me?

And of course, the very first thing you want to do when someone tells you something in confidence is to betray that confidence by trying to verify the information. You don’t do that, of course, not directly — your reputation is on the line — but the temptation can be overwhelming.

It’s enough to drive you mad.

Often there is a whole parallel history subtending the historical, a skein of friendships and betrayals, grudges and affairs, suicides and depressions, that the researcher has to navigate in order to find out basic details like what artists or paintings appeared in a given exhibition; who owned the gallery or bought the sculpture; who published the catalog or the brochure and whether any copies even still exist... in someone’s house in the mountains, or at a printer in the former East Berlin, or in some Canadian university’s noncirculating archive. You are always in danger of stumbling into a decades-old feud, siding with the enemy, reopening an old wound. Knowing whom to ask about what; who they’re friends with, who they hate; what they want you to think, what they don’t want you to 38

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know — knowing all this is part of your job, and yet most of what you learn will never, can never, appear in print.

Sometimes you wish you could do something about one or another ancient enmity. You want to share something you’ve learned: Your old friend, the one you hate? He said something nice about you. You look at the person in front of you and think, Can you really not let that go?

You fantasize about listening in on the conversations that would result if you could put two bitter rivals together again, both because it would be sweet or cute or deeply moving or whatever and because imagine the opportunity to finally verify that information. But you desist. Because it is not your place. And because it might just make things worse.

These are the wages of definitively non-verifiable speech.

••• I remember her telling me a story about a gallery owner from the Eighties who was accused of working for the Mossad! Isn’t that incredible! The ultimate smear!

— Anonymous

I often dream of research. Usually I’m on some kind of mission, in a library or an archive, in someone’s house, at my desk. Sometimes I dream I’m on the computer.

Sometimes I learn a crucial piece of information, though most often my quest is a failure, or I wake up in the middle of the action. Of course, when I make dream39

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progress, I scramble to hold on to the dream long enough to write down the information — and then I begin the process of evaluating what I have learned, which may or may not be true.

Once I dreamed about stolen paintings, about a journey to try and find them that came to naught. I think the dream came out of a conversation I’d had with an artist in London or maybe Amman, maybe both, who’d told me about someone who had come to him offering to sell him his own paintings, which had been part of the permanent collection of the national museum until the looting after the invasion. The guy was fencing stolen goods, trying to make a quick buck, and the artist refused on principle — and so his paintings were still floating around on one or another black market, available if you knew who to talk to.

In my dream, we were in a city where I have never been, trying to help someone I do not know recover that same artist’s stolen paintings. There were these high walls all over the city, security fences. We said we were buyers for a museum in the Gulf so as not to get dragged into any local politics we might not understand. On the trail of the paintings, we met a number of people, one of them an artist who said he knew where to find them. And yet as we walked around his studio, there were these curious… wrongnesses. There were paintings everywhere, works I knew by reputation, had seen in books or catalogs or sometimes with my own eyes — but they were slightly off somehow. Too bright or too flat or something. These 40

KHOURI

were works by important artists, some of them produced fifty years ago; the paintings were for sale, and they were asking a lot for them.

And then when I excused myself and found my way to the bathroom, I peered through an open door and saw… three paintings leaning against the wall, works I had seen in the catalog of an important exhibition from the Seventies, but the paint was shiny wet. They were forgeries, forgeries everywhere.

But it was a dream. None of it was true. Right?

I’d like to thank the Shatana 5 for the ongoing discussions that germinated this piece, and that will surely generate more definitively unverifiable speeches, and hopefully some facts, in the future.

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Hussein, I am so sorry to say but your great-great-greatgreat-great-great-great grandfather’s first brush with sufism was disastrous!!!! When he was taught the secrets of the First Divine Name, he temporarily lost his balance and had to be hospitalized in a lunatic asylum.

That was Victor’s first message to me. I had contacted him on Facebook.

FBFFs

The Spirit Medium of Media

by Hussein Omar

I spent my adolescence in Cairo’s northern necropolis, moving between various ancestors’ mausolea, deciphering the marble cenotaphs and mapping out the bloodlines that ran between them. I followed the curves of the calligraphy, centuries old, with a graphite pencil. It was a repetitive act of ancestor worship — grave rubbing. A secret sin, and all the more pleasurable for it. I pretended not to see the two empty tombs that awaited my brother and me.

One tomb had Bohemian crystal chandeliers and a sagging sofa. (Vulgar and Ottoman, my grandmother would say.) Another belonged to a great aunt who’d died a week after her wedding day, and was buried with the carved wooden headboard of her marital bed. My favorite tomb was a wooden dome painted with birds and sailboats. It belonged to a grandfather (to the power of seven) who had been the head of the Khalwatiyya, a now nearly defunct Sufi order. A Google search took me to Victor Kioumgi, an eighty-five-year-old living in exile in France whose homemade website sported an image of my forebear with an onion-shaped turban perched on his head.

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HUSSEIN

My dear Hussein, I forgot to tell you, when he came out of the mental hospital he was such a successful disciple that the sheikh of the order invested him with their crown!

Every two weeks, unprompted — a function of his exile, perhaps, or simply his advanced age — Victor would unearth a photograph or anecdote riveting to no one in the world but me, and deposit it for all to see on Facebook. Victor knew everything.

I’ve tagged a wonderful picture of your great-grandmother Hedeyya Hanem sewing with Princess Chivekiar and the famous Mary Kahil, with a Singer Sewing Machine in 1946, did you see it?

You know, Hussein, no one knows why your greatgrandfather, a sophisticated man, could have stayed married to her till the end… your great-grandmother was an indelicate woman of little education who dabbled in black magic with one of the El Monasterly women (do not know which one)…

She actually tried to poison your grandfather when he was an infant.

I have many other recordings specially from my childhood and youth. But it is so far that I don’t remember well.

Recordings, I later realized, was his way of saying memories.

••• A year into our correspondence, when I pressed him for still more stories — no one in my own family ever spoke 44

OMAR

of such things — he referred me to another member of what I was beginning to see was my own lost tribe.

My very dear Hussein,

Thanks for your Mail. This afternoon I spoke for over one hour with Fazil Seljuk, a living encyclopedia on Egyptian History that you love. I can say he is one of the last person to know so well our history and the families histories. He is preparing a conference he must give in Geneva on the period 1914 to 1922 in Egypt. He will be in Geneva at the end of January till March. You are from the same family, he is the nephew of Safia Hanem and you are from the family of Saad Bacha.

He is a charming gentleman and he knows everything on Old Egypt. He is a living book of history.

Happy New Years 1431 and 2010, for ONCE beginning almost the same time.

I failed to reach Seljuk, but Victor urged me on: My very dear Hussein, Try as much as you can!!! Fazil Seljuk Bey has a very brilliant social life in Geneva and he is invited very often. Try in the morning around 9h15, Swiss Time (10h15 Egyptian time).

But go on!

Warm regards.

With a baffling enthusiasm, or perhaps desperation, it became clear that Victor was leading me down into a 45

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network of virtual catacombs and those who kept vigil outside them, via pathways of distant relation, some hyperactive but most at rest — a kind of necroverse, which he had already expertly situated me within. There was Sharif Sharif Sharaf, a few years younger than Victor, more flamboyant; if his Facebook profile is true, he is never not smoking a cigar. He couldn’t bear Cairo anymore (“They’ve ruined it. Shame on Abdelnasser and his minions!”) and lived mostly between first-class lounges in countries he insisted were not real (Lebanon, the UAE). He would take advantage of their free and fast Wi-Fi to upload Facebook albums of death notices.

He swore to me that he spent “at least a third of the year” trawling newspaper archives to find them.

Copy of the death certificate of my great-great-grandfather, who died at the age of 35 on 21 November 1885, two years before his father.

Copy of the death certificate of my grandmother’s great-greatuncle who died at the age of 77 on 3 March 1899.

Death notice of my cousin who died at the age of 33 on 13 August 1977. He is buried in the family mausoleum in the southern necropolis, Cairo.

Sharaf ’s cousin Dawlat Riaz, another prolific member of Egypt’s elderly Facebook generation, also suffered from our peculiar strain of Egyptian necromania. The owner of Cairo’s most luxurious animal hotel, she alternately posted albums of photographs from the Gezira club pet cemetery and of her ancestors (whom she insisted all had 46

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“stunning mustaches”). On the days that she experienced a particularly strong sepulchuric pang, she would post addresses.

The cemetery bears the name of Riaz Pacha. It’s located in the street behind Imam El Laithy Street, which itself is parallel to the Imam El Shafei Street. It is very easy to find, you can ask anyone. If you’re facing the entrance of the Shafei shrine, there is a small side street on the left. You go down that street then left, 500–100 meters on, on the left, there is a plaque with his name.

People nowadays no longer remember these things. I’ve written all this in case something happens to me then people will know how to get there :):) ! I’ve known several cases where elderly people died and their relatives had no idea where they should be buried!

A bit morbid but true. A cousin of mine got lost and was going around in circles followed by the hearse because he forgot where the cemetery was.

When I asked Dawlat a simple question about a mutual ancestor, she responded with an irresistible offer.

Anytime you would like to visit the cemetery, let me know, we could go together, it would be a good idea to make a list of the headings on the tombstones. It is the most peaceful place in Cairo.

I was in. She went on.

I must confess that I am enjoying this exchange very much...

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HUSSEIN

Thank you young Hussein for taking me down memory lane :) “On dit que lorsqu’on devient âgé, on se penche sur son passé”.

Dawlat in turn became a trustworthy guide to me, taking me down the winding alleys of the virtual City of the Dead we had all created. The vaults of Facebook albums, and the sturdy walls layered in graffiti of likes and shares, would remain as permanent as the tombs our ancestors had erected.

••• I found out that Victor passed away on August 20, 2011.

A simple line on my newsfeed delivered the news. I returned to his last message.

Dear Hussein, now I understand. I am the generation of your grand-parents.

I used to see the Bey and his French wife, in Guizeh in their villa but specially every year in Paris. How old are you??? It is wonderful to find young people interested in these old things.

I remember my aunt loved so much your great-grandparents, she mentioned them so many times to me.

Warm regards, Victor

Months later, he mysteriously continues to friend people.

And although he no longer sends messages, we remain Facebook friends forever.

Unwittingly they contributed to a message far removed from the one they intended.

— Edmund Snow Carpenter, They Became What They Beheld (1970)

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Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it… or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.

— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

ATROCITY EXHIBITIONISM Revulsion, Video, Revolution

by Nicholas Sautin

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The online reproduction and proliferation of amateur footage of war, popular uprisings, and police crackdowns has upended notions of obscenity, trauma, and journalistic responsibility. Digital recording blurs the distinction between witness and participant such that anyone with the right mobile device can participate. And if we are all, at least potentially, journalists now, we are all editors too, viewers with the ability to decide what we will expose ourselves to.

As it happens, many of us are terrible editors. During the bloodiest years of the war in Iraq, the most awful possibilities of anonymous user-generated content were realized. The sheer horror of the spectacle — beheadings, ambushes, sniper cams, car bombs, dead children, let alone Abu Ghraib — made a mockery of traditional journalism, overwhelming even the best documentarians.

Dread and shame mingled uneasily with exhilaration and astonishment. From mesmerizing, almost abstract Apache helicopter footage to the braggadocio of insurgent videos, everything found its place online.

On YouTube and its more permissive cousins, an everexpanding archive of obscene images of carnage took shape. Activists looked online for unfiltered access to the actual sights and sounds of state-sanctioned violence — for any alternative to the compromised ethics of embedded journalism. (As a perusal of the comment sections reveals, many just came for gruesome kicks.)

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Although voyeuristic horror from Iraq and Afghanistan still occupies a central role in popular online consciousness, in recent years the rise of citizen journalism has offered a more utopian view of the camera’s new digital omniscience.

Anonymous footage has been an integral catalyst, from the Occupy gatherings to the Arab Spring. Certain clips have taken on iconic power, including the pepper spray– wielding campus policeman at UC Davis, the battle for the Qasr al-Nil Bridge near Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution, and the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan during the protests over the 2009 Iranian presidential election. The video clip itself has become a site of memory and mourning, its unbearable violence impossible to erase, censor, or discredit.

This is the insight behind WITNESS’s project The Hub (“See It, Film It, Change It”), which has provided an exemplary platform for documenting human rights abuses across the globe. WITNESS and organizations like it seek to overcome the trap of voyeurism — the debilitating notion that the only possible emotional response to such footage is dread, helplessness, and guilt. The hope is that digital footage will give voice to resistance. In the service of that hope, The Hub has amassed a sizeable archive of footage and testimony.

And yet traumatic image-events are inherently unstable referents. In areas where Western media are largely absent, repulsive sites like LiveLeak archive videos with 52

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such titles as “Butchered Man Found Tied in Plastic Bag” (sample comment: “I can smell it from here”) or “Girl Wipes Hands on Headless Brother’s Body and Writes in Blood on the Living Room Wall” on its Yemen channel.

Many of these videos contain links to organizations like Human Rights Watch, intimating that this archive, too, is engaged in the good work of citizen-journalistic documentation.

And indeed, if the value of such footage is merely its evidentiary power, then it follows that very little separates a bottom-feeder site like LiveLeak from WITNESS. To the citizen editor, all such images are inherently gratuitous. Scrolling through either site requires the same type of macabre selectivity.

The problem with Internet atrocity footage is not one of documentation; it is a problem of empathy and aesthetics.

I learn nothing, am moved to do nothing, by seeing Neda Agha-Soltan die. The experience is entirely aesthetic; my response, merely empathic. Empathy is my defense mechanism not against the destruction of her body but against my own feelings of complicity and helplessness in other, mostly unrecorded events; those acts of slow or structural violence too boring to document.

The aesthetic nature of my emotional response to traumatic footage — the amoral search for violent shock (modernism’s lasting gift) — will always outpace the desire for moral clarity, explanation, thinking, and mourning. Without context or understanding, atrocity 53

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images coalesce into a new kind of stock footage — a visual shorthand for a revolution without meaning.

As with stock footage, the viewer fits the image into preexisting narratives. The task of seeing is to try and approach the image without being beguiled by the spectacle of its violence. But it may be, in the end, that images of atrocity, even the best-intentioned, reveal nothing at all.

It is one of the curiosities of a new medium, a new format, that at the moment it first appears, it’s never valued, but it is believed.

— Edmund Snow Carpenter, They Became What They Beheld (1970) 54

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P.S.

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I’m not exactly sure how rank became this particular verb in the vast arsenal of context-specific, nonsensical slang from X, but among the nearly feral pack of teenagers I hung out with through high school, to rank was to insult, or more precisely, to rain down a relentless barrage of adjective-driven, obscenity- laden abuse on an adversary who was usually also your best friend. It would start, inevitably, with the outfit, proceed through physical attributes from head to toe, and then dig into the dirt of your mother, your father, your rung on the class ladder, your other friends, whoever you were fooling around with at the time, and whatever weird corner of the world your family was originally from. Ranking was a highly performative practice, a seemingly spontaneously outpouring of intricately crafted offense that was always rehearsed in advance and intended for an audience. Without a crowd, though, there was plenty of potential in the retelling, which was naturally prone to exaggeration.

All of this was an obscurely coded language, which took the place of anything remotely close to kindness, endearment, or affection. It was an expression of fierce and unyielding loyalty, much as it walked a fine line between good humor and getting punched in the face. The only time sincerity ever came into play was in the form of a stern or blustering intervention whenever a situation was snowballing toward something like jail, rehab, or suicide (hey, suburbia), and even then, it would be patched over with thick and ample sarcasm after. There were no compliments, pep talks, or positive reinforcements among us. They didn’t exist in our vocabulary. There was probably some intense and fragile love under all of that posturing, but we never would have alluded to it, for to do so would have been soft and batty. In a sense, the parents, teachers, coaches, elders who told us we’d let this go and learn to be human in college were not wrong. But it was an awkward adjustment, as the rank regime left little room for good manners, social graces, or an honesty that wasn’t blunt or jagged. It was also the product of a kind of place you either never left or left behind, so it’s an open question to me now whether we actually assuaged or merely reinforced our anger over being stuck there with so much invective, brutal wordplay, and verbal terror. On a good day, I would like to think I came to writing and to criticism for reasons completely unrelated, but on some level it is probably just a variation, albeit more productive, of that same adrenaline-inducing enthusiasm for the force, color, and tumult of language.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

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The Medium of Media Television Without Pity Afghanistan by Satellite

Only Refresh

Syria, “the Hamra Left,� and Anti-Social Networking

Memoir of a Map

The Schizophrenic Cartographer and the Empire of Man

Definitively Non-Verifiable Speech Girls Gossip and/as Historical Research

FBFFs

The Spirit Medium of Media

Atrocity Exhibitionism Revulsion, Video, Revolution

Postscript

Ranking as a Vocation

Art Dubai Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art 58