The Burdening Spine

THE BURDENING SPINE

ON GRATITUDE

For all that I often feel overwhelmed with rage and an urge to shake the dust off this earth, I am also unequivocally grateful for the many people, things, incidents, and happenings that have formed my life and have loved me into this moment. I never imagined this. I never even imagined a version of this. So as to not overflow with it, I lustrate this text by writing down my gratitude.

None of this would be possible without my family. To my mother who visited me so often because she missed me, and she knew I missed her too. To my father who always texted me because he wanted me to call and didn’t know how to ask for it. To May and Rana for being there when I needed them most and to Sama who will own my heart forever and continues to teach me how to be better every single day.

To Bojana and Lois for being the reason I set this chapter of my life in motion. To Jerry, Milton, and Erika for holding me through a couple of meltdowns at the beginning of this journey and for giving me language for things I did not know I didn’t have language for. To Aubrey and Eel for constantly pulling me into our wonderful trio even though I needed to be dragged kicking and screaming so as not to be an island. To Chiedza and Cade for teaching me so many lessons in tempering the self and reaching for the center of the practice regardless of what everyone else thinks. To Aaron and Zahra for

being the people I felt safest with in many ways and who made the Woodshop a sanctuary for all of us. To Cy for building systems that let me so joyfully glitch. To Mar for being the whole damn poem. To Marina for coming to the ends of the earth for me and who is truly the friend of my soul.

I can never thank any of you enough.

And most importantly, to Palestine. I know liberation because Palestine exists. To Palestinians. To Palestinian women, to Palestinian children, to Palestinian men, to the people: I am grateful for the ways you’ve shown us how to reach for your own revolution. I will never forgive the world for the ways it has turned its back on you. May we live long enough to celebrate the lives and grieve the deaths of our kin.

ON ACKNOWLEDGING THE LAND

For anything to begin, the land must be named—the land I am a settler on, and by extension occupy, along with the lands I come from. My name is Yasmeen Nematt Alla ( هلَّٰلٱ ةمعن نيمساي in my native tongue). I’m a mad and queer diasporic settler, with familial roots that tie me to Tanta, Alexandria, and Mansoura, Egyptian cities that I am always thinking about going home to. I was raised in Kuwait and hold in me more bitterness than I would like to admit towards that country for being told I am unworthy of existing in it—not the land’s fault and yet.

I am originally a settler on the unceded, stolen, and occupied Treaty 13 Territory in Tkaronto, Turtle Island, (colonially known as Toronto). Treaty 13 is covered by the Dish with One Spoon covenant, an agreement between the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinabek, the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Chippewa, and allied nations to share and protect the resources which surround the Great Lakes. Currently however, I am writing this on the occupied territories of Waawiiyaataanong, named by the Anishinaabeg which includes the Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa), and Bodewatomi (Potawatomi) peoples, (colonially known as Metro Detroit) where I am pursuing my Master of Fine Arts degree at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

By acknowledging the names of the lands, we speak them and their peoples into the light. We begin by naming the stolen, the occupied, and the colonized with the hope that when we end, we can end in liberation. I commit to learning from Indigenous Peoples and to centering decolonial understandings of embodied and enminded difference.

As a settler who gets to breathe, love, care, create, protest, hold, and hope on lands that are not my own, I pay gratitude to Indigenous communities and their teachings; the ways they’ve taught me to futurize and dream, to care for my spirit as I do my body and to enmesh my grief with my joy. They’ve also taught me that our interdependent liberations—and they are indeed bound to one another—hinge on the return of land to their Original Caretakers. From Turtle Island to Palestine, landback forevermore. 1

1 Much of this language is borrowed and inspired by Sama Nemat Allah, my youngest sister, the fourth of four. I am always in awe of the ways she navigates the world and her commitment to liberation in her every day. I hope I can one day echo even a fraction of this dedication in the life I’ve chosen to live.

With so many ruminations around sound and ends it felt right to make an offering of resonance as you explore this writing. My sister, Rana Nemat Allah, curated a Spotify playlist for you. You can open your Spotify app, click on the camera icon, and hover your phone on the image below.

After you reach the end of the playlist, the Spotify algorithym will choose songs for you based on your taste and the songs you just experienced.

Let it.

ON BUILDING A SPINE

To avoid the slippery slope of writing an incredibly indulgent masters statement (which, try as I may, will be inevitable), I am hoping to begin by building a spine. Egyptians say 2enty Dahry or يرهظ تنأ, meaning you are my back, or even more accurately you are my spine. What that means is you are what allows me to stand, what allows me to walk, and what I lean on to keep me upright. But outside of colloquialism and in relation to a practice, I first learnt about spines from May, my sister (the second of four). May went to an all-arts high school where she majored in theater, something I recall fighting at the time. The school was away from our quaint townhouse in suburban Mississauga, and it felt ridiculous to pursue theater of all things. The irony of this does not evade me considering my penning a thesis for a degree in fine art.

May tells me about spines. Physiologically, the spine is a crucial structure that provides support for your entire body. It serves as the connecting framework for all parts of your musculoskeletal system, which encompasses your bones and muscles. The spine functions as the central axis for everything within the body. For a play to function dramaturgically, May tells me, the actors must always return to the spine of a work. A spine must consist of motivations, thinkings, conversations, and motifs forming the supporting

premise of the work. Even as every other dimension of the story is composed the stage, the atmospherics, the sound and light design theatre practitioners invariably check in with their grounding, their spine: Am I still standing? Am I still walking? With intention and sentiment? Why do I feel unsteady? What’s changed?

I learn later that this concept falls under Konstantin Stanislavski’s art of experiencing . It engages the actor’s conscious thought and will to orchestrate other psychological and physiological processes, the actor’s inner emotional experience and outer conscious behavior, in a sympathetic and indirect manner. During rehearsals, the actor questions and explores inner motives of the role to rationalize actions and delineate the character’s objectives at each juncture, often referred to as a task 2

Jean Benedetti, acting teacher and Stanislavski’s biographer, writes,

A rediscovery of the ‘system’ must begin with the realization that it is the questions which are important, the logic of their sequence and the consequent logic of the answers. A ritualistic repetition of the exercises contained in the published books, a solemn analysis of a text into bits and tasks will not ensure artistic success, let alone creative vitality. It is the Why?

2 Jean Benedetti, Stanislavski: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2004), 182-183.

and What for? that matter and the acknowledgement that with every new play and every new role the process begins again. 3

Stanislavski argues that establishing a system of asking the Why? and the What for? pushes us towards understanding the motivations of a work and why it requires itself to exist and be embodied in the world. He explains that the surrounding parts that wrap around the spine are perhaps not as essential to the success of the work as the spine itself.

While the word spine was used as a metaphor for Stanislavski’s system, he is referring more accurately to the spinal cord of the play; the core, the center of it. I would argue, however that a spinal cord alone cannot provide support without its vertebrae. A core can exist but without its various protections and scaffolding, it is impossible for it to control the rest of the body. Stanislavski asks about the Why? and What for? because he believes that in order for something to exist, it must justify its existence. But a spinal cord without its vertebrae is vulnerable to the elements and a body exists without known justification.

For years when thinking about making work, May would ask me, What’s the spine? What’s one question you’re attempting to answer in one sentence? What’s the cord that this body is building around? I would agonize over the spine of the work for days

before I began making it. I hated having to be concise, but without it, I was never sure how I wanted a work to function, and I could seldom justify bringing it to life. To center the spine of a work, to center the spine of the practice, felt like a way to center the self as well. But reflecting back, I wonder if I build spines without bodies far more often than not. My making was vulnerable, tender, and unrooted in what it knew to be true. In many ways it still is. And while I am still invested in building spines, I am now far more interested in building them as systems that are open to be seen and witnessed without having to always justify their existence. In this hostile world, we think for a thing to exist, it must do so with reason and explanation. I refuse. I ask art to exist anyway, in any way it wishes.

From the creation of artwork to various forms of expression, from the functioning of internal organs to the intricacies of performance and sound, every element is intricately connected to the spine of the work as well as my own. These central components act as the fundamental highways that support and facilitate every function, while simultaneously being part of them. The vertebrae form the sturdy backbone that supports and enables the harmonious interplay of all bodily processes, keeping the central spine in place while the body connects through it and creates around it.

3 Benedetti, Stanislavski, 376-377.

This statement will investigate eight vertebrae (chapters) that wrap around the spinal cord of my practice. While they exist separately, they are connected and linked, bound to bleed into and onto one another. One of these chapters on its own cannot hold the backbone of a practice but together a mapping occurs. From poetry, the glitch, to Brownness, I am interested in wrapping the spinal cord that aligns the different works I have made in my practice thus far. Not every work will individually hold my practice, and neither should it. But coalitionally, you begin witnessing how a body unfolds, and you begin unfolding witnessing itself.

Each vertebra also begins with a foreword. Each foreword is written by a person in my life who commands said vertebra. I am made by the people in my community, and it was important that when I write about this practice at this intersection of my life, they would get a chance to introduce the thought in whatever way they deemed fit. I am a burden onto them, and they are a burden onto me, which is to say that they have loved me through so much and I have loved them through the same. This collection of writings will therefore not just be my own but will be underscored by the people who hold me through the linkage of the spine.

The spine stands as the cornerstone upon which the symphony of life plays out. It holds together the most vital elements while tirelessly

connecting and supplying everything needed for the seamless functioning of the body. Within the spine, its cells epitomize unparalleled generosity, both within the cord itself and in the sturdy vertebrae that cradle it. The very essence of thriving stems form the existence of the spinal cord, nurtured and supported by resilient vertebrae.

My practice, much like my life, flourishes because of the spine—both the vulnerability and spirit it embodies, upheld by the collective strength of community. Like roots spreading from a steadfast trunk, everything emanates from the spine toward the world—toward the audience, toward the work, toward a politic as they emerge from the fertile ground of vulnerability intertwined with community support.

In highlighting the spinal cord and everything that protects and embraces it, I hope to illuminate the bearer of my burdens, the scaffold upon which my practice stands. I reveal the essence of its inception, the stability provided by its vertebrae, and the vulnerability inherent in its spinal cord—the very core from which growth and creation unfurl into the world.

I hope you join me in building, protecting, and witnessing a body come together.

A FOREWORD BY

MAR MERRALL

I’m writing a foreword for a chapter that doesn’t yet exist, and which, consequently, I’ve had no opportunity to read.

And I wish I could say that this is the most ridiculous thing about Yasmeen, but the truth is that in almost seven years of friendship very little surprises me about her anymore. When she shared this chapter title written with me in mind, my initial response was:

first: what the fuck is relationality?

then: who am I to speak on poetry?

and finally: I clocked the loneliness of loving and felt compelled to argue with Yasmeen over how loving isn’t lonely.

I once made a joke to Yas that she was a Cancer who thinks she invented poetry. Obviously to roast some of the melodramatic things she said to me in undergrad, but the truth in that statement is that Yasmeen might as well have invented poetry to me.

Yasmeen’s voice, heard during the first and only poetry night I ever attended, transformed my perception of how words and sounds and meanings work. Through her, I learned how poetry is meant to resonate. Yasmeen speaks and you listen. Her fierce care for others, though at times overwhelming, reveals a strong sense of what people deserve.

Any love I have for poetry is because of Yasmeen.

Anything I know about words and how to string them together, occasionally eloquently, is because of Yasmeen.

The love and care I give to others is because of the love and care that Yasmeen modeled for me.

My own artistic journey and relationship with poetry go back to a pivotal conversation fueled by deadline-induced panic at 1AM in the print studio. Yasmeen’s advocacy for the power of text altered the course of my practice. She changed my mind - highlighting the impact of storytelling and well-chosen words - and the way that ever since then I have held onto fragments of words so tightly.

What do I know about poetry? Except everything I’ve ever written has been for Yasmeen. Has been because she taught me how to look for words that I like, that speak to me about what they can hold and carry. She told me how to put them together and take them apart. How can love be lonely when this love has brought so much into my life? How can love be lonely when it fills your cup all the way up?

All that is to say that of course love isn’t lonely. Love is seeing something that reminds you of them when you live 3000 kilometers away and knowing it would make them laugh. Knowing that they live in you, in your memory, in the flesh. Knowing that no matter what you are made up of all of the people who have been in our lives and the ties we

have mean we are never aloneeven when it feels like it. Loving means you carry it all with you.

I am a collection of everyone I’ve ever loved.

I texted Yasmeen’s piece Commuting and Other Lonely Thoughts multiple times just to hear her voice speaking to me through the reply texts the piece generated. When I didn’t have any words to say, I texted to hear her. That piece talks about the loneliness of commuting, but commuting has never been lonely for me. It’s been something I get to sink into - to enjoy. But seeing this piece showed me that maybe we all feel lonely in different ways. And, maybe the loneliness is always there but in ways we don’t recognize. I think of love, and that isn’t somewhere that loneliness hides for me, it lingers in unexpected corners, but never in love.

[I never once texted that piece while actually commuting, only when I missed Yasmeen.]

Yasmeen has a way of speaking in poetry to me when I need to hear it most. Telling me that being queer isn’t the thing that’s going to ruin me. Telling me that she’s never met anyone else who has such steady faith and conviction that the universe is looking out for me. There is no lens to look at poetry that doesn’t include relationality. And, there is no lens to look at poetry that doesn’t center Yasmeen.

I tried desperately to write this foreword in any way that wasn’t just a love letter to Yasmeen, but for me, there is no talking

about poetry, relationality, or the fullness of loving where she is not at the center. Yasmeen has taught me that words can be chosen and woven as vessels to carry and share the love we feel and that we make.

And, when this chapter is finally written, I look forward to Yasmeen changing my mind.

Carrying heavy things has made me good at picking them up while bending my knees first (less of a stress on my back) it’s not as if taking someone’s boxes over six floors of stairs hasn’t made me more sure footed when I’ve never been really sure of anything, my balance (I know) has always been off, the first time I held someone for long enough to anchor their hurt, I stopped feeling like I was susceptible to floating, what a burden it is to hold, (of course it’s a burden but so are my legs when they fall asleep yet I still want to take them home) you’re a burden in the same way taking my groceries across two blocks is, a sweet complaint, I’m excited for the meal we’re going to make when we get back, make sure you’re holding the bag from the bottom, the eggs are just sitting there, (what a burden it is to be careful, as in full of care, as in I want to burden you with my care the same way you burden me with yours), like I once had a fever so high death seemed like an escape and you force fed me honey so sweet I winced, what a burden it is to be taken care of, to cancel my plans because you can’t (shouldn’t) be alone right now, to kiss your damp forehead through a rough night (your hair is in the way), to wait for you outside of the hospital, to hold you through the sobbing, anyway, really what I’m saying is loving (god, all this loving) it’s such a burden, isn’t it? Not burden like it’s hard, burden like, was living always supposed to leave me this heavy? But I can’t imagine living without it, can’t imagine wanting to be so light no one notices they’re carrying me across my sad days, or my good ones, or the ones that are not worth writing poems about, what a tragedy to be without burden, I have tasted that emptiness and it is bitter in a way I cannot get used to, burden me with you (give me the honey instead) I know I’m burdening you with myself, but god, I am grateful for the weights I carry when I’m alone and the ones I carry when we’re together (why else be alive if not for one another) I want to be a burden, I want to trust enough and be earnest enough to become it, and I hope you become burdensome, become difficult and unrelenting, become so unmoving, so heavy, that burdening me with you can’t help but become a printed memory in my bones years after we burden the earth with us once more.

I wrote this poem as an ode to Sama. Sama exists and shines brighter than anything in my life. She exists and tells the world she wants more of it, she exists and grieves all the ways it fails. For years now, we go back and forth, I tell her to burden me with her, she does the same, we both fail.

I remember writing this poem in Alexandria because she had a rough night, and I didn’t have the right words (I rarely do) and I remember her apologizing.

Something along the lines of her being sorry for always ending up like this and I say nothing. How do you tell someone that you are sweeter for loving them? How do you tell them that carrying their weight in your arms is the only real memory you have of physicality? I am the closest to my body when my arms are wrapped around her, yet when she needs it, the poem is never there.

But the poem comes later, as it always does, in pieces and parts, stuttering and tumbling out of me. There is loneliness here. The poem when it arrives often happens when I am alone. The loneliness of loving doesn’t come until the room is empty for it to arrive. Like a plane that can only land when the airport is empty with no one to greet its arrival. My poetry has always been like this and the poetic gestures in my work manifest in similar ways by extension. I invite audience members to connect

to material—whether that be physical or conceptual—but I only do it within an opacity. Inside layers of semiotics, I hide. The loneliness of loving makes me hungry for connection and forces me to reach for a linkage to my audience members; perhaps if I bare myself to them, they will see me as worthy of relating to and witnessing. Art making, poem writing, and relational fabricating becomes, then, a method of triggering an occurrence of witnessing in audience members. Maybe if I let myself reach for others, I will cease with all this hiding.

When I was conceptualizing Help! (In Calm Waters) I was examining the buoy as a method of archiving death and seeking life. In a moment, an object is itself, but it is also a seeking of the body—a marker for the death of a person, and a mechanism of saving another. I was reaching for the audience at that moment too—for them to use the attached buoy as a grappling and a tool to assert their belief that the bog water (the site) was worth marking, that the buoy was worth retrieving, that the artist—that I— was worth following, maybe even worth saving. 4

Artworks that engage with relational aesthetics—works that concretize a more material dynamic between artist and audience—often unfold over time, evolving through ongoing interactions and exchanges. This

4 The bog water was a quiet graveyard, a naturally fabricated scene that is cleaned and cultivated to exist in this western bastardized context yet manages to still hold a sentiment that I have yet to fully be able to undo. Why does it call for me? Why does it need me to save it? Am I the bog? Am I the buoy? Does it matter?

temporal dimension highlights the transient and process-oriented nature of relationality, as opposed to the static and fixed qualities often associated with traditional art objects. 5 When I think about my audience, I think about the relationship that we sustain. I consider what they bring to a piece. I consider how they activate it. I think about how the piece becomes different the second it is out of my body. Perhaps I also consider how lonely I am and how often I do not allow anyone to witness this part of the making—how deeply unsettled I am by my own isolation that I am forever gasping for a saving.

I’ve spent so much time going from place to place and ending up nowhere. The inbetweeners have witnessed more of me than I am willing to admit. My last work, right before beginning my Masters, was Commuting and Other Lonely Thoughts . STEPs Public Art accepted a proposal I had offered that investigated the loneliness of commuting in Tkaronto. Small cards with a number on the back were left on subways, buses, trains, and streetcars. I offered a number to text, a conversation where someone texts back and tells you about a loneliness in exchange for yours. I received over 800 responses, and sometimes I still get people visiting the number telling me about the guilt, the shame, the loneliness (so much of the loneliness) of their commutes.

For a very long time I thought

about work as a way to relate to people, to love them, to care for them, to show them that they are worth more than a bystander denomination as they submit themselves to something as divine as witnessing art. They are the activators of it. But to want to activate an object, it must compel you forward. To want to connect, loneliness must surface. To surface you must allow yourself to be witnessed, and perhaps that’s the whole poem. For me to be witnessed I almost always must begin with my grandmother.

5 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: les presses du réel, 2002).

The last time she held me, not very tightly, she can’t hold very tightly anymore, her breath was wet, like the words were so trapped for so long, she needed to break down to ease all this tightness, to dislodge them. My grandmother whispers, (softly so my mother can’t hear) (softly so my grandfather can’t hear), my grandmother, “I don’t remember how to be happy,” and I blink back tears, I do not need to break down to ease this tightness, there are no words trying to escape, there is only all this wet breath.. My grandmother, she whispers, “ I don’t think I know how to anymore” and part of me wants to wonder, part of me wants to understand, is it the distance? (we’re so far, for so long, and we call, I swear we do, but it’s not the same, can you love someone you can’t hold, I don’t know, god I never know) and I wonder, is it my grandfather, the dementia, the staying up all night long, the screaming, he doesn’t know where he is, wants to be home (you’re home gedo, you’re home love) he wants to talk to one of his friends, tells us he owes him some money, asks if we can lend him some money, says he has a debt to pay (what debt?) he can’t just not give the money he borrowed back (grandpa what money), is it the walking out of the door when no one hears him, is it him not remembering my face, or calling me my mother’s name, is it that he sometimes sounds so betrayed, as if his wife, my grandmother, is the biggest surprise, that her of all people, wouldn’t help him, how could you not help me, we’ve been together for so long, why won’t you help memy grandmother, she whispers, “ I feel like I can’t breathe sometimes,” and I hold her (tightly) (it’s how you love in this house, you hold them tightly) (it’s why we notice when they’re not tight anymore) I hold her, and I want to say, I’m sorry (I don’t know for what) I want to say, let me help you, (how can we, we are so far) (a continent away, a difference of eight hours, I am waking up when they’re tucking themselves to bed) (my grandpa is awake anyway) I want to say, I love you, I will love you, how do I fix this, how do you love someone you can’t hold. My grandmother, she is so curious, wonders how things happen, wants to understand how this new world shines, she whispers “It’s like the world is going, but I am stuck here,” she means in this house, she means beside my grandfather’s bed, she means away from us, she means in this city, in this time, she means in this state of ache, nowhere to go and nowhere to be, where do we go from here, how do we love someone we can’t hold, my grandmother and I are so similar sometimes, my mother says, “you’re not like the women in this family,” says it with disappointment, my uncle says, “ you’re not like the women in this family,” says it with pride, when they say, the women in this family, they mean women who want, women who want so much, women who can’t stop wanting, they mean women who will want but not do, women who get stuck, women who don’t know how to leave, women who love so much they let go of the want (the want never leaves), I am the women of my family aren’t I, I hoped I wouldn’t be, but god I think I am, wanting and wanting and wanting, but stuck and stuck and stuck, god knows I want to let go of this want because I don’t know how to love someone I can’t hold and how can I hold you if I’m too busy wanting, my grandmother wants to die, prays to god sometimes that he takes her, she is tired, of being stuck, of wanting, I don’t know, god I never know, the women in my family don’t leave and want to die, or leave and be filled with guilt and I don’t want to be either and want to do both and when will all of this want end?

ON VULNERABILITY, TIM KREIDER, AND BEING NAKED WHILE HIDING YOUR FACE

A

FOREWORD BY MARINA ABADEER

It feels impossible to write on vulnerability without cringing through the entire process.

Describing how I think and explore my own fragility while trusting you to stay with me through this unbearable task is in itself dangerously honest. In good faith I hope you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt as I risk sounding foolish and naive here. The term ‘vulnerability’ often sounds like an overused catchphrase to me now. In our culture of self-awareness, it’s a cliche insert thrown in mental health spaces and self-help books. A counseling buzzword I’ve heard from therapists, attempting to convince me that there is hope if I can bear to trust others. I’ve often wondered why their framework never quite suited me. We know that being honest and open with others is fundamental for meaningful connections - but how to use vulnerability to bond with others, with yourself, why it’s so essential and whether or not we truly can get vulnerable as humans has often puzzled me.

The most illuminating description of vulnerability I’ve read is Tim Kreider’s New York Times essay ‘I Know What You Think of Me.’ In the work he argues the true discomfort in having others become close to you is the complete la7ck of control over their perceptions and opinions of you. I couldn’t agree more. This notion has always been the most terrifying for me, and has haunted me from early on. As

someone living with a visible disability, there is a specific torture associated with knowing that I have no authority or control over others perceptions of me, regardless how skewed by stereotypes they might be. Before I was anything to anyone, I was a disabled person.

As a result, I had a solution to this conundrum that Tim might not have considered, which was to dedicate myself to an impossible task - manually override people’s first impressions of me with my personality. From your first interaction with me you’ll quickly find that I am a pleasure to have around, a perfect, carefully designed and curated woman who seems to mirror your exact personality. Don’t doubt it, I have been excellent at knowing what people want to see in others from the very beginning and I have made it my life’s work to present it on a silver platter. In this successful hypnosis I am almost always able to make friends and delude myself into believing that they no longer see my disability, or any other honest part of me by similar consequence. I play the con artist who ensures they see exactly what I want them to, a slightly different version of themselves with selected mannerisms to avoid suspicion. This may be formed as an ableist adaptation I now realize, but one that worked for years.

So when Tim later explains that being vulnerable and allowing yourself to be loved requires honesty of your most embarrassing and true self, I audibly laughed. Why would I let anyone see the undesirable parts of myself? If I can control

what they see in me then I could control what manufactured pieces of vulnerability I could provide them with too. I can feign emotional intimacy, attract empathy with a specific sob story and act the part while looking distraught, ‘exposing feelings,’ and easily gain their sympathiesthey will believe that I trust them. We have lasted so long without my honesty. Why would I need to actually trust them now? How could I do that when they have never even met me?

To say that this theatrical narrative served as a barrier in the first chapters of my relationships would be an understatement. I had succeeded in making others fall in love with a version of myself that didn’t exist, and it was not sustainable to say the least. What I didn’t plan for was that this idyllic version of myself can expire, it can become unbearable to hold and allow my undesired self to fall through the crackseven for an expert such as myself.

The performance drops when it’s 3am and you’re up late studying with friends while making embarrassing dad jokes and laughing uncontrollably at yourself. Your nakedness becomes all of a sudden bewildering when your class partner points out the way you tend to bite your shirt neckline while focusing. Or the absolute worst of it - your best friend dares to mention your disability in the middle of their sentence, without hesitation, unnoticed, as if it was a small unimportant fact known to all, and simply moves on.

Devastating isn’t it? To sit with the crushing realization that I’ve

never quite convinced anyone to blind themselves to my body?

I have failed to control their perception for even a moment. I have in fact been naked all this time and the journey I have painfully pursued for years has been futile and ineffective. Apparently, everyone I have invested in has always been able to see me, all of me, my body, my quirks, my bad decisions and silly personality. The most surprising realization though, is that they are still here. The people I have been so dedicated to hypnotize can see directly through the fog and have remained content in place, dare I say happily in place sitting next to me. Am I the only one who abandoned myself? Did I prematurely disregard my personality and claim a new one to compensate for what my body lacks? Declare imposture to the most fragile parts of myself in hopes that others would accept me without them? Why did my friends choose to stay once they saw me?

Consequently, I learned through the most turbulent path that I am indeed the only one who constantly rejected myself in preference for an imagined idea of what I thought others wanted me to be - what I ‘should’ be. Now that I’ve arrived, let me introduce you to the secret. It turns out the endeavor in manufacturing identity is wasted, and true friends do not shy away from your nakedness.

It seems Tim Krieder had a point with his closing line, which later became a meme that all too many people related to: ‘if we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying

ordeal of being known.’ I am thankful my friends patiently wait for me to brave the dark staircase of humiliating truths and find joy in being known. My friends who wait for me to trust them, and accept my nakedness before I can. It is the greatest honor of my life to be known by them and to know them in the most vulnerable and intimate sense - though the path to such love is relentlessly terrifying. It is only through their brave commitment to the mortifying ordeal of being known that I may partake in the euphoric experience of knowing them and be given the courage to take those same risks.

If I am ever given the time and space, the narrativization of my personhood somehow always starts the same.

I am 14, painfully lonely, and startled by Canadiana at its so-called finest. My family landed in Pearson Airport in August of 2009, after months of preparation, months of my parents fighting over whether this was the right thing to do, months of my grandfather—the proud man he is—begging my mother, his daughter, not to leave everything she knows for a future that he cannot imagine.

The apartment we land in is smaller than our place back home and my mother begins crying when she sees it. She tells my father that this was not what was promised, that she would like to go back home. He calms her down, soft with her in a way he rarely is. Two weeks later (maybe it was a month) , he packs his bags and leaves, citing a job back home, citing that it’s the only way, citing that there is little to do. Then I’m cited, too. He tells me, his eldest daughter, that I am worth a hundred men (high praise from my father, ever the patriarch) , that my mother needs me now more than ever. Which is to say that I am 14 and smiling constantly because my sisters are too young to learn how grief can unsettle a face. It is so strange and quiet here, and my mother and I lug groceries for the house through the snow, and take buses to the mall, and I secretly taste life in a way I haven’t, and

it is fine but I am 14 and so so lonely. I begin high school late, and my name is shortened in a way I didn’t ask for but accept, and someone (I think her name was Sarah) mentions her new blogging site. No one knows you there, she says, and I become a moth and it becomes a flame. It is curiosity that leads me, of what it’s like to not be known, to not be worth a hundred men, to not be my mother’s daughter.

That night (a school night) I make an account and I’m in transports of delight.

You can write anything here and no one will know ( you can be anyone here and no one will know ). I pick up fanfiction right around the same time. On Tumblr, people share writings about books that have already been written, and then they scandalously write more with no fidelity to its origins. People (mostly girls, women, queer folks) change narratives to fit fantasies, would ignore canon and pitch themselves in their stories, would make characters that never shared screen time suddenly undergo the most unabashedly devastating lore and love and fulfillment. Sometimes they were derivative of the original text. More often, though, it was better, queerer, more tender. And then, I am 14 and suddenly someone posts:

And it’s too much 6 at that moment perhaps. But on Tumblr, it was like that all the time. People would post these words that left me overwhelmed into feeling, overwhelmed into creating, overwhelmed into the discovery of myself even though I didn’t think there was much to discover. In the depths of this virtual space, we could be anything.

For years, I speak in reverence about Tumblr’s online community, painting it in bright colours for what it is: being naked while hiding your face. Anonymity is a drug, and for the first time ever I am honest with strangers and it’s okay because they don’t know me so I could be anyone. What a wonder it is to be known without being known. Then Tim Kreider decides to ruin everything .

In 2013, Tim Kreider releases an essay titled “I Know What You Think of Me.” In it, he writes that “if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.” 7

This becomes a running joke/ meme/call-out on Tumblr for years and the sentiment has haunted me and my practice till this day.

Tumblr crumbles under this sentiment. I’m sure Kreider does not know what this line does to what many of us endearingly call a “hell site,” but we crumble, nonetheless. Everything from think pieces, to meta character analysis, to thousands of quotes tagged with the #MortiyfingOrdealOfBeingKnown

For those so carnally averse to vulnerability, Tumblr was a haven. Tim Kreider’s writings, however, made it a space where those of us running away from our lives had to face the multiplicitous reasons behind our desperate need for this anonymity. Are we truly known in this virtual space? Are we even truly anonymous? Are we truly seen? Are we truly vulnerable?

What I’m asking of course is: If I decide to give you a glimpse of my face, will I be worthy of your love for it?

My practice does not escape this treatment. For years the work and I asked: Do we really have to be witnessed to be loved? Must I bear my soul to be seen? When I speak about my work, even in passing, I am always questioning if the practice is too much, too self-centered, too vulnerable,

6 As I inch closer to 30, I am realizing that I am starting to forget what it was like to be 14 but it is important that I remember. Everything (and I really mean everything) felt so intense, everything felt like it was my responsibility, and it always felt like I was failing. My mother was my best friend, and she was so unhappy, and I could not fix it and it felt like no matter how many times I try to convince her to leave my father, to live this life on her own, that I would help her, she would shake her head tell me it wasn’t that simple, and we’d rinse and repeat. My late teens were so normal in many ways, I made friends, and lost them, and I was abrasive, and exhausted and made aware of my own limitations more often than I would like. To be 14 is to sincerely believe in the end of the world at any given moment and to also believe in your ability to take over it. To be 14 is to perhaps, more than anything, more than anyone, believe in impossibility.

7 Tim Kreider, “I Know What You Think of Me,” Opinionator, New York Times, June 15, 2013. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/i-know-what-you-think-of-me/.

whether I am too self-involved. But of course I am. There is no making without an obsession with the self. I often become mortified with the knowledge that for the work to exist, the self must be witnessed. For my work to exist, I must be witnessed. However, to be mortified and to be known is to be loved, right?

When I first began identifying with the label of an artist, my grandmother, while looking over some images of my early work, told me that she was so happy I was making beautiful things for the world to see. I argued with her and said that I do not make things for the world, but for myself—to appease my selfish need to make. The making is only ever in the witnessing , she replied while shaking her head. Her half-mooned smile is still in my mind’s eye. She’s right, of course, as our elders often are. It’s no surprise that I think often about the act of witnessing, about who we deem worthy of witnessing, who we deem worthy of archiving, all the ways that I allow the world to witness me, and all the ways I do not. Living is a horrifying act of vulnerability. Artmaking, in many ways, is an extension of that act. It feels like divine punishment that I continue to lead a life where I ask people to see me as often as I do.

I’ve tried my best to build a logic around not needing a witnessing to make. I’ve argued with myself back and forth about what it means to make freely. I’ve read arguments for an art that exists independently—free from the need of an audience. I get it.

The true artistic genius should exist for its own sake. But I am no genius. I do not know what it would mean for an artwork to exist without an audience— without being watched, naked, and this time, with no hands covering your face.

A FOREWORD BY AUBREY THEOBALD

“Mutual love is often thought of as mutual recognition: I see you for who you are, and you see me back. But recognition is inevitably also a naming, a fixing, a pining down. In order to recognize, you have to categorize, and categories are notoriously inflexible…However inadvertently, the recognition required for mutual love can easily slip into a form of control.” 8

Someone I was at once close with once asked me what I felt the difference between shame and embarrassment was. At the moment they asked, I was struggling with something that felt embarrassing, to me, that had been shared in their presence. For weeks I lamented, completely overtaken by that guttural feeling of being caught. I was caught off guard, seen in a light I had not chosen, curated, and controlled. It sat within the warm curve of my stomach lining and turned one rotation, right when it felt I had forgotten it.

If you’re reading this, hold the psychoanalytic diagnosis of my anxious neurosis, I’m working on it. Do you want to know what it was that I did?

What is the difference between shame and embarrassment?

Shame is internalized, a knowing, and encompassing clash against your personal moral compass

that touches itself freezing cold, rigidly. I have crossed a line with myself, I have gone against what I know to be true, I acted against what I believe, I broke my own heart. I was told that I could not be who I know myself to be; I hurt myself. I feel shame.

Embarrassment will wrestle and contort itself into shame to make itself feel less alone, as it simply cannot exist without its counterpart, you. She’s desperate in her need to be known, she just wants closure and for you to come over one last time. But I didn’t do anything wrong? Something happened, why are you leaving? Wait. Did I do something wrong? Was it me? Am I here? I didn’t think it was that bad. No, I see it playing back. It was a mistake, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. It was wrong.

The most insidious chapter of embarrassment lies in the knowledge that it will come back to you when you are just beginning to escape your mind, releasing your body from its performative state. When you feel joy, when you allow yourself to play, when you release your tightened body. I slipped and fell. My breath smelled bad this morning. Her laugh broke into a series of small snorts. You waited too long to call. I really hurt you. Your fly is down. Is it all you? No, it never was. Ultimately, I can know deeply that both shame and embarrassment are my own to hold visibly. I can

8 Elvia Wilk, “As Before you Bite,” e-Flux issue #103, October 2019, accessed [insert access date], https://www.e-flux.com/journal/103/292645/ask-before-you-bite/.

choose never to be embarrassed, but why did you walk away?

To allow yourself to feel embarrassment is to gnaw—piece by piece by piece—the boundary of control and release, all in the name of finding a new knowing, an opening, of the dissolving of what you knew about yourself prior. The boundary is the desired perception, the curation of the self away from whatever forcefully shame-ridden ideas you hold toward your own person. I don’t believe it is in the release of embarrassment that we can find an ease of being. It is embarrassment that calls us back into our relationship with our body, skin, touch, being, the intrapersonal—your breath is also a little stinky this morning, let’s make some coffee, my love. I want to keep embarrassment close, my fear of knowing her deeply, so I can be called back into my body, so she can turn one rotation, right when I had forgotten it.

Can I tell you what happened? Would you sit there, with me, curled up in a little ball caressing the back of my neck and telling me there is nothing to be ashamed of? Would you heal the part of you that felt embarrassed once by sitting and calming me in my own brokenness? Would you just want to watch me? Do you like that?

Alexandria has the perfect sky for kite flying. I am biased, I know, but there is no joy like flying a kite by the beach and running back to my teta for fried liver sandwiches that have sand in them. I hold this memory, and ones like it, warmly.

In 2020, the Egyptian military government claims a fear of sky surveillance, of the tracking and tracing of Egyptian land, and ban one of cheapest objects of joy from Egyptian children: kites. Egyptians don’t take the threat seriously and proceed to fly kites anyway. In a matter of weeks, over 300 kites are collected in Alexandria, and over 1000 in Cairo with even more around the country. I haven’t flown a kite in years, since I was a child, but suddenly I am eager to make 300 kites, to make so many kites that can be flown in this strange town in Michigan of all places, where kites are allowed to fly.

One problem: I have no idea how to make a kite. The hundreds of YouTube tutorials don’t help, I make so many failed kites, over and over, in different shapes, styles, with wood, thread, and hot glue, and it does not work. None of them take off. Not even one of them flies. I call my engineer of a father and he says, Yasmeen kites are so easy to make, and then jokingly he says, maybe you’re making them right, maybe you’ve just forgotten the most Egyptian thing in the world. Maybe you’ve forgotten how to fly a kite.

The audacity of this man, I swear.

For weeks, I make kites, and

I don’t know why. The kites have failed me, the wind has failed me, and I have failed me. I am mortified of being a laughingstock; a grown woman who cannot play a child’s game.

Marina, someone who undoubtedly possesses a piece of my soul, visits me during this time. She embodies shamelessness in all the ways I am gripped by shame, and having her around is a delight. I invite her to accompany me to an open field at Cranbrook, where we set up a camera and spend hours attempting to get a single kite to fly. It turns into a disaster. The failure stings for a while, but then humor prevails because Marina is laughing. She loves me enough to share in the laughter about the ways I fall short. I had constructed a sense of responsibility with this endeavor, envisioning the kiteflying as some grand task(s), and the kites as carriers of my people’s essence; this was how I could reach them, represent them even though I was continents away. But my kites crumbled under the weight of this burden. Perhaps that wasn’t the point, though. Maybe, in the end, it was about all my inadequacies in flying those kites, or even just in making them. Or perhaps I was the anomaly in the culture, or maybe it was the wind. Perhaps it was Marina’s laughter, shattering the facade of seriousness.

This moment becomes a study in both commiseration and failure. Of the desperation of wanting to belong to a diasporic struggle that you cannot claim as your

own. Failing. What a tragedy it is to have kites to fly but not be able to fly them. What a tragedy it is to be a thread that tangles but is never able to knot.

What does it mean to be a kite that never takes flight? What does it mean to materialize a kite that will never fly despite an undeniable abundance of wanting, of reaching, of hoping? The anatomy of obsession is rooted in the guilt of the making. What penance is this obsession attempting to absolve itself from? Is it an apology to the self? To the Egyptians whose joy is so often stolen from them? Or is it an apology from me? For having the chance to fly kites and not being able to anyway?

Sama and I have a similar relationship with our languages but in vastly different ways. She knows English in ways that I don’t, and I know Arabic in ways she doesn’t. It relates to how we grew up; how so many of my most honest emotions were in Arabic, where so much of English existed in a time where I was asked to erase and numb myself. Much of my Arabic is so soft, so emotional, so erratic. Almost never coherent. Not for lack of knowledge of coherence, but because it was the only language I had when I was realigning some

things about myself, my culture, my family, my personhood. 9

But I am forgetting Arabic. To forget the only language I can emote in feels like I’m forgetting how to feel. I’m worried I’m forgetting how to emote. Arabic as a language builds itself from its roots. For every word I say, its root is what I mean. This is how I center myself in my language now, uncovering each word from its root all the way up to its spine. What does it mean for a language to be lost from you? What does it mean for a culture to be lost from you? How do you find yourself in the gaps of loss? How do you find yourself in a past that you weren’t in, but one that impacted your future anyway? I have no answers to these questions. I offer them to you anyway.

I think about the kites, about my Arabic, about how hard it is for me to tell anyone I love how I feel. I am burning with the shame of opening up.

God forbid I have an emotion that is undignified. God forbid I am petty, jealous, and angry.

God forbid I am worthy of being ugly.

9 I have this memory of being nine or ten. It was late enough for all my sisters to be asleep but not late enough for me to not hear my parents in the living room, the television on, my parents never speaking to one another, me trying to quiet down. I remember the crying, I’m not sure why, the gut-wrenching weeping that makes me hurt still and craving so badly for someone to come check on me. Even then, I couldn’t really tell anyone, I couldn’t tell them that I felt a grief I couldn’t understand, that something was wrong (I never really discovered what) but if they found me, if they checked, if they stumbled on me, crying, always always crying, maybe they would ask, maybe they would wonder, if something was wrong, if this small thing wrapped in her covers, on a damp pillow, ensuring a headache no one can explain the next day, if someone had come in, I wonder, I wonder if things would have been different, I wonder if all the words could come easier now, if all the ache would be easier to let go of but...But. No one ever came. No one ever really comes.

ON

AND THE HUMILIATION OF EXCELLENCE

A

FOREWORD BY ZAHRA ALMAJIDI

It may often feel like your Brownness is a condition you must overcome. To exist in a space while Brown is to have to be constantly interrogated, judged, and held to ridiculously high standards.

You may constantly feel like you’re being othered but that’s only because you are not opening up about your background, your family, how you ended up where you are now, and where you are from.

No, no, you didn’t understand the question. Where are you REALLY from? Like were you born here? No? So, where were you born? How did you end up here? Are you a citizen? Oh, you are. That explains why your English is so good.

See, if only you were more transparent with people, they wouldn’t be so uncomfortable around you.

And you can’t publicly make mistakes or fail, otherwise that’s proof that you don’t actually belong in these spaces. What did you think would happen if you pretended to be competent and skilled at school or your job? Don’t feel too bad if people don’t come to you for help, you just haven’t proven you can handle the work. After all, you haven’t told them enough about yourself and how you ended up in this position.

So how did you end up here at this job? This residency? Showing at this exhibition? Are you even

qualified to be here right now? It seems that certain positions are being filled just to meet some diversity quota. I guess Brown people are just getting all the opportunities right now. Well, it looks like you’ll just have to prove yourself.

And you most likely will prove yourself—time and again—but that won’t be enough. It will never be enough. You thought not being able to make mistakes was exhausting? Just wait until you are expected to succeed, and you are always asked to do more, and achieve more, and excel more.

Why?

Well, that’s because even worse than the fear of failure is the dread of excelling and having to maintain that standard of excellence. Because, again, to excel while Brown means you cannot make mistakes, acknowledge your faults, or show any weaknesses. You can’t be vulnerable. At least not in the way you’d like to be. You can be vulnerable as long as it doesn’t make others uncomfortable.

Also, you can’t share how isolating this can be. How it feels like to always be held to other people’s standards. How it never feels like you’re doing something just for yourself. How you are always asked whether your work is relatable enough to a broader audience, or whether other people can realistically purchase and own your work. And how you are always asked to consider how your work is benefiting your community and others. Because, as a Brown person you are not considered to be an individual. Everything you say and do is seen as a reflection

of your community. You ARE NOT an individual amongst a group of people. Your people ARE a monolith.

Okay, yeah, sure, it seems this isn’t the case for the White other. And it is very clear their credentials aren’t constantly being called into question. They aren’t held to the same absurdly high standards. People automatically assume they belong in any space they enter. That they are the authority in their respective field or practice even if their skills are mediocre at best. They aren’t asked to prove themselves. Their racism or bigotry is not a disqualifier. It is simply seen as something they can work on. Or not. They can get things wrong. And they will. But that’s only natural. How can one learn if they don’t fail? Everyone has things they can work on, so they should be encouraged to learn from their mistakes.

Well, maybe not you

So, don’t share what you think about any of this. Don’t try to change or fix any of this. Don’t express how you feel about any of this. Just don’t feel.

Wouldn’t want to burden people with those BROWN feelings now, would you? You can’t expect them to handle them. How are they supposed to know how to sympathize with you? You’re just so “different.”

But just so you know, you also can’t express your discomfort or displeasure with any of this. What are you complaining about? You have it so easy.

Oh, that doesn’t mean you can

be too happy, content, or proud about excelling either.

Like why are you so full of yourself? Do you think you’re better than us? That we couldn’t have achieved what you’ve achieved? That we don’t also deserve to just have things handed to us? That you don’t have to work as hard as us? Because, let’s be honest, you aren’t working as hard as us. You really should be more humble about your accomplishments. Stop bragging.

BASICALLY, you can’t make mistakes or have too many faults otherwise people begin to question your competence. SO, you must excel at everything you do and far exceed everybody’s expectations of you. BUT you can’t be too good at what you do or ever boast about your accomplishments because you will be seen as too pretentious, too unrelatable, too intimidating, and perhaps even too threatening, to those around you.

Does that make sense?

Essentially…To be Brown is to be judged for the mistakes of every Brown person ever, while your successes are treated as an anomaly.

I had a studio visit once where the visiting artist remarked on the rarity of meeting Brown artists with poor craftsmanship. I tell them that we are rarely ever afforded the grace of incompetence.

To be Brown is to never be allowed to own your success. I study, and make, and write, and read, and when I am rewarded, it is chalked up to filling out a diversity quota. Applications to residencies, fellowships, schools, grants, jobs, and everything in between advertise themselves as seeking out the marginalized. But even as I am yearned for, rarely am I afforded the privilege of mediocrity. As a baseline, I must exist in excellence, or not at all. To the public, to my colleagues, to my friends even, I am where I am due to the privilege of our times. Oppression becomes capital and I am rich in this socially constructed currency. How humiliating it is to be so ashamed of your excellence, to be unable to see it as anything other than happenstance. User @kermitlesbian on tumblr has a post that reads, hm, i think every time i feel an impulse to people please, to be unproblematic and likable and charming and feel the safety that comes with universal adoration, I need to remind myself that i want to be loved like a person, not like a dog.

I want to be liked like a person and not a dog. But I can only be liked when I am smiling, and kind, and apologetic, and humble, and wise, and excellent and most of all ashamed of this excellence. 10

It took my family seven years to gain our Canadian citizenship when traditionally the process takes three. My mother kept all our receipts, my sisters’ and my report cards, our graduation certificates, and bills. My mother and I developed a strange relationship with our mailbox. Will today be another day where we are asked for more paperwork; more proof that we are investing in the Canadian economy; more papers to justify prove that we are living lives worth living? ?

There is a room of boxes of paperwork living in my house, a safekeeping, just in case someone returns asking for substantiation.

My mother studied towards a certificate in logistics and climbed the metaphorical corporate ladder to give us a chance at anything and my father stayed back in Kuwait because otherwise we couldn’t afford to live in Canada. And it still took seven years. We watched friends

10 I’m told that since the first time I left my mother, my crying has always sounded as if I was trying to quiet myself down. There were corners in the house I grew up in that were known as my hiding spots only to be visited when I couldn’t handle being anymore. It seemed I always felt the stinging in the back of my eyes, quickly shutting them so tight so anything holy (or not) could not see that I was about to break a little. My mother tells me I have not changed. I do not cry in front of my mother anymore but two days ago, I was sitting on the couch opposite her, and she said something, I don’t remember what, just that it was casually cruel, as parents are wont to be, and I just. The living room starts swimming, and my breath starts hitching, and I am two again searching for corners to hide me, praying for someone to find me, and this is the curse of loving I think. It will only ever leave you with stinging eyes and a bruised pair of eyelids and fingers that hope to dig it all out of you one day.

who entered the country after us receive their immigration statuses. We weren’t allowed to travel or visit my grandparents or visit our home. We placated and assimilated and mutated our tongues to speak a language that tasted sour on our lips. And it still wasn’t enough.

The beginning of my master’s degree coincided with the murder of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman who was arrested and then battered for allegedly wearing her headscarf too loosely. Iranian authorities claim that Amini died of heart failure, but her family and protesters across Iran accuse the government of covering up her murder.

Days prior to her murder, my mother and I drove to the American border with the intention of moving me to Detroit to fulfill my master’s degree. Obtaining my student visa had been a grueling ordeal, spanning nearly four months, marked by restless nights, frantic activity, the anxious mailing of my Canadian passport with hopes for its safe arrival, shelling out over six hundred dollars in fees, and ultimately undergoing an interview at the US embassy for permission to study.

One night in the middle of all of this, I had cried to my father about how much I resented this piece of paper I’m supposed to carry with me—and the arduous seven-year journey it took to receive it. Why should we have bothered coming here when I still would’ve ended up in

rooms being questioned for my legitimacy, looked at as if I was up to something nefarious. I had told my father then that as long as there is a hijab on my head and the word Allah in my name, I would always be Brown and there would always be a western agency policing my existence. He held me and said nothing. There really was nothing to say.

Weeks after I am settled in Detroit, I travel to Berlin for a week-long residency. We stumble upon an Iranian protest where a German man in a gaudy jumpsuit shouts at the protestors. I am staring at him because even though I do not speak German, I know these words. He finds my eyes and stares back, starts pointing at me, the EU flags flying over my head, and then back at the protestors. My friend looks at me and translates some of what was being said, something about how Muslims deserve the death that is inflicted upon them.

Back at the American border with my mother, the security guard asks me if I’m Muslim, I smile and I nod, hoping it doesn’t translate as a nod of shame. I wonder if the security will go through my car of belongings, if they will see the pictures of my sisters I have with me, if they will search my mother and I, if they will look through my phone, if I too will be in a room waiting and waiting and waiting, trapped and unable to go home. None of this happens, and within an hour we are crossing the Windsor border into Detroit. And yet; and yet; and yet.

It is impossible to experience all of these ostensibly disconnected events and not trace them back to the same atrophying roots: as inherently and inextricably linked to one another by threads of diasporic trauma and intergenerational wounds. I wear my Brownness like an ill-fitting jacket I have not grown into. I perform it, and hold it, and rarely am I allowed to love it.

When We’re Back! was being made, I was thinking about that border and about my Brownness. Thinking about my grandmother and the way she taught me how to cook just by letting me watch her hands move. My grandmother, curious about the world and everything in it, forever devastated by the ways it passes her by. I wanted to cook for a piece because I missed her. I missed that house. I missed the water. And I missed the sand.

I wanted to make Ma7shi and kept thinking about the sand in it. Sitting by the beach having food handed to me, biting into it, and tasting the leftover sand on my hand. I am always small in these memories, browned by the sun, sleepy and filled with so much contentment I can still taste it. The work is an 18-minute episode of a traditional Egyptian cooking TV show from the 90s. A lone hijabi woman with bright lipstick walks you through the meal she’s making. I walk the audience through the recipe, interrupted periodically by bizarre contemporary Egyptian commercials. Halfway through, I begin stuffing sand into the vegetables along with the

rice and the parsley and the seasoning. The performance begins to stutter, begins to speed, begins to slow, the commercials begin to eat themselves. A poison into poison. A home in a home. The performance wraps like a cooking show. The host eats the meal they’ve prepared. I eat the meal I’ve prepared. The camera cuts to me, retching, puking the sand out of my mouth.

A FOREWORD BY CHIEDZA PASIPANODYA

The title of the poem I wrote could be “Amidst the Chaos.”

In the symphony of existence, where drums pound and tails spiral, primal instincts collide with divine complexities. Amidst the tumult, a trembling tambourine sings of choking cows and graceful hawks tethered to fate’s whims. There’s a belief, albeit fragile, in unseen forces and the judgment of flawed yet divine humanity. But amidst this belief lies a pervasive apathy, a shadow that stretches towards redemption but often falls short.

Yet, there’s a flicker of hope, a solitary star in the night sky of despair. It’s the belief in resilience, in the capacity for growth amidst chaos. But hope is fragile, threatened by the inertia of resignation. In fleeting moments of clarity, amidst laughter and tender touches, there’s solace, a refuge from the harsh realities of existence.

Yet, even these moments are tinged with sadness, a reminder of innocence lost. The world is a paradox, where joy and sorrow coexist in delicate balance. Amidst the uncertainty, questions abound, more numerous than answers.

Adrift in the tumult, grappling with the complexities of existence, there’s a search for meaning amidst the chaos. And yet, amidst the turmoil, there’s a whisper of possibility, a belief that perhaps, just perhaps, there’s meaning to be found in the madness.

let me believe you

this is the banging of drums the spiraling tails of hunting dogs blood hungry divine and difficult this is a shivering tambourine a choking cow whose cud is green with cyanide this is a graceful hawk tied to a string hung in (cunning) undulating bunches at the end of a world that does not burn books but buries buildings and leaves limbs cleaved together like the claws of swallows [or doves] on branches on a cold night eschewed on this mighty course craving correction a nervous disposition with machinations stealing lines from divinations and where the clamouring wont mean nothing no thing none you believe in forces of nature or luck for your own good you will judge yourself before these humans who however dim are divine and blessed without reason or motive you believe in humans and robots, God and blue glass you believe in love (though remise, not in love with the bliss but) what the blessing both bring and are filled with apathy that goes the distance so far it enters the sacrament from the side door playing the performance of a lifetime as one who holds the privilege to be both a fool, always blind erstwhile softened without reason or motive you don’t deserve anything except heaven (we had forgotten about heaven hadn’t we?) yet this is not that, this is the banging tails of hunting dogs a blood hungry shivering tambourine a divine and difficult machine.

11 This work considers Yasmeen Nematt Alla’s practice which uses poetics, translation, devices (literal and metaphorical), and themes of uncertainty and apocalypse. This poem was written by Chiedza Pasipanodya using prevalent poetic devices and techniques such as using found texts as an entry point for another new poem. Here an excerpt from Toni Morrison’s Paradise was the found text used. It was edited using redaction and erasure, then expanded and rewritten into 7 versions. The final version was presented to an AI. The AI was asked to interpret Pasipanodya’s poem, expand on the themes it identified in the poem and finally to “write” its own 250-word poem based on the originally presented version. The writing on the left is the AI’s and the one on the right is Chiedza Pasipanodya’s differentiated by italic text.

I don’t remember much of my uncle’s wedding, but I know I was something akin to a flower girl and that I held a long candle when the bride and groom were meant to walk in. I remember the tabla, the Fer2a (band), the mothers, aunts, grandmothers, the women , I remember their Za3’areet. A Za3’roota is one of the sweetest sounds in the world. It’s so bound up in joy, bred by the matriarchs who for a moment become a chorus of birds. Everyone we knew, adorned in their best gold, clapping, dancing, and twirling the newlyweds around and around. I remember the colours, the music, the talking, the food, and being so tired and inebriated by a joyful kind of overstimulation. It’s my most colorful memory.

I’ve never been someone with a particularly good memory, but I seem to always remember the sounds of my childhood. I remember my parents calling my name on Alexandria’s beach—to not go too deep because the waves were pullers. I remember the shops, my grandmother having me pick a rabbit for dinner that night, the bustle of the butcher as he followed my teta’s careful instructions. The sound of the butcher’s knife on the table, the cutting whip in the air, my grandmother’s voice in my ear, whispering, giggling like a much younger woman. 12

I remember the sounds in a way I remember little else. Even now, my sweetest memories are tinged

with my friends’ laughter, with singing in a car, with the crying of a new baby.

And it wasn’t just the joy. The wailing in the weddings mirrored the wailing in the funerals. When my grandfather died, my mother called me screaming on the phone, shouting over and over again that her father had passed. The kindest man she ever knew had left us, for something and somewhere better, but he left us, nonetheless. The wailing isn’t thoughtful or rational or timid. It is loud and jarring and I often must push down the urge to quiet it.

My life is a constant return towards an ululation.

I am not a musician, but much of my life is lived through sounds. When I came back for my second year of my masters, I had written about wanting to bring sound back to a space. I wanted it to be loud again. I wanted to make it ring in the gallery. I wanted to make it unnerving, and I wanted to allow the uncoordinated, unchoreographed notion of an ululation to be present in the spaces that my works occupy.

Sagat and Daf are two pieces that will always feel like sisters to me. Sagat , the Arabic term for cymbals, has a melodic sound that changes based on how hard or soft you hit them together. While they are often used by Arab dancers as they float through a space, they functioned for a long time as funerary

12 We were always giggling, she and I.

instruments. Once again, like a pendulum, we rang for grief, and we rang for joy. For weeks, I attempted to recreate a Sagat, one that I could see in a future I couldn’t fully imagine. I started etching so many of the words I wouldn’t say into the brass of the Sagat. I started feeding algorithms, sentences of grief and poems about my family. I asked it to mix hieroglyphics symbols with the root system of Arabic and build a third language that I could etch back into the metal. To carve it so deep that years from now, even this ululation is not forgotten.

Daf was, in many ways, a response to a Sagat’s ululation.

A Daf is an Arab instrument that exists in many SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) regions. I learn about it from my mother as I tell her that I miss the sound of the Tabla , how I keep returning to a drum, the thump thump thump beat of it. She tells me about a Daf, how it’s made of goat hide that is cured using its brains, how she had a huge crush on a Daf player when she was a teenager. She also tells me that while they played the Daf in weddings, they also played at the beginning of battle to announce the invitation of death and the onset of liberation.

As I plan on recreating this Daf, a different kind of fight begins in my life. Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Cranbrook Education Community accosts its students for raising Palestinian flags on their campus and paints them as criminals to the public of

Metro Detroit. This institutional reckoning echoes around the world. For weeks, students around North America are suspended, expelled, and, at times, brutalized for speaking up for Palestine—for asking their institutions to divest from apartheid Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian Peoples and their resistance. Somehow though, during these times, I am closer to my cohort than ever. We are careful with each other, tender with one another in ways we weren’t in the past. We talk to each about witnessing the revolution. We tell each other that this is what it sounds like to seek out liberation. We watch as people from around the world march and chant for Palestine. The chants are still singing in my ears now. I can still hear them.

When Daf eventually comes to be, I ask Nabeela, my friend’s mother, to perform a song of revolution with me on it. A large drum that isn’t traditional in size, made of copper, hide, and algorithms, but mostly of heartache. We both drum throughout our performance. She knows how to play so she does it beautifully. I don’t know how to play so I try to mimic her, and it is embarrassing, and wrong, and hopeful in a way that I rarely am.

A FOREWORD BY CY FUNG

In conversations around AI, or any new avenue of technology, i hear talk about change, about hope, and about fear.

In 1958, Werner Heisenberg writes that “...technology, which progresses step by step to ever-new realms, changes our surroundings before our very eyes and thus stamps them with our image.” 13 He is reflecting on the epistemological and ontological shifts posed by quantum theory and expresses unease around this newest technology of his time by which “modern man confronts himself alone.” 14

Heisenberg compares us to snails who concrete shells of technologies and so change our environments. Like anybody, we in turn are changed by our environments. When these environments no longer suit, we secrete more technology to adapt until, as Hannah Arendt says, “all our pride in what we can do will disappear into some kind of mutation of the human race; the whole of technology, seen from this point, in fact no longer appears ‘as the result of a conscious human effort to extend man’s material powers, but rather as a large-scale biological

It is 1963; Arendt is quoting Heisenberg in reflecting on the Space Race and the Cold War. Though she does not use the term, she describes the alienation and dissonance of the time and struggles with the large-scale “glitch-becoming” process that Legacy Russell says “encourages us to challenge the world around us, and, through this constant redressing and challenging, change the world as we know it, prompting the creation of entirely new worlds altogether.” 16

The term glitch , by Arendt’s time, is a minor electrical deviation between defined operational states of the system: the 0 and the 1. The glitch is an error that occurs when the system is on the threshold between one state and another.

Even then, the glitch exists somewhere indiscernible in the interstices. In its liminality, it highlights the border of is/not, the failure of the binary, and the quiddity of the in-between.

The glitch expresses a desire for something else to be. The glitch is yearning. (Yes, glitch feminists, it is also opportunity and protest and criticism and subversion and and and...) To seek the glitch intentionally expresses a yearning born from environments that do not suit:

13 Jagdish Mehra, The Physicist’s Conception of Nature (New York: Springer, 1973), 19.

14 Mehra, The Physicist’s Conception of Nature, 23.

15 “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” Between Past and Future, New York, 2006, p. 274.

16 Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London: Verso, 2020), 69. process.’” 15

A desire for a world where we can exist within our uncanny and glossy shells because our environments are too sharpedged and too rough for our soft peculiar little bodies alone. With our technologies, we transform not only our surroundings but also our selves. Or rather: we mutate our selves through our surroundings. As a result, any glitch we find in our shells’ mirrored surfaces is inevitably reflecting us. And what we see in each glitch, how we perceive it, also reflects us.

In these glitch-glittered pages, i see snails world-dreaming futures where they can become.

To all autofuturistic snails:

Algorithms in 2024 are an incredibly divisive subject. People affiliate with AI in two fraught camps: You either believe in the utopia AI will bring or you believe that it will bring upon human demise. With the speed at which capitalism has grown, and the ways AI has been designed to mine user data without their consent, people have largely gravitated towards the second camp.

Companies like Google, Amazon, Meta, and Apple enlist their repositories of exploited resources and labour to invest in algorithmic research and development. Their algorithms power search engines, recommendation systems, social media, and e-commerce platforms, dually shaping the way people interact with technology and consume information. This breeds a mound of ethical questions that big capitalist corporations have no interest in answering or even entertaining. Everything from mining data, to eradicating any semblance of privacy, all the way to stripping creatives from their jobs in creative industries. If it is easier and cheaper for an AI to create a script for a movie, or for a robot to serve your food at a restaurant, or check out your groceries, why in the world would profit-hungry tyrants hire a human being instead?.

Of course, it’s not that simple. With every technological advancement, we write about our collective terror of our own erasure. Human beings are unable to imagine a world where

they are not at the center. We will, even in this case, adapt. We will use the tools offered and rise to the occasion of the nightmares we create, as we have always done. We struggle with offering nuances to these conversations because we can’t escape the binary of our existences. But theorists have been discussing the ways in which we can/should/will allow technology into our lives. In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway presents a multifaceted critique of traditional dualisms, advocating for the embrace of hybridity and the blurring of boundaries between human and machine, nature and culture, male and female. Through the metaphor of the cyborg, Haraway explores the complexities of contemporary subjectivity, highlighting its fluid nature and inherent plurality. She argues for a politic of coalition-building that challenges essentialist notions of identity and embraces diversity and complexity. By destabilizing traditional power structures, the cyborg offers new possibilities for feminist and socialist politics, utilizing technology as a tool for social transformation and resistance.

Overall, Haraway’s manifesto offers a provocative reimagining of identity, politics, and technology, emphasizing the need for a more legible understanding of humanity in the postmodern era. My experience with Haraway’s manifesto was a thrilling literary discovery of how the next fifty years of our lives might unfold if we’d allow it to. If we ally AI towards liberation and

against oppressive systems, we run the real possibility of shifting how we approach the systems that govern us. We are becoming cyborgs. We are becoming machines. But with it we are also contending with what it means for us to exist in a world that rejects difference and error as unnatural. What would it mean to imagine a future where we exist in the cracks of the systems we have destroyed?

I have not always been so optimistic about the ways in which we fit in the world with technology.

During my research surrounding ancient Egyptian civilizations, I started reading more around the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. In 1799 during Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign, a French soldier, in Rosetta, Egypt (modern-day Rashid, Egypt) all but trips on the Rosetta Stone. The stone, dating back to 196 BCE, features etchings in three scripts: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Ancient Greek. The significance of the Rosetta Stone lies in the fact that it provided scholars with the key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs. By comparing the Greek text, which was already understood, with the Egyptian scripts, linguists were able to decipher the once-enigmatic hieroglyphs. This breakthrough in decipherment opened a wealth of knowledge about ancient Egyptian civilization, its history, culture, and language. 17

This accident changed and uncovered a whole culture that was unbeknownst to us. While I am immersing myself in this research, I am also reading and writing on Legacy Russell’s notion of the glitched body. Glitched bodies, those that defy the conventions of white cisgender heteronormativity, often find themselves marginalized within digital spheres. Despite the promise of AI tools, they have fallen short, perpetuating biases and prejudices. The internet, once hailed as a utopian space, reveals its fractured nature, accommodating myriad worlds while simultaneously rendering Othered bodies—glitches, as Russel names them invisible due to the limitations of binary categorizations.

However, Glitch Feminism offers a radical reimagining. If we exist invisibly within oppressive systems, perhaps glitched/glitching embodiments can become a source of empowerment. They allow for the creation of narratives that transcend the limitations of the physical body and manifest in cyberspace. Glitched bodies become embodiments of resistance, exposing the failures of the systems that seek to confine them, and paving the way for new modes of existence.

In this paradigm, errors and glitches cease to be mere malfunctions; they become conscious acts of resistance. They disrupt the normative narratives

17 Richard B. Parkinson and Stephen Quirke, The Rosetta Stone. British Museum Press, 1999.

perpetuated by hegemonic structures and offer a space for reclamation and reimagination. Immigrancy itself becomes a glitch, transforming personhood and, in my case, objecthood into a tangible manifestation of resilience and defiance. 18

I began thinking of building systems while developing a need to watch them glitch. Khamasin came out of this interest. How can I construct a technological and living system that is bound by its own laws? Khamasin (translated from Arabic as the fifty day winds ) references a phenomenon where dry, sand-filled windstorms 19 blow sporadically in Egypt over fifty days in spring. The sandy winds and the humidity cause tension to settle over the country, a heat that makes a person seek an escape from one’s skin. This installation offers six heat-bent plexiglass pieces–some with sand escaping them and some with sand entrapped in them. Three of the entities hold small servo motors that move along the plexiglass pieces causing a small vibration. The movement slowly and steadily causes the sand to escape from its encasement, splaying itself on the gallery’s floor. With time, the servos stumble, they tremble, they turn, and they churn. They also die. They vibrate and due to their battery life, they pass

away. Is death another error here? Is it the glitch? I lost the sand from the Plexiglas piece where their irritant sleeps, but where was the system? Where was the interruption? The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden, says Donna Haraway. [I]t is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. 20

I spend so much of 2023’s summer thinking about this moment—a soldier stumbles on a rock, uncovers a history and a key to unlocking a civilization. A glitch, an error, an interruption becomes the answer to deciphering the language of my ancestors. For weeks I tie myself into knots as I reflect on the fact that perhaps it is only due to the glitch of coloniality that we can understand our past. How can we be glitched bodies when I am only ever able to witness myself through coloniality? Egyptian hieroglyphics and our ability to understand them become so tied to our understanding of Greek, the language of an imperial force at the time. Is my understanding of a language that belonged to my ancestors nothing more than an accessory glitch of an oppressive system? And if so,

18 Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London: Verso, 2020), 25.

19 I can’t help but think about the Mars Rover here, Opportunity. How it died because of a sand storm.

20 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-181.

is Russel’s manifesto an airy radical belief? Can we ever truly distribute hegemonic structures when we are exclusively defined and understood by them? Is there no clarity of the Black and Brown self beyond our understanding of whiteness? Does the concept of self-identity become irrelevant?

So, this is what a pit of despair feels like. I was on a plane coming back from Egypt almost tearing up talking to May about this because really what was the point? Why was I making work when everything is forever tinged with the ways I am erred into existence? May–wonderful May–tells me that perhaps to glitch is to interrupt, a purposeful interjection in a system that could destroy it or mutate it. With each glitch, with each error, with each interruption, a new future is formed. The universe in many ways is forever seeking entropy and chaos. Our need for systems that govern order is the furthest thing from the natural order. To err is to be alive. To err is to serve disorder in the ways it begs to exist. Colonial systems require a lack of shifting. However, natural orders assume a constant repositioning and break in the rhythm. While colonial structures reject this change of rhythm, natural order embraces it. The Brown Queer Self exists and survives with the knowledge that it must collapse the unchangeable oppressive structures it inhabits. Which is to say, Russel is onto something after all.

ON PERFORMANCE, DISCOMFORT, AND BEING WORTHY

A FOREWORD BY MAY NEMAT ALLAH

I’ve always loved text more than I ever loved performance.

Text is stable, constant, and primary. It is structured and yet provides a system with which unique realities and unique experiences can be formed within the reader. Text is specific and based on centuries upon centuries of linguistic minutiae and poetic rhetoric. It only made sense for me to pursue the theatrical arts; what is theatre but the translation and transformation of my beloved texts on a stage?

Performance, however, took it a step too far.

David E.R. George posits that if theatre is the translation of a written dramatic text, then performance is a one-off of that transformation, a twice-removed ‘betrayal’ of the original text. 21 Performance is fundamentally ephemeral, chaotic, unstable. Performance possesses no concrete epistemology (the study of knowledge and how to obtain it) or ontology (the study of the nature of being and all that is or exists). Too singular, too unrepeatable, too unforeseen. There is no unique performance that a performer creates; the simple action of performing simultaneously evokes others as it lives on in spectators’ heads- the choices made by the performer vs. the infinite paths never taken. The very act of performing creates comparisons, and

comparisons prevent closure.

But performance also demands we take up space. Performance demands we announce our existence out loud, insists that our iteration of the narrative deserves to be witnessed. It relishes in anticipation and discovery, in interacting with the physical self of audiences and allowing their reactions to mold it into something unique and meaningful every single time.

The problem with performance being a demand to take up time and space, however, is that artists love self-flagellation.

We will sit and ponder our worthiness until we are blue in the face and there is sick staining our clothes. We will doubt, and hate, and deny our most fundamental human rights to exist, to create, to love, to witness, to shadow, to breathe, to birth. We will stab knives through our sculptures, scream at our words in complete and abject frustration, wish our own filthy, undeserving feet had never stepped foot on a stage. Our work will never be special enough, good enough, worthy enough to have reared its ugly head. An artist can and will live their whole life wallowing in selfpity and whipping their spirit into complete and utter submission. We will rarely (or even ever) stop and wonder who wins? Who wins when I sit there and doubt my right to be alive?

In “The Empty Ritual”, Eugenio Barba says we find theatre and

21 David E.R. George, “Performance Epistemology,” Performance Research, One, no. 1 (1996): 16–25.

enter the world of performance because of an initial impulse, a wound, trauma that triggers movement. 22 What happens when art isn’t born from a wound, from a lesion, from severe and utter pain? What happens when it is born from love, joy, utter gratitude at having been given a chance to create and share? What happens when artists tie their self-esteem not to their accomplishments and services but to unconditional self-worth, loving their souls for the simple fact that they exist?

I hated performance only because I thought it was shameful to present. I thought it was mortifying to be known, to commit the sinful act of spectacle. I enjoyed nothing more than indulging in the classic artistic ritual of self-flagellation. But I want to be seen. I want to be heard. I want to be loved, and cherished, and hated, and cursed. I want to be known even if it is not good, even if I stumble and stutter, and snort through laughter. And I want to perform. I deserve to perform. I am worthy simply because I am. And I vow to spend the rest of my life begging others to believe the same.

22 Eugenio Barba, On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House (London: Routledge, 2010).

I’ve been telling people I’m in my discomfort era, which is to say I’ve been making work that decenters the audience’s comfort from the work to allow them access to a more sensual experience.

This feels like a strange turn for my practice due to my history with building a practice of care. Care practices, at least in a Canadian Art canon, are always grappling with how to transform institutional colonial spaces into spaces of care and anti-colonial efforts. It is a hefty goal but one that I once sought to create with my work.

. These conversations around care became important to me because the internet was important to me, and I felt most cared for on the internet. In a world that didn’t want my carnality, the performance of existing on the internet allowed me to be worthy of a life. Around the same time I was having these ruminations around my practice, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity , sent its final message to Earth: my battery is low and it’s getting dark. 23

With over 15 years of service exploring Mars, Opportunity was

faced with a sand storm that was one of the worst we have witnessed. A storm so violent it drained the rover of its power and covered its solar panels, preventing it from charging itself. The rover’s final words were shared on social media to mark the end of a solitary machine’s life, only for thousands of people to mourn Opportunity in one of the most grief-ridden humanrobot interactions in our history. In many ways, Opportunity’s message, when poured onto the internet, triggered a collective mourning that was rooted in care. Folks created everything from fanfiction, to poetry, to love letters, to comics, and fanart lamenting an unknown android experiencing something humans are intimately familiar with.

I had wondered at the time if I could translate what the internet was feeling. In a moment where we were mourning metal and binary code, how did the internet stand as a mechanism of amassing grief? What was the internet going through? Could it tell me? How can I collect the feelings of the internet in ways that echo our collective and individual experiences? Algorithms can become analogues to translation

23 The thing they don’t tell you about reaching for the end of your life is that you are almost always filled with an absurd deal of disappointment. So much of childhood is a loaded, perhaps unfairly, with hope for a future that will hold you together, and then one day, whether it be when you’re twelve or when you’re twenty-three or when you’re fifty-nine, you look in the mirror and find it all a little lacking. You wonder if it’s ever going to happen. If you are ever going to be known beyond the person looking back at you. If ever you were going to stop carrying your childhood around like a mistake you can’t forgive yourself for. If ever you were going to taste the promised sublime that everyone keeps harping about. Reaching for the end of your life, whenever it happens, and it happens for all of us, some a little bit more insistent than others, the reaching, I think it’s just. Disappointing. That’s all. Just disappointing. You just thought it was all going to be a little more than this and. In a sudden burst of self-awareness that you are not particularly known for, you realize that you’re not going to get anything out of this life this time around. See? See? Disappointing.

and language—communicating the emotion of the internet in a tongue human beings can understand.

Feeding grief and care into the internet resulted in more grief and care being shared, exemplifying the cyclical relationship between our human and digital realities. The question became: how do we instigate this cyclical exchange in a much more intentional manner? I believed the answer lied in unveiling the internet’s emotion as something that can be affected by us. Grief for grief, joy for joy, care for care. If we create a narrative focused on being in community with the internet, on how the internet reciprocates care, then we are bound to create a much more nuanced and kinder digital space. We must also, perhaps more importantly, attach worth to the spectacles of living. How do I consider the internet’s worth, a robot’s worth, if I don’t allow myself to watch the performance of its life and deem it as worthy of my attention? 24

Now, I can’t help but see this past vision as a naive one. Watching a genocide from your phone changes the way you’re willing to make. I’m realizing that for care to manifest we must pinpoint the ways in which care does

not occur. To repair, we must acknowledge the rupture.

Underpinned by Marx’s conviction that to be sensuous is to suffer, I have started inviting my audience to settle into discomfort as a form of communalist care and witnessing. I invite them to excise pejorative connotations from framings of suffering by rooting them in a doctrine of mutualism. To suffer, then, is to burden and be burdened; to witness is to be witnessed. This assertion of the sensuousness of the self being interlinked with the sensuousness of the collective echoes liberationist sentiments that makeup the ether of our everyday beliefs and praxis: we cannot be free if we are not all free. I burden my audience with the grief of our collectivity. I burden them with the witnessing. I invite them towards suffering, which is to say I invite them towards sensuousness.

While I still think it’s beholden to a care politic, I no longer believe my practice is about comfort. With this distinction, I became wary of how I can make a practice that decenters comfort but also highlights accessibility. Burdening and discomforting don’t negate access (one can even argue that discomfort and burdening beget access). While

24 I have not stopped asking myself, “Am I worthy?”. Am I worthy of being alive? Of this much luck? I can’t be grateful because I feel like I’m living someone else’s life, someone who deserves this because I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t want a life where I felt so much. Where every night I would perform a biopsy on the person I’ve become and note down all the things missing. I deserve so little of this and yet and yet and yet. Do I deserve this? A terrifying, horrifying thought because it would be so much easier if I don’t. Then I can just sit with that. But God. I think. More than anything. I’m so terrified that I do. I’m so terrified that I do deserve this. That I deserve a life where I am rested and joyful, and caring, and loved, and, and, and I’m not sure I deserve to be loved but maybe, God. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m waiting for the joy to end. Because it is bound to. Maybe it’s not about whether I am worthy of this or if I’m deserving of this, maybe, maybe, maybe I’ve just been looking for something to let me allow myself to cry this whole time.

building these experiences, the accessibility of the projects becomes an even more crucial part of constructing this new ethic of discomfort. So, when considering the making of my pieces, I tried to also hold how this work would, and could, be made accessible for a larger audience, to allow them the space to experience with the least amount of obstacles possible.

Access activator, disability dramaturg and editor of Interdependent Magic: Disability Performance in Canada Jessica Watkin speaks to this notion in a much more eloquent manner in the following quote:

And this is where I coined the term, the terminology, the phrasing, of ease of access. Relaxed Performance doesn’t mean you as an audience member, are relaxed. Relaxed Performance means we’re relaxing the performance. So, you can have ease of engagement. And my supervisor really pushed me on this topic. She’s like, if it’s [about] ease, isn’t it easy? I said, no. Ease means smooth. It means without resistance. It means you have ease of accessing the story and the narrative. It doesn’t mean it’s easy to hold. 25

When I think about how a work performs, I consider this notion of a Relaxed Performance.

Bojana Videkanic, one of my beloved mentors and an incredible performance artist in her own right, often spoke to me about performance. All work is performance. All the pieces, the process, the making is performance. Even more than that, the living is the performance. The waking up in the morning, the eating, the knitting, the watching, the holding, the sobbing. To live is to perform. I have never navigated my practice the same way after she taught me that lesson. To live is to perform. To be alive is our ultimate performance piece. 26

Creating a performance then becomes about easing the audience into discomfort. Building performances and performative objects becomes an act of repairing the audience’s nature with art viewing. To ease their experience with artwork is to allow them insight into why it is difficult to hold it.

I am in my discomfort era because I am starting to believe that an ethics of care is what got me here. As I watch the slaughter of Palestinians on my phone, I am reminded that there are not enough art gestures in the world that can fix this. No poetry, tender rendering, nor affect can make the performance of a Palestinian life worth this. I am in my discomfort era because otherwise my anger will consume

25 Sama Nemat Allah, Zoom conversation with Jessica Watkin, October 18, 2023.

26 Bojana used to say that my performance personas were particularly mean. She talked about them as if they were separate from me. She used to point at me and tell me, “all this kindness will kill you one day. The terribleness is bleeding into the performances”. I used to laugh at her and say there was nothing kind about me and I am in fact quite mean. I think she was the only one who ever truly believed me.

me. It must go somewhere. I was once told that I should be careful with where my practice was heading because it seemed like I wanted my audience to be in pain, and art should be about beauty. And maybe some art is meant to be beautiful. But I’m more interested in compelling us to confront ourselves in the mirror and question whether we are willing to squander our limited time permitting those in power to strip away everything that holds value from us, all while unwittingly furnishing them with the means to do so.

ON REVELATION, THE APOCALYPSE, AND LIFE BEYOND DEATH

A FOREWORD BY LAMIAA MOHAMED

Today is April 3, 2024 and there is a total eclipse happening in five days. My friends and I are planning to see it because Eel always believes that miracle happenings must be witnessed and I happen to agree.

There are hundreds of people on TikTok claiming to have had prophetic dreams about the 2024 eclipse and how, with its arrival, we will bear witness to the fulfillment of a biblical apocalyptic prophecy. 27 While I don’t believe that a religious end of time will befall us in the next week, I understand the need to see the apocalypse in everything the universe seems to be offering me and I am by no means the only one.

In his The Guardian article, “‘End of the World Vibes’: Why Culture can’t Stop Thinking about Apocalypse”, Dorian Lynskey talks about our obsession with ends and how we love to talk about the death of this and the fall of that, and to boast that we are there to witness it. We do like to feel special. He speaks to the fact that we are by no means the first or only generation to be obsessed with how we will end. Perhaps we believe that we will be the final chapter because we can’t imagine a world that will not hold us.

Almost 45 years ago, Lebanese American poet Etel Adnan wrote the book-length poem The Arab Apocalypse, which I find to be

especially prescient. In 1980, Adnan writes about America’s crumbling empire, meanwhile the American dollar crashes in February 2024, writes about Palestinians in foul waters , and for days online we witness images of Palestinians wading through the Mediterranean Sea attempting to receive aid dropped by Jordan and France in the blockaded Gaza strip. An excerpt from the poem reads:

In the dark irritation of the eyes there is a snake hiding

In the exhalations of Americans there is a crumbling empire

In the foul waters of the rivers there are Palestinians OUT OUT of its borders pain has a leash on its neck

In the wheat stalks there are insects vaccinated against bread

In the Arabian boats there are sharks shaken with laughter

In the camel’s belly there are blind highways OUT OUT of TIME there is spring’s shattered hope

In the deluge on our plains there are no rains but stones 28

This poem felt like it existed outside the construct of time, almost like a prophecy. Yet, Adnan wrote this poem in response to, and in the immediate context of, the Lebanese Civil War, which broke out in 1975. I am overwhelmed by the simultaneity of the poem’s functions; it becomes both an archive of her moment and a prophetic outlook on the one I am

27 “Post-Apocalyptic Solar Eclipse Dreams,” TikTok, accessed April 3, 2024, https://www. tiktok.com/discover/post-apocalyptic-solar-eclipse-dreams.

28 Adnan, Etel. Arab Apocalypse. Page 211.

living through. Two apocalypses, 45 years apart. I return to this gesture often as I watch Palestinians genocided, as I watch as another Flour Massacre occurs.

On Thursday February 29, 2024, at 2:30 GMT, aid trucks carrying flour were believed to be on the way to Harun al-Rashid Street in Gaza. As people gathered in large groups waiting for the much-needed aid, they were shot at by all kinds of military equipment, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reported from Rafah. 29 Adnan writes a poem of violence, of endings, of terror that invites you to be terrified of her, for her, and for others–stitching herself into your experiences. In doing so, the text becomes a disaster in the process of witnessing disaster.

We keep predicting the end of the world because we can’t imagine surviving the one we are currently experiencing. Every media we are offered, every zombie movie, every show, every animation seems to be predicating a never-ending list of ends. The apocalypse has become a constant of our living. I understand the urge to look at the world and see it as a large ball of fire that desperately needs to be put out. I’m not a doomer or whatever the latest pejorative is. I’m not predicting the end of the world because I think we’re already living it.

In moments like these when I am

overwhelmed with the complexity and weight of language and how we navigate it, when a word starts to become larger than its meaning, I always return to its etymology. Apocalypse comes from Greek apokálypsis uncovering , a derivative of the verb apokalýptein to take the cover off , a compound whose first element is the preposition and prefix apó, apo- off, away The preposition apó is distantly related to Latin ab away from , Sanskrit ápa away, and English off and of.

Apocalypse means uncovering for the sake of revelation. In the past, I’ve reflected on death and grief as ends that I am unable to unravel. To die is to disappear. To die is to leave behind the ones who spoke your language, leaving them tripping and tongue tied. Death, in my ways, became a stand in for how I navigate my relationships. We will all die, and therefore I must enjoy the current state of affairs and never commit myself to a future I cannot perceive or imagine. But my practice has never allowed me the grace of my pessimism. My writing practice became about hopeful unexistings:

29 Al Jazeera, “Flour Massacre: How Gaza Food Killings Unfolded and Israel’s Story Changed,” accessed March 1, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/1/flour-massacre-howgaza-food-killings-unfolded-and-israels-story-changed.

I think about how we refer to people in the past tense, how when my great grandfather left for the last time, we all said “he was such a kind man” as if he had ceased to be kind just by his lack of attendance, even though the tree he watered every single day for 30 years still bears us fruit, how on his birthday the persimmons taste (somehow) like grief, I wonder if they know he’s not the one who waters them anymore (perhaps they do), for what is death but a condition that we are presently in (albeit being a more permanent sort), what is death but a house on the meadows that I cannot find the time to go to (there is no time anymore), what is it but an attic in a long game of hide and seek, one that holds all the ones I love, where one day I will stumble on it and they will smile and ask me what took me so long, (perhaps that’s why when you die, I will not refer to you in the past tense, there is nothing past about this hurt, nothing past about the way your eyes soften when you see me, nothing past about the plates I still set years later (grief is love that we do not know how to let go of), darling you will not unexist to me, for I am forever shifting because of you, changed by your presence and changed by your absence, forever eating fruit that tastes bitter but feels like love, you will not unexist here, for there is everything to this and, nothing past about it.

My visual practice has been taking a similar life of its own because yes, the world is burning, and I am a part of it. I am coming to terms with the fact that the work is pushing me to see the apocalypse as a reaching for the revelation of liberation. Death will become us, and when it does, it will not be an ending. I’ve been building funerals for the living to allow them a path for an afterlife of which I am sure exists. Everywhere I look, the apocalypse is upon us, but everywhere I look, it also asks us for a revelation. I am not so jaded that I cannot see that for the lifeline it is.

Egyptians have believed beyond the death in every part of their living. Much of their fears lied in not reaching beyond the viel. To be good during life means to get a chance at a second fuller existence. The Book of the Dead is a testament to an obsession with funerary rights and for the life of the beyond.

In Chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead, the names and origins of the Assessors of Maat are solemnly inscribed, their presence both earthly and ethereal. Each deity stands as arbiter, bearing witness to the soul’s declaration of innocence, a fervent plea to avoid damnation for transgressions against justice and truth. Amidst the divine assembly, the deceased stands in the hallowed presence of Osiris, guided by the vigilant Anubis, the psychopomp. With solemn resolve, the soul recites the Negative Confessions , proclaiming absolution from

the 42 sins , each ascribed to a vigilant Judge of Maat. Upon the sacred scales, the heart, vessel of the soul’s essence, is measured against the weight of Maat’s feather, symbolizing truth, and cosmic order. Should equilibrium prevail, the path to eternal life, marked by the honorific justified , unfolds before the justified one. Yet, should the heart falter, burdened by the weight of wrongdoing, the Devourer, fearsome guardian of divine justice, claims its toll, consuming the errant soul.

This psychostasia, an evocative tableau of moral reckoning, not only embodies the ancient Egyptian ethos but also echoes the profound moral imperatives of human conscience. Within the Negative Confessions lies not merely divine dictum, but a mirror reflecting the moral fabric of existence, each declaration a testament to the timeless pursuit of righteousness and truth, transcending the bounds of mortal decree.

42 Sins Until Midnight was made with the above funerary ritual as a centering force. As I end my time here at Cranbrook, I was certain that I wanted to involve a moment of revelation in a piece of work. The Negative Confession is told to be a tailored rite of passage. Each sin would be tailored to the person receiving it. I wondered what my sins would be? Which ones would I be guilty of? When I told Cy–one of my best friends and collaborators– about this, they said that it reminded them of the Doomsday Clock. Every January

in recent decades, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set the hands of the Doomsday Clock—a graphic illustration of how close the planet is to the civilizationending disaster symbolized by midnight. 30

I introduced the Vestaboard, a motorized letter machine that can be controlled from your phone–a mixing of the contemporary notions of a thing that spits out predictions based on arbitrary forms of communication. Cy and I built a system where ChatGPT creates sins and presents it to the audience. I then inserted 42 different responses that would be randomly assorted with the sins created by the AI. I was interested in this moment of death and the encounter of the aftermath. When we encounter the larger-than-life Vestaboard and its algorithm–the thing stopping us from accessing the afterlife–we witness a judgment of this machine. This judgment offers this ongoing placement of sin upon us, and my responses continue to feed this never-ending conversation.

Every death to the Egyptians was another form of an apocalypse in that it was a revelation of the beyond and a reckoning with the self and the sins it carries. Truth and justice are both arbitrary and didactic but it allowed for a questioning to occur in how one navigated the world.

I am held by this revelation.

Held by the ways it pushes us

towards navigating the ways we do not exist in liberation of one another in this life. To be witnessed in the afterlife is to allow yourself to be known; to be allowed to live beyond death, something I’ve been seeking and will continue seeking for my kin for far longer that my life will allow me to live it.

In death we end and in death we begin.

30 “The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,” Introduction: What you can do to turn back the hands of the clock. January 2024. Accessed April 11, 2024. https://thebulletin.org/premium/2024-01/ introduction-what-you-can-do-to-turn-back-the-hands-of-the-clock/#post-heading.

ON GOODBYES

A FOREWORD

BY SAMA NEMAT ALLAH

I spent my childhood memorizing Du’as to appease my Arabic school teacher, my mad mind, and God. My subconscious is an ever-rotating rolodex of invocations. I say one before I leave the house and one when I’m home. I say one before I begin my meal and one when I’ve taken my last bite. There’s a miscellany of supplications for cataclysmic events, for changes in weather, for receiving good news and bad news, for fear of the oppression of rulers. My favourite Du’a, though, is one my father taught me to say every night before falling asleep:

In Your name my Lord, I lie down and in Your name I rise. The most intimate of prostrations; A prayerful cleanse; An acknowledgment that this flesh is not my own, that I do not get to decide on the temporality of its tenancy.

My father tells me that in case I didn’t wake up, were those to be my last words, I could die in a state of divinity.

When I am 12, and suicidality calls to me for the first time (much like an invocation), I cannot find a Du’a to lustrate the process.

My father notices the way I am looking for endings everywhere, so he tells me a story about a man that ends his own life and is denied access to the heavens as punishment. I do not believe

him. But he goes home in a few weeks so I let him make tea for his youngest daughter until then.

Most of my life has been spent imagining a dead Otherwise. Every poem is written in the past tense. I am numb to talks of futurity. I mourn bad meals, sunny days spent indoors, conversations where I couldn’t make someone laugh—it always feels like the last day, the last time, the last chance.

But then Palestinian resistance fighters break through barricade walls and I want to be there to see their body/mind/lands free.

I write eulogies for myself and forget about them when I get on a call with my sisters. We play broken telephone and I get to grow old.

I cancel plans with Jamil because my body feels too liquid to move but I want to eat mangoes surrounded by Egyptian incense on their apartment floor again, so we reschedule instead.

I mail out posthumous love letters to Elysia but wait for her reply each time. She sends me stickers and tea and asks me questions that stick to me like glue.

Everything starts sounding like Not yet. Everyone starts speaking dialects of Wait. Joy is coming. Contentment is coming. Liberation is coming. You can go if you have to. We’ve written you into our futures anyway.

Still, I cling onto my suicidality with a viselike grip. I think she’s the most perennial part about me. She yearns for abundance, asks more from the world, howls when

it does not offer more. She is my fulcrum for she is always unruly, always hungry, always dreaming. She seeks death, yes. But only in defense of life. May I grow to be as unshrinking. InshAllah. Ameen.

In a turn of events that is a surprise to no one, I am terrible at goodbyes. I am obsessed with figuring out a way out of death and beyond it because I cannot contain the grief of it all. I cannot hold the love I have remaining from the people that have left me. Yet I love them anyway. Yet I hold the grief anyway.

I hesitated so much here, not knowing what to write to conclude this thesis, almost to the point of not wanting to write anything at all. But Marina told me that I really should close the body that I’ve opened.

If you’ve read up to this point, I am so grateful for you. Knowing that this might be read by people makes my face heat up but I’m learning to let myself be seen through the discomfort.

Writing this book took a village. Editing it took a village. Loving me through it took a village. This wouldn’t have existed without the community and spine of people that made this come together. From late night chats to sending images of my work and writing endless forewords, I am so overwhelmed by these people.

My last work here was a small vase filled with poppies, olive oil, and vinegar, situated in a hidden haven on Cranbrook grounds. Nearby, an Athan clock that announces the call for prayer five times a day. My first work during this time was also placed beside the bog so it felt right to return to another bog once more.

This piece came to me like a poem. I thought about the goodbyes I couldn’t voice. The people I’ve left behind and the ones that have left me behind. I’ve thought about the past two years and how they still read like a dream I can’t decipher.

I’ve thought about Palestinians, buried under the rubble, not even allowed a proper burial. How do the dead pray when they cannot return to the soil?

I don’t know.

I do know however that the atlas is the first vertebra in the spine. It’s what allows your head to move and nod. The beginning of the protection. I think about my sister, her cheek pressing into my collarbone, right underneath my chin, my atlas moving me to rest my head on hers. I think about Atlas, how condemned he was to hold up the heavens and sky for eternity. How we name our bones based on the gods that echo them. How my head, thinking about death and grief and my sister, feels at times like carrying the heavens.

But perhaps it is much simpler than that. For even with all this burdening, my spine still moves me. It still pushes and pulls and protects. It still carries me. This practice pulls and pushes and protects and still carries me. Which is to say this ending only exists if I cease burdening you with my witnessing and my existing.

Which is to say, this is not a goodbye at all.