Volume 2: Bodies

Copyright Š 2021 Reconstructed.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Reconstructed except for the use of quotations in book review or related noncommercial uses or features. For permission requests, please reach out to Reconstructed via website.

ISBN: 978-1-7364420-0-5 Front cover image by Alia Ali. Book design by Lameesa Mallic.

First printing edition 2021. www.reconstructedmag.com

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VOLUME 2: BODIES FROM THE BIOMEDICAL TO THE SPIRITUAL, OUR UNDERSTANDINGS OF BODIES— HUMAN, DIGITAL, DIVINE, OR OTHERWISE—ARE UNBOUNDED.

BODIES AS ARCHIVES, AS BORDERS, AS BEARERS AND HEALERS, AS THE PHYSICALITY OF OUR ESOTERISM, AS VESSELS OF MIGRATION, AS BRIDGES BETWEEN SELF AND OTHER, AS ANCESTRAL DOCUMENTATION, AS CREATION. BODIES AS DEPARTURE, BODIES AS YEARNING, BODIES AS HOME.

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CHAPTER ONE

AZZAH SULTAN SHAHEER ZAZAI AYQA KHAN GOLNAR ADILI SADIYAH BASHIR WESAAM AL-BADRY ARNELA MAHMUTOVIĆ ANONYMOUS

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MINA AKIDA HEND AL-MANSOUR SAAD MOOSAJEE DHAN ILLIANI YUSOF, SHARINA SHAHRIN, AND AMANI AZLIN KECIA ALI ESTHER ELIA SULTAN A. ISFAHAN

Azzah Sultan Growing up in Malaysia, our culture and customs are significant areas of familial focus. It is important to not lose touch of who we are—the rite of passage to transfer knowledge is traditionally passed from one generation to next.

Anak Dara is a Malay term that translates to "a young and unmarried child." It is a term of endearment my mother often uses.

Here Anak Dara is an ode to the diaspora leaving home and the journey to recover what was lost through materiality, performance, and the power of my mother’s voice.

Melipat, Anak Dara Series (2020), Canvases, batik fabric, acrylic paint

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Membalut, Anak Dara Series (2020), Wooden boxes, batik fabric, 3 tube TVs, tikar mat and rugs

Bungkus, Part of Membalut, Anak Dara Series, Film

Gelang, Part of Membalut, Anak Dara Series, Film

Tudung Ibu, Part of Membalut, Anak Dara Series, Film

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AZZAH SULTAN

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Shaheer Zazai

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Shaheer Zazai is a Toronto-based Afghan-Canadian artist. His current studio practices—both as a painter and a digital new media artist—attempt to investigate social and cultural development throughout history and the constant re-examination and reconstruction of identity. His work explores the effects of displacement, hybridization, and appropriation as a result of technological advances. The digital works revolve around imagery drawn from traditional Afghan carpets, constructed in Microsoft Word.

MFPTN1 (2019), Detail

SHAHEER ZAZAI

MFPTN1 (2019), Produced in Microsoft Word, Print on watercolor paper, 22x17 in 9

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Through mimicking carpet-making methods, Zazai creates his own designs in Microsoft Word, where every knot of a carpet is translated into a typed character.

44NS10F (2019), Produced in Microsoft Word, Print on watercolor paper, 22x17 in 11

Ayqa Khan’s interdisciplinary practice is united by one theme—alignment. In her fabric paintings, mehndi tattoos, photographs, dream-like drawings, sculptures, and more, Khan channels a deep, ritualistic connection with the collective. This collection of scarves, Alignment (2020), bloomed from her alignment tattoo practice, rooted in the desire for inner-peace in her own life and the lives of those who engage with trust and openness in this communal adornment practice.

AYQA KHAN

VOL 2KHAN AYQA

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AYQA KHAN

Verbs from the 14th Century Persian poet’s poem, Samanbouyan (the Jasmine Scented Ones), set to pixelated typography and made into pattern.

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Golnar Adili

Barbandand (They Are Bound) (2015), Silk screen on two layers of Rayon Japanese lens, 24x36 in

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The images printed on the six sides of the cubes reference documentation from the years 1979 to 1981, when my family migrated back to Iran from the US until the time my father escaped Iran for fear of persecution due to his activism.

Family History Wood Block Book is inspired by my toddler’s play blocks.

For the past decade I have been deconstructing and reconstructing materials and imagery relating to my family history through mining my late father’s archive of letters, photos and printed matter.

Family History Wood Block Book (2018), Transfer on paper, beeswax, 4x6x1.5 in

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These blocks are housed inside a box which opens flat. The book cloth covering the box carries the print of the airplane ticket which I found in my late father’s archive referencing his trip from Madrid to the US as the last leg of a long journey from Iran.

When the box is closed the airplane hugs the blocks, keeping the events inside until the next time they unravel to tell a visual story of how a family was affected by larger political shifts.

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22 Benshinand-Benshaanand Landscape (As They Sit They Settle) (2018), 3D resin print, 14x9x1.5 in

In this piece I investigate the words “benshinand” and “benshaanand”, to sit and to seat something or someone, formally. I have designed the typography of these words in pixels to alleviate questions of calligraphy and to infuse them with a contemporary read.

To draw attention to their similarity and form, I criss-cross the verbs, creating architecture and suggesting urban space.

Saman Bouyan (The Jasmine Scented Ones) Original Drawing (2009), Graphite on graph paper, 24x36 in

GOLNAR ADILI

Saman Bouyan (The Jasmine Scented Ones) Process photo (2015), 3D resin print

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From Your Heart to My Heart There Are References (2008), 1/4 in museum board strips hand-cut and layered, 22x53x11 in

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Sadiyah Bashir took to poetry at a young age as a means of self-expression. Ten years later, she is a two-time youth Grand Slam champion who has showcased her poetry across platforms, including Al-Jazeera, UNICEF, Penny Appeal, and Apple. She recently published a book, Seven, which explores trauma and triumph through the lens of Black Muslim womanhood.

My Body, the Sepulcher

BY SADIYAH BASHIR

The first time I got my period, I left my worn pad on the bathroom counter, My mother said no man wanted to see my blood So why do they bare their teeth when they speak to me?

The first time a grown man wanted to take me out I was seven.

My mother gave my body a prayer for a funeral, Modesty, My mother's synonym for fear.

Here we make hijab a bandage built for a hemorrhage.

In my mind I hear my mother’s voice before I hear my own And I hate my body with it, Like she hates that my body grew faster than my mouth And thicker than her knife She makes me watch every news segment featuring someone’s daughter who got raped, molested or turned a catacomb.

I do not tell her all my friends have lost their virginity by hellfire.

I do not tell her I returned burning.

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Wesaam Al-Badry Photographer and writer Wesaam Al-Badry (b. 1984, Nasiriyah, Iraq) examines Western consumerism’s influence on traditional Muslim culture. When Al-Badry was seven years old, at the outset of what became known as the Gulf War, his mother fled on foot with her five children, including his three-day-old sister. They arrived at a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia, where they stayed for four years. In 1994, Al-Badry and his family were relocated to Lincoln, Nebraska. As a young man growing up in Middle America, Al-Badry fiercely felt the disconnect between his experiences in Iraq, the refugee camps, and his new American reality.

Ephemerality (2018), Poem and photograph

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It’s forged in Russia in China and elsewhere It comes via cargo planes and dusty lorry trucks It comes in all sizes for all ages in the name of peace in exchange you’ll pick up the pieces I got mine at the age of six— was I happy?

It comes to sculpt new canons to create new chapters and scars It comes to create a new symphony the wailing of its magnificent music makes the orphans and widows sing in harmony— the maestro hands them out in dozens.

It comes to create martyrs in the name of God country, and freedom— to build their fabled empires and thrones But they forget their time is ephemeral.

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Al Kouture UNVEILS THE CONTRADICTION BETWEEN CULTURAL,

RELIGIOUS, CONSUMER, AND CORPORATE INTERESTS THROUGH INVESTIGATING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE COMMODITY FETISH OBJECT AS A SYMBOL OF MODERNITY. BY TOYING WITH SYMBOLISM, EMULATION, AND CONSUMERISM, AL-BADRY BOTH QUESTIONS THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FABRIC AND ASKS,

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“Would the Western World accept the niqab if it were on the racks of luxury fashion designers?”

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WESAAM AL-BADRY

Hermes #VIII (2018)

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Gucci #VII (2018)

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Chanel #VII (2018)

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ARNELA MAHMUTOVIĆ

Arnela Mahmutović Surrender to the Story of Your Hands (2019), Oil and graphite on canvas, 65x45 in

What Marvelous Route Did You Take From This World?

(2019), Oil and graphite and gold leaf on panel, 36x24 in

Adonis (2019), Oil, graphite, wax crayon and gold leaf on canvas, 46x34 in

Drum Tap (2019), Oil and graphite on canvas, 65x45 in 35

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As a first generation Bosniak-American, I am interested in the displaced body and how its function shifts when living between cultures. Much of my inspiration comes from old Islamic manuscripts, Balkan tradition, and my personal histories and narratives. Through painting, my goal is to explore the lineages and evolutions of these influences in relation to each other.

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The body plays a crucial role in this relationship—the painted figure serves as a vessel of representation of self and other. The veiled bodies in my work are anonymous forms that also allude to the spiritual. By placing them in different environments, I am constantly de-contextualizing them from their origin, much like displaced and relocated bodies in migration both physically and socially. Ultimately, the spaces I construct only offer some level of context.

The rest can only be questioned, assumed, or projected.

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Golden Lily (2019), Oil, graphite, wax crayon and gold leaf on canvas, 46x34 in 37

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DISPLACEMENT

Displacement is my mother's joint pain; the knee support she wears. But she still winces from the stinging sensation of pain when she finally lies down after coming back from work, where her co-workers started working at the age of 18, and she at 50. She spends over nine hours on her feet daily, smiling, cleaning, and questioning her broken English when selling to one woman after another. But even still, she does not hit the daily sale goal for her capitalist department store that pins its retail workers against each other like competitors in a tournament. On those days, my mother won't talk to me much when she comes home—she's floating in the anxiety of losing her job. She doesn't tell me this, but I

This piece understands bodies through the perspective of migration and displacement. Both the physical displacement of bodies from one locality to another—a Homeland to a Hostland—while also reading the symptoms of displacement in the bodies of migrants. These symptoms stem, in part, from the ways in which parents sacrifice their own health and

ANONYMOUS

My mother says her knees can't lose her this job because my father's income would not suffice. It comes from self-disciplined 8-hour shifts of driving in the blazing California sun, working through a food delivery app. A job that he treats seriously, waking up early, dressing up, leaving at the same time every day, taking his lunch at a specific time, and repeat—it's not too hard on his heart.

The one with a pacemaker, his signature sound. I hear the chk chk chk chk of it approaching before I even hear the sound of his footsteps or his breathing. I hear the chk chk chk chk like the sound of a ticking bomb, and I wonder if there was a ticking timer on the bombs that would shower the streets of Tehran in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war and shake my mother’s then-healthy knees as she waited in the lobby of the hospital for my father's second, but not last, open-heart surgery. Only two years into their marriage. When my mother was only two years older than I currently am. Before she knew the displaced fate of her own body and that of my father.

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know from the particular way that she stares into space while pretending to watch TV, her index finger swinging back and forth in the air, outlining numbers as she does hesab ketab for the upcoming bills and doesn't answer when I ask her the same question three times. Eh MAMAN! She snaps out of it.

wellbeing to support their families, oftentimes retreating to jobs that are easier to attain but demand strenuous physical labor. The hardships, traumas, and anxieties of displacement are archived and expressed through the body, whether it manifests physically or otherwise.

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Mina Akida

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Griffintown Centre for Discovery (Conceptual Proposal) (2016), Digital model, Rhinoceros 3D NURBS modelling

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Ceramic Bowl 02 — Ibn Arabi’s Cloud (2017), Wheel-thrown, porcelain clay, glazed, 4.5x4.5 in

Ceramic Bowl 01 — Ibn Arabi’s Cosmos (2017), Wheel-thrown, porcelain clay, glazed, 4.5x4.5 in

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The Temporal Body (2016), Analog photography, Minolta X-700, 35mm film

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MINA AKIDA

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The Absent Body I (2018), Acrylic on canvas, 30x50 in

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Phenomenology has been a valuable methodology for making and research because it employs methods of experience, which focus on notions that are sensorial, perceptive, imaginative, embodied—the emotions and desires which give us bodily awareness. For years, I have been fascinated by rituals; they lend themselves to phenomenal knowing because they employ patterns of motions and actions, often accompanied by liturgical or secular objects. Those actions which humans reproduce with such precision and effervescence, both in collective and singular bodies, emanate embodied memories.

Over the course of my art and subsequent research, I have developed methods of “tracing” to document evidence of the body in ritual. I valourize the ritual as genesis rather than precedent. Performance of those embodied memories provides the space for measure—measuring space, measuring time, measuring movement.

In this three-part series of work, I endeavour to bring to life and decipher the evidence of the acting Islamic body to unpack divine epiphany through the objects of direct experience. I employ art as the tool for revealing the theophanic nature of the Islamic prayer. Beginning with the widely accepted notion that Islamic art is to be iconoclastic, I endeavour to employ techniques to measure the acting Islamic body within the realms of doctrine.

The body was covered in paint, and the cycle of prayers were conducted in accordance with Islamic principles and movements. In the first study, initial contact with the ground is mapped in black acrylic paint on raw canvas. In order to understand the physical space of prostration in Salah (Islamic prayer), the seven parts of the body in prostration are imprinted;

MINA AKIDA

Methodology

The Islamic Messenger of God (pbuh) said: “I have been commanded to prostrate on seven bones: the forehead—and he pointed to his nose—the hands, the knees and the ends of the feet (i.e., toes).” (In the report narrated by al-Bukhaari (812) and Muslim (490) from Ibn ‘Abbaas)

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The Absent Body I (2018), Acrylic on canvas, 30x50 in

(1) In series 01, the artist conducts the cycles of prayer, without invocation (i.e. the pure movements were recorded).

VOL 2 MINA AKIDA

The Absent Body II (2018), Acrylic on canvas, 30x110 in

(2) In series 02, the artist conducts the 5 daily prayers with invocation and appropriate timing and responses (i.e. the prayers were conducted as they would be performed in habitual life).

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The Absent Body III (2018), Acrylic on canvas, 110x70 in

RECONSTRUCTED MINA AKIDA

(3) In series 03, the artist conducts the 5 daily prayers in procession, with a vertical succession towards the centre of Islamic life, Mecca. The artist moves forward a foot’s length after completing each cycle of prayers, in accordance with the Islamic principle; “In moving after every prayer, one will have more of the earth to bear witness for one upon Resurrection in the afterlife.” (Shurunbulali, Maraqi al-Falah) 49

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Hend Al-Mansour’s early years pursued a passion for art. As a child, she carved images of women into sand, filled many sketchbooks with her drawings, and was known as an artist by her peers. Yet she was acutely aware of her limitations—in terms of freedom and status—as a Saudi Arabian woman. At age sixteen, she decided to become a doctor and was accepted into medical school in Cairo, Egypt. She practiced medicine for many years, and became known in the medical community for the large figures she drew and painted in their waiting rooms.

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How would you describe your relationship to Islam?

I feel like I've been thinking about that. I am not a religious person at all. Since I left Saudi Arabia, I feel like Islam is like a parent—something that you have inherited. It’s in your DNA, in your genes, and you cannot change it. Some things you're proud of, some things you argue with, some things you don't like, and some things you celebrate. That's how I feel about it. I celebrate it, but I also criticize it.

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HEND AL-MANSOUR

Do you find that you leverage certain types of practices to celebrate and criticize it?

The way I make images. Art regarding Islamic figures is very, very controversial, and I address that in the images themselves by focusing on gender justice and sexual independence. Sometimes, I represent the “Mothers of the Believers” and how they are holy, powerful, and revered women.

They are wrapped and adorned by Islamic designs, calligraphy, and patterns of henna and sadou, which is a traditional form of Bedouin weaving. Representing them brings to life the idea that these women can lead in political, social, and religious structures. Women as whole humans; I depict them in all of their glory. This is my call.

I grew up in a religious society where sacred stories are revered.

I learned about the “Mothers of Believers,” who were the Prophet’s [(pbuh)] wives. On the one hand, they are revered as goddess-like figures and on the other, they could not have come to their fullness without the Prophet Muhammad [(pbuh)] or without Islam. It’s as if they have risen in-spite of and

above their womanhood. We don’t know as much about them as we do, for example, know about the male “Companions of the Prophet.” But making images is “imagination” and it needs only a few words to come to life. For example, I don’t need to know the whole life story of someone to draw her portrait.

Making a portrait of someone for whom we only have a name or a few words to describe makes her more present—it gives her a tangible authority.

So, I started making portraits of those wives and of other women that I heard and read about.

Is there a specific way that you technically approach creating these feminine forms, especially the ones for whom you don’t have physical references?

I use my mirror and my body as a model, but I don't strive for an exact likeness. I use them to understand shapes, balances, and movements. For example, if I want to have somebody sitting, I want to see what percentage of their torso is showing. Or maybe I’ll dress a certain way, take a photo of myself, and then try to imitate it. And then I stylize it. I like to make it more of a fantasy by centering the feminine form within ornate borders and

flattening the image itself.

It seems like an embodied process.

Yeah, it's a lot of fun. And my dilemma is always choosing the colors. You know, for screen printing, you have to decide on a palette theme and then you have to repeat it. And I can never do that!

I try all the colors just to find out which one feels the best for what is being created. And then I decide I like them all! Oftentimes, I change colors with each print.

I love that. What a wonderful, intuitive process. Is there a color scheme that you're drawn to?

I think so. Henna is my hometown’s unnamed goddess. There, the clash between beauty and austerity paralleled the rivalry between vivid colors of clothes and commodities and the monochrome of the desert. My palette echoes this collision: I work either in vibrant, almost gaudy colors or in monochrome using henna or black and white. Occasionally, I feel like I want to just have a conversation between the line and the image without the interference of colors, so I create a monochromatic piece or the whole image is one color.

That sounds really powerful.

I can imagine that each color evokes different emotions, and themes evolve with various color schemes. Our second volume treats the theme of bodies, and our initial call for submissions attempted to underscore how bodies can mean so many different things for different people.

It can invoke representations of borders, migration, archives.

We have digital bodies, physical bodies, and more. How would you define a body?

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T for Feminine (2010), Mixed media: screen printing, painting, cyanotype, resin and gold leaf, 16x24 in, Edition: 3 variable prints

I see the body as an avatar that you embody and that presents you to the world, but also it reflects yourself back to you.

That’s really rich. It’s powerful to think through what you have agency over, what you don’t, and the relationship that you can have with your own body based on what it vibrates off of. I was really excited to learn that you were a practicing cardiologist, and even had a fellowship with Mayo Clinic. Have your experiences in the biomedical setting informed the way that you represent bodies creatively or the way that you think of embodiment?

INTERVIEW BY ANISSA ABDEL-JELIL

To me, the body is an avatar.

Whoever you are, you have this body that represents you and that you carry through this world. There are parts of it that are imposed upon you that you cannot choose and parts of it that you can change.

It is not totally detached from you or who you are because it also influences who you become and how you relate to yourself and your environments. When you look at your body, it gives you an impression of yourself.

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It must have, especially knowing the physicality of the body, what we look like beneath the surface, and how organs function. Maybe doctors have more time exposure to that, like this is their life. So, knowing the physical meaning of the body—the physical meaning of eating, breathing, or sleeping, you know, those things—must have affected me and my understanding of the body.

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HEND AL-MANSOUR

That’s amazing. I’ve been really moved by the murals and installations that you make at a large scale. How do you decide the scale that you’re going to work with? What does that scale mean to you?

I remember a conversation between my mentor and an artist friend. She wanted to make a large painting, but she was intimidated by the scale. She struggled to create at that size. My mentor told her “everyone has a size and this is your size.” This idea that everyone has a comfort zone or a size resonates with me. I know that if I create a small piece, I feel crowded. I need space to create my details and my lines. As for her, she gets lost in the big space. Maybe it mirrors something inside of us, like when people sometimes shout.

They think that if they shout, they will have their message delivered faster and to a wider audience. But sometimes when you whisper, your message reaches more people.

I love that teaching from your mentor because it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not pushing yourself, but rather it acknowledges that there are certain practices that you might enjoy more or a size that you can really lean into and explore.

It was a good teaching. You just have a size, you know?

I'm excited to see where that goes. Are there particular communities that you feel a part of that either inform your art or help you feel nourished enough to be able to create?

I have a lot of communities.

My inspiration comes from my childhood memories of Hofuf, Saudi Arabia, the women who raised me, and the women in Islam.

Even the Kaaba is a big inspiration to me because I think of it as an unnamed goddess in Islam.

There's incredible symbolism in the Kaaba as a woman. When I go to Saudi Arabia, I see the women in my community more, and I am in touch with what they talk about, how they dress, and how they feel. It brings back memories— my old feelings and frustrations of celebrating and criticizing my environment. I also have a lot of supportive artist friends in the Twin Cities around me. There are such beautiful people and I feel blessed that I am here. It's an incredible place and I didn't choose it; it was my fate. When I immigrated to the United States, I thought that I should go to New York because that's the place for artists, but now I feel that I am so lucky I stayed here.

That’s wonderful to hear. Do you feel like you create for someone or something?

I feel like the audience question is really difficult for me to answer. I think artists, in general, are motivated not first by who is going to see their works, but by something they felt, saw, dreamt, or read. Or simply something that moved them to which they want to react. This is

how it started for me. After I make my pieces, I think “I should wait until this person sees it.” The first person I show my work to is my husband. He doesn't really humor me in his reaction. If he doesn't like it, he says so. I feel a little nervous before I show him, but I don't really change my work. Otherwise, it's not that I choose my audience. I think they form organically.

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Ana (2004), Screen printing on canvas, 35x30 in, Edition: 7 variable prints

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Saad Moosajee

Sanctuary (2018), Computer-generated imagery

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Pyramid Relic (2018), Computer-generated imagery

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“The Continent� is a series of work that documents a utopia of artifact and assemblage. These images belong to a place formed through reconstructing different notions of faith. Through quilt-like assembly and digital generation, each artifact creates a collision of meaning rooted in the visual symbols of the abrahamic religions. I am interested in the potential of computer-generated imagery (CGI) to cross the boundaries of representation into something unseen.

SAAD MOOSAJEE

Shaman Relic (2018), Computer-generated imagery

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lemah lembut

Lemah Lembut is a collaboration between Dhan Illiani Yusof, Sharina Shahrin, and Amani Azlin

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In the Malay language, ‘lemah lembut’ in direct translation means ‘weak and soft,’ often used in relation to desirable, sought-out traits in women.

This collaboration imagines a reformed version of the phrase and constructs a dual-narrative and paradox—a softness that does not break.

DHAN VOL 2ILLIANI YUSOF, SHARINA SHAHRIN, AND AMANI AZLIN

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DHAN VOL 2ILLIANI YUSOF, SHARINA SHAHRIN, AND AMANI AZLIN

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A Hazy Shade of Springtime (2020), Acrylic on canvas, 36x30 in

Kecia Ali is Professor of Religion and current chair of the Religion Department at Boston University.

Primarily a scholar of gender and Islam, she also writes about ethics and popular fiction.

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Art is, for me, embodied practice: material, tangible, immediate. It is a respite. My job requires that I speak, read, write. Scholars prize clarity, precision, logic. Even if the process is messy, our final products must be polished. Defensible. Preferably, unassailable.

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The art I make tries to communicate hand to hand and eye to eye, not brain to brain. I experiment with color and gesture and repetition. I work mostly in acrylic on canvas, sometimes incorporating collage and found objects. I often begin with a desire to see specific colors in juxtaposition or conversation. Sometimes my inspiration is a title, a series of shapes, a feeling or sensation. Sometimes it’s a discarded nothing: a piece of wood or a bit of metal. Occasionally it’s a scrap of text from an old book (The Journey Back II [2016]).

Sometimes I start with only a need to make a mark, to bring something new into existence, to transform matter from potential to actuality. I add on impulse, make gestures, brush wildly, or draw lines. I move through curiosity, pleasure, boredom, excitement, frustration, despair, satisfaction.

Written on the Skin (2018), Acrylic and paint pen on canvas, 8x8 in

KECIA ALI

The Journey Back II (2016), Acrylic and mixed media collage on canvas, 8x8 in

In the midst of our current global crisis, the effects of which fall unequally and by design on marginalized and vulnerable people, making any art at all (A Hazy Shade of Springtime [2020] is a pandemic painting) is a luxury. I try to remind myself that the appropriate response is not to feel guilty about the time and space I have to create, but rather to make it possible for others to do the same.

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I oscillate between movement and rest.

I leave, return, confront results. Leave again. If satisfaction lingers, the painting is done. This is rare. Usually I tinker: add or subtract an element, a color, a line. Sometimes a minor addition or correction becomes a major overhaul.

Sometimes, what seemed compelling turns out to be uninteresting after all.

Hours or days or weeks or months later, I return to the canvas as the base for another round of brush-strokes, palette knife swipes, curlicues with paint markers (as in Written on the Skin [2018]), or other embellishments. In these layered paintings, something of the past always remains: an uneven surface, a hint of fuschia, cracks and shadows that hint at texture. My paintings do not conceal the labor that created them, or their imperfect histories.

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Esther Elia

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Nanajan & Buelah (2019), Poplar and acrylic, 16x18x36, 15x10x15 in

A portrait of my great-grandmother, Nanajan, and her daughter, Buelah. Nanajan became pregnant during the height of the conflict, and birthed Buelah in migration, which included moving from Urmia to Tabriz, crossing the Sahara to get to Egypt, crossing France by ship, coming to Ellis Island by ship, then taking a train from New York to San Francisco. Buelah is still alive today at a healthy 96, and chauffeurs her ‘elderly’ friends around Los Angeles.

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Backgammon Board (2019), Painted backgammon board, 18x22.4x1.18 in

ESTHER ELIA

This piece considers bodies in migration, the mixed body’s ethnicity through the backgammon board. It speaks of the similar journeys of running from inhospitable conditions: genocide on one side, the Dust Bowl on the other—how those events shaped a generation of survival and coping, creating a sense of understanding between an Assyrian boy and an Irish girl. Claiming the Lamassu as a metaphor for my hybridity.

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Pomegranate Juice (fresh) (2020), Acrylic on canvas, 36x24 in

ESTHER ELIA

Ninurta With Female Bodybuilder (2020), Acrylic on cinderblocks, 23x23x5.5 in

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RECONSTRUCTED

COMMUNAL BODIES

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Sultan A. Isfahan The piece documents my time working at the Kennedy Fried Chicken in Woodbridge, New Jersey as a delivery driver.

Most Kennedy Fried Chickens are independent businesses, nearly always run by Muslims. They establish themselves as the cornerstone of their neighborhoods. I view the chicken shack as a community space, for both Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and their presence constitutes a unique part of Muslim identity in Jersey.

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KEN CHICACK SH

SULTAN A. ISFAHAN

I MADE A LOT OF MONEY AT THE CHICKEN SHACK MADE MY FIRST G AT THE CHICKEN SHACK USED TO PRAY IN THE BACK OF THE CHICKEN SHACK HAD MY FIRST DATE IN THE CHICKEN SHACK USED TO RACE IN FRONT OF THE CHICKEN SHACK USED TO? MAN I STILL WORK AT THE CHICKEN SHACK THEY KNOW MY NAME AT THE CHICKEN SHACK DON’T KNOW IF I’LL EVER LEAVE THE CHICKEN SHACK

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PHYSICAL BODIES

CHAPTER TWO

SHAHREZ SYED ALIA ALI SHARMAIN SIDDIQUI ALIF SHAHED SOPHIA TAREEN ZIA AHMED OSMAN NOOR PERVEZ

PHYSICAL BODIES

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AYSHA KHAN RIDWANA RAHMAN MAHSA MERCI MARISSA KHAOS KINZA ARIF HAYLEY MOJICA HANIF ABDURRAQIB ANUSHEH ZIA

Shahrez Syed’s practices as a biologist and a South Asian classical musician are fundamentally driven by an aesthetic appreciation of the molecular and physical nature of the underlying biological processes, mirrored in the harmonics that comprise natural soundscapes.

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This print consists of DNA collected from the hair, skin and clothes of different individuals, treated in order to reveal the processes that comprise the individuals’ metabolic activities. These processes, inherent in the biology of the individuals, are naively and wrongly linked with intelligence, strength and general notions of societal standing. The organic patterns obtained make no such distinction, challenging racially driven ideas of difference and superiority.

SHAHREZ SYED

Skin, Hair Clothes (2019), DNA on nylon, 6.5x2 in

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82 PHYSICAL BODIES RECONSTRUCTED

This print consists of DNA and proteins obtained from the fragrance producing parts of the ‘Raat ki Rani’ flower, whose fragrance fluctuates throughout the day and is strongest at night. The increasing intensity of the marks from left to right represents a visual depiction of the “Chhand” or pattern of the fragrance of the flower over the course of a day.

Raat Ki Rani (2020), DNA on nylon, 7x8 in

SHAHREZ SYED

These works are physical outputs of my meditations on identity, lineage, the abstract notions of being. After designing biological experiments to generate visual marks from these hypotheses, mark by mark, insights are illuminated. In the creation of this series, DNA was extracted from various species of plants as well as people from varying ethno-religious backgrounds, and the extractions were blotted onto sheets of nylon.

Following this process, I treated these prints or ‘blots’ with substances I specifically designed to expose visual patterns. The resultant marks are a direct consequence of the internal life-sustaining processes inherent in the living beings that the DNA was sourced from.

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“ ‫( ”چهنڈ‬Chhand) is a series of prints that result from a desire to create syncretic audio-visual experiences based on personhood and interconnectedness, molded by my experience as a queer, Punjabi Muslim.

Sound is also an essential component of the ideas and experiences inherent in these pieces. I accompanied each print with a brief musical score of a phrase composed in a different Raga of Hindustani classical music, providing my interpretation of the rasa and “chhand” conceptually immanent in each visual.

These patterns unveil not only the intrinsic aesthetic value of the underlying biology comprising these beings, but also the multiplicities between them. There is an underlying complexity and beauty that complicates traditional notions of identity-based recognition, let alone distinction, as well as our perceived interconnectedness.

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Mama, Baba, Pakistan (2019), DNA on nylon, 8x6 in

This print consists of DNA obtained from my mother and father, suspended in a gel-like substance. The DNAcontaining gels were treated to reveal unique characteristics often used to determine one’s genetic ancestry. Through examining the contrasts between the top (Mama) and bottom (Baba) suspensions, I visualize their comparative genetic backgrounds, and by extension, challenge narratives of ethno-religious homogeneity in their native Punjab.

SHAHREZ SYED Punjab (2020), DNA on nylon, 9x12 in

This print consists of DNA sourced from different animals, plants, people, insects and microbes from various parts of the state of Punjab. This DNA was treated in a proprietary way that revealed the activity of different fundamental life sustaining processes, appearing in the intensity of the glow of the dots. To me, this is the clearest depiction of everything that unites to create my multisensory experience of Punjab.

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Alia Ali

Tassels, Cast No Evil Series, by Alia Ali. 2016.

Courtesy of the Artist.

CAST NO EVIL, 2015-16 I come from two countries that no longer exist: South Yemen and Yugoslavia. Today, they are known as the Republic of Yemen, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. My parents are migrant linguists, though speaking seven languages between them, they share only English. I grew up between Sana’a, Sarajevo, Istanbul, Michigan, and Indiana. Later I lived in Wales, Ho Chi Minh City, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Marrakech. As a female artist who exists on the borders of identifying as West Asian, Eastern European, a United States citizen, and culturally Muslim yet spiritually independent, my work explores cultural binaries, challenges culturally sanctioned oppression, and confronts the dualistic barriers of conflicted notions of gender, politics, media, and citizenship.

Creating work from my own multilingual lens has shown me how language can be a form of misinterpretation rather than a means for understanding. My work critiques linguistics and inherited political structures and narratives, while simultaneously attempting to counter the polarization and miscommunication that imperils communities across the

world, encouraging viewers to confront their own prejudices.

Working between photography, video, and installation, I address the politicization of the body, histories of colonization, imperialism, sexism, and racism through projects that take pattern and textile as their primary motif. In my immersive installations I utilize light, pattern, and textile to move past language and offer an expansive, experiential understanding of self, culture, and nation. In my experimental video work and sound installations, I aim to reactivate historical and political archives of Yemen and Bosnia, using deep research to highlight untold narratives.

Textile has always been a constant in my practice. I believe that textile is significant to all of us. We are born into it, we sleep in it, we eat on it, we define ourselves by it, we shield ourselves with it, and eventually, we die in it. While it unites us, it also divides us physically and symbolically. In my work, textiles represent the fabricated barriers in society that can both segregate and connect us. What side of the fabric are

we on? Can we exist on both sides at once? Ultimately, do we exclude others, due to the fear of being excluded ourselves? Is this exclusion a form of self preservation, motivated by primitive fears of social isolation and our search for security? Or does exclusion represent a metamorphosis of the outcast into the villain? What do we fear discovering beneath the cloth?

My work is also informed by discourses of criminality, Yemeni Futurism, and feminist theory, all of which are tools to unpack practices of refusal and rupture.

I define Sabean/Yemeni Futurism as new explorations of Yemeni selfhood that are free from limitations of travel bans, borders, colonialism, trauma, and imposed linear timeframes. I call upon Yemeni oral histories to conceptualize these narratives, while reflecting on contemporary circumstances in Yemen and its diaspora. Drawing on stories including the nostalgic past of Queen Belquis of Saba (also known as the Queen of Sheba), my work investigates dystopian realities of the present and radically imagined possibilities for the future.

Throughout life we are presented with endless examples in which individuals and groups have been excluded from communities based on appearances, beliefs and actions. In these scenarios, there are always two primary actors: those who impose standards (decision makers, the ‘included’), and those who are excluded. Communication can be used both as a means to connect and to divide, to evolve and to regress, to educate and to destroy. Inclusion involves, therefore, engaging someone in a dialogue, though not necessarily a verbal one. In the photographic series, CAST NO EVIL, the viewer is invited to analyze their subjective perception with regards to inclusion and exclusion, and the threshold in which the transition between the two occurs. What are the parameters that define each?

These auto-portraits highlight the notion of the immediate duality that occurs in any given situation. In this case, understanding inclusion requires us to be critical of what it means to be excluded. In order to be included, must one come from a state of exclusion or vice versa? The theme of duality extends to questioning the moment in which the mysterious becomes apparent, restraint becomes freedom, the hidden becomes the revealed, and illusion becomes reality.

The characters in these portraits, called ‘-cludes’, are wrapped in layers of fabric that shield them from interrelating with anything beyond the material. What are these fabricated barriers in society that inhibit the inclusion of others? Or are the obstacles just that: ideas, intuitions, fear, discriminations and ‘understandings’? Does inclusion mean acceptance? If so, does the definition of exclusion at its core mean rejection?

What side of the fabric are we on? Can we exist on both sides at once? When we exclude, does this stem from the fear of being excluded ourselves? Isn’t exclusion a form of security, as well? If so, what is it that we fear discovering that lies beneath the cloth?

Stripes I, Cast No Evil Series, by Alia Ali. 2016.

Courtesy of the Artist.

Liberty, Cast No Evil Series, by Alia Ali. 2015.

Courtesy of the Artist.

Does the material enforce a power dynamic? It certainly creates a boundary, but who holds the power: them, for their anonymity, or us, for imposing their confinement? Ultimately, who are the ‘includes’ and who are the ‘excludes’?

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BORDERLAND, 2017 Two things are for sure: as long as there is humanity, violence is certain and art will always be created from its sparks.

PHYSICAL BODIES

The term “borderland” is most commonly referred to as the crossroads where nations collide. It is a porous zone that diffuses outward from an artificially imposed human-made punctuation called a border. Borders enact violence on the geography and identity of those living within borderlands.

They are both imprints of power and scars of destruction.

Borderlands themselves, on the other hand, are the result of naturally occurring interactions among people and nature attempting to forge an existence in proximity to what is around them.

In the photographic series, BORDERLAND, I re-examine these demarcated zones as territories of exploration, drawing attention to them as both transient physical spaces and a contemporary phenomenon from which the body of artwork is presented and the viewer is a participant.

BORDERLAND was inspired by the aggressive push to block access, coupled with a strong nationalistic phenomenon taking precedence over providing security and refuge for those in greatest need. This discourse has already begun to build walls around the globe while simultaneously eroding communities built on diversity.

RECONSTRUCTED

The ‘-cludes’ are wrapped in layers of fabric from 11 regions of the world that shield them from interrelating with anything beyond the material. The question, ‘who is on the other side of

the fabric,’ interrogates the very nature of belonging and the binary of home versus exile. Through the human act of processing our surroundings, we unconsciously categorize.

We separate good from evil, familiar from unfamiliar, threat from safety, alien from native. We, influenced by categorizations, create these dichotomies ourselves.

Seeing is an act of power, but so is being seen. Are the -cludes choosing to hide or are they being hidden? Are they engaging in an active form of anonymity or a passive one?

The -cludes are “undocumented” characters. Their names are ambiguous and their exact location is a mystery. They are unidentifiable, except for the details displayed such as color, symbolism, and texture. Their existence questions what the human is, and how the human relates to all that lies both outside and within it.

Fabric, ancient in its invention, becomes an archival object with the passage of time. The fabric, like the human beneath it, or the border it symbolizes in this series, is also vulnerable to the elements and to time. When all is said and done, borders shift and textiles disintegrate, but if well preserved and nurtured with culture, knowledge, and grace they can remain intact. Borderlands, like textiles, are territories for exploration, and zones in which we will be judged for our humanity.

BORDERLAND Series, by Alia Ali. 2017. Courtesy of the Artist.

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FLUX, 2019-2021

Orange Palms, FLUX Series, by Alia Ali. 2019.

Courtesy of the Artist.

RECONSTRUCTED

Textile unites and divides us, both physically and symbolically.

While its functional purposes are evident, its indexical capacities are not. In FLUX, the viewer’s attention is drawn to the textile as a document in which politics, economics, and histories collide. Focusing specifically on wax print, the work questions how these textiles obtained their names. Wax print—a wax-resistant dyeing technique—exists under various monikers, including African wax print, Dutch wax prints, Ankara, and batik. These names reveal that colonial histories and economic reactions are woven into the processes and patterns that define each print. A vibrant aesthetic obscures an iniquitous past and embodies a dynamic narrative that accentuates the complex conditions by which these textiles have come into existence.

FLUX is a series of shifting photographic artworks that embody silhouettes that are warped by textile, saturated in colors and a medley of motifs. Each frame is uniquely upholstered with wax print sourced from Cote d’Ivoire.

While some of the images distort visibility, others create hypervisibility, almost negating themselves into animated forms of camouflage. The outburst of saturated colors and

Radio, FLUX Series, by Alia Ali. 2019.

Courtesy of the Artist.

hyperoptic motifs create a visual vibration that obscures the complex conditions through which these textiles came to fruition, and destabilizes the sources from which they came.

The multiple dimensionality creates a kaleidoscope of perspectives, horizontally and vertically. Horizontally, in that this material has come into existence across borders over land and water, and vertically in that they draw from and evoke cosmic, mythical, and religious inspirations. Furthermore, these particular wax prints are a key to mapping the colonial trade routes. While they certainly can be seen as escapist dreamscapes, they are also objects of oppression and capitalism.

In most cases the fabric is defined by its maker, but these fabrics in FLUX are an exception. The work questions who names these textiles. Are they named by the entity who produces the cloth, or the entity that consumes it? Or are the fabrics named for the entity that ensures their passage into a new geographic coordinate? What is clear is that these wax prints present a literal and conceptual space replete with hidden stories and promised potentiality. They conjure pride and pity, celebration and rejection, power and greed.

VOL 2 ALIA ALI

Ochre Waves, FLUX Series, by Alia Ali. 2019.

Courtesy of the Artist.

While the classification of this cloth is complex, its origins are not. Wax prints have come into existence by a variety of cultures. Batik was first seen in India, China, and Java. The colonial trading that took place in the region (primarily between the British and the Dutch) involved exchange of objects, ideas, and humans. It was through water that this trading would occur. Fabric requires water, not only for the growth and harvesting of the fibers and dyeing techniques, but for their migration as well. The trans-global trade routes networked across the oceans and seas from Europe, around Africa, along the Arabian coast, through South Asia reaching East Asia, and back.

In the mid 19th century, the Dutch would engage new technologies to mass-produce wax fabrics to sell to the Javanese market. The look of the batik would be seemingly similar, but ultimately different in that it was not as refined as the labor-intensive handcrafted textiles made by batik masters in Java. In the process, a cracking effect would occur, causing the pigment to seep into the fabric in unintended places. While these batiks were rejected in Java, markets on other parts of the trade routes, particularly along the African coastline,

Blue Pearls, FLUX Series, by Alia Ali. 2019.

Courtesy of the Artist.

embraced them. An alternative narrative suggests that in the late 19th century, several thousand Ghanaian soldiers served in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. These individuals would bring back the rejected batiks to Ghana and gift them to their families. The fabric fever caught on and today these fabrics are widely found in Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire ,and Namibia. Yet to this day, the majority of the production takes place in the Netherlands, China, and India.

These fabrics in FLUX are a commodity once considered as precious and as commonplace as gold, frankincense, myrrh, jewelry, and, as previously mentioned, humans. FLUX questions the very nature of how things get named, how they are translated, and how eventually, they are reinterpreted.

Furthermore, it questions the intention of their production. If this production is not for the preservation of heritage, then is it for the propagation of economic wealth? And for that matter, whose wealth?

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‫ حب‬// LOVE, 2020

RECONSTRUCTED

PHYSICAL BODIES

‫ حب‬// LOVE reclaims the beauty and nonviolence of the Arabic language. The word, ‫( حب‬roman: hub, meaning love) is the first Arabic word that I most want non-Arabic speakers to be able to recognize. Creating this series involves block printing the word on found fabrics—a process that allows me to decipher the lexicon of patterns within the textiles, learn how they correspond to their individual cultures, and understand how they relate to my own diasporic heritage. The block printing represents that the Arabic language deserves a place in the United States that should be seen as one of nonviolence. The meditative gesture of repeating a pattern that changes each time brings to mind the endless ways a simple phenomenon can radically alter our thought processes.

The series questions what it means for me to be a United States citizen, but not consider myself an American. By becoming a citizen, one enters into a contract whereby an individual is meant to uphold the values of a community and culture, and in return, the government is meant to protect that individual. Though since 2001, the United States government has not maintained the human and civil rights that my compatriots and I should have.

In essence, The U.S. has not held up its end of the bargain. Especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, as many people are leaving the United States, this series explores this notion of a contract. I question whether or not the mere conceptual values of a city or country can hold someone in one place.

VOL 2 ALIA ALI

‫ حب‬// LOVE Series, by Alia Ali. 2020. Courtesy of the Artist.

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A written piece by Sharmain Siddiqui

Unani Tibb & Healing Remedies for Postcolonial Wounds Sarsari tum jahan se guzre Varna har ja jahan-e-digar tha You passed through this world so quickly Although there was another world in every place

I first heard this well-known couplet of Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir during an interview with a hakim of Hamdard University in Karachi, Pakistan, in the midst of a discussion on medicine and community-based practice. I was spending my summer in Karachi documenting the oral histories of medical practitioners. This session with Hakim Bari Sahib, although having begun as a more formal interview, had evolved into a night of poetry and laughter over chai and cake rusks.1 Hakim Bari Sahib had been sharing his love for Urdu poetry with me, reciting Faiz and Mir and Ghalib, and was circling back to the poetry’s relationship to the medical tradition known as unani tibb. A standard reading of Mir’s couplet follows a Sufi interpretation: Mir is speaking about asceticism, worldly

1 2

desire, and finding Allah in anything. For Hakim Bari Sahib however, Mir’s couplet highlighted the importance of understanding the interrelated nature of different forms of medicine. Mir’s “another worlds in every place” was to him akin to a veil being lifted off the eyes of healers in Karachi, paving the way for holistic forms of healing. For Hakim Sahib, tibb was practiced and experienced in a plurality of ways, as illustrated by the “many worlds” of unani tibb. The veil Hakim Sahib spoke of was the competing demands on tibb to serve as both a Pakistani cultural artifact and simultaneously a biomedical enterprise.2 Hakim Sahib’s reflections on Mir illustrated the negotiations hakims faced as they tried to preserve the “true essence” of the medical tradition and

The names of every practitioner in this work are pseudonyms, given in order to protect their identities.

Guy N. A. Attewell. Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial India. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007.

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Unani Tibb & Healing Remedies for Postcolonial Wounds

lessen unani tibb’s marginalization in the face of modern Western medicine, also known as biomedicine.3 Scholars argue that unani tibb’s cultural value lay in its antiquity and specifically South Asian appeal while its functioning as a Western enterprise was its response to its obvious marginalization in the face of biomedicine.4 As hakims continue to unveil the competing demands on unani tibb, we more clearly see not only the multiplicity of different medical practices in Pakistan today, but also a unique narrative of resistance against the medical-legal apparatus in post-47 Pakistan. Hakim Sahib’s recitation of Mir encapsulates a central thread of this thesis; his nuanced way of understanding medicine is at the root of many hakims’ practice of unani tibb: it is experiential, exploratory, changing, and interpretive.

Unani tibb has a long complex history and present as a pluralist tradition of medicine in South Asia. Practitioners of unani tibb—otherwise known as hakims—practice healing through a wide range of activities, including pulse and palm readings, acupuncture, herbal treatments and homeopathy, biomedicine, and, above all, religious intercession and empathy. The development of tibb can be traced as far back as the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when Spanish Moors brought together scholars from Europe and North Africa to nourish the development of medicine. From this era, “the interaction of Christian, Arab, and Jewish scholars led to the preparation of the numerous medical and scientific texts that are the corpus of Unani medicine.”5 Unani tibb flourished within the Mughal courts—while not remaining dependent on them—where “large numbers of practitioners travelling from Iran and elsewhere went to seek their fortunes at the richest court of the day.”6 Tibb was widespread in early modern, pre-colonial India and was then transformed by its encounter with colonialism. This contact continues to inform tibb’s practice today.

I argue that unani tibb functions as a postcolonial force for resistance. This resistance manifests through the many, sometimes contradictory ways that hakims are engaging, thinking through, as well as implicitly and explicitly resisting the government’s attempts

to regulate medical practice and biomedicine. I use ethnographic fieldwork from the summers of 2018 and 2019 in Karachi, Pakistan to demonstrate how unani tibb has metamorphosized in our contemporary moment and is rooted in an anti-colonial legacy. I also argue that unani tibb cannot be reduced to a rigid set of texts or practices. I show how tibb is unintelligible to outsiders because of the plurality of ways it is practiced, despite the colonial legacy of systemizing, regulating, and aiming to fully “know” the practice. This unintelligibility underscores how colonial historiographies affect the way we think about any given set of practices. Ultimately, tibb’s transformations are informed by colonization and it is critical to examine its effects on medical traditions in South Asia. A postcolonial analysis opens up the potential to understand unani tibb as a dynamic tradition of healing and curing, rather than one that fulfills the colonial and post-colonial desire to know and control. Unani tibb traditions have been radically reimagined into sites of postcolonial resistance and their related anti-Statist movements in Karachi are revolutionary, creative, and necessary to explore.

A selfie reflected on the windows of Habib University in Karachi, where I came in to do most of my transcribing work.

3 Biomedicine is commonplace in medical anthropological writings. Biomedicine is also known as allopathy, modern medicine, or western medicine. Attewell. Refiguring Unani Tibb.

4 Langford, Fluent Bodies.

5 Ullmann, Manfred. Islamic medicine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978.

6 Alavi, Seema. Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600–1900. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007.

Unani Tibb Unani tibb is rooted in diagnosis and treatment focusing on the four humors of the body.8 The four humors of the body are regarded as dam (blood), balgham (phlegm), safra (yellow bile), and sawda (black bile).9 It holds that each individual retains a unique mixture of humors and elements, which then determines that individual’s temperament. Through various forms of treatment and diagnosis, hakims are able to keep a patient’s temperament internally balanced, creating wellness and health.10 Despite a historiography that seeks to limit tibb to a set of strict textual practices, tibb is dynamic and wide-ranging. Tibb has been associated with astrology,

SHARMAIN SIDDIQUI

The fieldwork points to three specific ways hakims are thinking about and experiencing unani tibb. First, they are thinking expansively and subversively about Cartesian dualisms, as well as the Western vs. non-Western binary to answer questions about who unani tibb is serving and why.

Although postcolonial thought is often opposed to reifying such binaries, hakims are working within them strategically to reinvent tibb. Second, in line with thinking about Cartesian dualisms subversively, hakims are reappropriating notions of tibb as an Islamic or Pakistani science. Their redefinitions can be interpreted as “ways of creatively addressing epistemological imbalances of late colonial and postcolonial times.”7 Finally, hakims in Karachi are practicing the tibbi tradition as anti-Statist. The Pakistani government, in step with private pharmaceutical companies, sap the ownership of unani medicine from tibb practitioners themselves. This sapping of ownership is a form of regulation rooted in the capitalist logics of systemizing the practice. Today, regulation and commodification has manifested in the form of the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) Act. The DRAP Act mandates the testing of unani tibb medicines by European and US pharmacopoeia methods. Through this mandate, the Pakistani government decides what is and is not medicine.

Medicines they consider passing the DRAP’s standards are sold commercially and produced at large scales by private pharmaceutical companies, often at the expense of the poor. Hakims today are fighting the DRAP Act, which is not a mandate that exists in isolation, but rather points to larger structural issues about the transformations of tibb in the face of biomedicine.

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Sourcing Postcolonial Resistance

climatology, land politics, and calling upon jinn, among others.11 Although tibb is practiced in expansive ways, there are a few (flexible) central principles often underlying unani tibb. The first is that the body has the ability to heal itself, so that any therapy or intervention must augment this natural healing ability of the body. The second is that each individual is unique, with their own unique temperament; this understanding must dictate diagnosis.

Binary constructions of unani tibb and biomedicine are pervasive in the medical world. Unani tibb is characterized in the global pharmaceuticals market as a complementary or alternative medicine.12 What is considered alternative however, depends on one’s own social position, as well as the historical, political, and economic circumstances that grant or do not grant power and authority to a specific set of practices.

Similarly, biomedicine’s normativity is a historical, political and cultural fact rather than a scientific one. Although many argue that the phenomenology of health in unani tibb is culturally distinct from that of biomedicine, where unani tibb is considered “ethnomedicine”, it is important to remember that biomedicine, like all other medical systems, is also an ethnomedical system. Ritual and cultural specificity underlie biomedicine as much as they underlie unani tibb. This labeling is a part of the larger societal distinction between tradition and modernity, where modernization is understood as a civilizing process that non-Western societies can undertake only by abandoning their own “traditional” cultures. As articulated by Hobsbawm and Ranger, the antiquity embedded within any longstanding “tradition” is often a construction of the nineteenth or early twentieth century and is a part of the modern and post-modern project of nation-state building.13

Postcolonial Resistance Karachi held overcast skies the day I met Hakim Rahim Khan.

While sitting in his clinic, I was struck by his friendliness. He had not stopped smiling since we had sat down and paused our conversation every so often to offer Professor Muqeem and I more sweets and drinks. As I began to ask him about how and where he had learned tibbi knowledge however, he turned slightly inward. Although not evasive, he certainly was protective about tibb and the tradition of storytelling he believed it came from: “Hakims are healers because we keep the living memories of people [through storytelling and archiving]. Our power, although coming from God, is channeled through listening to others, and absorbing their daily realities, their daily pains, their daily suffering.”14

7 Langford, Fluent Bodies.

8 Rahman A. et al,. “Concept of Akhlat Arba (four humors) with relation to health and disease.” International Journal of Herbal Medicine 2(4):46-9, 2014.

9 Ibid.

10 Azmi, A. Basic Concepts of Unani Medicine: A Critical Study. New Delhi: Jamia Hamdard; 1995.

11 A jinn is a spiritual entity or demon in South Asian culture.

12 Alternative medicine denotes anything outside of the dominant system of healthcare that exists today.

13 Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

14 Khan, Rahim. September 21st, 2018.

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Unani Tibb & Healing Remedies for Postcolonial Wounds

For Hakim Rahim, storytelling and oratory knowledge was a generative force because the storyteller was the oracle and the hakim. For him, healing was an act of archiving and preserving knowledge, knowledge that was stored in the body, stored in experience. Storytelling however, is often not understood as “history” and “knowledge” in the way Hakim Rahim was thinking of it. Instead, within biomedical frameworks, it is cast off into the realm of tale, fiction, and legend.15 Robin Kimmerer writes that in Western contexts “storytelling is associated with backwardness, ignorance, and illiteracy.”16 Hakim Rahim’s practice of healing was an embodied and bodily practice because of the elusive transference of knowledge from Allah it involved. Because his practice involved storytellers and archiving, it would not be deemed as knowledge within Western paradigms. He spoke about tibb in this protective way before diving into stories of jinn exorcism, godly intercession, and magic in medical interventions. Perhaps he had been so protective because he was warding off the questions — did it really happen? Is it a true story?

As we see, hakims resist the compartmentalized logics of how tibb should be practiced or understood. Their remedies defy these logics because of the embodied ways they practice tibb. It becomes clear that unani tibb—as it is understood by practitioners—utilizes a much more phenomenological framework than the ways bodies are commonly understood in biomedicine. And with this framework it is clear that the ways bodies are experienced in medicine is shifting and constantly in flux. This makes it more difficult to superimpose the biomedicine body-mind logic onto unani tibb, as it illustrates the ways that even biological and anatomical principles cannot be understood as homogenous and static categories. Hakims collapse common medical paradigms, resist government action, and utilize a variety (of sometimes contradictory) theoretical orientations and belief systems that creates an unintelligibility to their practice. Their reappropriations and reinventions of tibb heal postcolonial ills, ultimately creating openings for agency and resistance.

Binary Framings of Medicine Hakim Syed Zahoor ul-Hassan Zaidi is a quiet and introspective man. His office space at Hamdard University, where we conducted our interview, was overflowing with books on biotechnology, Islamiat, and of course, unani tibb. The slow-moving fan in the room did not offer much respite in the hot August weather, and so Hakim Zaidi brought out mango juice rather than hot chai for us to drink while we chatted. Hakim Zaidi was born into a family of hakims, and although he acquired his BUMS (Bachelor of Unani Medicine and Surgery) degree in 1998 from Hamdard University in Karachi, he had been learning unani tibb since early childhood, by sitting with his father—who is also a hakim—during his appointments. His father’s knowledge came from his ustads, his teachers, who taught him from books as well as generationally passed down oral knowledge.

After acquiring his PhD from Hamdard in Eastern Medicine, Hakim Zaidi became a professor of unani tibb there. Hakim Zaidi’s diverse education—which is not atypical of contemporary practitioners—allows him to perform pulse readings via a mix of known procedures as well as from the intuition that he believes is developed uniquely through non-Western medicine. Hakim Zaidi considers his practice, which employs biomedicine, to be a fusion of biomedicine and unani tibb. He was adamant in not considering himself a practitioner of either Western medicine or unani tibb alone. When first asked about binary constructions of tibb and biomedicine, Hakim Zaidi spoke of unani tibb as just another manifestation of biomedicine. He said that binary framings of tibb and biomedicine position biomedicine at the top of the medical hierarchy.

Because biomedicine is the medical paradigm through which all other medicinal systems and traditions are evaluated, unani tibb becomes considered an alternative form of medicine. To Hakim Zaidi, the recognition that Western and non-Western medicine do not exist within a binary was deeply important to make and further, he believed that they were different forms of the same practice of healing. As he went on to talk about the hidden implications of naming

15 Trinh T. Minh-ha. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

16 Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.

Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2012.

They have 5,000 classified diseases, but only 50 cures.

Beyond those 50 cures, they just invest themselves in management of disease. This is a vast departure from unani tibb. Here you can solve things chronically. For example, we don’t just have a cardiologist to examine someone’s heart, so a person can walk out of an appointment knowing that their heart is beating fine, but not understanding anything else about their bodies, even in relation to their heart. Here, we have holistic practitioners. Here we look at everything, both inside and beyond the body.17

On our first meeting, Hakim Ibrahim conducted a face reading of me. As I sat down in his office, smiling, he told me my face held tension, unresolved anger, and that I had a tendency to act too fast. His practice of physiognomy—understanding a person’s characteristics, past, and future based on their facial features—was not actively a part of his practice of unani tibb, but rather a part of the intuition that he had developed as a result of practicing tibb for many years. He spoke of the lack of religiosity embedded within newer hakims. Although the “unbiased” and “rational” nature of biomedicine is a part of its appeal, to Hakim Ibrahim, biomedicine’s focus on the biological and anatomical meant that it glossed over the soul that was deeply embedded within not only each patient, but the practice as a whole.

Doctors use tests for their own relief, not the relief of the patient. It is because they rely on these tests to tell them if what their senses are telling them is correct or not. In this way Western practitioners are not able to develop an intuition that is at the heart of this practice.20

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Again, in order to position unani tibb as on par with, if not better than biomedicine, Hakim Zaidi differentiated the two by placing them in binaries. The curing/healing dichotomy becomes important to sit with here.18 The dichotomy is representative of larger structural and epistemological differences between biomedicine and “alternative” medicine.19 The idea that traditional medicine can only heal illness, while biomedicine cures disease—when we associate the West with biomedicine and Othered cultures and peoples with alternative medicine —serves to marginalize different practices of medicine as well as the people who practice them. Hakim Zaidi reappropriated this dichotomy by arguing that biomedicine does not wholly “fix”—or cure—the body.

Rather, he claimed that the focus on curing meant that the majority of people suffering from ill health were never fully treated.

Hakim Ibrahim went on to talk about the downfall of biomedical technologies as well:

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unani tibb alternative, Hakim Zaidi spoke of the more holistic nature of unani tibb. He characterized Western medicine as relying exclusively on biomedicine and reductionist views of health whereas for him, unani tibb was entirely separate from that mode of knowledge and treatment. Unani tibb’s superiority subsequently lay in its cultural difference: although Hakim Zaidi stated that he abhorred the notion of a binary, he was both reifying and reappropriating it to validate tibb alongside biomedicine. Despite popular notions of biomedicine being more systemic knowledge than unani tibb, Hakim Zaidi also went on to speak of its lack of success rates in both diagnosis and treatment:

Image 1: Hakim Ibrahim conducting a pulse reading of a client.

Unani tibb as an Islamic science Hakim Akbar Siddiqi lives in Lyari, Karachi and practices med-

17 Zaidi, Syed Zahoor ul-Hassan. September 18th, 2018.

18 The curing/healing dichotomy has been described and defined by medical anthropologist James B. Waldram. Waldrom, James. “The Efficacy of Traditional Medicine: Current Theoretical and Methodological Issues” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 14(4), 2000.

19 Khan, Ibrahim. September 28, 2018.

20 Ibid.

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icine in an apothecary his family has owned as far back as he can remember. His bright orange henna-dyed beard along with the many rosaries around his neck gave him a mystical appearance; many who passed by referred to him as Sufi sahib, a term of respect and a simultaneous acknowledgement of his sainthood. Hakim Siddiqi had learned unani tibb at home with his grandfather and took over the apothecary in his late twenties. A line of chairs decorated the perimeter of the bustling apothecary where clients were seated, waiting to be seen in the backroom

by Hakim Siddiqi. An expressive man, Hakim Siddiqi bristled at the thought of unani tibb being regarded solely as an Islamic system of medicine. This reductionist framing, he argued, compartmentalized the practice. He also spoke of the similarities between ayurveda and unani tibb. “The practices are very similar. I would even argue that they are the same thing. But you do not see people claiming ayurvedic sciences as Islamic, do you?”21 His question poured life into the specter of colonial politics and nationalist agendas haunting these practices, and their conceptualizations as separate and divided along religious lines. His question also raised an important point about the hydraulics of how spirituality is defined vis-a-vis different practitioners, as some other practitioners did see unani tibb as deeply rooted in Islam.

Hakim Bari spoke of those who are helped

by God in their diagnoses. He referred to them as Allah vale log, or the people of God22:

They are unable to just explain how they can diagnose. There is nothing scientific to it. It is bodily. There is something in the pit of my stomach sometimes, I get the feeling that I have to say this [diagnosis] in my heart, and when that thought settles in my chest, then I say it. It is Allah’s hand on our heads.23

there was no room for this form of tibb to be understood as science. His understanding of diagnosis also articulates the belief that bodies are not simply physical objects of knowledge, but archives of knowledge as well. Thus, the practice of tibb here also stresses the importance of viewing the body as a body of knowledge that is already consistent with scientific norms and values, and therefore an equally viable and valid modern belief system.

When Hakim Ibrahim and I spoke about the embodied nature of unani tibb, he spoke largely of it being embodied knowledge by way of being religious knowledge. He spoke of two forms of knowledge that matter in the world:

The first kind of knowledge is the knowledge that we can perceive. Through learning, books, our own observations. The second kind of knowledge is the most important kind… And it is the kind that you cannot put into words. I call it transferred knowledge, because it is just transferred, from Him to you.24 Hakim Ibrahim—and presumably other practitioners—felt that unani tibb knowledge was embodied. It existed outside of normative structures of knowledge and capitalism because it was only truly transmitted through God. The body, enhanced by submission to God, thus becomes a site of anti-colonial forms of knowing. By giving authority to religious, spiritual, bodily, and transcorporeal knowledge, Hakim Ibrahim was pushing back against Western ways of knowing. This ultimately highlighted the abundance and unintelligibility of tibb as well as the resourcefulness, agency and value systems of tibbi practitioners.

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His understanding of spirituality functioned in a binary framing against a more rational science, as in his own words, being helped by God in practicing medicine held “nothing scientific to it.” Hakim Bari understood unani tibb as wholly compatible with Islam, but within his framework,

21 Siddiqi, Akbar. September 2nd, 2018.

22 My conversations with hakims have all been translated into English. The fieldwork was all conducted in Urdu and then translated by me for the purposes of this paper. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. There were many negotiations involved in the process of translating this work, and much of the knowledge I sought to translate into the English language was experiential and embodied knowledge. I write phrases in Urdu transliterations whenever I feel I cannot do the original justice.

23 Bari, Abdul. September 12th, 2018.

24 Khan, Ibrahim. September 10th, 2019.

Tabiba Laila Sheikh was behind the pharmacy counter the first time I walked into Hakim Ibrahim’s office.25 She was giving drug requests to Hakim Ibrahim’s understudies while simultaneously watching the younger hakims demonstrate how to make certain medicines. When told I was from America, dealing with residual sickness from my travels, Tabiba Laila immediately offered up remedies to heal my sore throat and fatigue.26 Incisive and holding an incredible amount of medicinal knowledge within her, Tabiba Laila was one of the few women I was able to interview during my time in Karachi.

She worked alongside Hakim Ibrahim, as his understudy. She was present at all my meetings with Hakim Ibrahim, but it was not until one of her last few meetings that I learned about her activist organizing outside of the clinic. She spoke extensively and eloquently about the lack of support unani tibb received from the government.

Tabiba Laila spoke of the strong congruence between unani tibb and nation-building in the post-colonial era.

Before and after Partition, the Pakistani government began

25 26 27 28 29 30

The law regulates unani tibb medicines according to laws designed for allopathic medicines. The DRAP has required us to test tibb-e-unani medicines by European pharmacopoeia methods. The question we must ask first is that are the herbs available here in Karachi similar to the ones found in Baloch, or Khyber Pass, or even Hyderabad? The simple answer is no. How then, can we expect our herbs to be the same as the ones used in Europe? How then, can we test our medicines by European standards?29

SHARMAIN SIDDIQUI

Behind the counter where Tabiba Laila makes medicines

to regulate and professionalize the practice to create a sense of national identity and unity.27 Globalization accelerated this sense of ownership and professionalization, as both pharmaceutical companies and patent systems commodify these fluid forms of medical knowledge into property for the global pharmaceutical market. In Pakistan, the government and private pharmaceutical companies act as hegemonies that sap the ownership of unani tibb knowledge from practitioners. Pharmaceutical companies in Pakistan receive tax breaks from the government, while still charging exorbitant prices for meditations.28 Many hakims spoke of the ayurvedic and tibbi drugs that had gained prominence with these pharmaceutical companies. They sold the same medicines that were often prescribed by and made locally by practitioners of tibb in their own apothecaries. Much to the dismay of practitioners, these were gaining prominence at the expense of individual’s buying drugs from local apothecaries.

In step with this disenfranchisement, Tabiba Laila spoke of her frustrations with the Drug Regulatory Agency of Pakistan (DRAP). The DRAP Act, which was passed in 2014 by the Sindh court in Karachi, mandates the testing of unani tibb medicines by European and US pharmacopoeia methods. This mandate serves to disenfranchise practitioners of unani tibb:

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The DRAP Act

There was a clear tension that existed between hakims in Karachi and large pharmaceuticals, corporations, and more broadly the government. The antagonistic relationship existed because practitioners like Tabiba Laila believed the government was invested in biomedicine more than it was in tibb. Tabiba Laila’s struggles were a clear example of what Ella Shohat terms the “First World/Third World” struggle. This struggle takes place not only between nations, such as India and Pakistan, but also within nations, “with constantly changing relationships between dominant and subaltern groups.”30 Resistance against the DRAP Act shows the ways multiplicity of power relations exist in Karachi. A simple binary of colonizer vs. colonized, proletariat vs. bourgeois, or even powerful vs. powerless would mask the contradictions and

Tabiba is a term used for a woman who practices tibb; a female hakim.

The medicinals Tabiba Laila prescribed to me can be found in Appendix II. Misra, A. “On South Asian States and the State of the Nations in South Asia.” Third World Quarterly, 19(5): 1998.

Rashid, Hira. “Impact of the Drug Regulatory Authority.” New Visions for Public Affairs 50(7): 2015.

Sheikh, Laila. September 17th, 2019.

Shohat, Ella. “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial.’” Social Text, 31(32): 1992.

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heterogeneities happening with the Pakistani government and its subjects. Moving towards a discursive analysis that interrogates and contextualizes anti-Statist struggles historically and culturally provides a better conceptual frame with which to understand said struggles.

Resistance to the DRAP also illustrates how social inequalities come to be materialized in bodies. Because bodies, health, and healing are treated as commodities under capitalism and under the Pakistani government, they become artifacts, and in the words of Foucault, tools of

social and political control. The DRAP functions as evidence of the relationship between political and economic dynamics of oppression and their impact on the body. This obfuscation of affordable and accessible medications lands, with great violence, on the subaltern in Pakistan, who cannot afford expensive and commercialized government medications. The DRAP shows how our bodies are of great concern to the nation-state, because of our capacity to act as consumers. It shows, too viscerally, the ways our bodies are shaped by class relations.

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Unani Tibb & Healing Remedies for Postcolonial Wounds

An image of local and commercial medicines packaged and sold at a local apothecary in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Although not visible in these pictures, the commercial medicines were slightly more expensive, but bought more frequently than locally made and packaged medicines.

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Conclusion Sarsari tum jahan se guzre Varna har ja jahan-e-digar tha You passed through this world so quickly Although there was another world in every place

SHARMAIN SIDDIQUI

At the start of this thesis, we looked towards Hakim Bari Sahib’s recitation of Mir Taqi Mir, which highlighted the importance of understanding the interrelated nature of different forms of medicine. As we return to Mir’s couplet, we can hold a newfound appreciation of the way his work captures an intense level of complexity in understanding the slippages between biomedicine and tibb. The grievances Hakim Sahib first articulated about unani tibb were the competing demands on it to serve as both a cultural and scientific enterprise. Twenty first century practitioners have dealt with this tension by redirecting their practice towards the nationalist task of healing the particular wounds of colonialism and postcolonialism. In doing so, they also sustain the tension between “modern” modes of medicine and the “tradition” embedded within unani tibb, which makes it meaningful to Pakistani cultural identity.

The framing of medicinal systems within the binary of tradition vs. modernity is unavoidable. It is pervasive in not only literature, media, and both popular and academic discourses, but it is also saturated within government interactions, and perhaps most importantly, into the psyches of practicing hakims themselves. It is both the commodifying fetishes of late capitalism and neo-orientalism, as well as the political desires of postcolonial nationalism that have encouraged the development of unani tibb in these contradictory directions. Unani tibb thus functions as a cultural project while also functioning as a commodity. Despite the inescapable nature of this binary, we have explored the wholly creative remedies on the parts of the practitioners that allow unani tibb to function as a postcolonial force for resistance and agency.

Ultimately, hakims are practicing tibb in ways that are experiential, exploratory, changing, and interpretive, even if they are still subscribing to the popularized essentialization of the two as separate and non-permeable categories. They are using and adopting Western practices and epistemologies while also resisting them in ways that are both productive and meaningful. Hakims have been breaking with fixed notions of Western and traditional knowledge, where straightforward distinctions between tradition and modernity cannot hold.

Their ability to destabilize dichotomies that are so prevalent in medical anthropology is creating subversive interpretations of the relationship between scientific and religious thought. Their many manifestations of practice also usurp the social networks hegemonized by the Pakistani government and stands more broadly as an examination of how a set of practices and institutions are constructed and how knowledge systems and bodily practices are developed at the intersection of colonial and postcolonial discourses and systems of power.

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Two Poems by Binoy Majumdar TRANSLATED BY ALIF SHAHED

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

These two poems form the opening pages of Binoy Majumdar’s Haspataler Lekha Kobitaguccho (Kobi Prokashoni, Dhaka: 2014), an anthology of poems he wrote while hospitalized. In order to come to terms with his own inevitable entry into oblivion, Binoy thinks of his parents’ deaths decades prior. I translated these in the summer of 2018 when I first picked up the book in Dhaka, and recently translated them again after losing someone dear to me. Perhaps I understood them better this time. There’s a certain solace in thinking that bodily dismemberment and disease is the reason we may have lost someone, and not because it’s the natural endpoint of life.

Dismemberment is a theme which reoccurs throughout these poems, both in its physical sense of losing part of your body, and in the spiritual sense of your soul being dismembered from your body. Even the act of taking these two poems from a larger collection and translating them from Bengali feels like an act of dismemberment, first from its body and then from itself. Is the essence of his father and of his mother left in their bodies after their soul departs from it? Is the essence of these poems left after they’ve been taken from their original language?

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Two Poems by Binoy Majumdar TRANSLATED

BY ALIF SHAHED

WHEN MY FATHER When my father turned ninety-three, He couldn’t even sit on his bed, he would only lay there.

This is what happens when you grow old, it will happen to me too.

My eldest brother-in-law took him to Howrah, Where they sliced his little stomach open, And then for eleven days blood spilled from the gaping hole.

And then my father died.

Will he be reborn? Father had no soul.

After the cremations only his ash remained.

Why does ash think it is one with the earth’s soil?

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PHYSICAL BODIES

An Atlas of Human Anatomy COLLAGES

BY SOPHIA TAREEN

An Atlas of Human Anatomy (2020), Collage, 20.7x16.8 in

MY MOTHER’S There was cancer in my mother’s esophagus, And for that she could not swallow anything, Not even water.

Piyush, the doctor, He would inject glucose into her hands.

But what good came from that? After fifteen days of not eating,

Mother died.

One day before she died, She called my father a dog.

Before my mother died, She knelt before the household servant, And touched his feet.

This is what they call death.

A Short Practice of Surgery (2020), Collage, 12x17.1 in

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Zia Ahmed Osman

practice 1 (2018), Acrylic on canvas board, 8x10 in

practice 2 (2018), Detail, Acrylic on wood panel, 8x10 in

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practice 3 (2019), Acrylic on wood panel, 8x10 in

practice 4 (2018), Detail, Acrylic on canvas, 20x16 in 109

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Painting these bodies has been a personal healing practice in many ways. I’ll name one to start.

PHYSICAL BODIES

Growing up and even now I had a lot of shame of my own nakedness, so I tried to minimize the amount of time I spent naked. Through these paintings, I’ve spent hours inspecting nude figures, and this process has helped me depart and deconstruct some constructs around modesty.

On a whim, I decided to share my paintings with my mother.

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She responded by quickly saying "SubhanAllah" and then muttered protection prayers in Arabic.

VOL 2 ZIA AHMED OSMAN

wrestlers (2019), Acrylic on canvas, 10x8 in 111

112 NOOR PERVEZ RECONSTRUCTED

Noor Pervez is a student organizer turned disability and LGBT+ educator, public speaker, and internet researcher.

He focuses on the intersections of disability, gender identity, sexuality and religion.

He has bylines at Rooted in Rights and the Disability Visibility Project blog, and can frequently be found posting about his beagle, KIBBY, on Twitter at @SnoringDoggo

At present, I would describe myself as religiously, spiritually, and generally speaking, Muslim. However, based on disablity, queerness, and other facets of my identity, I have trouble physically participating in Muslim spaces. Most Muslim traditions and rituals are not physically accessible to me, so I would describe myself as close in spirit and close in being, but not in physical proximity.

How do you facilitate and foster that closeness when so many community spaces and interactions are inaccessible?

This has happened in the last decade or so, starting with my first entry into queer Muslim spaces in college. There, I was talking to queer Muslims, Black Muslims, disabled Muslims, people with substance use disorders, and more.

By seeing how these people connected with God, I thought about how I could get creative and make my relationships to Islam stronger while remaining whole and full in my humanity.

That is inspiring, and it also resonates with our work of decentering majority narratives around Islam, including who carries closeness to Islam. We are grateful to you, as we have personally benefited from the spaces you have cultivated over the years. These connections in digital space are very rich. How do you see digital space and online connections supporting this work of cultivating closeness?

I have had to get more accustomed to this while getting older. I grew up in a rural suburb or North Texas—we had farm-raising as an elective! I was surrounded by a very strong Islamic

How do you see digital space addressing some of the questions and concerns you have around the inaccessibility of Muslim spaces?

Having online services available for disabled Muslims is a lifeline. People who are housebound or might physically be incapable of getting into their local mosque can now access spirituality in a very tangible way, on par with what other Muslims experience. It can also be more accessible in the sense that most in-person mosques that I've run into aren't willing to pay for, say, an interpreter or live captioning.

Whereas, with online mosques, by virtue of it being online, your main audience is going to be people who generally can’t attend standard mosque settings, whether that's for queer reasons, disability reasons, or racial discrimination reasons. I find, generally, more online mosques are motivated to have online accessibility. This is good and important. However, it’s important to remember that online services are inherently inaccessible to some degree. I say this not as a pro or con to the internet itself, but rather as a statement about how accessibility works. The reality is that there are what we call “conflicting access needs,” where you have to get creative about negotiating people’s needs. It's important to recognize that sometimes the answer is to provide more than one method of doing “the thing,” in order for it to be accessible to more

INTERVIEW BY ANISSA ABDEL-JELIL

My ability to do this has evolved over time and taken a lot of practice. Two main ways come to mind. First, finding community online, in terms of connecting to queer, trans, and disabilityaffirming mosques. Second, by fostering direct interpersonal connections with other individuals who have been marginalized because of how the larger Muslim community, however intentional or not, has furthered our marginalization.

community, especially South Asian Muslims living in the Dallas suburbs. My sense of community power was intensely tied to the couple times a year that we would physically gather. I got really hung up on the idea that if you're not physically in the same place, how do you know that you're there? As I grew older, my relationship to Islam became more complicated because I had all of these identities that I was being taught were scary and rejected by the larger community, such as my queerness and disabilities. I got it in my head that this type of community power wasn't possible for me—that is until I started working with Masjid al-Rabia on disability stuff. What I found was that this queer, disabled Muslim community would pop up every so often and I would think “Okay, we’re a thing, but I don't see you every day, so this is weird.”

Leveraging digital space and online connections helps bridge the distance and come together to do cool stuff. The internet gives us the platform to do this year-round.

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How would you describe your relationship to Islam?

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than one type of person. But it's also important for in-person services to just be fucking accessible, so that people for whom being online is just not a thing their brain can do easily can participate.

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NOOR PERVEZ

Reconstructed’s second volume treats the theme of bodies. I'm wondering how you conceive of bodies?

I would say at a fundamental level, a body is something that allows you to experience the world and allows us to experience each other.

I conceive of bodies as an important way to understand other people, but bodies are also a physical, tangible way for people to understand social proximity. The ways that we conceive of different types of bodies represent a projection screen that we have for our biases and ideas about how people exist and what they're like.

As someone who exists in a trans and disabled body, I have found myself looking at other people and becoming progressively more aware of how the way we see people is really informed by who we've allowed ourselves to think of as human. Growing up, I didn't really have conceptions of disabled people as fully human because the stories that I was told were about disabled people as vectors for other people's humanity. When I was younger, I saw trans people being used for different reasons, but in a similar way. They were never talked about as fully fleshed out people living out their lives. I find bodies are a reflection of the stories that we tell ourselves and each other.

What a powerful way of framing bodies. I'm wondering if there was a moment where you came to acknowledge your own humanity and your wholeness?

I can think of three big moments where I came to understand that disability was an integrated part of myself, rather than this separate hurdle to overcome or a burden for others to bear.

The first time that I really thought of myself as part of a disability community, even if I didn't really have the word disabled, was in college at the University of Texas at Dallas. I was part of an LGBT activism circle where functionally everyone out of a group of 50-60 people was neurodiverse in some capacity. I had this moment where I realized that all of these people's brains were like mine. So, I talked to my counselor at the time and asked, “So do other people feel like they're an alien that crash landed on a planet that's basically Earth and everything looks and sounds exactly the same, but all of the social customs are completely different and you kind of go along with it, but you don't really understand why people are doing things?”

The counselor looked at me and was like, "I'm not qualified to say that you’re autistic, but you should look into seeing a specialist because that is verbatim what autistic people say." That was the first time that I realized there was a word to describe how my brain functions and that there are, in fact, a lot of people who have this different operating system. And I like these people!

The second time was when I became a disability activist. I was participating in the Autistic Campus Inclusion Leadership Summit, which was put on by my current employer, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, before I was working for them. I traveled to Washington D.C to learn about disability history; it's basically an “Activism 101” course for students seeking to impact disability policies on their college campuses. During this experience, I met a lot of autistic people of color and came to understand myself as part of a larger and longer disability community history—where my rights were earned and fought for in blood. That was the first time I went, "Wait a minute, I have a history. I have ancestors. I'm not just a random, very strange person that just projected here and dishonored the entirety of Muslim culture by not understanding how most of it worked right away.” I realized that I’m a person who has roots!

I enjoy storytelling. I think of it as a way to try and make people think about things from different perspectives, but also as a way to express myself without adapting to what other people expect me to think of things. I write Twitter-length poetry; I think in very short clips, so on one level, that's great. On the other hand, that doesn’t bring income in easily. It's one of those things where disability frequently lends itself to really important things that capitalism doesn't value. I would like to write for larger platforms with broader audiences, in order to reach more disabled people. Disabled people don't usually find themselves reflected in media until late into their disability journeys. I want to reach more people before they think of themselves as disabled.

I’m looking forward to reading more of your work and seeing how you leverage the different lengths and platforms. What would you say to members of our community who are early in their disability journey?

I want people, especially those who are new to learning about disability, to understand your humanity and survival is tied to all disabled people. When I say “all,” I mean all. Your humanity is tied to people with the highest support needs, this includes people who have ventilators, people with medically complex needs, people who have survived polio, kids who are non-speaking, adults who are non-speaking, people who are deaf and blind, people who are chronically ill and have other disabilities, autistic people who you have been taught to be afraid of, and more. You are not better for being closer to an able-bodied person.

INTERVIEW BY ANISSA ABDEL-JELIL

You've spoken about the body as it relates to community, seeing yourself reflected in others and others reflected in you. You’ve talked about the body as tied to ancestry and “aha” moments like, "Oh, I have roots and I’m part of a lineage!” And you’ve shared what happens when you're granted the space to really become literate in yourself, your body and have that externally validated. You’ve shared these experiences in such an engaging way, weaving stories throughout this conversation. So, I'm curious, what do you find to be nourishing creative practices?

The first and biggest thing I would say is that it’s okay to be afraid of the word disability because you’ve been taught to be afraid of it. Historically, people have been afraid of the word because it holds power. Disability is what gives people legal rights, particularly access to IEPS, Centers for Independent Living, workplace accommodations, public transit, housing we can actually use, and resources that make people’s lives livable.

This includes the right to live outside of institutions. The word disability is a reclamation of this idea that we are whole and complete people.

It’s okay not to ascribe to every single aspect of disability ideology, but it’s important to acknowledge that without the word disabled, it’s very hard to access the resources that you need. It’s also important to allow yourself access to the history and the lineage of the word. Some of the resources that supported me in my journey include the Disability Visibility Project, Centers for Independent Living, local disability rights and activism groups, and support groups on Twitter and Facebook.

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The third instance was when I finally got my diagnoses for my physical disabilities, and was able to crowdfund for my first power chair. That was a really big incident of me feeling like a person because I was able to have someone validate and acknowledge that the pain I had been feeling my entire life was a real thing.

Having that be validated, both professionally and personally, was very big for me. It felt like coming into having a body that I could use meaningfully.

There’s no such thing as too disabled. All means all, and we leave nobody behind.

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OBSCENE!

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PHYSICAL BODIES

PHOTOGRAPHS (2020) BY RIDWANA RAHMAN

GUTTED (OR ALWAYS THIS WAY?) POEM BY AYSHA KHAN

something, a word, a hue of oil paints something to strike a chord: is there a chord? there is only the hollow of a casket, a violin case, a cantaloupe, intestines scooped clean just for something birth, death, marriage life something, a word, a filthy stranger smelling of mints, something to break this: is there a hollow?

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Hair Paper (2018), Charcoal on paper, 59x39.4 in

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Mahsa Merci (b. 1990, Tehran, Iran) is an experimental artist based in Canada, combining various art forms in new and unusual ways, partially due to censorship in expressing her feelings and realities as a bisexual Iranian woman.

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Half-naked (2019), Artificial eyelashes, patina material and sock on canvas, 9.4x7.1 in

VOL 2 MAHSA MERCI Bulge (2020), Artificial eyelashes, patina material and sock on canvas, 13.8x11 in

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A drag with white towel (2020), Oil on canvas, 15.7x11.8 in

VOL 2 MAHSA MERCI A queer with red hair (2020), Oil on canvas, 13.8x11 in 123

Limbo, or this unknown, intermediate holding place between two theoretical places, often houses those who are lost, forgotten or unwanted.

In Iran, people can legally change their ‘sex,’ although sexual activity between members of the same sex is illegal and can be punishable by death. The government forces individuals to choose between ‘male’ and ‘female’ and their simplified and often false identity is then recognized by the state through sex-reassignment surgery.

Limbo (2018), Digital animation

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MAHSA MERCI

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Repetition of the certain action (2019), Plaster, acrylic, resin, artificial nail, nail polish, fur on MDF, 59.1x39.4x4 in

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look at yourself in me (2017), Shoe, mirrors, plaster, artificial nail, steel wool, 12.6x10.6x4.7 in 127

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PHYSICAL BODIES

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A Play by Marissa Khaos

The Offering MONSTERS, MASTI, AND THE NAFS

ABSTRACT

This play challenges borders by offering an embodied comparative of Lucumi and Amerindian (Anishinaebe) cosmologies with Persian (Afghan) poetics through the gaze of the nafs. It is based on the extended definition of literature which includes oral narratives and challenges the dualism of Western thinking but presenting, firstly, the idea that human life comprises not merely of human of flesh and blood, but human of flesh and blood, spirit, and ego; and, secondly, the idea of an expanded definition of ‘life’ to include all living matter.

In this manner, this piece is a performance of the nafs through biosemiotics and hopes to explore nafs (self and ego) as the destructive consumption of the urban construct which depends upon the destruction of the rural, the colonised, the other. It is my belief that the environmental crisis is caused by dualistic, anthropocentric vision which views consumption as metonym of modernity.

I wish to challenge this by offering a change in values where the human, as Wynter suggests, is both bios and mythoi, and where sensing, hence consciousness, overshadows vision, which views through the prism of the ego. This play is left deliberately incomplete as the second part of it will comprise of dance, where the body is itself a site of knowledge, beyond words, and beyond definitions and categorisations, as well as of mourning, which is rooted in Shi'a ritual of Moharram as a means of collective empowerment.

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The Offering Act I: Scene I

Enter DANCER. DANCER. Brothers, they forced the chains on you, but they

willingly put them around their own necks. Hands and

feet bound… necks bowed in line to the dictate of the

tyrant. But the soul escaped.

WRITER. The soul…?

DANCER. The soul escaped the hungry jaws of the giant cannibal.

WRITER. The body without a soul.

DANCER. It is the monster with the sepulchral face. It has a

big head bowed low. That is why it has cast a shadow

over the way of the heart. In trepidation the big head

says, “If I am able to have power, I can be god!”

WRITER. The giant is made up of all the bodies it eats.

DANCER. Its desiccated skin stretches over its bones be cause it is a giant in height only. It is thin and its complexion is the ash grey of death with eyes pushed back deep into their sockets. It has big genitals protruding; crimson red. Its eyes are two pools of blood, and its lips are tattered and bloody from its constant chewing with jagged teeth.

WRITER. It grows as it eats; but hollow.

DANCER. In the city of the blind, the one who can see is insane.

Exit DANCER.

Act I: Scene II

Enter WOMAN with a rope tied around her neck. She is carrying a heavy load in each hand. MAN2 follows, carrying the end of the rope.

WOMAN. A fear awoke me. 9 to 12, 12 to 1; 1 to 2:40 exactly: The hour when the fox screamed and I wander the streets thinking, “How could it be I?” It was not a system, it was all of us, wandering within the system, feeding it.

MAN2 taunts her, perversely, blowing kisses.

WOMAN. I got scared. It is so noisy in the city. It doesn’t communicate with me. I saw the white statue of the white man in military wear carrying a sword and shield, and I thought I saw a dragon engraved on its face.

MAN2 throws something at her. One falls at the corner of the stage where RAT has appeared. RAT runs away quickly.

WOMAN. War and exploitation! … I thought: Cannibalism.

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Looks around nervously.

WOMAN. I saw the lights and breathed the fumes of cars and the smell of war awakened in my dreams.

Enter AVERAGE JOE. He looks very carefully at WOMAN, who is

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struggling under the weight of the luggage she is carrying. He watches her silently. Goes to MAN2.

AVERAGE JOE (directing the question at WOMAN). Why won’t it put down the luggage?

Moves over to MAN2.

AVERAGE JOE. Why won’t it put down the luggage?

MAN2. It wants to carry it … for me!

AVERAGE JOE. But why won’t it put it down now?

MAN2. Why don’t you ask it?

AVERAGE JOE. Does it speak? Can it think?

MAN2 (commands). Think!

WOMAN (putting down the bags). Just like vultures watching from afar waiting on the carcasses of young, I thought: Cannibalism! I move but fear whatever may be around. An unnatural fear I had never before felt as nightmares got a hold of me. I dream: You! It was you! All of you! It was I in the midst of you. Eating the I of the mind of the perceived. Only one reality that demands, “You must be like the man!”

AVERAGE JOE (interrupting her crudely). What does it say? I can’t understand. Make it stop. Make it stop! It’s hysterical!

Mad! Make it stop! Make it stop!!

MAN2 (orders). Back!

WOMAN picks up load and staggers backwards.

MARISSA KHAOS

Exit AVERAGE JOE.

WOMAN (aside). I asked one man what it meant to be a man.

He said flesh and blood. His name was Unamuno. I ate him.

I asked another. He said word. His name was Cesaire. I ate him. I asked a third. His name was Frantz. I opened my mouth to eat, and he ate me back.

Goes into fetal position and mourns. MAN2 watches with sadistic pleasure.

WOMAN. My son is gone… The land was not well.

Mourns as if in the wake of the dream. MAN2 has already lost interest and is on the look-out for beautiful ladies in the audience.

WOMAN. My son is gone. My body… gone too! Away with this land carving sad lines that wrinkle my hands. These hands! (Looks at her hands). Bad dream. Keep ... Me … Up … All ... Night ... Again.

Exit MAN2. WOMAN gets up and pulls slowly at the rope. Hunches over menacingly and follows MAN2, letting the rope guide her.

WOMAN. Bad dream keeps me up all night. They said to tell it to the water, but I only told it to the light. Too bright is the city!

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The Offering Act II: Scene I

Enter DANCER with just a fabric wrapped around his waist.

DANCER. A dervish reported, “I saw my [ego] in the form of a rat and I asked it, ‘Who are you?’ It replied, ‘I am the destruction of the heedless, for I incite them to wickedness.

But if it were not for me and my diseased existence, they would be proud of their purity of heart… when they see me in themselves, all their pride disappears.’”

Moves like a rat. Squeaks and crawls, quickly rushing from this end to that. Stops at one end.

DANCER. No more than a few paces do humans live from the rat than the rat from the human.

Squeaks and rushes to the other end as if to respond to himself. Picks up a mask which is the nose of the rat and puts it on his face.

Enter WOMAN.

PHYSICAL BODIES

WOMAN. When the earth was flooded, life was coming to an end. A new life was beginning in the womb of Sky Woman. She was sitting on the back of the turtle and asked the animals for a morsel of soil to make land again.

DANCER lowers himself on all fours.

WOMAN. None of the animals could manage to go to the depths of the water to get the soil. None except the smallest of the kin: A muskrat!

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Picks up an imaginary handful of soil, stands up straight, and breathes life in the soil.

DANCER. Again, when the flood came, it was a rat who dived to the deepest, darkest depth of the water to get the soil when all the other animals made excuses, “It’s too dark!”

“It’s too deep!”

WOMAN (mockingly). “It’s impossible!”

DANCER. The rat is my kin. Cannibalism alone unites us!

WOMAN. Carnal cannibalism: the realisation of comfort.

DANCER. Law: The codification of cannibalism.

WOMAN. Science: The codification of magic.

DANCER. Magic: Turning taboo into totem.

WOMAN. The envy of my womb.

DANCER. Cannibalism.

WOMAN. The white man discovered God in his own image.

He ate and God became the man.

DANCER. Before He discovered the world, the world discovered happiness.

WOMAN. Then He discovered the world and the world discovered havingness.

DANCER. Cannibalism.

WOMAN. If the earth is a coiled serpent, the rat is in its timeline spiral, and the human is in nature, thinking always

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about the earth.

DANCER. To be human is to always think about the earth.

WOMAN. To be is to always feel of the earth; of life. If the earth is a coiled serpent, then what of the rat?

DANCER. The rat is in its timeline spiral.

WOMAN. And what of Man? DANCER. His path is linear with only one way up: To have!

To accumulate! Knowledge, power, things, people!

WOMAN (addressing Dancer for the first time). Do you know where you are?

DANCER (looking away from Woman). Yes. I am small as a mouse in the shade of giant trees surrounding me… far… far… as far as the eye can see. Trees. Big, thin, prickly, smooth, bent… tall (inhales deeply) trees. Green.

WOMAN. In the forest?

DANCER. The flesh and skin of the earth. It is burning.

WOMAN. The mountains?

DANCER. Before man had Book, the mountains spoke.

WOMAN. The bones of the earth.

DANCER. The city is alive! The dry meandering riverbed at its middle is its heart.

WOMAN. My blood remembers.

DANCER. Cannibalism emerges from the biomorphic unconscious of the metropolis.

WOMAN. Men of the book devour; my blood remembers.

DANCER. The city is alive! Canals and sewers are its veins where the memories flow.

WOMAN. Cannibalism.

DANCER. The city is the exoskeleton of the man.

WOMAN. The earth is a coiled serpent.

DANCER. The city is an imposition of a violent settlement.

WOMAN. To see it! See it light up like starlight! See it! It has stolen even the stars! See how the bones and flesh of the earth is broken, divided, split, shattered. But all the pieces are put together to make a violent second skin.

DANCER. The exoskeleton protects the commerce of bodies within its walls.

WOMAN. But the Angel of Death now wears black and she comes to speak the end.

DANCER. She will take us all. She will take us all.

WOMAN. We are acting against reality without madness.

Cannibalism.

DANCER. We are acting against the disease of a cultured, civilised people who drink blood and shit in rivers. Cannibals.

WOMAN. She will take us all.

Exit WOMAN.

Act II: Scene II

Enter DEATH. It is dark and a form slowly takes shape from the darkness as if at first, it is nothing more than a shadow, a whisper in the night air. A black fabric is held up across the stage by two people on either end.

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The Offering Act II: Scene I

They cannot be seen. The shape of a woman takes form within the fabric. The shape starts to gather the fabric into itself until its form can be well-distinguished; thus, the darkness creates a body.

DEATH rises, back straight, arms outstretched. She looks at her arms and feels her new form with eager hands. She smiles. Her skin is soft but firm. Her flesh is smooth. She has wide hips that sway sensually.

Her smile widens and she tilts her head backwards. Her hands move slowly feeling her hips, her belly, her breasts. She looks at her bare arms again. The colour of her skin is darker than the night. She looks up to the sky, holding her hands up to marvel at her own creation. She looks down menacingly, smiling a smile that reeks of danger. She knows she is every woman’s dream and every man’s desire.

PHYSICAL BODIES

DEATH flays her arms out and eats from the air, repeatedly and viciously as if she is on a rampage over the earth. She pulls the darkness to herself, consuming everything. The entire fabric is pulled while the sound of destruction (buildings collapsing, chainsaws cutting trees etc) can be heard. The other actors, disguised by the fabric, lift up Death so that she grows taller as she eats.

She is put down and hunches over, slightly, enwrapped by the black fabric which she puts over her head like a scarf. The other actors beat their chests. Death starts to mourn. The sound of chest-beating maintains a regular rhythm and merges in with the mourning. The mourning gets louder until it abruptly stops.

DEATH rises her head and lets the fabric spread around her.

Enter MAN2.

DEATH. Were you charged with the death of life?

MAN2 (nervously). I can fix it. Just give me one more chance.

DEATH. First you created Man, the divine; then you created Man, the defined: All along you were creating Man, afraid!

MAN2. Listen! Can you hear that voice? It is coming from far away. Listen! I have heard it a long time. I know someone is out there waiting for me.

DEATH. That was me, and now I’ve brought you the message.

MAN2 (pleads). But I am not ready. I have not even found myself.

DEATH. Come! Your time is up!

MAN2 presses his hand against his chest, staggers, grabs onto the black fabric and falls by the feet of DEATH. DEATH walks slowly off stage. MAN2 follows, pulling his body across the floor while still holding onto the black sheet.

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The End.

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Trying in the confine (after Jericho Brown)

BY HAYLEY MOJICA

We write letters and hope they matter.

The streets were his medicine of choice

when his laughter was my medicine of choice.

But since his mouth isn’t within eye’s reach,

I open windows, and with closed eyes reach for memories in the last home we shared.

He rarely calls for the home we shared.

I slice my bedroom into a cell, imagining his slice of shared, slate cell.

My baby brother converted to Islam.

Piecing prayers with other men of Islam, he cradles the newness of his mind.

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Waiting for the judge to make up his mind, we write letters and hope they matter.

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On the other side of the hinges (notes on “Trying in the confine”) This is my first ever “duplex,” a form created by Jericho Brown through a reimagining and reconfiguring of specific traditions that aren’t him, but together create an ecosystem for him to unfurl.

HAYLEY MOJICA

I was nervous form would constrain, constrict my imagination. But in fact, the rules gave me rail guards that ushered me down a path as close to a straight line as possible. A clear end point. I think in the end, what keeps us (or rather me, and I imagine plenty of others) from relinquishing to the desperation of any given moment, is the understanding that it won’t always be.

My younger brother was jailed a day before independence—rather sour and ironic.

On the day we expected him to receive his sentence, clusters of months after he was originally confined, after various visits before the judge, he (the judge) concluded he (the judge) did not have enough information to make a decision.

And that we should write and collect letters speaking on my brother’s character.

That we should write so as to sway the judge toward some form of mercy.

My brother’s kufi cradled his crown as my ribs unhinged and closed pews away.

I’m realizing now (or maybe remembering) just how difficult expectations are. How destabilizing when the turn, the small end, does not come when it’s supposed to.

When relief is postponed and indefinitely. His chains narrowed his gait and long-fingered wave as he shuffled out—was shuffled out—beyond us. (not necessarily in the following order) “Do you still believe in Jesus,” my mom asked?

“I pray Allah keeps my beloveds safe,” my brother says, “I am at peace, I know this is not my future.”

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Kinza Arif

PHYSICAL BODIES

My central interest lies in the beauty and horror of the human body—specifically in large bodies, in the particular presence they occupy in a room. Despite the power surrounding a large body, there exists an insecurity as well. I am intent on undoing the stereotypical, idealized femme body, which informs my exploration of paint and how it constructs the body. I paint the natural form using colors derived from make-up palettes, foundations, and blushes, using a palette knife and applying paint in such a way to emulate the fleshiness of the skin.

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Untitled (2019), Oil on wood panel, 24x17.3 in

With this project, there is a fine line between abstraction and realism, and I make a conscious effort to keep the physicality and weight present in the form. The human body evolves with time—each mark tells a story, which I hope to bring to life on the canvas. I want to glorify an aged, modern femme body, and I focus on honesty in my portrayal. My paintings confront and challenge conceived notions of femme beauty, and in accepting the non-idealized body, I hope to give my subjects agency. Instead of narrating a body’s story, I give my compositions the form, depth, and textures so that they may speak to the viewer themselves.

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The Dancing Girl (2019), Oil on wood panel, 30.3x23.6 in 139

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Untitled (2019), Oil on wood panel, 35.8x35.8 in

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Untitled (2019), Oil on wood panel, 33.9x27.2 in

Untitled (2019), Oil on wood panel, 30.3x23.6 in

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Untitled (2019), Oil on wood panel, 35.9x24 in

Untitled (2019), Oil on wood panel, 26x24 in

Untitled (2019), Oil on wood panel, 30x24 in

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142 HANIF ABDURRAQIB

Hanif Abdurraqib is a writer from the east side of Columbus, Ohio. His latest book is A Little Devil In America, out in March 2021.

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I’ve been reading you since your MTV days, so I’m a fan, lowkey. It was really fun to read everyone during those time periods, when they felt alive, when places could publish things more freely, but clearly, we always adapt. So, how are you, first and foremost?

I am okay. So I live alone, with my dog. I put this elaborate plan in place to help me through the winter, which involved puzzles, doubling down on my therapy schedule. In the summer, because of how so much of my organizing work had to be prioritized, there were days where I had therapy on the calendar, but had to miss it and step away. By doubling down, I mean getting in a good routine again to help me bear

the winter. Plans are great and plans are very worth following, but when shit pops off, it is often much more devastating than expected. It has been exceptionally cold and snowy in Columbus the last couple days. I tried to go outside in the mornings, and realized I had to edit the plan.

All that to say, I’m doing alright.

I’ve been doing a lot of that, too.

Editing the plan feels necessary.

There are people being very honest, open, and vulnerable right now. These days, I’ve been listening a lot, talking to friends, and when I feel like I have something to say, the energy to do it, then I sit down and write.

Sometimes your routines just evolve based on what you’ve

become fixated on, you know?

Completely. I love cleaning, I absolutely love doing dishes. And I’ve recently fallen into this habit of making more elaborate meals so that I have more dishes to wash after. I’ve always been routinebased, I work from home and make my own schedule. In 2019, I travelled almost all year. I did like 91 readings after putting out 2 books, and now I'm just home all the time. Which is great, but in order to get through that, I have to make these routines for myself that I just have to stick to.

One thing that really stood out in your writings and interviews was this desire to be wrong, and you exist in that tension of not trying to be the perfect anything, but rather still exploring and doing.

This is the complete opposite of most people’s desires. How did you come to that?

Well, I don’t have a real background in academia. I wasn’t good at college, didn’t go to grad school.

I think I got most, if not all of the knowledge I have just on the back of a real relentless curiosity. The engine for me, when it comes to curiosity, is a willingness to operate outside the binary of right and wrong. And in the middle of that, be fulfilled in a way that provides more questions. In the times when I’ve operated this binary of right and wrong, on one end, there is a sense of superiority and closure and, on the other side, there is some shame. In the middle of those two things are a lot of really interesting questions that lead me down other directions. I often leave a lot of thoughts unfinished. In the pursuit of wading through that forest of that middle ground, I find some newer, better questions that are worth pursuing. I am not interested

VOL 2 INTERVIEW BY NAJMA SHARIF

In the times when I’ve operated this binary of right and wrong, on one end, there is a sense of superiority and closure and, on the other side, there is some shame. In the middle of those two things are a lot of really interesting questions that lead me down other directions.

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in being an authority on anything, really. There is not much I can be an authority on—authority perhaps on my own many personal excitements and obsessions—but that’s about it.

The work then becomes, how do I articulate this to an audience who might not share this excitement, but perhaps could? That’s how most of the work I love has arrived to me: someone who is excited about something that I otherwise wouldn't be interested in, but now am. Their excitement becomes infectious. I think that if I imagine myself as an authority, I would get away from the gratitude that comes with sharing an excitement or my obsessions of the moment with the public.

Is that ever alienating? My autonomy as a Black Muslim woman has often been taken away from me in very subtle ways, so sometimes, I try to pronounce what is right or wrong as a form of control.

It is a privilege to be able to be somewhat whimsical about rightness and wrongness. Not whimsical in the sense that I’m wandering with no principles, but the low-stakes, uncritical rights and wrongs. I’m not whimsical about my abolitionist politics, or anything of that sort. Is it isolating? The short answer is, probably. I just have such an interesting relationship with isolation. Often, even my isolation doesn’t register as isolation or anything treacherous. I don’t think I’m that interesting, but I populate my isolating world with interests that keep me full. Somehow, I just don’t mind isolation. Now, what we are in right now is a very extreme version of isolation. This is different, this is hard. But generally speaking, even if I'm in the throes of isolation, I don’t register it as such because I am so invested in getting to the bottom of an excite-

ment and those things arrive to me robustly and frequently. Last month, I was sitting on my couch, putting together visuals for my next book that comes out in March. It involves a lot of soul train lines, and before I knew it, I fell into a YouTube hole and two hours passed. I am very susceptible to the unearthing and revisiting of old obsessions and the joy of new ones. That makes me feel less isolated.

How do you feel when you look back at your older work when your curiosities land you in a totally different direction sometimes?

I think I'm often immensely thankful for my old work, even if I'm not always proud of the ideas I was pursuing. I needed them—those ideas and the pursuit of them—to end up somewhere else. Somewhere better, or more fulfilling. I think in making my peace with the idea that few things age well, I have to be humble enough to recognize that also means my own work, my own ideas, and my own feelings. But, on the other side of that, I hope that I can evolve more freely.

What is influencing you most as a writer right now?

What is really influencing my writing is something that I haven't yet written about publicly. Right now, I am thinking about touch and longing in a different way. There are many ways that people will reenter the world when they feel safe about the vaccine, or feel safe in an alternate way, or safe in general.

There are some people who just want to hug everyone they see, and some people who are feeling really nervous about touching people again. I have friends who live close to me who I haven't hugged in almost a year. If the kingdom of

physical touch has been altered in such a profound way, I have a hard time seeing how it can be rebuilt in a day, a week, or a month. In my writing and scribblings right now, I am longing for both touch that I took for granted, and reconsidering the future of, and reentry into, touch.

What you shared about touch and the future of touch was resonant. How do you think your relationship with bodies (self, material, physical, spiritual, other) fed into this evolution, this year?

Well, I feel like I became more thankful for my own body's abilities. I became even more aware of those abilities as a privilege, particularly my ability to move fairly well and to have running as a mental health outlet. But, beyond that, there's no way for me to be romantic about the plain fact that I simply miss physical contact. I miss the people I love—being in their homes, which can be like extensions of ourselves. So, I'm thinking about the future of touch, not just solely from the standpoint of hugging or holding hands, but also from a desire to re-immerse myself in the many expressions and extensions of the people I love.

What do you consistently return to for comfort, in this process?

I have listened to a ton of new music because that’s what I always do, but less this year. Now, I find myself returning to albums for comfort—albums where I knew what was coming, the weight and crack of the original vinyl. I’ve been listening to Alice Coltrane, a ton.

The way her records sound on vinyl, it really fills a room, and the room becomes softer. I’ve really enjoyed falling into that. Sometimes, if your

For sure, but if I am at all adjacent to even the slightest bit of dread or discomfort, my free time is no longer free. There is a tax on that freedom. But in some ways, it's been so good to be home. I was on the road for so much of last year, and I love my city! Being here, of course there are the frustrations that come with being in, and loving, any place. I love the relationships I have with people, here, and I’ve loved writing

INTERVIEW BY NAJMA SHARIF

And that's very freeing in a sense, right? Wasting the time you want—not taking yourself too seriously, folding back into that self.

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full body and weight are on the floor while listening, depending on what your sound set up is, you even get the ground level vibrations that are coming up. I’ve been returning to records, bad movies, and spaces where I know exactly what’s coming. Sometimes you know it’s awful, and you can laugh and not feel entirely ashamed of yourself. I rewatched Friday Night Lights this year—and I mean, nothing ages well—but for me, I’m glad I don’t feel the same way about it as I did in 2007, but I still allowed myself to be swept up in the melodrama.

Allowing myself that overly cheesy, swelling moment that made my heart beat, and not experiencing shame felt like some sort of mercy.

In some ways, I think about how the pandemic has returned me, and some people I love, into our childlike selves. The only downside is that we are adults. Three Saturdays ago, I was on my couch eating cereal out of a giant bowl, watching TV. At night, I try to stay up later than I probably should, as if I have to answer to anyone except my future self. If there is a child in me, this is the tension that exists, and the pandemic has pushed us to fold into that self.

and organizing in Columbus, for many years. Being here has been freeing. Having time to connect with people here has been freeing, even if we are sharing an undercurrent of dread.

What has been most energizing for me, that I hope continues, is that so many people have found and cultivated new ways to build and create communities with each other, physically, digitally, and beyond.

I don’t know how much my life is going to change. I don’t think it's going to change all that much, whenever there is “freedom of movement,” big air quotes on that.

I have become affiliated with the comforts of my home. I certainly cannot travel in the same way I did

again, it's not healthy or particularly useful for me. There are so few things that I miss that I actually want to go do. I miss going to the movies alone. But when movies opened back up, I was like this really isn’t worth it. I have created ways—and this too is a privilege— to feel comfort at home that I hadn’t yet been able to feel in my adult life.

I have created communities outside my home, outside my home city, that I hadn’t been able to create in my adult life. Those are the things I hope to sustain, whatever comes next.

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PHYSICAL BODIES

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ANUSHEH ZIA

POSITIONS (2020): Explorations of the various body positions in Salah through painting.

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Anusheh Zia

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BEYOND BODIES

CHAPTER THREE

MOMTAZA MEHRI MIRRORED FATALITY Y. MALIK JALAL HIWOT ADILOW FARAH GHAFOOR MARIAM ADESOKAN NATASHA HAKIMALI MERCHANT DARIEN ALEXANDER WILLIAMS

BEYOND BODIES

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TARFIA FAIZULLAH FARAH DIANPUTRI BASEERA KHAN ILAF NOURY ILYAS KASSAM ROMILA BARRYMAN MUNIRA TABASSUM AHMED SABA TAJ

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A Nearness That Cannot Nurture: Art at the Dunya’s Edge

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BEYOND BODIES

BY MOMTAZA MEHRI

I am most Muslim when I am uncertain, unmoored.

Moorish, more or less. I thrive in the maelstrom of unpredictability. Struggle is to be anticipated, then shouldered communally. It’s as regular as the rise and fall of tides. Still, it’s difficult to sublimate this assuredness into the creative industry parlance so often regurgitated at talks, panels and workshops.

Distilling what keeps me going as a writer (and Muslimah) into clinically defanged and secularised soundbites is even harder. Nowadays, I suspend my disbelief virtually. I try to not let it leak into the Zoomsphere. I have my bouts of blistering honesty, but it’s always easier to take less alienating detours. I am rarely able to say what I truly mean, which is to say, I often don’t mean what I say. How can I articulate my torturous faith in all that we owe each other? How do I sustain my punctually betrayed hopes that we can, we must, resist our unholy subservience to the cult of individualist success? Neoliberalism naturalizes what we have been taught to consider unnatural. It infects every sphere of life, embroiling even the sacredly intimate into its market logics of incessant competition, brand cultivation and generalized alienation. Its reach extends from the “state to the soul”.1 We are worth more than we have

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Wendy Brown, Dissent Magazine

been conditioned to accept. The Muslim artist should know and live this. She should celebrate her ineptness under this regime of productivity. Her inability to adjust is a badge of honour, her uneasy estrangement a gift. Be in this world as if you were a stranger. I often think of this hadith and what it means to be amongst the ghuraba. Ghareeb. Strange. A loanword which reverberates across so many of our languages. Al-Ghaib. The concealed elsewhere/s.

The dominion of the unseen as detailed in scripture, pertaining to all that lies outside human perception.

A true believer is not Wendy Brown, Dissent Magazine afraid of the unknown, the uncanny. How do we reconcile our desire for representation with an appreciation for the power of the unknowable?

Invisibility can be transgressive in a world that seeks to excavate, dissect and pathologically commodify difference. There is freedom in illegibility, in strangeness. For those of us attempting to create at a time of collapse, these are the questions keeping us up at night. In our efforts to be seen, to be recognized, who are we looking past? I am tired of being celebrated for speaking over the shoulders of my people. A cultural intermediary can be indistinguishable from an informant.

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I am tethered to those searching for their elsewhere/s. Ours is a kinship sustained through our own prisms of meaning, our sprawling freedom dreams. “We labor to make our getaway, into the an-

cient image, into a new correspondence with ourselves and our Black family.” Baraka’s Ka’ba is an impres-

sion of our ambivalent ummah/s. We know who is with us, who is closer to us than our jugular vein. We purify our intentions to the best of our ability and move through industries and global orders which do not support nor love us. We do not need their paltry, conditional love. It only works to separate us from our family. I return to childhood taraweeh prayers, to young feet tingling. Desperate not to be excluded from the buzz of nightly congregation, I was

committed to remaining upright despite my tiredness. At home, livestreams of worshippers would illuminate our television screen. Rows and rows of believers lining the thick carpets of masjids in Casablanca, Khartoum, Mecca. One prayer, a pleading, lives with me. Oh Allah, do not make this

MOMTAZA MEHRI

“You ever look at a thing you ain’t make, but become a mother in the looking?”

– Angel Nafis

dunya our biggest concern, nor the extent of our knowledge. Dunya as in this world, that which is

nearest, that which rests in our limited grasp. This an etymology of scarcity and constraint. I think of this dua as an appeal for an expansion of the imagination. Far from an endorsement of political quietism, it is a reminder that we have a duty to envision beyond what this world’s structures attempt to reduce us to. With every revisit, I realize how much it has unconsciously guided my creative practice. This is what I bring to my engagements with the thinkers and writers I admire today. When Fred Moten writes that he “ran from it and was still in it”, I think of how that could so easily be mistaken for an Al-Ghazali saying. Anyone who clarifies this dunya’s trappings is a fellow traveller I am grateful to accompany.

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mirrored fatality mirrored fatality is a nonbinary Kapampangan-Pilipinx and Pakistani-Muslim performance art duo, Mango and Samar, sharing their rituals, altars, and medicine through DIT (Do It Together) experimental and healing noise punk. mirrored fatality creates their self-proclaimed “cocoon webs� combining performance art, music, spoken word, graphic design, film, photography, painting, drawing, upcycled garments, anti-imperialist education, and healing justice practice spaces; mobilizing and bridging a transnational warrior community who responds urgently to transnational calls-to-action between Turtle Island, Kashmir, and Mindanao.

BLOOM, Music Video

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So much of what you create involves intricate adorning of self and other. What do you consider when adorning the body? How is this process inspired and intentional?

Samar:

MIRRORED FATALITY

To me, adorning the body is an important reclamation process of creating the vessel of myself where I feel the most beautiful, powerful, and holistically myself. As someone who grew up in a Muslim household, I have always been policed in what I am allowed to wear. Having autonomy over how I choose an outfit and wearing whatever I want without being told I can’t has been really important. I also create eyeliner markings that are meant to be spells and use my face as a canvas for creation. I love wearing jewelry that can be part of the armor I am creating, like beetle earrings or jhumkas gifted from my mother, or chain hardware and amulets of protection, such as crystals or special stones. I tend to wear clothes that make me feel good in my body, which can fluctuate from tight corsets to loose fitting mesh wear depending on what feels the least dysphoric from day to day. I believe that my body is a political site—I treat everyday as an opportunity to show my full self in public spaces, where I have historically not belonged.

When I was younger, I watched my Ma (my apu, grandmother) intentionally get dressed everyday to feel powerful as a Filipina migrant in the US—even to just exchange laundry quarters. My great-great-grand tito (who was murdered for being queer) would wear flashy monochrome suits. Embodying shape-shifting entities through adornment and carrying on their rituals is important to me. I translate my emotions into my garments, jewelry, and the painting on my face for the day. If I’m pissed off, I’m in red and black, embodying a vampiric crow courageously flying through debris and wearing patches from comrades in protests. If I’m deep in my feelings, I’m in blue and white, mirroring the hues of the ocean, wearing selenite I charge up in the water and shells from the Philippines. Recently, I found out that Commander Liwayway, a Kapampangan guerilla battle commander from the Hukbuluhap, would always wear lipstick get dressed in femme clothes before battle with the Japanese imperialists in Pampanga, where my family is from in the Philippines. I am reminded that adorning the body is an ancestral and ancient process in my journey of tying together Ma, Commander Liwayway, and my grand uncles aesthetics in how I dress for shows, protests, and how I create upcycled warrior garments through mirrored fatality.

Wow, thank you for sharing these powerful histories and narratives of self that have brought you closer to the ways in which you adorn the body. What leads you to wanting to build a transnational warrior community who acts in protection of people, ancestry, and land?

m:

The Philippines has always been colonized, from Indian Hinduism, Chinese Buddhism, Catholicism/ Christianity from the Spanish, Japanese, and the US. Prior to colonial forces, the Philippines first-ever-recorded religion was Islam—there are Indigenous Muslim communities, the Moro peoples in Mindanao, who continue to fight for their ancestral lands against transnational corporations extracting Mindanao’s natural resources. In San Simon, San Fernando, and Pampanga where my family is from, Chinese and Korean corporations are buying out the rice fields, lands. The Pampanga River, where my family used to swim and gather fish for their basic needs, is now flooded because of the factory's pollution. As a result of the air pollution of the US traveling to Philippines, climate change, the lack of trees because of mining, and more, the Philippines is the #1 country in Asia susceptible to environmental disasters and Mindanao is the #1 place in the Philippines that is fatal and deadly for human rights defenders, environmentalists, and journalists under Duterte’s Anti-Terror Bill. As a Kapampangan-Pilipinx in Tongva Land, I find it my soul mission and passion to build solidarity with all fights happening globally.

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mango:

IF OUR INDIGENOUS KIN AND TRANSNATIONAL

POLITICAL PRISONERS DO NOT HAVE ACCESS TO THEIR LAND, WE ARE NOT FREE. S:

My name, “Samar,” has a multitude of meanings including “Battlefield Commander.” I believe that my namesake informs my dream of a world where forces of oppression no longer exist. My organizing work has always expanded across a transnational lens, growing up as a person with complex roots in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India.

Learning about my family’s refugee experience after Partition and interaction with incarceration has informed my dedication to centering an international lens. Through growing up in LA, I have been gratefully been able to tap into different activist spaces and expand across borders, movements, and fights.

Before mirrored fatality, I was tapped into prison abolition and healing justice work through Dignity and Power Now and other organizing spaces such as Vigilant Love, which fights against surveillance of Black and Brown Muslim youth. As I began to learn more about Kashmiri occupation and India’s fascist

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government, I wanted to find a means of connecting art with radical education and sending financial support to Kashmiri-led organizations. With other queer and trans folks in the South Asian diaspora, we created arwah collective, through which we hosted teach-ins and art fundraisers to support the fight against India’s genocidal policies. fatality is able to share mirrored mirrored the dedication to honoring the of communities who are fatality: fights resisting the fascist and Through the song UTOPIA,

In creating these transnational communities and movements, you’re also operating across modality and means of creation. What does it mean to create in such an interdisciplinary way for such an international movement?

INTERVIEW BY SARAH ZARINA HAKANI

imperialist government forces of the United States, India, and the Philippines. Building a transnational community honors that although we may be physically separated, we are connected in supporting the land defenders and rightful stewards of Earth who are consistently forced off their land due to settler colonialism which prioritizes making money over building a reciprocal relationship with our multiverse. When we build together, have aligned visions, and unite across different diasporas and struggles and build affinity the more, we can continue to feel passionate, strengthened, and centered on fighting together. However, we can’t just be fighting and burnt out all the time. So by creating community and interdependent care, we also then can create art, laugh, fall in love with one another’s stories and medicine, and truly break down borders and resist. Whether you’re in the Philippines, Thailand, Mexico, or Iceland, a transnational warrior community can house one another, provide mutual aid, share art, party, and have the energy and support to continue uplifting each others’ fights, always.

If you’re passionate about what you’re doing, have NEVER HAS TO BE IN ONE to express, want to share it, and on top mf: something of that, have collaborators who feel the same way CATEGORY AND WE CAN then not having the classes/lessons/equipment/education doesn’t matter—you just make do. Whether it is working on RELEASE OUR SELFlyrics, film, upcycled warrior ware, or a painting; each piece is rooted in the prayer and vision of imagining a world where CRITICISM AND COLONIAL each of us are able to the healing we deserve and a world where each person has their needs met and we are connectDESIRE FOR PERFECTION. ed to spirit, the Earth, and each other.

LEARNING TO HARNESS MULTIPLICITIES IS SACRED BECAUSE IT IS A REMINDER THAT ART

We all have the capacity to create art across mediums that captures the essence and experience of what we are moving through and trusting in sustainable, communal creation over consumption.

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These modes also become so clear when engaging with your new project, COCOON WEBS EP! We’d love to learn more about your process of creating your new EP, as it relates to the context of creating it on the farm, being one with the Earth, and exploring themes of ancestry, including within your track, EARTHBODY(S).

mf:

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MIRRORED FATALITY

Creating COCOON WEBS began in May 2019 when we first created a set at Chewing Foil and performed INVALIDATION and UTOPIA for the first time. After a year of touring across Turtle Island, Thailand, and Mexico, we performed BLOOM, INVALIDATION, and UTOPIA. While being organizers, full-time students, working multiple jobs, and touring, it was hard to have time to access creativity and get into a flow of producing work consistently. When the pandemic first hit, all of our gigs—from academic conferences, artist talks, and shows—were canceled. We had to figure out how to create our set in the virtual world when our set is so deeply tied to communal practices of building a physical altar, deep breathing, and sonic yelling.

When we moved to Anishinabek nations land known as Philadelphia Community Farm in Osceola, Wisconsin for the farm and artist residency, we talked about how we wanted the EP to encapsulate our performance pre-covid. It was beautiful to find ways to create a soundscape of the anger, rage, and healing we felt before and throughout the pandemic by reliving rent strikes, having Freedom Harvests with Dignity and Power Now in front of prisons and detention centers, Black Lives Matter actions, climate justice actions with Indigenous Youth Council Los Angeles, and attending teach-ins by arwah collective and Liyang Network. We meditated on how we were really on the frontlines and on the ground in Tongva Land performing these songs, and now we’re in the Midwest… in the middle of nowhere… with a lot of rural white people who support Trump. But here, we also have this abundance of forest, waterfalls, and rivers to feel safe and recharged in. We spent every single day for two months feeding horses, cows, chickens, and pigs, while learning the process of picking fresh vegetables, planting new seeds, and creating produce boxes.

Learning skills of farming was important to us because so many folks in the community never have access to learning to grow food from the soil or tend to the land. Entering the twomonth artist residency, allowed for us to be granted the time and space to record and produce an EP, and we learned how to through community research, watching YouTube videos about music production, and asking for support from other DIY artists such as Kohinoorgasm and marvin cardenas.

In November on the full moon, we finished recording EARTHBODY(S). This track was a reflective and meditative way to archive our grief of leaving LA, surrounded by our QTBIPOC loved ones. It also held the teachings of the necessity to restore ourselves in nature, and fight for a world where we could all be living in land where we can grow our food, harvest, preserve herbs and food, be in deep relationship with animals, and drink fresh water. We knew we couldn’t stay at this farm forever—if Trans and Queer Indigenous Black People of Color aren’t cohabitating here, we have to continue our fight in the cities, learn from other land projects centered on BIPOC healing and food justice, bridge warriors together

who can cohabitate, dismantle white supremacist landownership, and center Indigenous sovereignty. The EP is our deepest reflections and motivation to keep building warrior connections, bridging through the revolution until we truly can live communally, be stewards of the Earth, and have the freedom and time to truly heal our spirits, emotions, and bodies outside of fascist capitalist oppression.

You’ve shared about queer spirtualities and what it means to return to something so sacred.

What does the process of returning to, excavating, or rewriting faith look like? What is the role of language in this excavation, for you?

S:

The limited view of Islam I was raised with and surrounded by had a lot of toxic and oppressive cultural values that didn’t accept my nonbinary identity. I had to separate myself from the community I was raised in for fear of my safety, even though Islam also taught me the meaning of collective prayer and kinship. Through mirrored fatality, I have been able to reclaim spiritual practices and build my own means of having a connection to the multiverse, spirit, and magic. mirrored fatality has allowed me to bring in dua and salaat outside of a patriarchal, gendered, and judgemental space. Language is also a powerful tool for connection, and although most of the lyricism is in English, bringing in Urdu from my ancestral land

is helping me salvage pieces of my culture that have been lost through colonialism and assimilation.

m:

My grandmothers in San Simon were really involved with the church, and they would always organize ways to distribute food and resources throughout the community. Growing up, my Apus and Ingkongs would recite the Hail Mary and Our Fathers with a rosary, but in this little booklet with the Virgin Mary. All the prayers were written in Kapampangan, so we recited them in Kapampangan. When my parents separated, my mother sent us to the Philippines because she couldn’t afford supporting us in the US, and I went to a Catholic school, where I felt extremely policed, sexualized, and gaslit

Through mirrored fatality, I get to recite my own Kapampangan prayers, sing Ave Maria non-gendered, and bridge them with Samar’s duas.

Returning to pre-colonial faith is so salient for us as well, and your methodology of this return carries so many lessons for what this looks like for our duas, our rituals, and our histories. Thinking back to our theme, how has the way you treat and view the body evolved through creating mirrored fatality?

Champoy, a Pilipinx multimedia artist from Mindanao, taught me that our history is in the stories we tell each other. I feel like sharing the story of queering spiritually through mirrored fatality is a way to pave a way for myself to reclaim precolonial spirituality and inspire new ways for others to do so as well.

mf:

mirrored fatality in itself has become a living entity, and to nurture and care for mirrored fatality, requires putting that labor, time, and love into each other. Through building mirrored fatality, we have and constantly learn how to hold space for our egos, our intergenerational trauma, past pains and mistrust from relationships, insecurity, and evolve with each other into a loving space of holistic wellness, creation, and forgiveness.

The affinity and intimacy we share with each other and pour into our creation hopefully inspires and permeates to the individuals that consume our work.

By healing ourselves and loving each other, we learn to love, nourish, and protect our bodies, map those modalities to the bodies around us, remember we have birthed a body of work we can turn to for support and nourishment, and only continue

INTERVIEW BY SARAH ZARINA HAKANI

WE CREATE OUR OWN QUEER SPIRITUAL CEREMONIES. AS A PRIEST WOULD CONSTRUCT A SHRINE FOR JESUS WITH HOLY WATER AND BREAD, READ BIBLE VERSES, AND SHARE ANECDOTES CONNECTED TO THAT, WE AS MIRRORED FATALITY CREATE COMMUNAL ALTARS, BRING QTBIPOC KIN AND COMMUNITY TOGETHER, SING OUR OWN SPELLS, EDUCATE FOLKS ABOUT THE FASCIST AND IMPERIALIST FORCES IN BOTH PHILIPPINES AND INDIA, AND BRING OUR CHOSEN FAMILY FROM VARIOUS DIASPORAS TOGETHER TO DANCE, RELAX, AND GET GROUNDED AS WE BATTLE AGAINST OUR JOBS, HOUSELESSNESS, GRIEF WITH BLOOD FAMILY, AND MORE.

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for the shit I was experiencing. When I moved back to the US and came to terms with my queerness, I removed all relations with my family because of their violence around my identity.

to grow if our bodies are energetically and physically cared for on all levels. When we experience burn out, it becomes harder to harness creative energy or get projects done, as we simultaneously dedicate time to mutual aid, kin and blood family support, and surviving to get our basic needs met as nonbinary artists of color. Co-producing and co-managing ourselves as DIT artists requires that we learn to take care of our bodies and create healthy boundaries with our work so that we do not mimic the capitalist schedules of work that fuel corrupt and energy sucking institutions. Through the physical act of performance, mirrored fatality has molted the space to utilize the body as a force of protest and resistance through viscerally expelling our rage and ritual to many different communities, from white folks being faced with their own white supremacy to QTBIPOC folks finding a space for catharsis and rightful anger.

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Y. Malik Jalal

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Choppa Wit a Blade (2019), Chevy floor mat, collaged images, 12x8 in

Y. MALIK JALAL

Communion (2019), Aluminum store front door, vinyl, found images, 74x32x6 in

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The primary interest within my work is the study and celebration of Blackness.

I am interested in the representation of Blackness, in thought, in speech, as pictures, as object, those false and imposed, and those true and from within. I am drawn to the Black image in its entirety. I work primarily within the mediums of drawing, painting, collage and sculpture. Collage, however, is what defines what I do—the appropriation of images, the use of ‘discarded’ materials. To imbue or reveal truth and significance in the mundane and in the spaces between seemingly disparate, is the sort of alchemy that defines my people.

Y.VOL MALIK 2 JALAL Scorched Earth Study No. 1 (2020), Found images, asphalt paint, plate steel, 96x74x16 in

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Muddy Banks (2020), Found and forged steel, galvanized paint, 72x60x36 in

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Landscape No. 2 (2020), Oil and acrylic on canvas, 96x60 in

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The Pyramids Shall Rise (2020), Found weight bench, Dogon iron statues, Morracan coffee pot, jewelry and other ephemera, 48x36x12 in

Y. MALIK JALAL

Yall Cheatin, Yall Playin Sober (2019), Collaged found images, 8x5 in

Untitled (2020), Found scrap steel, 96x106x32 in

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IA R E

HYST

Hiwot Adilow

I’m problematic, I’m toxic, I appropriate white culture, I rock sneakers ‘til they talk, I wear flip flops in October.

When it’s 50 degrees out, I’m four, five seconds from catching a coochie cold all cuz I’m getting drunk just to trick my body to believe it’s warm. It’s that nordic shit.

Somewhere, deep down, I am part neanderthal, therefore, it is not wrong for me to live my best caucasicoid life: a murderer, his wife, licking knives, pointing out men I wish to be lynched.

I am a witch because I want to talk nonstop and make niggas drop.

Train hopping beside 9 bucks, my girlfriend and I decide to pickup tricks from amongst the vagrants.

I play my part, scream so loud with thrill I lose my wits, it’s wet everywhere, kids drip down my thigh and I consider what I’ve always been guilty of, since I was Helen, since my fathers invented Hell. I can’t cock a gun ‘cause I’m a debutant counting coins and wincing when lil nigger fingers touch my hand.

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WALKING PAST WHISKEY JACK’S AFTER DARK for 272

HIWOT ADILOW

Mr. Patton spits out fire before imploring us to listen to science. He’s the sponsor of our class. Gave me tactics to practice tipping cows in the dark. He knows I am from a farm field full of hands, crackling wrists and shivers through blue smoke.

He could point the jungles out before I knew Tarzan was a joke about me. Mr. Patton hates two things: weiner dogs and The Voice With a Chokehold on The Negro Soul: Phil Collins.

Now, I know courage through a polar vortex is brats, big pitchers, tipping over, breathing bile, wolfish through snow.

“I have been writing and thinking through what it means to be well, to be loved, to be cared for, and to feel peace.”

Hiwot Adilow is an Ethiopian poet and performer from Southwest Philly. Hiwot has lent her voice to projects including NPR’s Tell Me More, CNN’s Black in America, and PBS’s Wisconsin Life. Her writing has been supported by Callaloo Writers Workshop, The Pink Door Retreat, and The Brunel International African Poetry Prize. Hiwot is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s First Wave Learning Community where she earned her BA in Anthropology with a certificate in African Studies. Her second chapbook, Prodigal Daughter, is currently available as part of Akashic Books limited-edition New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Sita), edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani.

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THE DEAD THING

BY FARAH GHAFOOR

Summer slipped inside sometime in the night.

I woke, not knowing her or anything, veteran as the earth. I woke in tears cooled by a beaten atmospheric ceiling fan.

She had torn up my living room and only I could see it.

Draped on the couch like a killer, her unblinking black eyes are endless as rot, as day. I must prepare refreshments, I thought. I have manners, after all. But the heavenly peaches and clementines which the night before were fragrant and dew-sweet, were now spotted with wet ruin and bitter mint.

A wet, whispering trickle approaches my ear: the tap is running somewhere like a subtle animal.

I must turn it off, I thought, and I am running towards it until there’s a gasp, then nothing.

She knows I don’t know anything now, and says nothing.

The other night, I turned the light off and off and off again.

I had shut my eyes and my teeth had danced a jig in the dark until they broke into my mouth. Even these clothes hang dull and quiet, like curtains.

Ever since this witness arrived, my mind has moved slow as a noon breeze on four outstretched limbs through the square.

It has torn through the trees and climbed up, up, to where it fades in front of these eyes under the light’s militia.

I must be grateful. Grateful, as existence.

We know the next year will be harsher, and as unpredictable as the dead, rising and rising like the dutiful sun, coming for the rest of us one by one, and we must—

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A written piece by Mariam Adesokan Angel Talk is a series of fictional dialogues that aim to highlight the inner workings of human life from a non human perspective (angels). Using these otherworldly embodiments of life has enabled me to write in ways that detach myself from the world as if I were an observer. Writing in this way has helped me to have some personal introspective moments. As detached as this specific piece may sound, it is very personal, if not completely.

Angel Talk: Interviews THIS INTERVIEW WAS HOSTED ON THE 13TH OF JANUARY 2020 THE INTERVIEWEES NAME WILL BE CENSORED FOR CONFIDENTIALITY. 169

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Angel Talk: Interviews Hosted by Munkar & Nakir

Nakir & Munkar Interviewee

Asalamu Alaikum [Interviewee]

Walaikum Assalam—Sorry, before we start can I just ask where I am? I have established I have passed away.

Unfortunately we cannot disclose this information until the interview is over.

Okay, what do you want to ask me?

Who are you?—Rather, who were you?

I’ve been asked this question so many times in my life, I never knew what to say.

Do you not know who you are?

I mean, if this was a human asking me, it would make sense to identify myself with what the world has already identified me as—people would just be on with their day.

Understood. What identification was given to you on Earth?

BEYOND BODIES

For someone like me, I would say that I was queer, Black, a woman, and it was only when I got much older I identified as Muslim.

So you are queer, Black, a woman, and a believer. That is all you are, correct?

Well no.

No?

I don’t really know who I am. I don’t think I ever did—My memory tends to fade but I remember for the longest time I was chasing myself, it was extremely tiresome, trying to figure out who I truly was. It’s a strange little thing, being so detached from your mind and your body. So to answer your original question, I don’t know, sorry.

What do you think, Munkar?

Your answer has not been accepted [Interviewee]

But why? I don’t know how to answer the question, I don’t know what to say.

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Maybe on Earth you are all of those things you described, but now that your body has perished, who are you now?

We do not know what you look like, these physical attributes that resonate with your human form does not do much for you now.

So what are you claiming, are you merely flesh to be strung on wire for others to pin empty characteristics onto you?

This interview follows after the death of a young Black Muslim woman.

Munkar & Nakir took it upon themselves to record and share the exchange between themselves and the interviewee. Munkar & Nakir set a basic rule to ask a limited set of questions, however, progression onto the next question did not happen unless both angels were fulfilled by the interviewees answer.

MARIAM ADESOKAN

The answers given from the interviewee must be honest.

Before you perished [Interviewee], you were a living and breathing vessel, you were complete concentrated life. You were a creature capable of beautiful things, don’t you agree Nakir?

Yes. Me and the other angels find it truly fascinating how humans are capable of so much. The ability of your brains to produce chemicals that make you feel love, your ability to heal yourselves and others. More so, your animalistic nature, your physical bodies, the hairs on your skin, the sharpness of your teeth and ultimately the way your body speaks to you. Your wounds, scars and the minor abrasions that you humans try to scrape away, the way the hairs on your head have mannerisms, mannerisms that correspond to the Earth itself. The angels are also fascinated by humans burning desire to be better, all the time. This burning desire is beautiful if done with love, but that is another conversation for another lifetime.

So you see [Interviewee] you are so much more than what you originally answered. And if you really want to conclude and summarise who you are, you are life, a human being.

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No.

But not anymore.

Yes, but not anymore.

So who am I now?

You tell us—tell us what your all time longing was, what rested on your heart until the day you died, your yearnings and ultimately how you cared for yourself.

Is this the second question?

Yes

Elaborate.

My all time longings—I’m not too sure, I suppose I longed for love. I longed for the world to handle me with care. A lot of things rested on my heart, for the longest time I was trying to unweave these tight constrictions around myself. I yearned for freedom every single day, to be and be happy with being. I never cared for myself enough however, I always tried.

Its like I spent a million nights chiselling my body until it was finally right, picking at my 171

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Angel Talk: Interviews Hosted by Munkar & Nakir

Munkar & Nakir Interviewee

vocabulary or how I delivered my words that most people did not care about anyway. I spent a million nights switching facades and dancing in and out of shadows, to live or to hide? Not sure which one made me more uncomfortable on current Earth. My love language was to be understood, and if the other party did not understand, then they should proceed with gentleness. I was looking for truth in everything I did, sometimes I found it. Everything Im describing sounds like a radical goose-chase just aimlessly running towards what I thought to be ideal, its draining. Before I died I wish I didn’t drain my body into sea—Sorry if I’m not making sense.

Do not fret—Munkar?

Next question.

Did being a believer ease these ‘tight constrictions’ around yourself?

Why?

What pulled you towards Islam.

Now that I’m dead does it really matter?

Yes.

Hostility does not make sense here.

The sword is ultimately pointed towards yourself [Interviewee] and frankly we are not the ones holding it. The answer has not been accepted.

BEYOND BODIES

I don’t know, I questioned my belief a lot.

I just—I don’t know.

I was born into this belief, everyone was born into this belief. Thats my answer to the question, take it or leave it.

These questions are difficult.

To release fear is difficult.

I think it is best to pause for now and come back to this question later.

Nakir, she must abandon her human fearful emotions, they do not serve her.

She is indeed trying her best and for that, she is brave.

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Salaam [Interviewee]

Salaam

Back to the previous question, we would just

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like to understand what exactly Islam has done to help you on the journey of your life before you perished.

As I said before, I questioned my belief frequently. I’d go some months feeling extremely disconnected from Islam and then I’d have strange and sudden pulls towards it.

Continue

If you wish.

That is all we ask.

Beautiful indeed.

Mashallah—This is the final question before you pass on, it might sound slightly insensitive—Are you ready for the transformation of your body and soul? You said you have established you are no longer

Shall I be completely honest?

MARIAM ADESOKAN

My ever-wavering belief sat on the premise of being told what to do, being born into a split religion household I often found myself in limbo. My father was never really religious and my mother lived and breathed Islam, so I didn’t really know where to place myself. I often longed for the connection my mother had, Islam gave her strength. With all this, I sometimes believe that I should just be kind and loving often thinking that should be enough, love being my religion. Peace. I am quite distraught now that I am reflecting on my pastlife, I wish I navigated Islam completely differently, but then, I feel like I somehow indirectly followed the teachings of Islam. To summarise, I think my life was aided by being genuine when I could, being awfully kind and just being human. There was so much bubbling tension all over the world, and Earth being as beautiful as it is had so many insidious dark patches that just seemed to burst into death. Islam might have not had immense impact on the life I lived but I saw how Islam held my mothers hand through all her hardships. She found Islam on her own you know—she was an orphan, she was alone in the ocean that was the world. She believed in Islam to guide her, sometimes I think she done everything by herself, I mean she did—but—um—yeah she was strong through it all, and thanked Allah (swt) for everything she overcame. I think that’s beautiful, its not my beauty I know, its hers, but I witnessed it in realtime.

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Angel Talk: Interviews Hosted by Munkar & Nakir

Munkar & Nakir Interviewee

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Well I have no choice.

You always have choice.

What do you choose?

In Jannah.

I choose to be free, in Jannah.

Earth was cruel, the cruelest thing to ever be written. That place is so full of fury and unrest, there was some nights where my heart could not bear this Earth for a second longer. There were some nights I’d be so disgusted to be human. I don’t know if this sounds strange, but I am content with the uncertainty of my soul—If it decides to transform into a beautiful thing of light or burst into nothingness, either way, the cycle of my spirit has ended.

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alive, do you mean that?

So you have chosen to be free in Jannah, we will of course let you proceed, but your soul might reject the fate you have chosen. Are you sure this is what you want?

Yes.

Granted.

Granted.

Is there any questions you have for us before you go?

No, I am weary.

Very well.

Thank you for letting us record this, you are cherished.

Thank you, will I see you again?

I thought you were weary!—The answer is no, you will never see us again.

Goodbye [Interviewee].

Asalamu Alaikum.

She is already gone—Walaikum Asalaam.

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MARIAM ADESOKAN

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Silencing the Spiritual Somatic

BY NATASHA HAKIMALI MERCHANT

Natasha is an Assistant Professor of Multicultural Education and Social Studies at the University of Washington Bothell (situated on Coast Salish and Snohomish occupied land) where she teaches interdisciplinary courses addressing issues of equity in schooling and education. Her research interests involve investigations of how the Muslim-other is approached in social studies curricula and how Muslim-bodies resist against and acquiesce to curricular conceptions of Islam and Muslims. Natasha’s diverse experiences as a community worker, teacher, and scholar are driven by her commitment to honoring the humanity of individuals and communities who are often (mis)understood through narrow frameworks.

The silencing of the body’s experience is one personally familiar to me. Everyday my body sits in discomfort and disjuncture and I suppress it by intellectualizing that I must calm-down so I can get-on. The trauma, the longing, the anger held within the body, if it is to exist, must be expressed in intelligible and elegant verses that have utility beyond the experience itself. The right to exist, extends to the materiality of the body itself.

NATASHA HAKIMALI MERCHANT

The experience of the body, for me, typifies why this night is known as one of power. Yet, the sweat, pressure, and pain of it all is obscured year after year as the pious wait for peace until the break of dawn. What are the depths of wisdom in the body and its experience that we ignore in favor of focusing on the external Qur’an as catalyst? The lack of focus on the body is not simply in deference to the greater emphasis on the revelation of the Qur’an, but it is also a way to maintain a patriarchal separation between somatic wisdom (often read as feminine) and the nonmaterial sacred. Afterall, as I’ve been told by my teachers: to emphasize his frantic state would be tantamount to equating the Prophet (pbuh) with weakness.

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I write this in preparation for Layltul Qadr, The Night of Power and Destiny, the night when the first verses of the Qur’an were said to manifest. For me, this night is less about the Qur’an as a book of guidance and more about the haqiqah or truth revealed through somatic wisdom. It is said that he felt a tightening and squeezing in his chest as the revelation was at the threshold of his being. Once the verses penetrated through his being, with his heart-trembling, shivering and sweating, he came to Bibi Khadija and asked her to wrap him up till he found composure.

We experience the disappearing of the body into quieter and acceptable forms- ones that don’t talk too loud, ones that disappear into the binary, ones that are faint in substance and heft—it is as if we are slowly becoming translucent before we cease to exist in the body altogether. The physical and visceral become sacrifices at the altar of equanimity and longing for peace. The agitation from within becomes a hindrance to manage rather than the way into the Divine.

The reminder of Inna Lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un echoes that we are fashioned of clay, something of black mud, and with every prostration where our head meets the ground we are reminded of this physical origin point and its physical end. Between the two bookends of everythingness/nothingness we live in our bodies. Is the goal then to never fully occupy what the body has to offer—stretching it to its limits of pleasure and pain? Are we to tread lightly within these vessels trying to avoid full occupation within the physical knowing of its ephemeral nature?

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178 DARIEN ALEXANDER WILLIAMS

Darien Alexander Williams is writer, doctoral student, and researcher whose work centers Blackness, community organizing, Islam, climate change, and disaster. Hailing from Jacksonville, Florida and currently based in Boston, Massachusetts, his writing engages resistance and reimagining urban planning and democratic institutions, particularly for The South.

In what ways does your relationship to Islam connect to space—its evolution, destruction, and rebirth?

My relationship to Islam is connected to space through people. That’s generic, but I feel like spirituality, being a bridge between the profane and the Divine, is central to being a queer Muslim. This began in the South for me, in North Carolina, specifically. It’s not really acknowledged as a place that fosters queer Muslim community, but it was for me.

In more literal ways, I’m an urban planner and engage with space in my daily working life. My research deals with pain, disaster, climate change, and communal healing. I also consider the deeper, historical questions around different Black Muslim urban spaces—what they once were and what they’ve evolved into now. My work is inherently connected to space through its evolution, destruction, and rebirth. To me, all of these things are the same.

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moment, all of this has come together for me, but it’s semi-recent. And of course, it's playing out in weird ways during this global disaster.

Even in an allegedly secular way, I think a lot of people are okay with the thought that the only constant is change. There are more poetic ways to say that, but I move through this by placing a lot of emphasis on lineage, narration, commentary, and imagination—all key aspects of Islamic traditions.

I also think a lot about the fact that for me to even exist in the place where I’m at—spiritually, politically, physically—someone else had to imagine a new world into existence, one where I could exist. At this

Totally. I think even just sharing that and understanding your evolution of how lineage appears in your life matters. It makes me think of the evolution of your relationship to disaster during this time. Since much of your work treats the topic of disasters, how are you currently viewing bodies in relation to disaster?

If I start with my own body, in the past I’ve dealt with disaster in the sense that it’s a geographically bounded process—think hurricanes, natural disaster pipelines, or technological disasters. It’s often location-bound or contextspecific. People are impacted in a way that we can measure, understand, and conceptualize. Therefore, we can wrap our minds around how to help people through that experience. Eventually, we’re able to understand what is required to prevent something like this from happening again.

It's easier for me as a researcher who is normally outside of a disaster scenario to go to the disaster, experience what I need to experience, and leave.

There's no leaving a pandemic. There is a tremendous amount of stress associated with the

It’s such a unique positionality— the pandemic is an extension of your research and you can never fully log off. What nourishes you spiritually in the face of perpetual destruction? In what way does faith influence that doom or the feelings of resilience?

I feel nourishment from faith through the very deliberate actions of other people. I pray, I read Qur'an, but I don't gain a sense of peace doing these things alone. I feel fed when I’m connecting in faith with a group of people who are already used to creating intentional, alternate spaces, which are often queer and trans Muslims spaces. I also engage in things like online Tajwid, Muslim speed friending or speed dating, and the abolition and transformative justice workshop that Reconstructed put together. These are impactful spaces for me.

You know when you see something, and you didn’t know you needed it, but you really, really did?

I do feel like resilience and rebuilding are possible. That is all that I know, as a Black person.

There aren't other options. At the same time, I don't know what that's going to look like.

INTERVIEW BY SARAH ZARINA HAKANI

kind of fucked over on a very regular basis. That boomeranging is a familiar feeling when I think about free will and about the evil that happens in the world, both generally and in Islamic terms.

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material reality of this disaster and people dying— people I know dying—and suffering the grief, loss, and disorder of that death. As a result, the worker and researcher in me feels like I'm never leaving work. It's really taxing, so I've been grateful for spaces that have been curated to be somewhere else, even though I'm not physically somewhere else. I don’t mean that in an escapist way, but in a way that reminds me that we are in this together.

These spaces remind me that I have the capacity to hold other people up, and other people have the capacity to hold me up.

But I am not entirely optimistic. This whole experience is having me rethink how I feel about the idea of community care. There are plenty of people that I am in community with who—I don't want to say are not invested in community care—are differently invested in this type of care. I’m struggling with this realization. I’m trying my best to sort of hold space for multiple truths, like the truths that none of us necessarily deserve what is happening right now, that there are systemic forces producing this level of avoidable suffering, and the reality of “What else did we expect? Of course, the state abandons us.”

I'm bouncing between how to think about these things on the individual terms that make sense in my personal life and how I think about these things in systemic terms that honor the fact that we're all 179

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Part of me is really scared because I want to keep an open heart and I want to be as loving as I think of myself as being, but sometimes pain changes you.

I feel myself being changed and I'm scared of what that’s going to look like on the other end of this.

Pain definitely has an impact that can be hard to measure and often translates to our relationships.

We’ve been inspired by your recent writings on community and friendship, digital and beyond, and how you choose to love on people who are showing care in different ways right now. Could you share more about that evolution?

with people.” It sounds petty, but I’m someone who sends audio messages to my friends, monthly letters, and texts back. Before the pandemic, I was used to sending people letters and then getting a text back like “Hey girl, got your letter, thank you!”

And now people are a little bit more invested in connecting across the distance. Because of my experiences with transience, I was already in the headspace of “Oh I want my friends from these different eras of my life to know each other, so let me create some kind of digital space for all of us to hang out and have a shared experience, so that in the future we’ll have this shared history.”

It’s powerful that you’ve set the blueprint, considering so many people are learning what it means to have these relationships cultivated from a distance. So, you’re currently a doctoral student conducting research right now! How have you approached learning during this time? Is there anything that learning has accelerated or shifted for you?

DARIEN ALEXANDER WILLIAMS

I thrive in spaces where I know I'm accountable to people and I know that I have to try my best for the sake of “us” and not just for the sake of “me.” I know this is gloomy—I don’t know if I’ve ever articulated this out loud—but if something is just for me, I’m not going to try my best. Right now, I’m wrestling with the fact that not everyone is built like that and that’s okay. The friction present in that realization mirrors that of other realizations I’ve had, particularly ones that remind me I’m aging outside of my bodily experiences. There are specific moments I can point to and say, “Oh, I got older there.” Often, I go from being softer and more naive to having a more jaded view of humanity. In those moments, I realize it is possible for people to have dark intentions or for me to be hurt in a particular way. If you're productive about those moments of aging, that can turn into wisdom. If it doesn't turn into wisdom, it may lead you down a darker path. I feel like friendship holds space for the wisdom that comes from the experiences that age us in painful ways. I’ve been seeking friendship out more because I don’t know how to hold all of these feelings in these accelerated moments of aging.

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You’re speaking to something really powerful, which relates to spaciousness in yourself and your community. How does your experience of transience, physical or otherwise, inform how you’re experiencing this pandemic time?

Transience has given me the muscle memory to keep in touch with people from a distance. I have a line that I say whenever I move: “If our friendship falls apart, it’s your fault because I keep in touch

I don't want to say I've been thriving work-wise in the pandemic because that's not the case. However, I am thriving from a mandatory distance between me and a conventional university setting. My approach to learning has been liberated. Suddenly, I only have to interact with the people that I work very closely with and communicate progress to people who care about me and my work, which was not the case before the pandemic. Being able to do academic and intellectual work without having to perform academia and intellectualism has been amazing.

Even after this conversation, I’m FaceTiming my homegirl who is a public health researcher to do work on Blackness and the COVID-19 response, particularly around abolition and the pandemic’s impact on prisons. Our whole research group is chill Black researchers and abolitionist organizers who all have healthy relationships with themselves, each other, and their work. Collectivizing, having meetings, writing things, preparing grant proposals, and conducting research digitally, on our own terms, changes the knowledge produced, itself. I'm realizing how I like to work and exactly to whom I like to be beholden. Before, my work felt more specialized and geographically isolated, but now there is no corner of the world where people are not experiencing disaster. It is easier to pull more

We have to believe that if we are organizing, other people are, too.

I’d like to think that there really is always someone looking out for me; I can rest in that.

Hearing you talk about your new reality, the fear of reverting into how systems were in the past, and applying these lessons to the future has me thinking about future Darien. If you could give the future you a prayer, whether it be for your bodily self, your queer Black Muslim self, or otherwise, what would that prayer be?

I hope that I am still praying. There have been periods of my life where I was not in regular conversation with God, and that shit is dark. I don’t want that to happen again, but I won’t deny that it could. So, I hope there is a future self in existence and I hope that person is talking to God on a regular basis. I’ve been journaling frequently, since I was nine years old. Oftentimes, I’ll return to intense, stressful journal entries of the past and write responses in the margins. Now, when I have a really fucked up day or I’m going through some kind of trauma and writing in my journal, I write with the hope that, at some point in time, another me will respond in the margins. It makes me think less about what is being written and allows me to lean into the hope that a future me isn’t going to leave me on “read.” My prayer for future me is that I text back—that future me will be around to have something to say.

INTERVIEW BY SARAH ZARINA HAKANI

Early on in the pandemic, a lot of students were getting kicked out of their dorms and dealing with sudden displacement in Boston. Plenty had direct places to go, but many did not. I thought about the lessons I’ve learned from the organizing that follows a disaster and joined a group of students developing a regional mutual aid network. There’s always so much that needs to get done, so we mobilized to replace paychecks, get people food, shelter, and transportation. In this work, there’s always the ethical question of “Why are all of these students mobilizing resources for this acute, disaster-oriented need, as if there are not plenty of chronic issues deserving of the same attention?

There are many homeless people in the area—are their needs distinct from these needs?” It’s moments like these that highlight that all communities need to be included in our work and that all of these needs are actually one in the same. Outside of the established institutions of care, we have to build our own. This gives me hope about community care and what that can look like.

priating research resources to those organizers by writing those needs into grants and getting money and a team of researchers to those organizations, in order for them to do their work. I think one in five prisoners has gotten COVID-19. There are some really awful hotspots here in Massachusetts, and in Texas, where most of my team is located right now.

These projects and reprioritizations have furthered my ability to leave the model of academic work that has been presented to me. I am committed to working with the people I come from—other Black people—and prioritizing the South.

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people into the work, whether or not their experience is traditionally valued. Of course, I look forward to the day the pandemic is behind us, but I almost fear the way capitalism is going to co-opt any joy that I’ve found from the ways the pandemic has disrupted the processes that had a hold over my life.

I’ve been part of a community of researchers who have been pushing for abolition in emergencymanagement and disaster spaces that are historically tied to myths around first responders, police, and law and order. Lately, we have been pairing up with other abolition groups, like Fight Toxic Prisons, who are already doing this work. We are saying, “Hey, we have some resources. Do you have a research question that you need to answer to better organize for your people?” We’re appro181

POEM THAT BEGINS WITH FAITH AND ENDS WITH PATIENCE

BY TARFIA FAIZULLAH

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf 2018) and Seam (SIU 2014). The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, three Pushcart prizes, and other honors, Tarfia has been featured in periodicals, magazines, and anthologies both in the US and abroad. Tarfia presents work at institutions and organizations worldwide, and collaborations include photographers, producers, composers, filmmakers, musicians, and visual artists, resulting in several interdisciplinary projects.

I’ve stopped scowling. My toothbrush rests solo on the porcelain lips of sinks.

I live with rituals of faith in my own rooms.

Faith is flinching.

It looks like two skullcapped boys holding hands.

Let’s say it’s in the rain.

Faith is a girl afraid of losing the connection.

Once, in a winter storm, I made a wrong turn.

I pressed my hot forehead.

(The coolness of ice keeling open the window the worry) But I wasn’t strong enough to die!

To kiss someone for the first time.

I reversed and drove and reversed and drove my way back to learn the human brain and the mind are the same, but a surgeon can only cut into one.

I still cradle my head in one palm to make any corner a home.

I forget daily.

Patience is a virtue, a blind man once told me.

Sure . . .

but when?

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FARAH DIANPUTRI

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BEYOND BODIES

Baseera Khan

Installation View, snake skin, Simone Subal Gallery, New York, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist and Simone Subal Gallery, New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni.

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BASEERA KHAN

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Installation view

snake skin, Simone Subal Gallery, New York, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist and Simone Subal Gallery, New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni.

“I’m showing new work about eminent fallen powers and their circumstantial influences on visual culture. I dissected a singular 6x14 foot column through material traditions of resistance and dissent, by means of collaging graphic and ornamental histories within these acts of building sovereignty. I’m unpacking the blind spots and pointing to architectural connections to our body and how we adorn and outfit ourselves.”

Khan uses Plexi cut-outs and screen-printing to redact elements of power throughout the material.

Khan found the issues of Mosaik—translated for the artist by friend and scholar of German Studies, Anna Horakova—to contain “resistance and dissent from capitalist mentality, but when it came to ideas on race and religion, Mosaik seemed to be stuck in the same way the right-wing regimes were stuck.

Kind of like here and now, with the failures of the left, flying toward conservative anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant, anti-Black policies.” Horakova notes, “The comic was devised as a socialist educational tool that would emulate the success of Disney comics in the West, while countering their perceived capitalist bias by offering a socialist narrative. It partially succeeds in this critique, while simultaneously creating a space in which to satirize the self-legitimation of state power in East Germany and power in general, thus resonating with Khan’s own recurrent motifs of columns and carpets. At its worst, however, Mosaik evinces a recourse to racist and anti-Semitic representation in the caricatures and plot motifs it deploys—motifs that Khan’s collages appropriate and subsequently assail.”

BASEERA KHAN

snake skin addresses traditional representations and their misrepresentations, which have led to The vertical columns are functional as well as emblematic of institutional power, but the rugs veil volatile social environments globally and most notably within capitalist-driven societies such as the and blend them with radical ornamentation and U.S. Volatility creates the need for self-censorship into histories of people coming together to talk and secrecies among people who are marginalized and work on these rugs together. Why adorn the and othered. Deploying linguistic shifts and column? Obfuscating its patriarchal reinforcing fashion as political mediums, Khan attempts to ideals, “the rug wraps itself like a snake choking at this system, exposing a hollow core.” In addition untrap revolutionary material through work with textiles, archives, performance, and sculpture. to wrapping, the column was subjected to various forms of performative dissection by the artist—cut- Revolution can often be confined by its treatment ting, dividing, and scraping off emancipated slivers through traditional documentation and its historical archive. Creating lexicons on their own terms, Khan that migrate away from the larger architectural challenges the evidentiary capabilities of all forms masses. Khan’s structural disassembly and of documentation. Here, Khan’s precise alterations scattering of the column’s parts reveal stratified layers of foam, its ‘hollow core,’ while their surface of architecture privilege “peculiar ruins,” and analysis evokes the peeling flyers of postered urban unseated or fallen powers, giving the feeling that spaces that distribute a collaboratively assembled their far-reaching implications are manifested in other forms of adornment like clothing or jewelry, collage of materials and messages. or that they move the culture through music, and influence “the way people feel they can occupy and Column Number One–Seven are paired with speak in spaces of generative cultural shifts.” a series of chromatic collaged prints set in a Shedding and un-shedding. handmade framing system with spacers made from the same Kashmiri rugs. Roman ruins, ancient mosques, and pages of Khan’s own reading material including 1980s issues of Mosaik and –Written by Lia Gangitano Arundhati Roy’s End of Imagination, are pieced together to draw connections between political revolutionary activities in Central Europe and India.

Like a teenager scribbling out unwanted subjects,

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Khan’s series of sculptural works, Column Number One–Seven, is informed in part by the columns of the Malcolm X Masjid in Harlem, which are wrapped with the same prayer rugs as the floor of the mosque, flattening the structural elements into more of an expansive landscape.

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Column 5 (2019), Pink Panther foamular, plywood, resin dye, custom handmade silk rugs made in Kashmir, 72×22×72 in Image courtesy of the artist and Simone Subal Gallery, New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni.

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Column 6 (2019), Pink Panther foamular, plywood, resin dye, custom handmade silk rugs made in Kashmir, 72×22×72 in Image courtesy of the artist and Simone Subal Gallery, New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni.

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Ilaf Noury

RECONSTRUCTED

As an Iraqi born and raised person, displaced and growing up in France, I have been questioning “Mesopotamia” (the perception of it) for as long as I remember. Highly influenced by Zainab Bahrani and her contribution in this field, my research led me to question the narrative and ontic concept of Mesopotamia as has been determined

by Western archaeological discourses. Rather, I aim to consider the ideological components of this phenomenon, to understand the politicising inquiry in archaeology, to consider Mesopotamia not as a factual historical and geographical entity waiting to be studied, excavated and interpreted according to one set of conventions or another, but as a product of a Western historical narrative.

Personally, I have always found it very strange to walk in museums in Europe and find so many “Mesopotamian artifacts,” not really knowing why they were brought here, objects they love to

analyse, preserve, expose, monetize, study and finally dispossess and displace. An echo to “Statues Also Die,” by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Cloquet.

Science fiction appeared to me very clearly as an essential starting point. Fiction as a liberating tool, escaping and reconstructing, shaping and reshaping autonomously, full of possibilities, hope and poetry.

A series of fictional stories, narratives, invented events, are created. They are intentionally and ironically floating and uncertain, both in time and space, in order to reconstruct, balance and escape a certain gaze imposed on us. A fictional narrative in order to finally speak for ourselves, as a part of “reclaiming what’s ours” as an autonomous entity, reinventing our own narratives.

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What if we have to look at these objects, not with an academic or historical lens, but with our faith?

What if Western archeology, historians and explorators, completely misunderstood for so many years the real function of Mesopotmian artefacts?

The fictional story

As I identify as Muslim, it is quite obvious to me that the importance of faith goes beyond the visible and material world, as real miracles did happen, and it’s only our faith that guides us to believe and see them.

ILAF NOURY

THE FICTIONAL NARRATIVE INVENTED HERE, FOR THIS PROJECT, MADE ITS WAY TO A VERY SERIOUS NEWSPAPER’S HEADLINE, SHAKING ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS MUSEUMS IN THE WORLD, AUTHORITIES, HISTORIANS, ARCHEOLOGISTS AND MORE. 193

Ilyas Kassam Ilyas Kassam (b. 1986, UK) is a London-based artist and poet.

Drawing from Japanese and Arabic calligraphic traditions, his works centres around the notion of infinity and the role language plays within the mystical experience. Ilyas is known for his large textual paintings on rice paper, that have a explosive yet meditative quality. He is the author of Reminiscence of the Present (2011), co-host of Karl

Marx Does The Washing Up

podcast, and was an exhibitor at the 2018 International Ismaili Islamic Arts Festival.

Not Her. She, the Ether. Pneumas Series (2019), Mix media on Japanese Kozo paper, 71.7x38.2 in

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Every body is constructed of its environment. A body of matter is built and formed by the space that surrounds it. A body of text is given meaning by its context.

From an esoteric understanding of Islam, humans are seen in a similar light: A piece of matter enlivened by the energetic presence of Allah. We are born and continually constructed out of Their being, and it is the omnipresence of Allah that gives birth to the locality of man. These pieces explore the soul as well as the flesh as a localized body of energy, built of its spiritual environment. Each body has a centre but no definable edge—leaving it open, dynamic and eternally bound to its creator.

Fate Bestowed. Unhear the Cry, Pneumas Series (2019), Mix media on paper, 93.3x59.1 in

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I Bodies born of other bodies Bodies of flesh failing in their water Bodies breaking to know each other Bodies birthing fragments of their ancestors Bodies bleeding to find a milk Bodies dying to be reborn Bodies claiming a will that is lost Bodies searching for their skin Bodies bleeding in front of ghosts Bodies ghosting their only souls Bodies dissolving in dead soil Bodies becoming holy mulch Bodies cleaning their material Bodies searching for their past Bodies forgetting themselves in breath Bodies breathing for their life Bodies gliding in their absence Bodies being other bodies waiting for every body to share a whisper Whispers leaving to find their body Clouds disappearing in flesh No body To watch her massacre

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Legion sold to another earth

II Black bodies with white bones Crucifixes with fake blood Death threats sold on ebay Temperatures taken by Lucifer Black bodies and black bones Black deaths and black screams Black echoes and black lives Black tortures and black dances Black wilting and black hearing Broken bodies on white alters of black priests with white children Black screams and white screams and heartache and joy and bodies with hearts soft hearts and muscles of calcium, muscles cured through living, muscles tightened by leashes.

All bodies screaming. All bodies leaving. All bodies meeting - eye glances - between heavens.

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Krishna collects the tears to bathe each Muslim

We all sell our tears to know we can cry

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III Never again, a black thorn, eagles breathing new ecstasy, endless clavicles sing for a beginning In.

They called

With triumph

And madness

Scared beyond a past leaving Tell me your son is fragranced by death Tell me he is not broken Tell me he is a daughter like your other one, tell me she is strong and built of carbon, bleeding between months, cleansing the earth of its toxins, tell me there are vultures that we can’t see Tell the dark fairytales so I may be blinded by their magic

This piece explores the recent unusual intimacy that we have gained with our bodies, and with the bodies of others around us. This intimacy reveals our bodies as fragile, needy, and yet capable of something beyond themselves. When the body breaks, a bowing is released; the body falls to its knees, and understands itself within its context.

These paintings chronicle the heartbreak and brokenness a body often endures to know its light, to be able to bow to its origins, and reunite with that estranged and yet familiar source that once gave us flesh. This is a sad, and yet grateful prayer to our fragility, to each other and to the interpersonal ether that binds us.

When all is done and you are lost How will you look through the needle of Nazareth And commit the adultery of flesh Before your dearest child?

How will you answer the song of forgiveness when it descends with doves and whiplash?

How will the purging mock your organs When you have sold your body to a butcher, when you have broken the legs of cripples to glisten your YouTube?

ILYAS KASSAM

Tell me you have stolen my eyes and sold them for a lost camel.

Send me my apologies in the post and let it pass through clouds, teach me how to bow and to be kind, and to live with a cloud beneath my lungs, teach me to whisper, and leave the bazaar, teach me forgiveness, teach me to tie a camel, and leave the key beneath the tinder door.

And when you are done

Take me Take me to your body Take me With this broken body That you broke To know if it had light Take me to your light So I may know your wilting So I may sell my organs for real flesh.

Every Body Is A Trapped Prayer: I, II, III (2020), Oil on canvas, 15.7x11.8 in

And leave mine to rot on the alter of your favourite cattle.

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What My Spiritual Survivalism Owes Hip-Hop

BY ROMILA BARRYMAN

Romila Barryman is a digital mystic and settler residing on the unceded territories of the XwMuthkwium, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Selilwitulh. She carries the names of both her parents, which they combined to make hers. She facilitates between observing and experiencing this life through the written medium, her pieces often investigate the ways our identity leads us to the work we are called to do.

This intimate expression was my access to the lyrical lineage of North American realism that is hip-hop. I was eight when I heard Black on Both Sides, noticing it stood energetically distinct from other albums that would boom from my cousin’s room.

I lack a physical connection to Islam: I never spent Fridays attending Jummah, none of my family members wore a kerudung growing up, I don’t solat. When I come to my mother for advice, she listens to me and diagnoses the root of the experience: jealousy, lack of strength, doubt, fear.

“Repeat after me,” she’d guide me, teaching me a verse perfectly prescribed for the situation.

I come from mystics, my Islam is abstract; philosophically integrated into the way I move through the world. Like Jay Electronica calls his new album the adhan, likening his work to a call-toprayer, being Muslim is a state of awareness that asks me to find the perfect metaphor to describe the experiences in this life—a language that facilitates my intellect and spirit.

In a post-9/11 world where there are so few places to express an Islamic identity without being affronted by debates of the niqab, sharia law and other orthodox issues, hip-hop provides a spaciousness for spiritual nuance that exists beyond religious stereotypes. A syllabus in unapologetic expressions of sexuality: from equating the intimacies before love making as ”appreciating God's design” to indulging in the petty vengefulness of telling the fuckboi you’ve been

This Ramadhan, as the world was urged to collectively stay indoors, my reflections took place down the internet rabbit hole of red bow ties and permeated forms of Islam in pop culture.

Between Jay Electronica’s decade-long anticipated album, binge watching Who Killed Malcolm X? and Jaques Morel’s investigative piece on the use of Arabic in hip-hop, a realization emerged.

Beyond the poetic lyricisms that gives my immigrant body somatic and existential context of a North America that does not want me, my spiritual survivalism is indebted to the Black Muslim community that came before me who cultivated and produced these spaces in which I access multiplicity.

Islam is only supplementary, the salt that brings out the rest of life's flavour; vitamins in the morning. An international thread in a globalized world with a lineage of displacement that allows us to to connect to others with a common language.

A conversation starter to a worldwide community that asks, “And what else?” What did your Islam syncretize with? Was it your Hinduism, your Christianity, the peak of your cultural reclamation, a civil war, your father’s trauma? Hip-hop has given my body movement and thus, corporeal access to my activism, a desire to channel my anger into a mastery of the English language as was done before me in an enraged Malcolm X who was never afforded the ability to share the next chapter in his story: that anger transforms to an epiphany.

ROMILA BARRYMAN

Def’s work opened up a modern ancestry of hip-hop artists that asked for your undivided attention: Talib Kweli who would spit on the intro of Blackstar that he loved his Blackness “like the Prophet [(pbuh)] loves Khadija”; the dizzying laidbackness of Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad of Tribe Called Quest and anything The Ummah produced; Lupe Fiasco’s meditative critique of life itself; and eventually new waves like SZA who, like Wu Tang Clan’s RZA, derived her stage name from the Five Percent Nation’s supreme alphabet.

with that you don’t need him and you “fucked his homeboy” anyway. A catalogue for multiplicity: that Lupe Fiasco can be at once an intellect and a self-proclaimed nerd; that SZA can be at once insecure and extremely connected to matrilineal conversations with her mother and grandmother.

VOL 2

“Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim,” Mos Def whispers in the opening of Fear Not of Man, a spiritual invocation I had only ever heard my mother say before a meal, when embarking on a big trip, in readying herself to lift something heavy—and as I would witness later in my life—before skydiving out of a plane on her 50th birthday.

The Black Lives Matter revolution broke out only a few days following Eid. My mother, debating with me on whether protests are a part of our spiritual duty, asked if we weren’t meant to show up in other ways. But the Islam that connects me to my ancestors, gives me direct access to their voice and they ask me this: You come from a peoples who were once colonized. And when you came upon a peoples who were colonized what did you do? And my actions —including the food I prepare, the literature I read, the music I listen to and all the other daily actions that inform me how to show up answers to them everyday.

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200

Munira Tabassum Ahmed

RECONSTRUCTED

BEYOND BODIES

is a 15-year-old Bangladeshi writer and performer, living in Australia.

By focusing on this digital space, adjunct to the physical body, the user is able to replicate the surreality that the all-consuming digital body provides.

VOL 2

In her interactive comic, Disembody (2020), Tabassum uses the digital medium to create a comic for the audience to interact with by clicking on certain colors.

MUNIRA TABASSUM AHMED 201

202

of beast | of virgin

BY SABA TAJ

RECONSTRUCTED

BEYOND BODIES

Saba Taj’s work ruminates on Muslims, monsters, and nazar, often in the wake of apocalypse, and speculates on the boundaries between bodies and our evolutionary/spiritual potential for porousness and hybridity.

The Flood (2018), Mixed media on paper­—collage, acrylic paint, gold leaf, ink, glitter, rhinestones, graphite, 18x24 in

VOL 2

evacuation the earth administers a passive morality, as consequence to human “intelligence� and their deadly assumption that survival is contingent on control. they controlled themselves into galactic fugitives.

Her chorus rings out as the rich flee the warm, wet belly of planet. a poetic verse of molten, revolving center. She sings a warning, a prophecy: Be axis Be orbit Be entropy. extinction a spaceship a metastases a new site for human malignancy. muscles locking from looped attempts at domination, they suicide. bodies archive of noxious desire, infectious capital. evolution

SABA TAJ

those left on the ground to die, unravel into embryonic potential. wombs of seabed volcanic ash plastic bag tree root dust. inherited traumas calcify into ovum. chromosomal maps of pain fertilized by ancient knowledge in mating rituals of quivers, yawns, weeping -the wordless language of empathies. centuries buried cicada nourished by rhizomatic placenta awaken from barzakh eyes humbled. of beast, of virgin. empancipation we become into each other. we become into clay. we become into the space between. post-body, we unname god, surrender to spinning outward from center, submit, at long last, to the motions of stasis, the aliveness of all of it.

203

204

In of beast | of virgin, I imagine a future where the oppressed inherit the earth.

Generations ago, the powerful fled by way of spaceship, leaving the rest to die and calling it “the end of the world.”

But the world did not end. Those left behind transformed in their earthbound existence, evolving with a changing planet through a rapid process of unbecoming and hybridization. The boundaries between species, gender, bodies and environment collapsed, giving way to an interconnected and collaborative network of life forms. These chimeric life forms, or beasts of the earth, are the focus of this series. They are the embodiment of the in-between, of existing in motion—uncontrolled, uncolonized, and with endless adaptive possibilities.

The beasts are constructed primarily with mixed media collage. My clippings are sourced from popular fashion and bridal magazines from the US and South Asia, and National Geographic. The deconstruction of these materials disrupts the capitalist, white supremacist narratives of beauty, value, and humanity that they espouse. Fragments are recombined to create decadent femme-monsters. These creatures reflect the monstrous reputation of the Other—erotic, fearsome, and difficult to kill.

BEYOND BODIES

This narrative is inspired in part by Islamic cosmologies1 and speculative fiction, both of which harness magical realism to imagine miraculous possibilities in the face of struggle. More specifically, of beast | of virgin non-linearly describes an apocalypse or “end of the world,” asserting that there is no end, only transformation.

‫رألااألرض‬ ‫ دابة‬Dabbat al-Ardd, 27:82), The “beast of the earth” (‫ةباد‬ is described in the Qur'an and hadith as one of the signs of the coming of the Last Day. A hybrid creature that “encompasses so many animal forms in paradoxical and fantastical ways, symbolizes a ‘universal nature’ that bears, as it were, all wordly realities within it; it is a manifestation of that intermediate world... between bodies and spirits where certain kinds of opposites can exist together” (Nasr, The Study Qur'an).

This interpretation of the beast speaks to its expression of queerness and liminality; an intermediary that destroys and transcends binaries.

RECONSTRUCTED

“Virgin” in this work describes the beasts as uncolonized and unbound. Grotesque in South Asian bridal gowns, many of the figures challenge the expectation of a passive woman, instead reframing the “virgin bride” as an immaculate agendered creature full of monstrous potential. This naming suggests forms of reproduction that are non-linear and rhizomatic,2 while also referencing the Abrahamic religious figure Maryam (Mary), the quintessential mother.

Tree Begum (2018), Mixed media on paper—collage, watercolor, spray paint, ink, graphite, acrylic paint, thread, beads, gold leaf, 24x18 in

1 Theories of the origin of the universe.

2 A root system that grows horizontally, reproduces asexually, and produces many auxiliary plants that are connected underground. “The rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis, for a ‘rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia) The planar movement of the rhizome resists chronology and organization, instead favoring a nomadic system of growth and propagation.

SABA TAJ

of beast | of virgin (2018), Mixed media on paper—collage, acrylic paint, watercolor, thread, acrylic paint, ink, graphite, glitter, beads, gold leaf, 24x18 in

VOL 2

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206 BEYOND BODIES RECONSTRUCTED

Blue (2018), Mixed media on paper­—collage, acrylic paint, gold leaf, glitter, rhinestones, beads, ink, 18x24 in

VOL 2 SABA TAJ

Eruptions (2018), Mixed media on paper—collage, acrylic paint, graphite, beads, ink, thread, 18x24 in

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Contributors Alia Ali Alif Shahed Anonymous Anusheh Zia Arnela Mahmutović Ayqa Khan Aysha Khan Azzah Sultan Baseera Khan Dhan Illiani Yusof, Sharina Shahrin, and Amani Azlin Esther Elia Farah Dianputri Farah Ghafoor Golnar Adili Hayley Mojica Hiwot Adilow Ilaf Noury Ilyas Kassam Kecia Ali Kinza Arif Mahsa Merci Mariam Adesokan Marissa Khaos Mina Akida Momtaza Mehri

Munira Tabassum Ahmed Natasha Hakimali Merchant Ridwana Rahman Romila Barryman Saad Moosajee Saba Taj Sadiyah Bashir Shaheer Zazai Shahrez Syed Sharmain Siddiqui Sophia Tareen Sultan A. Isfahan Tarfia Faizullah Wesaam Al-Badry Y. Malik Jalal Zia Ahmed Osman

Interviews Darien Alexander Williams Hanif Abdurraqib Hend Al-Mansour mirrored fatality Noor Pervez

Editorial Team Anissa Abdel-Jelil - Founder, Editor Sarah Zarina Hakani - Founder, Editor Lameesa Mallic - Art Director, Designer Mirfat Abraham - Editor Najma Sharif - Guest Editor

We are grateful to the Religious Literacy Project, Harvard Divinity School and the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School for their financial support in bringing this publication to life.

RECONSTRUCTED RECONSTRUCTED IS A CREATIVE MAGAZINE AND CONVERSATION SPACE BETWEEN ALL MUSLIMS, INCLUDING MUSLIM-HERITAGE FOLKS AND INDIVIDUALS WITH EVOLVING PROXIMITY TO ISLAM, THAT RECOGNIZES RELIGION TO BE A NON-LINEAR JOURNEY.

OUR MAGAZINE UPLIFTS THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN MOST MARGINALIZED WITHIN, AND OUTSIDE OF, THE MUSLIM UMMAH, INCLUDING BLACK MUSLIMS, LGBTQIA+ MUSLIMS, CONVERTS, REVERTS, SHI’A MUSLIMS, DISABLED MUSLIMS, AND MORE.