In the space between the not waiting and the not letting go of waiting lies the solitary life of exile. A limbo created out of an ambivalence towards waiting, exile grows inside you in intensity to affect the most banal aspects of your life despite its outward insignificance. It is perhaps out of this contradiction that some exile communities build simulacrum towns as monuments to their displacement, such as the one Iranians conceived for themselves on the westside of Los Angeles where I live. There, business signs refuse to be translated to the dominant language; and an abundance of TV networks and production studios, as well as services and commodities, ensure the advertisement and sustenance of a tightly-knit microcosmic economy; the ragged voice of the AM radio host, cutting under every bridge, tunnel or freeway ramp in your car is the reliable source of facts against the community’s tabloid outlets when it comes to celebrity news; and beloved figures of the exile community’s elite are buried not far from Frank Zappa and Marilyn Monroe, in a cemetery tucked away between the US Bank Tower, the Oppenheimer Tower, and a museum of contemporary art.

The spectrum of exile lies somewhere between its often ungracious metaphoric use by itinerant artists who never land home, and a version of itself so drenched in nostalgia that it keeps one in a ceaseless production of a simulacrum of the past. Caught between domestic cruelties and imperial atrocities, some of us endlessly float in its orbits. As we rotate around our home and home—which, like two negative poles of a magnet, keep one another at a fixed distance—we write repeatedly, ad nauseam, of our ambivalent relationship to waiting. What can we share of the duration of that experience shaped by the impossibility of return and the impossibility of arrival? How do we talk about experiences that neither have a clear beginning nor end? What would it look like to try to make sense of these experiences while they morph your every sense of time and space, and of continuity? In more ways than one way, exile functions like a museum where objects and histories are memorialized without settling into a past.

You count every year, not to remember your age, but to count the years you have been away. You have said goodbye to some anticipating death. You skipped some goodbyes, which soon enough turned into saying hello through a computer screen. You wave your hand indiscriminately at all the faces on the other side thinking: Which one of them would be alive by the time I go back? You think five years… then a decade… then never would be the mark of amnesia. After that, you either go back immediately or move forward with your life. Every year during Nowruz you promise your parents that one day you will celebrate together at home. Your mother gives you a tour of the house in the ancestral village. She points to where you’d be sleeping when you go, inshallah, before her finger accidentally covers half the phone's camera. The blur covers the shame you feel inside, as if being exposed for lying. And then the camera drops entirely, and the image fixes on the chandelier hanging from the ceiling before she picks up the phone again laughing.

You have already received that call, that one call that made you think you’ll go no matter what happens. Your friend tells you how she was grateful to embrace her father before he passed away. You remember another friend watched her father’s entire burial through WhatsApp, with her cousin holding the camera the entire time. You knock yourself out at night to sleep, knowing the nightmares would come where you're navigating the labyrinth of apartment buildings the size of a city, to arrive somewhere on time and never find your way around. The nightmare is episodic and architectural, it always picks up where it previously left things off, and has been recurring for thirteen years and counting.

You ask yourself which one of them is going to go first, and hate yourself for even thinking about it. You wish you could apply a blurring effect on the voice in your head. You are grateful for the wall erected by a language you can hide behind, that protects your parents from reading this thought. You ask yourself again which one of them is going to go first. You remember your friend still missing her mother because she could not be there when she departed. She kept insisting that it all happened so quickly. You convince yourself that you need to see your childhood home, you miss the streets of your city. You serially call your friends back home. They’re rolling cigarettes and preparing to listen. You calculate the probabilities that (A) you’ll go and never return, (B) you’ll go and everything will be just fine, (C) you’ll go and they’ll just want to take you in to ask a few questions. It is a good time, you think to yourself, so long as these nuclear negotiations are happening. But it could also be tricky around the holidays. You think you should close all your social media accounts a few months in advance, and clear your record of anything deemed questionable on the internet.

If they interrogate me I’ll show them how my work is anti-imperialist. You remind yourself this is not a funding application, that they will find a way to humiliate you, that your queer ‘perversions’ don’t stand a chance of getting screened through a diversity function. You imagine your interrogation going logically and smoothly, as if conviction and reason are judicial tenets in the theater of forced confessions. You wish you could belong to a real cause or movement. You think if something happens it would be too much for your parents. You remember how annoyed your mother would get every time she had to go to your school to get you out of trouble. You see a tweet that reminds you of how your generation would go out as teenagers with their mothers’ words in mind. If they arrest you, I can’t bail you out. It’s your own responsibility. You remind yourself how she raised you through a war and in the aftermath of a revolution. You don’t take it personally, and process the sense of abandonment you still carry inside through therapy instead.

Your father has foraged some artichokes (کنگر), your favorite, and your mother tells you she is freezing it until you come and she is able to make you your favorite stew. You google how many years you can freeze vegetables before they’d lose their flavor. You look up tickets online and find an affordable one through Turkish Airlines. You tell yourself you’re still waiting to hear back from all the applications, that you might have to work in September. But this flight via Istanbul gives you enough time to prepare before you’re too close to the border, where trouble awaits. You look at the “fully refundable” ticket prices only. Maybe you don’t need to see where you came from that bad!

You have a studio visit with your student who asks you if you consider yourself an exile. You both talk about how you live in the anticipation of that one call. He tells you he wants to go back before getting the second call. (He has already received one announcing the loss of his mother.) You think to yourself how you don’t want to live in anticipation of any such call. You tell a friend you’re going to plan really well. He says there is no planning for this. If it happens it’s going to change your life forever. You think to yourself, how can one plan for the prospect of having their life changed forever? You wonder how they’d treat your injured knees in prison. Will they believe you when you tell them that you can’t kneel? You decide it’s better if you don’t disclose your health conditions before getting interrogated, that it would make you more vulnerable. You imagine how you might pick up smoking again if it happens. You read about hunger strikes, watch The Supper by Pere Portabella again and listen to former political prisoners talk about how they viewed hunger strikes as a “last resort.” The camera moves gently from one face to another as they sit around the kitchen table smoking. They all have gray hair, a visible sign of the anger they seem to keep out of that ostensibly intellectual discussion.

After work you drive around the city missing your exits with intent. You look at the map of Los Angeles and identify a map of exile. You have marked the apartment where German philosopher Theodor Adorno used to live on South Kenter Avenue. You think of driving toward his former residence to look at a place where exile is unmarked, and evidently in the past. You want to see how it has since aged. The footsteps of the post WWII German emigré intellectuals span from Bertolt Brecht’s house in Santa Monica, and the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades to Herbert Marcuse’s teaching years at UC San Diego. The university is located not far from the southern US border constructed to make Mexicans exiles in their own home. You drive around looking at the high rises and luxury lofts out of your car’s window. You fell in love with Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles, a classic of LA independent cinema. The film’s non-actor protagonists belong to a young indigenous group who had been displaced from Indian reservations of the American Southwest to Bunker Hill. The once working class neighborhood depicted in the 1961 film has gone through seven decades of redevelopment initially marketed as a ‘renaissance’.

You come home and take a shower thinking about the day and how you planned not to live your life waiting for that phone call. Your Iranian passport is valid and its American counterpart, which took you more than twelve years to get, is in the top drawer in your home office cabinet. You look up the plane ticket to make sure the price hasn’t changed, you tell your partner you have to go for the sake of your mental health. You are supported. Your parents tell you it’s a personal decision. That sends a shiver down your spine. You can’t stomach another WhatsApp tour of your parents’ house. You’re getting older but the mountain facing their balcony in the village seems unscathed. You envy that mountain. You do more research and find out your second passport could get you in trouble. You feel like shit knowing you could end up as currency for a potential prisoner swap transaction. You learn from a friend that another friend who had just gone back was questioned about where she had been all these years. You don’t have the nerve to call her and ask where she said she indeed had been all these years, the ones you spent being gay together in California.

You’re here but you’re somewhere else. You need to get away from this place to clear your head. It’s been four weeks since you’ve last heard from a friend who decided she would face her reality because she couldn’t “live with this” in her head anymore. That friend is the only one you talk to about exile. You write her another email, this time without sending it.

Dear م,

You said the worst that could happen is they would not let you in, that they would deport you back to your ‘home’ because, with your American passport in […] you would technically be a foreigner. You wondered how much easier that would be. I would come back to the US after being deported from my home, and then what?

I am writing to you without anticipating a response. I knew you would be traveling without your phone and computer for obvious reasons. You told me you would write me an email somehow. I told you to take your time, that I will be thinking about you all the time. In our last conversation we talked about our mothers, and about all that we couldn’t share with our families. You recalled your own mother's exile. You said you had painfully realized how exile existed in your family for generations.

How can our homes be so far away from those places these passports are issued from, we both wondered. I’m sitting in a bus in Buenos Aires remembering how you said you can’t just sit around casually listening to Arabic classics. It’s just too heavy. I told you about how I run away from anything that gives me a sense of arrival, how I’m chasing new places and languages to be uncomfortable. To be alienated and out of place is my home. Remaining an immigrant is my assimilation. I will make many more exiles of myself with this new passport and all the borders it opens to me.

Last time we spoke we shared our love for Lebanese filmmaker Borhane Alaouie’s “Letter from a Time of Exile”, and how we admire its simplicity. At the end of the day, we both agreed that experience is both personal and ultimately insignificant. We learn to write and record and appreciate our insignificant lives. What we have in common is time and space constantly, and quietly, morphing in our head. I play Sadoun Jaber, imagining us at a bar like the one Emmi Kurowski walks into in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” to the voice of Sabah. That bar is our orbit, our refuge—children of too many and no homes, immigrants of the films of our lives.

Love,
Gelare

Gelare Khoshgozaran is an undisciplinary artist and writer whose work engages with the legacies of imperial violence. She uses film and video to explore narratives of belonging outside of the geographies and temporalities that have both unsettled our sense of home, and make our places of affinity uninhabitable. Khoshgozaran has exhibited internationally and is an editor at MARCH: a journal of art and strategy.

Text by Nadia Christidi

Play accompanying soundtrack by Sary Moussa

Fritz Lang’s 1927 science-fiction film Metropolis opens with a frenzy of machinery. Pistons move up and down, up and down. Gears spin at great speeds. Pipes appear to squeal as they release pillars of steam. These make up the behemoth machines buried deep in the underground and operated by an army of laborers who keep the aboveground city running. Laborers perform a dizzying choreography; they pull levers, press buttons, and respond to lights that flash across switchboards. Meant to keep the machine from spinning out of control, their actions don’t always succeed. In one scene, a machine heats up, explodes, and transmogrifies into a monster whose beady eyes watch over the laborers as they march into its wide-open mouth.¹

Keeping the water machines of Saida running is M’s task. His tales of everyday experiences conjure images of the machine halls of Metropolis: M tries to keep the machines running in whatever way and with as little means as possible, while the machines he operates constantly teeter towards decay, disruption, and breakdown.² Sary, a water engineer who grew up in Saida and worked in Southern Lebanon, describes how, under dire conditions, problems related to water infrastructures in the country get solved in makeshift ways by operators like M. Just by turning valves on and off, they “find solutions to distribute water in ways that you would never think of, that you would never imagine.” Operators understand the social and political intricacies of the areas they work and live in; they know when and where water is needed, but also when and where it can be cut.³

Capital of the South and Lebanon’s third largest city, Saida is home to a predominantly Sunni Muslim population that includes a significant Palestinian presence. At its north, Saida’s entrance lies where the Awwali River empties into the Mediterranean Sea. Here, the Saida Municipal Stadium looms large like the outstretched wings of a bird perched along the water. Traffic jams stretch on the coastal highway from Beirut as cars sluggishly make their way through an entrance checkpoint. In the urban core of Old Saida, historic edifices from the Crusades and Ottoman Empire rise from the sea and jostle with run-down, modern multistorey residences. Citrus groves, banana fields, and plastic greenhouses ring the core in the traditional orchard areas of Wastani and Dekerman, separating them from multi-confessional hillside settlements on once tree-covered lands: Haret Saida, Abra, and Miyeh w Miyeh. The Sayniq River’s outlet marks Saida’s southern tip.⁴

Historically, rivers like the Awwali have irrigated Saida’s orchards, which have contributed considerably to the city’s economic activity.⁵ Overtime, and as agriculture has become less profitable, cultivated lands have been encroached on by real estate development and rivers channelized with concrete and turned into sewage conduits. Buildings catering to a booming populace, investors, and Gulf-based Lebanese in search of secondary homes have popped up along the coast, on orchards, and in the hills.⁶ An unmanaged urban sprawl typical of Lebanon. Breezes once tinged with tangy whiffs of orange and lemon skins and salt from the sea are now overpowered by the sweet, musty smell of cement.

Saida’s water infrastructures were first developed and managed by a private water company that belonged to the Tabet family. The family bought land in Nabeh Kfaroue in the neighboring province of Nabatieh. There, spring wells were dug and water conveyed by pipeline to the city’s growing population. In the early 1960s, the water company—like other water companies in Lebanon—became government-owned. By then, the spring water arriving at Saida was dwindling as towns and developments had sprouted along the pipeline’s route. New groundwater sources were added. In the early 2000s, and as part of the push to make public services ‘more efficient’ in preparation for their privatization, the Saida water office was merged along with nearby others into the South Lebanon Water Establishment, under whose jurisdiction it still lies.⁷

Today, Greater Saida, including Municipal Saida and its hillside satellites, gets its water from springs like Nabeh Kfaroue and Nabeh El Tasseh and from groundwater wells at the Fawwar Treatment Plant and Serail Treatment Plant, among other locations. Spring sources once made up more of the city’s water supply than groundwater; but population growth and the recent rerouting of some water from Nabeh el Tasseh to the city of Nabatieh have changed things.⁸ Saida’s public groundwater wells have been substantially supplemented by legal and illegal private counterparts. The city has one storage reservoir system at the Fawwar Treatment Plant that meets a seventh of its daily needs. Surrounding villages have their own wells and tiny reservoirs, and in some cases manage their own water supply completely independent of the South Lebanon Water Establishment.⁹

M is an electrician who has been working with the water authority in Saida for decades. His journey began as a technician in the early 1980s, when he worked the night shift at the water treatment plant. Long and monotonous hours of monitoring and repair, repair and monitoring, punctuated by explosive events like the emergence of armed resistance against Israel; the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990); the Israeli invasion and occupation of the Lebanese South; and, most recently, Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon.¹⁰

By the 1980s, Saida was already a site of resistance activity and a target of Israeli attacks, like much of Southern Lebanon. Palestinian refugee camps like Saida’s Ain el Helweh had come under Palestinian militant control, which had intensified with the legalization of armed resistance in Lebanon by the Cairo Agreement of 1969 and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s expulsion from Jordan and move into Lebanese territories in 1970. Armed resistance against Israel and against the pro-Western government by parties like the PLO and the Popular Nasserite Movement fomented in Ain el Helweh and nearby public housing project Ta’meer Saida, and spilled out into the city’s streets. Resistance was met with Israeli attacks, and led to clashes with the Lebanese and Syrian militaries and opposing militias, including the Israeli allied-South Lebanon Army. Akram, who grew up in Saida, describes how the city was transformed by a “culture of arms.” The modern planned development of New Saida, which was supposed to be the “city of the future,” instead became a “city of conflict,” he says. Popular political parties were quickly infiltrated by armed factions, regional powers, and personal interests, and today remain as organized thugs.¹¹ Israel’s attacks on Southern Lebanon throughout the 1970s, and its 1978 invasion and occupation of territories south of the Litani River brought waves of displaced and wounded into Saida as they would continue to do decades on.¹² I remember being transfixed by news reports of wounded being ferried by ambulances to Saida’s hospitals in the 2006 war.

In 1982, Saida fell under Israeli occupation with the invasion offensive ‘Operation Peace for Galilee,’ which reached all the way to Beirut. M says not much changed in his work under Israeli occupation, which lasted in Saida for three years; even occupiers, M reasons, need water and water providers.¹³ Akram remembers how Saida was occupied in under a week, which he spent in the basement of his family home. Parts of old Saida, he says, were badly damaged, and endure into the present as empty plots that testify to this past.¹⁴ Ain el Helweh, which was shelled for days, fared the worst.¹⁵ Akram remembers the nights of that week as particularly dark.¹⁶ Saida’s power plant had been struck, and the city was without power for many days¹⁷ and in places with only rancid water, if any at all.¹⁸ In the invasion’s immediate aftermath, newswire reports mention residents collecting water in pots and pans from an Israeli army tank parked outside the occupation headquarters.¹⁹ Within weeks, electricity and water were restored in the city.²⁰ But as services like water were reintroduced, new systems and policies were instituted for the first time. Mass arrests on suspicions of involvement in resistance activities, restrictions on the movement of people and goods between the occupied South and unoccupied Lebanon, and the flooding of southern markets by Israeli goods became features of daily life. Discontent evolved into regular guerilla attacks on Israeli forces that eventually led to their withdrawal in 1985.²¹

Amnesiacs can’t recall the past and can’t imagine the future, I recently learned.
Scientists claim that imagining the future is essentially remembering the past.
Looking back and looking forward both involve constructing mental scenes and use the same parts of the brain.²²

I remember the moment of silence my school held for the victims of Israeli attacks in 1996, just as Sary remembers a pin he was given to mark United Nations ‘Resolution 425’ that calls for Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon. When Sary and I recall these experiences, we reconstruct them as scenes in our heads. Maybe I hear once again the slight breeze that seemed to amplify the sounds of everything that couldn’t be silenced and sense the lump in my throat at the seeming cruel carelessness of those sounds. Maybe he still feels the metal on his fingers or the scratch of his t-shirt from when he clipped his pin on. When we imagine the future, we construct ‘pre-lived’ scenes by drawing on bits and pieces of memories like these. We combine memories with encultured expectations of the future to envision what may or may not come.²³

Our ability to imagine the future and plan for it increases our chances of survival, some argue. Futuring has an evolutionary advantage. But the futures we envision are only slightly different versions of the past and present on which they are based.²⁴

What does water’s future look like when viewed from the lens of Saida’s recent history?

When M imagines Saida’s future and thinks about how to ‘future-proof’ the city’s water supply, he draws on memories of Israeli attacks on water infrastructures from the 1990s and 2000s, and on shortages in electricity and diesel fuel today. M tells us how operators plan for the future in anticipation that infrastructures might be targeted by Israel. In the 1990s, he says, almost every other Israeli airstrike on Lebanon hit an infrastructure facility;²⁵ such infrastructural targeting amounts to what urbanist Stephen Graham calls ‘demodernization by design,’ for if water networks, electricity grids, roads, and fiber cables enable the flourishing of modern life, then their deliberate destruction effectively de-modernizes.²⁶ Fearing Saida’s main storage reservoir might one day be hit, M developed a badeel—i.e. a bypass or body double—for a pipe connecting a water treatment plant to the reservoir system that feeds the city’s network. With the bypass, water can go straight from the plant into the network, circumventing the future reservoir-in-ruins were the reservoir to be struck.²⁷ Building backups or redundancies into infrastructures to ensure a breakdown in one part doesn’t bring the system down is common practice in engineering, Sary says. But in Lebanon, he adds, built-in redundancies are more extreme in part because of the conflict with Israel.²⁸

Albert Camus’s 1942 treatise on existentialism, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, recounts the story of Sisyphus, who, punished by the gods, must push a heavy rock up a hill, only for it to roll back down to the bottom once he’s reached the top. From the bottom, he must push the rock up again. Over and over and over, Sisyphus repeats this same action to no resolution nor end. I remember being unsettled in my stomach by Sisyphus’s absurd fate, even as Camus reassured me he was an “absurd hero” for having accepted his meaningless lot.

When I think of the absurd, I am reminded of infrastructure in Lebanon, no more so than in the South.²⁹ Here, infrastructure evolves through cycles of construction-destruction-and-reconstruction and time appears to move forwards and back. Emphasizing the significance of reconstruction, development studies scholar Karim Eid Sabbagh writes, “[i]nfrastructure reconstruction has remained a major development concern over the last 20 years.” It emerged as a concern with the end of Lebanon’s civil war, which left significant infrastructure systems majorly damaged. But as Eid-Sabbagh adds, it has “repeatedly been brought to the fore [since] as a result of the destruction from the numerous Israeli attacks (1993, 1996, 2006) on the country.”³⁰

Already in the 1980s, destroyed infrastructures were undergoing reconstruction during wartime lulls. Established by the Lebanese government in 1977 following a 1976 ceasefire, the Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR) launched in 1978 the first of many reconstruction plans aimed at rebuilding infrastructures back to pre-war levels. The plan outlined reconstruction projects with unspecified timelines that were postponed with the renewal of civil and military violence. Following the 1982 Israeli invasion, the CDR released an updated plan in 1983 to address additional widespread infrastructure damage, but that plan suffered the same flaws and fate. With the war’s conclusion, the CDR issued a National Emergency Reconstruction Program in 1991–1992, which was incorporated in 1993 into the government’s Horizon 2000 strategy. Projects from 1978 and 1983 make a reappearance in Horizon 2000,³¹ and so on and so on.

Reconstruction, postponement, and the recycling of projects mark water sector planning as well. As economist and geographer Roland Riachi says, during the post-war reconstruction era, in which infrastructure (re-)development was largely financed through donations and loans, the Lebanese government eagerly revived and recycled cold-war developmentalist projects—with earlier colonial era inheritances—in order to attract lenders and bring money into the country. Most of the dams built or planned to be built in Lebanon since 1990 have such origins. Many are still not completed,³² stalled by disagreements over the sectarian distribution of projects and spoils among clientelist politicians, and rising costs due to work delays and rampant corruption, among other reasons.³³ The confessional political system in Lebanon means that every decision, from what new project is built for which community’s benefit to where a network line is laid down, is a point of contention.

Saida’s prodigal son, Rafic Al Hariri, was footing infrastructure reconstruction bills for the city from as early as 1982.³⁴ Golden soles is how Syrian documentarian Omar Amiralay describes Hariri’s shoes.³⁵ A Sidonian businessman, he became a billionaire working as a contractor for the Saudi royal family and served as “a conduit for Saudi redevelopment money” in Lebanon.³⁶ In the 1990s, Hariri rode into government on a wave of modernizing discourses³⁷ and emerged as the uncontested political leader of Lebanon’s Sunni community; his staunchest supporters were in his hometown of Saida.³⁸ Hariri was twice prime minister (1992–1998; 2000–2004) before his assassination in 2005. As premier, Hariri prioritized rebuilding physical infrastructures over the state. A policy of infrastructure reconstruction funded through loans from Lebanese commercial banks led to a spiraling national debt and a turn to relying on donations and loans from bilateral and multilateral organizations. The CDR, the main institution tasked with overseeing reconstruction projects and distributing funds, fell under the purview of Hariri, who ensured it remained autonomous and used it to dole out contracts and favors in exchange for political support.³⁹

Similar dynamics enabled the Hariri family, and especially sister Bahia Al Hariri, to monopolize development in Saida. The iron lady who never sleeps is what supporters call her. The charitable Hariri Foundation she heads gets funds through national and international allies, including the CDR, that it invests in projects which benefit clients and cultivate allegiance. While projects in Saida approved by Hariri get funded and built, opponents find their projects stalled, for instance, by Hariri-allied ministries. In the 2000s, the Hariri Foundation cemented its position as development gatekeeper when it brought civil society organizations active in Saida into a network over which it presides.⁴⁰ Akram says that no matter where you stand politically, Rafic Al Hariri did a lot of development work in Old Saida in the 1990s. More recently, Sidonian businessman Mohamad Zeidan has emerged to fill Hariri’s golden-sole shoes as Old Saida’s charitable benefactor.⁴¹ The Mohammad Zeidan Foundation has renovated buildings, streets, and markets throughout the city’s urban core.⁴²

Sary talks about Lebanon’s obsession with deliverance following Hariri, who emerged as the country’s savior in the post-war era with his “Government of Economic Salvation.”⁴³ In Lebanon, the crisis mode of the everyday is punctured by the expectation that some solution, savior, or deliverance is going to inevitably come, he says. But such hopes, he adds, overlook the role played by Hariri’s policies in the economic crisis we find ourselves in.⁴⁴

Hope is an escape from the absurdness of reality according to Camus.⁴⁵

Dreams have a “wish fulfilling tenor”⁴⁶ or so suggests Sigmund Freud. Dream-life continues waking-life, and fulfills desires otherwise unmet. Dreams can be forgotten - through psychic repression - almost as soon as they’ve been had.⁴⁷

Under current conditions, Sary likens planning in Lebanon to a dream. It seems absurd, he says, to develop plans spanning decades when even the short-term future is so uncertain. What will happen socially and politically in the next 5 or 10 years, and what will that mean for where, when, and whether infrastructures will get built? Plans and strategies for the distant future are drawn up by Lebanese water authorities, but authorities are often just overwhelmed by the urgent demand of making sure water doesn’t run out. Systematic issues, larger considerations, and long-term challenges like climate change are set aside for a future that never seems to come. Such short-termism, Sary clarifies, “doesn’t come from the absurd” and is “not about the fact that I don’t care about the future.” It is about how history has unfolded thus far. “It isn’t that absurd to give in to this logic when you feel helpless about changing things,” Sary concludes.⁴⁸

M says you can dream. You ask for this or that, but no one helps you get things done and you can’t do everything yourself. He says you can plan, but can you make things happen? And if you try to make things happen, can you in fact control them? A while back, he tells us, he proposed to build wells and a big storage reservoir up in Lebaa, from where water could be conveyed downwards by gravity; he also proposed to pump water from the Awwali River up to hillside areas with electricity from the Charles Helou Hydroelectric Power Station on the Litani River. Back in the war, he remembers, water from Nabeh el Tasseh would reach all the way to the east of Saida at Majdelyoun. But when the Israeli allied-South Lebanon Army took over, they cut the pipe leading there. M fears a pipe from Lebaa or the Litani, if built, could one day be cut and that sectarian tensions could be re-ignited in this way. He says: “It was war then. Now things are maybe a bit different but the same views continue to prevail.”⁴⁹

Writing about Beirut and its peripheries, urbanist Hiba Bou Akar has characterized views like M’s as ‘planning for the war to come.’ Bou Akar argues that such planning has temporal and spatial implications. “Temporally, it presents a moment from which the future can be imagined only as a time of further violent conflict. Spatially, it invokes a regulating logic in which Beirut’s peripheries are envisioned not only as spaces of urban growth and real estate profit but also as frontiers of future wars.”⁵⁰ ‘Planning for the war to come’ undergirds water management in Lebanon that is guided by partisan competitions over access to resources or attempts like M’s at sidestepping them.

In the 2010s, water rationing was a recurring theme for residents of Saida as pumps were idled by ever frequent electricity cuts and the exorbitant costs of running back-up generators. In 2011, for instance, it was discovered that untreated wastewater was being dumped into the sea to avoid turning on the generators at the newly opened Saida Wastewater Treatment Plant when electricity outages were in effect. In response to water rationing, angry protestors have occupied the offices of the South Lebanon Water Establishment year after year.⁵¹

Electricity cuts are particularly challenging given Saida’s small storage capacity, which means that water needs to be continually pumped into the system. M tells us that he recently came up with a make-shift solution: he connected a pump to the network to speed up water’s delivery from the reservoir system that can otherwise take hours to fill and reach residents by gravity alone. When the power goes out, the reservoir and network empty and water no longer reaches residents, but with a pump, the reservoir doesn’t have to be full for water to be delivered at greater speeds. M says that he could have resorted to turning on a backup generator, but that el mazout illi bi rouh ma fi badlo (“diesel used today means there’s less diesel tomorrow”).⁵²

Today, high power and maintenance costs and low service fee revenues raise existential doubts as to the government’s ability to afford running the current system;⁵³ they also provide political parties, who have greater means, with an opportunity to finance operations and gain support. M tells us that in April, the South Lebanon Water Establishment faced serious diesel shortages that would have impacted its ability to keep the city’s water supply on. Hezbollah, a significant political force in South Lebanon since the 1990s, gifted the establishment 8,000 liters of diesel that enabled it to avoid a disaster.⁵⁴ Conversely, in late May and early June, rumors circulated that the extended water cuts Saida residents were facing was to punish them for not voting for Hezbollah in the most recent parliamentary elections.

Akram says that the absence of transparency around water and where it comes from can lead imaginations to run wild.⁵⁵

In his 1982 essay “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” literary critic Frederic Jameson tackles the question of future imagining in science fiction. Taking issue with common conceptions of sci-fi as an anticipatory genre, Jameson suggests that sci-fi future worlds are not “‘images’ of the future at all” but ways to defamiliarize the present and address the unaddressable. He writes that “multiple mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come.” The future in sci-fi is always determined by our present as its history. Rather than imagining the future, according to Jameson, sci-fi demonstrates our inability to do so or “the atrophy in our time of what [Herbert] Marcuse has called the utopian imagination, the imagination of otherness and radical difference.” Of utopian sci-fi in specific, Jameson suggests that utopian writing points to the failure of the utopian imagination, which he attributes to “the systematic, cultural, and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners.”

Jameson see a silver lining, however, suggesting that “there is, indeed, something also at least vaguely comforting and reassuring … that all these things [in our present] are not seized, immobile forever, in some ‘end of history’ [as they appear in sci-fi] but move steadily in time towards some unimaginable yet inevitable ‘real’ future.”⁵⁶ But what if that “unimaginable yet inevitable ‘real’ future” we are moving towards in Lebanon is as it increasingly seems or as we make it out to be: an endless repetition of pasts and the preparation in the present for them?

Words uttered by Shia Imam Musa Al-Sadr and spray painted on a Saida wall might shed some light. “My revolutionary brothers, you are like the waves in the ocean. If you stop moving, you will be finished,” the words read. These are excerpted from a 1976 speech by Al-Sadr in which the Imam beseeches listeners to resist Israel or else face the existential threat of extinction.⁵⁷ Sumoud is what this steadfast resistance is called. Sary speaks of being haunted by Al Sadr’s words years after first encountering them.

Perhaps it is only steadfastness that remains in a reality so circumscribed by ‘planning for the war to come,’ anticipated airstrikes and declines, cycles of construction-destruction-and-reconstruction, and atrophied utopian imaginations. Steadfastness and the hope it belies—even if escapist. I think back to M and to Metropolis’s early machine hall scenes, for while Metropolis ends with its laborers’ emancipation,⁵⁸ M continues his work 40 years on. Is steadfastly keeping the machines running as M does the limited utopia we have left to aspire for? What are the implications of this for the future of our machines and the social and political worlds from which they emerge? And if as anthropologists Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta suggest infrastructure bears promise,⁵⁹ then is infrastructure’s promise in Lebanon the same as that borne in the rhetoric of sumud? Is the eventual betrayal of that promise, moreover, hinted at by the warned-of fate of Al Sadr’s waves? Hope offers an escape from a reality of fixes that must happen like the waves that cannot stop. Happening for the sake of continuing. Continuing that enables mere happening. Nothing else.

[1] Fritz Lang. Metropolis. Paramount Pictures, 1927.

[2] Interview between Sary Moussa and M. 25 April 2022.

[3] Personal interview with Sary Moussa. 11 January 2022.

[4] Aida Biscevic and Mario Auricchio. Inscribing the New City: Alternative Strategies for Urbanizing Agricultural Landscape of Saida. 2014. [Master’s Thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven]. Accessed: https://lilmadinainitiative.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/auricchio_biscevic_inscribing-the-new-city1.pdf.

[5] Jala Makhzoumi and Salwa Al-Sabbagh. “Landscape and Urban Governance: Participatory Planning of the Public Realm in Saida, Lebanon.” Land 7.2 (2018).

[6] Aida Biscevic and Mario Auricchio. 2014; Jala Makhzoumi and Salwa Al-Sabbagh. 2018; Personal conversation with Akram Zaatari and Sary Moussa. 13 June 2022.

[7] Interview between Sary Moussa and M. 25 April 2022.

[8] Personal interview with Sary Moussa. 11 January 2022.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Interview between Sary Moussa and M. 25 April 2022.

[11] Personal conversation with Akram Zaatari and Sary Moussa. 13 June 2022.

[12] See: Associated Press. No Title in Original. 3 September 1977; Associated Press. No Title in Original. 8 November 1977; Michael J. Duffy. No Title in Original. Associated Press. 17 March 1978; Farouk Nassar. No Title in Original. Associated Press. 10 April 1978.

[13] Interview between Sary Moussa and M. 25 April 2022.

[14] Personal conversation with Akram Zaatari and Sary Moussa. 13 June 2022.

[15] David K. Shipler. “Piles of Rubble Were the Homes of Palestinians.” The New York Times. 3 July 1982.

[16] Personal conversation with Akram Zaatari and Sary Moussa. 13 June 2022.

[17] Terry Anderson. “Israeli Military Administrators Move into Southern Lebanon.” Associated Press. 17 June 1982; David K. Shipler. “In Lebanon, White Flags Fly Amid the Misery and Rubble.” The New York Times. 15 June 1982.

[18] Stewart Dalby. “They Dumped the Sick on the Beach and Everyone Ran for It.” Financial Times. 17 June 1982; Richard Pyle. “Common Burial for Sidon Victims.” Associated Press. 16 June 1982.

[19] Brooke W. Kroeger. No Title in Original. United Press International. 14 June 1982.

[20] Ken Kusmer. “Israel Says 600 Killed in Sidon, Tyre.” Associated Press. 20 June 1982; “Israel Lowers Casualty Figure, Red Cross Asks Cooperation.” Associated Press. 5 July 1982; “Israel Helps Rebuild Lebanon Despite Tensions in Beirut.” Engineering News Record. 8 July 1982. p. 13.

[21] Personal conversation with Akram Zaatari and Sary Moussa. 13 June 2022.

[22] Julie Beck. “Imagining the Future is Just Another Form of Memory. The Atlantic. 17 October 2017. Accessed: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/imagining-the-future-is-just-another-form-of-memory/542832/.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Interview between Sary Moussa and M. 25 April 2022.

[26] Stephen Graham. “Demodernizing by Design: Everyday Infrastructure and Political Violence.” In Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence. Eds. Derek Gregory and Allan Pred. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2007. p. 309-328.

[27] Interview between Sary Moussa and M. 25 April 2022.

[28] Personal interview with Sary Moussa. 11 January 2022.

[29] Albert Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1955. Originally published in 1942.

[30] Karim-Philipp Eid-Sabbagh. A Political Economy of Water in Lebanon: Water Resource Management, Infrastructure Production, and the International Development Complex. 2015. [PhD Thesis. SOAS, University of London]. p. 18.

[31] Tom Najem. “Horizon 2000: Economic Viability and Political Realities.” Mediterranean Politics 3.1 (1998). Special issue on The Challenges to Lebanon in the Future Middle East. p. 29-56.

[32] Personal interview with Roland Riachi. 17 January 2022.

[33] Karim-Philipp Eid-Sabbagh. 2015. p. 41-80.

[34] Trudy Rubin. “Early Welcome Wearing Thin for Israel in South Lebanon.” Christian Science Monitor. 6 August 1982.

[35] Omar Amiralay. The Man with the Golden Soles. Arte France - AMIP, 2000.

[36] Trudy Rubin. “South Lebanon Braces for Israeli Rule.” Christian Science Monitor. 7 September 1983.

[37] Omar Amiralay. 2000.

[38] Sima Ghaddar. “Machine Politics in Lebanon’s Alleyways.” The Century Foundation. 6 May 2016. Accessed: https://tcf.org/content/report/machine-politics-lebanons-alleyways/.

[39] Karim-Philipp Eid-Sabbagh. 2015. p. 64-94. While in south Lebanon and the Chouf, the Council of the South (under the purview of Amal Movement leader Nabih Berri) and Central Fund for the Displaced (under the purview of Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblatt) also oversaw and funded some reconstruction, in Saida projects were largely the responsibility of CDR.

[40] Sima Ghaddar. 6 May 2016.

[41] Personal conversation with Akram Zaatari and Sary Moussa. 13 June 2022.

[42] UN-Habitat and UNICEF Lebanon. Old Saida Neighbourhood Profile 2019. Beirut: UN-Habitat Lebanon, 2019. p. 17.

[43] Karim-Philipp Eid-Sabbagh. 2015. p. 84.

[44] Personal interview with Sary Moussa. January 11, 2022.

[45] Albert Camus. 1955.

[46] Sigmund Freud. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. and Ed. James Strachey. Introduction by Gregory Zilboorg. New York: WW Norton & Company, 1961. Originally published in 1920. p. 7.

[47] Sigmund Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. A. A. Brill. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Originally published in 1899.

[48] Personal interview with Sary Moussa. January 11, 2022.

[49] Interview between Sary Moussa and M. 25 April 2022.

[50] Hiba Bou Akar. For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2018. p. 7.

[51] See: “Sidon Politicians Condemn Electricity and Water Crisis.” The Daily Star. 24 July 2010; Mohammed Zaatari. “Sidon Water Treatment Plant Pumping Sewage into Sea.” The Daily Star. 22 April 2011; Mohammed Zaatari. “Sidon Electricity and Water in Short Supply.” The Daily Star. 15 July 2011; Mohammed Zaatari. “Sidon Citizens Occupy Water Authority Office to Protest Shortages.” The Daily Star. 20 July 2012; Mohammed Zaatari. “Anger Boils in Sidon Over Power, Water Cuts.” The Daily Star. 6 August 2012; Mohammed Zaatari. “Sidon Residents Protest as Water Shortage Bites.” The Daily Star. 28 August 2018.

[52] Interview between Sary Moussa and M. 25 April 2022.

[53] UNICEF Lebanon. “Lebanon’s Water Infrastructure is Reaching a Breaking Point.” UNICEF. 18 January 2022. Accessed: https://www.unicef.org/lebanon/stories/lebanons-water-infrastructure-reaching-breaking-point.

[54] Interview between Sary Moussa and M. 25 April 2022.

[55] Personal conversation with Akram Zaatari and Sary Moussa. 13 June 2022.

[56] Frederic Jameson. “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9. 2 (July 2018). Special issue on Utopia and Anti-Utopia. pp. 147-158.

[57] Ibrahim Ali Naim. Imam Musa Al-Sadr: An Analysis of His Life, Accomplishments and Literary Output. 1998. [PhD Thesis. The University of Arizona]. p. 193.

[58] Fritz Lang. 1927.

[59] Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta, eds. The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

Nadia Christidi’s research is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation

Nadia Christidi is a PhD candidate in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and an arts practitioner. Her research explores how the future of water is being imagined and prepared for in cities facing water supply challenges which are intensifying with climate change. Working at the intersection of art, research, and public pedagogy, Nadia has presented work and public programs at Beirut Art Center, SALT Galata, SALT Ulus, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Jameel Arts Centre, the Al Sidr Environmental Film Festival, and Ocean Space. Nadia was previously a TBA-21 Academy Ocean Fellow, a Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellow for Water Solutions at MIT, an Art Jameel Arts Research and Writing Resident, and a Delfina-FICA Research Fellow. She holds an MA in Historical Studies from the New School for Social Research and BA in History of Art from Bryn Mawr College.

Sary Moussa is an electronic musician who has been active in the Beirut underground scene since 2008. He released his first full-length album Issrar in October of 2014 under the moniker radiokvm.

His latest record Imbalance, finds Moussa revisiting the soundscapes of his childhood; from the echoes of political unrest, to Greek-Catholic chants, and the quiet nights of a secluded Southern village. The album combines sound design with intricate melodic arrangements to create a choir of synthesizers and noise singing in and out of sync.

In addition to his solo work, Moussa has also composed music for theater and dance performances, short films, and museum installations.

حوار بين لمى الخطيب وجيسي دارلنغ

ل.خ.
منذ أن قرأنا سويًا مقالة سيلفيا ونتر "The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism" (يجب أن نوجد مراسم الاحتفال: ما بعد الإنسانوية) المنشورة عام 4891 وأنا لا أكف عن الرجوع إلى شخصية المهرج. المهرج كمهرطقٍ، حيث الهرطقة هي القوة المدمرة والمعمرة في آنٍ، والقادرة على الإطاحة بمعيارية الأنظمة الفكرية السائدة. فمهرج وينتر هو تجسدٌ، سالفٌ ومقبلٌ، للتغيير المعرفي الثوري. علمًا أن شخصية المهرج لا تستوي في موضعها الديناميكي ذاك إلا في تناظرها مع شخصية الكاهن. بعبارة أخرى، يجسد المهرج التأرجح التضادي ما بين الهرطقة والدوغما الذي ينسج خطوط تاريخ الفكر والإنتاج المعرفي. تقول ونتر التي تقتبس بدورها عن الفيلسوف البولندي ليشيك كولاكوفسكي: "في حين ينبثق كل جديدٍ من الحاجة الدائمة لمساءلة جميع المسلّمات، فإن كل تيارٍ فكريٍ يسعى إلى القطيعة مع "تلك المسلّمات الكائنة، يذهب بدوره إلى إرساء مسلّماتٍ خاصةٍ به"، حتى إذا ما آلت الثورة بالضرورة إلى حالة من الثبات يبقى أن "كل حراكٍ من هذا القبيل يفضي إلى مرحلةٍ لاحقةٍ تخضع فيها مسلّماته للمساءلة والنقد."¹

هل هذه الدورة حتمية؟ وأي هرطقة هي المحتومة بالتحول إلى معياريةٍ جديدة؟ وهل ينزع كل المهرجين إلى الهرطقة؟ هل يمهد المهرج طريقًا أم يصنع فجوةً؟ وأين الدعابة من هذا كلّه؟

ثم إنني بدأت أكوّن نوعًا من الهوس البصري التبسيطي المستوحى من ترسيمة ونتر المستفيضة وإن بعيدًا عن مشروعها الكوزمولوجي السياسي بعيد النظر. أقصد أنني بدأت أرى المهرج في كل مكان. بالأحرى، صرت أرى تمثيلًا بصريًا مفرطًا (والتعبير لونتر overrepresented) له – الملابس والألوان إلخ. ثم وجدتُ المهرج في الرسم الذي استخدمتِه لملصق معرضكِ في متحف أوكسفورد للفن الحديث No Medals, No Ribbons (لا أوسمة، لا أوشحة). كيف أنساه بعد الآن؟ هل هو في ذاك العمل الذي يحمل عنوان Big Voice (صوتُ جهور)؟

ج.د.
نعم. Big Voice أو Giant Voice هو التعبير العسكري المستخدم للإشارة إلى نظام البث في حالات الطوارئ على جهازٍ مكبرٍ للصوت في القواعد العسكرية. أكره العسكرة ولكنني أراها في كل مكانٍ، فيها سمةٌ هزليةٌ – من الزي إلى الصفارات والأجراس والأسلحة ولها طابعٍ أدائيٍ مبالغٍ فيه بالمعنى الذي تقدمه جوديث بتلر. أستطيع أن أتحدث عن الرسم ولكن لا يمكنني أن أدعي أن هذه الأفكار كانت حاضرةً بشكل واعٍ في ذهني وأنا أرسم. فالرسم مكانٌ تتراءى فيه جميع الأنماط البدائية للاوعي، لا سيما أنني لست رسامةً بارعةً. وبما أن لا وعيي يشتغل بمخيال نمطي غربي/أوروبي مسيحي/أخروي أبيض الرمزية، فهنالك فجوةٌ حتميةٌ بين ما يخرج إلى اللوحة وبين القرارات التي أتخذها. تلك الفجوة هي المكان الذي أسجل فيه موقفي السياسي وأي نزعةٍ إلغائيةٍ تسعى إلى تعرية الأنماط البدائية اللاواعية كأنماطٍ اعتباطيةٍ واستثنائيةٍ والعبث بها، بدلًا من أخذها على المحمل المعيّن له في الثقافة المهيمنة. بإمكانكِ النظر إلى الشخصية الرئيسية في الرسم على أنها "الذات" التي تنتمي إلى الثقافة المهيمنة والتي تتجلى في هيئاتٍ مختلفةٍ سواء مجازيةٍ أو حرفية. تحمل هذه الشخصية أمام عينيها يدين (بيضاوين) غير يديها. لا تريد هذه الشخصية أن تبصر – أو تتقبل – ما يحدث من حولها، فلا تجد في حوزتها ما يخرجها منه سوى هذه التكنولوجيا الواهية والمثيرة للشفقة. وقد يكون البياض بحد ذاته هو هذه التكنولوجيا التي لا توفر سوى وقايةٍ جزئيةٍ وإن كانت تعبر عن رغبةٍ ملموسةٍ وحقيقيةٍ سواء واعيةٍ أو لا واعيةٍ، فلا تعدو كونها وقايةً سطحيةً وشكلية. وهو يشبه أيضًا النكتة الشهيرة عن البهلوان الذي يقصد طبيبًا ليعالجه من اليأس فينصحه الطبيب بحضور عرض البهلوان الكبير بالياتشي. أعتقد أن ذلك يضع الذات السيدة في الحداثة الكولونيالية الرأسمالية موضع البهلوان الكبير بالياتشي، ما يدعو إلى التندر على الغرور الذي يعتد بمنطق أن "المستبد" هو الآخر دومًا، تفهمينني؟ وهذا هو التهريج إن شئتِ. وقد يكون بورتريهًا شخصيًا أو لا يكون، إنه أنا وليس أنا، مثل جميع رواد المنامات.

ل.خ.
البهلوان والمهرج – هل نتفق على استخدام اللفظتين للتعبير عن المعنى نفسه لتيسير هذا الحوار؟ أعلم أن لهما تواريخ مختلفة ولكنني أعتقد أن الفكرة التي أدور حولها هي نفسها وهي أن المهرج هو شخصية (متمردة) تنشئ احتمالية الفكاهة (المثمرة). يساورني الفضول حول جيسي المهرج.

ج.د.
لقد تدربتُ كمهرجٍ في سيرك لمدة من الزمن. كنا نخضع لتدريبٍ يوميٍ عامٍ، تدريبٍ بدنيٍ محض، حيث نتبادل الأدوار في قفز حبلٍ ضخمٍ يعلو ويهبط بوتيرةٍ إيقاعيةٍ بينما نحن نركض حوله ونحاول اجتيازه. يتوجب على مؤدي السيرك أن يحققوا الانسجام بين أجسادهم وأجساد الآخرين من خلال تكوين إدراكٍ حسيٍ عميقٍ بحركة الجسد ووضعيته وهو أمرٌ لا يمكن تلقينه وإنما يُكتسب بالممارسة فقط. كان المهرج الرئيسي يتحدث بلغة هي مزيج من الفرنسية والفلمنكية والبرتغالية البرازيلية وعامية إنكليزية أميركية مندثرة، ولكنه كان قادرًا على إيصال المعنى من خلال لغة جسده. وكان التدريب بالغ القسوة! في البداية، كان يستدعينا الواحد تلو الآخر إلى "خشبة المسرح" حيث يطلب منا أن نبذل ما في وسعنا لإضحاكه. وكان ضحوكًا ولاذعًا في الوقت عينه، يحتدّ على من لا تسعفه سرعة البديهة أو يُسقط الكرة أو يُطيل مكوثه على المسرح. كنا نبحث عن المهرج في دواخلنا. ولكن طبعًا، لا نفع من البحث عن شيءٍ موجودٍ من الأساس. وما إن يفطن إلى محاولاتنا يزجرنا ويطردنا من على الخشبة. تتذكر نوار الصدر في نصها "Clown School" (مدرسة المهرج) أسلوبًا مشابهًا في تدريبها. "كان باستفزازاته تلك ينزع الغطاء عن الأنماط البدائية التي نخزّنها في دواخلنا، تمامًا مثلما يفعل بعض المحللين النفسيين بهدف فهم الصراعات الداخلية للشخص فيبدأون بتحليل دفاعاته – أي الأدوات التي يستخدمها المرء لإخفاء ما بداخله – قبل الانتقال إلى تحليل ما هو مخفيٌ ولماذا."² المغزى هو أنني لم أكن مضحكًا قط. بل إن أفضل عرضٍ قدمته للمدرب كان عندما اعتليت المسرح وانفجرت بالبكاء. ضحك وضحك وضحك.

ل.خ.
هل كنت تريد أن تكون مضحكًا؟ أقصد هل كنت تطمحين لأن تكوني مهرجًا "بارعًا"؟

ج.د.
لا أعرف. أردت أن أكون في مأمنٍ على خشبة المسرح أو أن أكون آمنًا في جسدي أو أن أجد أسلوبًا جذابًا أؤدي به نفسي. بصراحة، لا أعتقد أنني وجدت ضالتي قط، رغم أنني حاولت بشتى الطرق. بالعودة إلى الاقتباس من الصدر: "يشترك التحليل النفسي وفن التهريج – وإن بطرق مختلفة جذريًا – في كونهما يشقّان الطريق إلى اللاوعي فيسهلان الولوج إلى الذات اللاجتماعية أو "أن يصبح المرء نفسه" على حد تعبير نيتشه. اعتبر المحلل النفسي د.و. وينيكوت اللعب "مدخل اللاوعي" وقسمه إلى قسمين: اللاوعي المكبوت والذي يجب أن يبقى مستترًا، وبقية اللاوعي الذي "يسعى كل فرد إلى التعرف عليه" من خلال "اللعب" والذي يساهم على غرار الأحلام في تجلي الذات". وفي مدرسة المهرج، يُشار إلى ذلك القسم من العقل الذي يسعى التحليل النفسي إلى استجلائه – من خلال تحليل مواد من الأحلام أو اللعب – المهرج الداخلي.³

ل.خ.
إذًا ثمة مهرجٌ بداخل كل واحد منا؟ وكأن ما تطرحه الصدر يوحي بالحرية المتلازمة مع فن التهريج. يمكننا قراءة ذلك على محملٍ مشابهٍ في مهرج ونتر الذي يهدم الأنظمة المعرفية السائدة بهرطقته. كما يمكن فهم الذات اللاجتماعية بالتوازي مع السؤال الذي تعيد ونتر طرحه حول من وما نحن في مواجهة مفاهيم "الإنسان." ولكن لنعد إلى التفكير في ذلك من خلال بالياتشي. ففي هذا المثال بالتحديد كما في عملك "الصوت الجهور" يبدو أن فعل التهريج لا يبغي زعزعة المنظومة بقدر ما يقنّعه وبالتالي يحافظ على وجوده. فالمهرج ليس إلا واجهةً للكاهن أو المقاتل أو الضابط إلخ.

ج.د.
لعل شخصيتَي المهرج والضابط متشابهتان بشكل أو بآخر، أو كأن أحدهما ظلٌ للآخر، من منظور ثنائيات الحداثة الاستعمارية. بيد أن المهرج كذلك شبيه بالشامان الذي يجسد اللاوعي الجمعي ويتحرك ويمثل سقم هذا اللاوعي سعيًا إلى إحقاق المنفعة العامة. ولكن ماذا عن الأوضاع التي ينطوي فيها اللاوعي الجمعي على نوع من الاستبداد العسكري المجندر على حد تعبير كلاوس تيفيلايت؟ ربما يصبح الكويري عندها مهرجًا. بوتش هارلوكوين حاملًا عصاه السحرية أو كويني كولومبينا – جميعهم ممثلون ذكور بطبيعة الحال (مع التحفظ المعتاد حول استخدام الضمائر المجندرة للإشارة لأي منهم/ن).

ل.خ.
نعم. لكن ماذا لو كان ذلك الذي يتم جرّه (أي تحويله إلى دراغ) هو تحديدًا ما تصفين: شرطي وضيع؟ هل يكفي فعل التهريج بحد ذاته "لإيقاف الشرطي عند حده"؟

ج.د.
أذكر كيف تعامل الجميع مع ترامب على أنه أضحوكة، مهرجٌ لا أكثر. كثرت السخرية من شعره ووجهه وتعابيره. ولم تفطن المؤسسة الليبرالية إلى التهديد الذي كان يمثله. كان الجميع مستغرقين في الضحك بينما كان هو يشق طريقه صعودًا بالتهريج. أثناء بحثي عن شخصية المهرج في الفلكلور الشامي، وقعتُ على مسرحية "المهرج" للمؤلف السوري العظيم محمد الماغوط. تروي المسرحية نسخة من قصة عطيل التي تؤديها "مجموعةٌ من الممثلين المغمورين الذين أوصدت في وجوههم أبواب الحياة - قرعوا باب الفن حتى كسروه."⁴ وتحمستُ كثيرًا لأن العلاقة بين عطيل والمهرج تتكرر في نص ونتر الذي قرأناه سويًا. دخلتُ إلى حساب تلغرام الخاص بحلقة القراءة لأسأل عن حساب يدخلني إلى منصة JSTOR بحثًا عن ترجمة، فنبّهتني رنا عيسى إلى أن الممثل الذي يؤدي شخصية "غوار" والذي تسميه "شارلي شابلن العربي" قد تحول في نهاية المطاف إلى مؤيدٍ للنظام.

تقول رنا عيسى ما معناه أنه يمكن اعتبار ترامب نموذجًا دوامة المهرج – الكاهن.

ل.خ.
على ذكر ترامب، هنالك مقطعٌ من مقابلة مع لورن برلنت لا ينفك يحضرني في محطات شتى من حوارنا هذا.⁵ تكتب برلنت في إطار مشروعها حول الكوميديا الخالية من الدعابة:

"إن الأبطال هم شخصيات سيدة تريد أن تبدو الأشياء بهيئة معينة. النصوص هي The King of Comedy (ملك الكوميديا) لسكورسيزي و"الكوميديان" لكولسن وايتهاند و"العودة" و Web Therapy (العلاج على الإنترنت) لليزا كودرو، وجميعها نصوص رائعة. تتمحور الكوميديا التي تقدمها هذه النصوص حول مشهدية العناد الراديكالي الذي يتسبب في الكارثة تلو الأخرى، تمامًا كشخصية الذئب في مسلسل "رود رانر" الكارتوني. تنشأ هذه الكوميديا عن رغبة الأبطال في تحطيم ما يهدد تطلعاتهم من شخصيات أو عوالم. تقنياً تكمن الكوميديا هنا في اتخاذنا كمتفرجين جانب البطل في مسعاه غير الكوميدي لتحقيق طموحه الواهم في تجاوز ذاته والتحول إلى ما يشبه نجمًا شهيرًا. نرى هنا بالطبع الصلة بين الكوميديا الخالية من الدعابة وترامب وغيره من الشخصيات السيدة السارحة في الخيال."

ربما تكون الكوميديا الخالية من الدعابة هي تلك التي يمكنها الحركة بين المهرج وظله.

فشخصية المهرج – رغم تاريخها المكتوب مرارًا – تضعني في مواجهة دوافع الفشل والتلقائية والالتباس والتعارض بين القصد والفعل. ربما كان التهريج محض لحظةٍ، أو إن أردنا استخدام منطق ونتر، هو خلق مساحةٍ أو فجوةٍ يمكننا من خلالها التفكير وإعادة النظر.

ج.د.
أنجزت للتو عرضًا فكرتُ من خلاله كثيرًا بالحنين (المركب والمشروع والجدير بالسخرية) إلى "الزمن الجميل" عندما كان العمل عملًا – والرجال رجالًا، إلخ.- فكرتُ بذلك من وجهة كيفية تلازم الشعائر والحق بالأرض بالأنماط الهوياتية لمفهوم السيادة. صنعت الكثير من المطارق المزدانة بالأجراس والشرائط. كان ذلك استعراضًا لتجسيد فكرة تحويل هذه الأشياء إلى آلاتٍ أو لعبٍ أو أغراضٍ شعائريةٍ وتجريدها من وظيفتها كأدوات. أظن أنني كنت أحاول أن أتلمس حيز التعارض "بين النية والفعل"، على حد قولك، لأصنع شيئًا مبهمًا له ثقل الخشب والمعدن ووظيفة المطرقة إلى جانب خفة الشرائط والأجراس ذات الارتباط بالطقس والإيقاع واللهو. كنت أفكر أيضًا بشخصية السيد بانتش الفولكلورية (المعروفة في أماكن أخرى باسم كاشبرل أو غنيول) و"المصفّق" الذي يضرب به زوجته وطفله ويستخدمه للقتل وإضحاك الناس. لن تخفف الأجراس والشرائط من شدة فتك هذه العصا. كانت محاولةً مني للتحريض أو التنظير الناعم والصلب، بناءً على حديثنا عن المهرج الذي لم يفارق ذهني.

ل.خ.
إن أدوات عمل المهرج هي لعبٌ في الوقت عينه. أعتقد أن في ذلك تضاربًا مثيرًا للاهتمام. إليكِ هذه الصورة الغريبة: المهرج هو نفسه أداةٌ لعمله. تؤطر هذه الصورة العامة بشكل أو بآخر فكرة المهرج كشخصية بلا جسد ولكنها ذات سمات جسمانية مفرطة.

تؤطر هذه الصورة العامة بشكل أو بآخر فكرة المهرج كشخصية بلا جسد ولكنها ذات سمات جسمانية مفرطة.

ج.د.
نعم. عصا المهرج هي القضيب أو السلاح أو العصا السحرية. ليس ضروريًا أن يكون القضيب سلاحًا ولكنه كذلك أحيانًا. وهنالك أوقات يكون فيها القضيب رمزًا نموذجيًا غير محدد الجنس في مواجهة العقم والرصانة المتوقعين والمفروضين من قبل النظام. لعل وجود المهرج هو بغرض التهكم على القانون، وقد أصبحتُ على قناعةٍ بأن هذه الظاهرة تنحدر من تاريخ السحر في الغرب – ولعل المصفّق هو محاكاةٌ ساخرةٌ للمطرقة. أما بالنسبة إلى أدوات المهرج، أوليست أدوات الشغيل، جميع الشغيلة، امتدادًا لذواتهم في إطار نسقٍ محدد؟ وفي الوقت نفسه، لم يكن الشغل بهذا القدر من الإعجاز قط. وهذا ما يجعلني أفكر في بحثك الحالي حول المشتقات المالية. السوق كناظم للاوعي الاجتماعي. في هذا السياق يمكنني أن فهم معنى الشهوة الجنسية من حيث هي تعلقٌ بنموذجٍ لشخصٍ ما يمثل ويشغل حيز التعارض والازدواجية والحَدية، الأمر الذي أجده أقرب إلى نموذج "المحتال". المحتال كمهرجٍ وكساحرٍ وكقوةٍ تخريبية. إليكِ هذا الاقتباس من على صفحة الويكيبيديا عن المحتال: "تعتبر بعض ثقافات السكان الأصليين وجود المهرجين والمحتالين أساسيًا للاتصال بما هو مقدس. ولم يكن في وسع الناس أن يتموا الصلاة ما لم يضحكوا لأن الضحك يشرح الصدر ويحرر الذهن من التحيز الأعمى. وقد حرص البشر على وجود المحتالين في أقدس شعائر التعبد كي لا ينسوا أن المقدس يتجلى في الضيق والانتكاس والمباغتة. وتعتبر معظم ثقافات السكان الأصليين وجود المحتال أساسيًا في عملية الخلق والولادة"⁶،إلا أن أحد أبرز الاختلافات التي "نراها في المحتال لدى الأميركيين الأصليين هي انفتاحه على تعددية الحياة وتناقضاتها الأمر الذي يفتقده التراث الأخلاقي الأورو-أميركي الحديث."⁷

ولكنني أتساءل كيف يمكننا إيجاد محتال مخرّب لدى اليسار. أعلم أنهم كثر بين أوساط اليمين.

ل.خ.
قرأت مؤخرًا في كتاب بياتريس ك. أوتو Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World (المهرجون في كل مكان: مهرج البلاط في ثقافات حول العالم) أن المفهوم الكلاسيكي عن "مهرج البلاط" كما نعرفه اليوم (بوصفه شخصيةً مخربةً تمتلك سلطة التأثير على الملك) ما هو سوى أسطورةٍ متأصلةٍ شديدة القدرة على إعادة إنتاج نفسها. تقول أوتو:

"تكثر الروايات عن مهرج البلاط الذي يُعد الشخص الوحيد القادر على نصح الملك المتعجرف، بما يوحي أن مهرجي البلاط قادرون على لجم سلطة ومزاجية الحاكم المطلق. . . . الحقيقة هي أن ظهور مهرجي البلاط الرصينين والمسؤولين مقتصرٌ على نوافذ زمنيةٍ قصيرةٍ جدًا في إيطاليا في القرنين الرابع عشر والخامس عشر وفي إنكلترا في مطلع القرن السابع عشر على سبيل المثال."⁸

ج.د.
هل تعلمين أن أوراق التاروت ظهرت في إيطاليا تحديدًا بين القرنين الرابع عشر والخامس عشر، وأنها بدأت دورتها مثل الميم (meme) لناحية سعة انتشار هذه الصور وتطورها عن طريق التداول. وكانت ألعاب الورق وسيلةً مهمةً للتبادل الاجتماعي في مجالات التجارة والتسلية على السواء، ويُقال أن أشكالًا مختلفةً من البروباغندا بدأت تنتشر على ظهور البطاقات (إعلانات لخدمات وسلع وإيديولوجيات) التي تحولت مع الوقت إلى وسيلة للعرافة والاطلاع على الغيب – إضافةً إلى إدخالها نظامًا للعب على نسق "المجموعة المملوكية"⁹ التي انتقلت إلى أوروبا عن طريق مصر مع اختراع الورق. يتألف السر الأعظم في التاروت من مجموعة من الأوراق الرابحة ومعها ورقةٌ "شاذةٌ" لا رقم لها: وهي ورقةٌ ذات قيمةٍ متقلبةٍ أو صفريةٍ، هي نفسها ورقة الجوكر أو المهرج في مجموعة ورق اللعب العادية. ويأتي المهرج في مستهل تسلسل أوراق السر الأعظم في تاروت التبصير ليمثل البطل في بداية رحلته. أفكر أحيانًا في الشفرة الثنائية صفر وواحد وكيف أن الواحد هو المتصل أو الصحيح والصفر هو المنقطع أو غير الصحيح. نورٌ مضاءٌ ونورٌ مطفأٌ. العتمة، الفوضى، الطبيعة، الآخر – كل ما يعجز مشروع التنوير عن احتوائه. وكيف تتمحور بنى العالم ما بعد الديكارتي وما بعد التنويري حول الثنائيات. وفي لعبة الأوراق التي نلعبها الآن والتي نحاول خلالها معرفة ما إذا كان المهرج شرطيًا أو رمزًا أسمىً للتغيير الثوري، يبقى المهرج هو الرابح كونه يتمثل بالصفر (في مقابل [الإنسان] السيد، على حد تعبير ونتر). والأرجح أننا وبعد كل هذا الكلام والتدبيج ما زلنا نراوح مكاننا في رحلة المهرج هذه. الدائرة تكتمل! تبلغ لعبة التبصير هذه خواتيمها ونكون قد خُدعنا جميعنا في النهاية.

[1] Wynter, Sylvia. “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism.” Boundary 2 (1984): 19–70.
[2] Alsadir, Nuar. “Clown School.” Granta, October 31, 2017.
[3] المصدر نفسه
[4] Myers, Robert and Neda Saab. Modern and Contemporary Political Theatre from the Levant: A Critical Anthology. Netherlands: Brill, 2019: 109.
[5] Markbreiter, Charlie. “Can’t Take a Joke: An interview with Lauren Berlant.” The New Inquiry, March 22, 2019.
[6] Gibbens, Byrd; quoted from letter to the author in Carlin, George. Napalm & Silly Putty. Hachette UK, 2001.
[7] Ballinger, Franchot. "Ambigere: the euro-american Picaro and the native American trickster." Melus 17, no. 1 (1991): 21–38.
[8] Otto, Beatrice K. Fools are everywhere: The court jester around the world. University of Chicago Press, 2001.
[9] المجموعة المملوكية هي تلك التي تتألف من أربعة أطقم: النقود والسيوف والكؤوس والعصي

لمى الخطيب تكتب وترسم وتصنع الأغراض. تخصصت في الهندسة المعمارية وتتابع حاليًا دراستها لتاريخ الفن والفلسفة. تتحرى ممارستها العلاقات المكانية كعلاقات جمالية وسياسية وثقافية متخذة المعمار كأساس ووسيط للفكر الاجتماعي.

جيسي دارلنغ شاعرةٌ وفنانةٌ تستخدم الوسائط المتنوعة "لألغاء تطبيع" الحياة النفسية للحداثة البترو-استعمارية. تقيم وتعمل في برلين.

أُنجز هذا النص بدعمٍ سخيٍ من معهد غوته لبنان.

Lama El Khatib in conversation with Jesse Darling

LK: I keep returning to the figure of the jester ever since we read Sylvia Wynter’s 1984 essay, “The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism,” together. The jester as the performer of heresy and heresy as a simultaneously destructive and constructive force capable of overturning the normative order of dominant systems of thought. Wynter’s jester is some sort of figure—historic and to-come—of a revolutionary rewriting of our knowledge. But the jester exists only in its dynamic position vis-a-vis the priest. In other words, the jester embodies the fundamental antagonistic oscillation between heresy and dogma that threads the history of thought and knowledge production. To quote Wynter, who is herself quoting Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski: “whereby everything that is new grows out of the permanent need to question all existing absolutes, with every current of thought that tries to break away from 'existing finalities coming in turn to establish other ones of its own,' so that though 'every rebellion is therefore metamorphosed into a conservative state'"; nevertheless, "each of these movements makes room for the next phase where its own absolutes will, in return, be the target of criticism.”¹

Is that cycle inescapable? And what is a heresy that inevitably becomes a new normative? Are all jesters bearers of a heretical drive? Is the jester then the one that ‘makes room’ or produces a gap? And where is the humor in all this?

Out of Wynter’s elaborate schema, besides following her acute cosmological/political project, I also developed a somewhat simplistic visual fixation. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been starting to see the jester everywhere. Well, mostly an overrepresented (to use Wynter’s word) image of him—the clothes, the colors, etc. I also found the jester in the drawing that was used for the poster of your Modern Art Oxford show, No Medals, No Ribbons. Now, I can’t unsee it. Is that work titled Big Voice?

JD: Yes. Big Voice, or Giant Voice, is the military term for the emergency comms broadcast over a speaker system in a military base. I hate militarism but I see it everywhere; it has its own clownishness—the costumes, whistles and bells, guns. It is—in a Judith Butler sense—highly performative. I can talk about the drawing, but I can’t claim that any of these thoughts were conscious when I was drawing it. Drawing is a place where the archetypes of one’s unconscious tend to emerge, especially because I'm not a very skilled draftsman. And since my unconscious operates a standard-issue, Western/European, Christian-eschatological, white-coded imaginary, there's a necessary gap in between what emerges and the decisions I make. That gap is where I insert my politics, or whichever abolitionist streak that wants to expose these unconscious archetypes as arbitrary and particular, and to fuck with them rather than take them on the terms by which they have become lodged in the dominant culture. You could see the main figure in the drawing as ‘the subject’ embedded in the terms of a dominant culture, which you see playing out all around it in various metaphorical or literal forms. And the subject is holding a pair of (white) hands, distinct from its own hands, in front of its eyes. This subject doesn’t want to see—or rather, to accept—what is going on around it, and it finds itself in possession of a flimsy technology by which it is able to opt out, however pathetically. And this technology could be among other things whiteness itself, always partially prophylactic but real enough as an extension of one’s conscious or unconscious desire in the world, and its protective aspect in this case is superficial and cosmetic. It’s also like the punchline of the famous joke about the clown who goes to the doctor for despair, and the doctor refers him to a performance of the great clown Pagliacci that afternoon. I guess this configures the sovereign subject of colonial-capitalist modernity as the great clown Pagliacci, which is also a riff on the conceit by which ‘the oppressor’ is always other people, you know? That’s some clown shit. Or jester, if you prefer. It might or might not be some kind of self-portrait; it both is and isn’t me, like everybody who shows up in one’s dreams.

LK: Clowns, jesters—should we think about them interchangeably for the purposes of our conversation? I know they have different histories, but I think the idea I’m circling around is one and the same, which is that they are (subversive) figures that produce sites for potential (productive) humor. I'm curious about the Jess-ter.

JD: I did train as a clown for a while in a circus. There was a general daily training, very physical, taking turns to jump a huge rope that rose and fell in rhythm as we ran around and around and through. Circus performers need to be attuned to one another’s bodies through a proprioceptive sense that can’t be taught, only practiced. The head clown spoke a hybrid language composed of French, Flemish, Brazilian Portuguese, and obsolete American English slang, but made himself understood mainly through the language of his body. It was a brutal training! In the beginning he would call us one by one to ‘the stage’ and we would each try to do something, anything, that would make him laugh. He was generous with his laughter but just as quick to chew somebody out for losing the moment, dropping the ball, or overstaying their welcome. We were striving for our inner clowns. Of course, striving is never a good look, and when the clown saw us striving, he would scream us off the stage. Nuar Alsadir, in her piece “Clown School,” remembers a similar dynamic in her own training. “His provocations knocked the lids off the prototypes we were hiding inside of, in a similar way to how many psychoanalysts, in the attempt to understand a person’s conflicts, begin by analyzing their defenses—what is being used as cover—before moving on to what is being covered up and why.”² The point is, I was never very funny. The best show I ever turned out for our teacher was when I got up on stage and just started crying. He laughed and laughed and laughed.

LK: Did you want to be funny? As in, did you strive to be a ‘good’ clown?

JD: I don’t know. I wanted a way, any way, to be safe on stage, or maybe just safe in my body, to find some mode of performing myself that would stick. Honestly I don’t think I ever found it, though I’ve tried in all kinds of ways. To quote Alsadir again: “Both psychoanalysis and the art of clowning—though in radically different ways—create a path towards the unconscious, making it easier to access the unsocialized self, or, in Nietzsche’s terms, to ‘become the one you are.’ Psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott considered play ‘the gateway to the unconscious,’ which he divided into two parts: the repressed unconscious that is to remain hidden and the rest of the unconscious that “each individual wants to get to know” by way of ‘play,’ which, “like dreams, serves the function of self-revelation.” In clown school, the part of the mind that psychoanalysis tries to reveal—by analyzing material brought into session, including dreams or play—is referred to as a person’s clown.”³

LK: So there is a jester within everybody? Alsadir’s framing seems to imply an inherent freedom accompanying the art of clowning. We can read this similarly to Wynter’s jester, whose heresy drags down dominant systems of knowledge. Alsadir’s unsocialized self could perhaps be read in parallel to Wynter’s re-opening of the question of who and what we are against the genres of ‘Man.’ But let’s think about this again with Pagliacci. In that example, and in what you described through Big Voice, clowning appears as an act that doesn’t so much destabilize the order as mask it and thus maintain its standing. The clown is only a front to the priest, the militant, the officer, etc.

JD: I’m wondering if the jester and the officer aren’t similar figures in some way, or the shadow of one another, in the binarisms of colonial modernity. But it seems like the clown is also something like the shaman, who embodies the unconscious of a community and moves through or rehearses the sickness of this unconscious for the common good. But then what about a situation in which the unconscious of a community is a kind of gendered militarism, as per Klaus Theweleit? Maybe the queer becomes figured then as a kind of clown. Butch Harlequin with his magic wand and the queeny Columbine—all played by men, of course (usual caveats for the use of gendered nouns).

LK: Yes. What if what is dragged out in the clowning, is precisely that which you describe: a crappy officer. Is the act of jestering itself enough to ‘stop the cop’?

JD: I remember that the figure of Trump was seen as a joke, a clown. Lots of funnies about his hair, his face, his syntax. The liberal establishment did not recognise the threat. They were rolling in the aisles as he clowned his way to the top. I was looking around for jesters in the Levantine folklore and came upon the play Al-Mouharej, by the great Syrian playwright Muhammad al-Maghout. The play narrates a version of Othello, as performed by a bunch of “self-proclaimed ‘artistes’ in whose faces the door of life has been slammed—so they have banged on the door of art until they broke it down.”⁴ I was excited because this connection between Othello and the jester is also a feature of the Wynter essay we’ve been reading together. I went to the reading group telegram channel to ask someone to lend me their JSTOR access for a translation, and Rana Issa observed that the actor who played Ghawwar—who Rana describes as ‘the Arabic Charlie Chaplin’—became in the end a regime supporter.

You could say that Trump is an example of the jester-priest cycle, to paraphrase Rana Issa.

LK: Since you mention Trump, here is a quote from an interview with Lauren Berlant that I find myself returning to at many points of our conversation.⁵ They write, in relation to their work on humorless comedy, that:

“The protagonists are all committed sovereigns who need things to appear a certain way. Humorless comedy is a comedy of compulsive sovereignty. The texts are Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, Colson Whitehead’s “The Comedian,” and Lisa Kudrow’s The Comeback and Web Therapy, all brilliant. The comedy they generate involves the spectacle of a radical willfulness that generates disaster after disaster, like a Road Runner cartoon. The works are barely comedic because the protagonists insist on bringing down any person or world that threatens their ambition. The pleasure of the text is comedic because technically, as spectators, we are on the side of the protagonist’s humorless ambition to pursue the pseudo-self-transcendence of a celebrity status. This of course links humorless comedy to Trump and many phantasmatic sovereigns.”

Perhaps humorless comedy is that which can move between the jester and its shadow.

This figure of the jester—despite its somewhat over-written history—presents me with a certain drive towards failure, with spontaneity, confusion, an incongruity between intention and action. Maybe jestering is just a moment. Or to think through Wynter, maybe it's that making room, a possible gap created from which to rethink, restructure, overturn…

JD: I just finished making a show in which I was thinking a lot about the (complicated, legitimate, and satire-worthy) longing for a ‘simpler time’ in which work was work—and men were men, etc—among other things, thinking through the ways that land rites and land rights get bound up with these identitarian forms of sovereignty. I made a lot of hammers, with bells and ribbons on them. A reification flex, to make these into instruments, playthings, or ritual objects, and to render them essentially useless as tools. I think I was trying to poke around in this space of incongruity ‘between intention and action,’ as you put it, to conjure something ambiguous that has the weight of wood and metal and what you know a hammer can do, as well as the lightness of bells and ribbons, with those associations of ritual and rhythm and play. I was also thinking of the European folk figure Mr Punch (elsewhere known as Kasperle, or Guignol) and the ‘slapstick’ with which he beats his wife and child, commits multiple murders, and makes everyone laugh. His stick is no less fatal for having bells and ribbons on it. I was trying to make a soft and hard provocation, or proposition. And the whole time I was thinking of you and our conversation about the jester.

LK: In the case of the jester the tools of his labor are somehow also playthings. I think that is an interesting clash. Here is a funny image: the jester is also doubled as his own tool.

Somehow, this generic image frames this idea of the jester as both lacking a body and a bearer of an excess of bodily qualities.

JD: Yes, the jester’s stick as phallus, weapon, or magic wand. A phallus doesn’t have to be a weapon of course, but sometimes it is; and sometimes it’s an archetypal, genderless symbol against the sterility and respectability demanded and enforced by the regime. Maybe the jester exists in a parody of law, which I increasingly believe to be a phenomenon that has evolved out of the Western history of magic—the slapstick a parody of the gavel. Regarding the jester’s tool, isn’t it also the case that the tools of any worker are in some sense just extensions of the self under a certain paradigm? And meanwhile work has never been more ineffable. This makes me think of your ongoing study on financial derivatives. The market as constitutive of a social unconscious. In this regard I can see where the libido comes from in terms of an attachment to a figure who both represents and thrives in the space of incongruity, ambivalence and liminality, and maybe this is something more akin to ‘the trickster’ archetype. The trickster as jester as magician as subversive force. On that Wikipedia page there’s a quote: “Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise. The trickster in most native traditions is essential to creation, to birth.”⁶ and yet, “One of the most important distinctions is that ‘we can see in the Native American trickster an openness to life's multiplicity and paradoxes largely missing in the modern Euro-American moral tradition.’”⁷

Even though I now wonder how we could figure a subversive trickster on the left. There are plenty on the right.

LK: I recently read in Beatrice K. Otto’s Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World, that the now-established idea of the classic ‘court jester’ (being a subversive figure with the power to influence a monarchy) is a strong and self-reproducing myth. Otto writes:

“There are many stories which show a jester as the only person who could counsel a stubborn king, and as such the myth of the court jester suggests that jesters could act as a check on the whimsical power of absolute monarchy. . . . The respected, responsible, official jesters only functioned in small historical windows of possibility, for example: fourteenth and fifteenth century Italy and around the turn of the seventeenth century in England.”

JD: You know, 14th and 15th century Italy is when you have the emergence of tarot cards, which began life as a kind of meme in the sense of being widely distributed images that evolved through circulation. Card games were an important social currency, both in business and in pleasure, and one story suggests that various forms of propaganda began to appear on the backs of these cards (ads, basically, for services and products and ideologies) which—together with the incorporation of a gaming system from an apocryphal “Mamluk Deck” that followed the invention of paper from Egypt into Europe—then evolved into a divination system over time. The major arcana is a set of trump cards, essentially, along with one numberless ‘wild’ card: a card whose value is mutable, or 0. In a standard deck this card appears as the Joker. And perhaps you know, but the fool is at the beginning of the linear narrative evoked in the major arcana of divinatory Tarot as a kind of hero’s journey. I think about the 1 and 0 in binary code sometimes and the way 1 is on, or true, and 0 is off, or false. Lights on; lights off. In the darkness, chaos; nature; Other—a projection of all that cannot be contained by the project of enlightenment. How post-cartesian, post-enlightenment worldbuilding is built around binaries. In this game of trumps we’re playing right now in which we’re trying to figure out whether the jester is a cop or an ineffable figure of revolutionary change, the fact that [he] is figured as 0 (as opposed to the sovereign [Man] 1, as per Sylvia Wynter) is a point scored towards the latter. And it seems appropriate that after all this talking and writing, we are no further into the fool’s journey than we were when we began it. Full circle! The divinatory paradigm plays itself out and we all get clowned in the end.

[1] Wynter, Sylvia. “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism.” Boundary 2 (1984): 19–70.
[2] Alsadir, Nuar. “Clown School.” Granta, October 31, 2017.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Myers, Robert and Neda Saab. Modern and Contemporary Political Theatre from the Levant: A Critical Anthology. Netherlands: Brill, 2019: 109.
[5] Markbreiter, Charlie. “Can’t Take a Joke: An interview with Lauren Berlant.” The New Inquiry, March 22, 2019.
[6] Gibbens, Byrd; quoted from letter to the author in Carlin, George. Napalm & Silly Putty. Hachette UK, 2001.
[7] Ballinger, Franchot. "Ambigere: the euro-american Picaro and the native American trickster." Melus 17, no. 1 (1991): 21–38.
[8] Otto, Beatrice K. Fools are everywhere: The court jester around the world. University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Lama El Khatib writes, draws, and makes objects. She is trained in architecture and continues to study art history and philosophy. Her practice examines spatial relations along/as aesthetic, political, and cultural lines—taking up the architectural as both ground and medium for social thought.

Jesse Darling is a poet and artist working in various media to ‘denaturalise’ the psychic life of petrocolonial modernity. JD lives and works in Berlin.

This text was commissioned with the generous support of Goethe-Institut Lebanon.

صهيب أيوب وفادي العبد الله

ف.ع.

يأتي هذا النقاش متابعة للقاءٍ في فرانكفورت العام الماضي، حيث قرأنا أنت وأنا، من نصوصنا عن طرابلس، شعراً ورواية، كما تحدثنا كلّ عن كتابة الآخر. أذكر انني أشرت انك، بمعنى ما، مرآة أرى فيها ما خفي عليّ من مدينتي لأننا، على تشابهنا في أمور كثيرة، على تعارض في الموقف بإزائها. إذ ربما سمح لي كوني أسنّ منك بخمسة عشر عاماً بالتعرف إليها في وقت لا يزال يسمح بالاندماج فيها، وبرؤيتها من خلال عائلات تقليدية ومحافظة، وبالنظر إلى صورتها من مسافة تسمح برؤية البحر والتراكيب الكبيرة لها. بينما، يلوح لي، انك تظل عكارياً وسورياً بنفس مقدار كونك طرابلسياً، ما يمنحك موقعاً فريداً وثرياً، وأنك تنظر إليها، تفاصيل وشخصيات، بعدسة مكبرة ودقيقة، كما أن مثليتك الجنسية أتاحت لك رؤية ليلٍ مختلفٍ غير محافظٍ ولا منفي من المدينة. وإذ نشترك، أنا وأنت في البعد، إلا انك منفيّ وأنا مغترب، فأنت تعود إليها في خيالك كل يوم، وانا أعود جسدياً كل عام لأصطدم بالموت والخراب المتوسع باستمرار.

كتبتُ نصي ذاك مباشرة بالانكليزية، لأول مرة. لم يكن قراراً واعياً، لكن ربما حاجة أملاها شعور الاغتراب، وكان ذلك أيضاً في وقتٍ باشرتُ فيه كتابة رواية بالفرنسية، أيضاً لأول مرة. قد لا تكون بحت مصادفة، لكن إشارات إلى تغيّر في علاقتي بالكتابة. فربما بحثت عن لغةٍ يعبّر ترددها وهزالها عن موضوعها هذا. لكننا نتحاور اليوم لننشر في اطار بيروتي بدعوة كريستين طعمة، وإن كان النشر على الشبكة. هذا يطرح عليّ مواضيع عدّة أرغب في استكشافها معك.

لنبدأ من طرابلس. لطالما كانت المدينة بالنسبة لي موضوعاً شعرياً لأنها نقطة تقاطع مسارات اللغة والتاريخ والذكريات ومكان التقاء الغرباء وقصص الحب واكتشافات الجسد والطعوم والحواس. طرابلس تحديداً غنية بمثل هذه التقاطعات، أو كانت. لكنني أشعر أنك، حتى الآن، تتفادى تقاطع هذه المسارات، وتقوم بما قد أسميه "حصر إرث"، رصد وتصنيف وتبويب ما توارى أو يتوارى منها، ولكن في وحدات منفصلة. ربما لا تقوم الرواية، وهي فنّك، من دون مثل هذا المجهود في حين يكتفي الشعر بالطاقة المنبثقة من اصطدام المسارات الآنف ذكرها.

ص. أ.

سأعترف لك بداية، أن ما قرأته في فرانكفورت لم أدرك أن فجوته التي أحدثها في داخلي، جعلتني أفتح ما هربت منه على مدى ست سنوات من منفاي. وهو باب يفضي إلى جنون ما كنت أظن أنه بهذه الرهبة في حياتي الجوّانية. اتاحت قراءتنا معاً، وضعي في تماس أعمق مع مشاعر منهوبة أتحسسها كسكاكين على رقبتي، ففي كل مرة أبتعد عن المدينة، زمنياً، أجدني أخترعها. أحتفظ بها. أرقمها، مثل عامل هندسي يحاول بالدقة المطلوبة منه أن يكون أميناً على تاريخها، ومن حيث لا أدرك أمحو ما عشته فيها من شاعرية محزونة، مركزاً على بهاء ما أعطته لي، وتبادلناه سراً وعلانية فيما بيننا. وكأن هذا التنازع اليومي مع ذاكرتي، حولني بصرياً إلى ذاكرة غير موجودة، لا مكان لها سوى في الرواية. وهذه الرواية في شخوصها تصنع أدوات المقاومة. إني أقاوم بهذا التأريخ والفجاجة والمخيال، ما أعرف أنه مات. المدينة الميتة التي في صناعتي لها أذكر أيضاً أنها لم تعد. وأقاوم من خلال التسطير والتدوين والاحتيال على الوقائع، صناعة نفسي عبرها. تلك النفس التي ماتت فيها. تلك التي تركتها خلفي. صهيب المدمّى في طرابلس، الذي عاش في ظلالها، مثل زهرة سوداء. كنت أعيش المدينة هناك بكل واقعيتها، لذلك نسيت أني أستطيع أن أقيم علاقة شعرية معها. ربما علاقتي بباريس شاعرية. يا لهذه الكليشيه بنت العرص. لكن فعلاً أنا في باريس، أكثر شاعرية. أكتب شعراً على الورق بين مقاهي الرصيف وفي ساحات مونمارتر الصغيرة وأدراجها. في باريس، أخرج من تسكعاتي الليليّة بقصيدة أو بذراع رجل. في طرابلس لا مكان للشعر. كنت في مصنع الواقعية التي جعلتني اليوم أعيد تركيبها بخيال يرسمها أكثر جلالاً.

واعتقادي أن استعادتي للمدينة في ترصدها وبناء شخوصها المنكسرة متأت من أني عشت في احتراقها وانزوائها. كان الصحافي الذي أمسك بيدي طوال فترة بقائي فيها، قد جعلني أرى جثث شبانها العائدين من حمص، قتلى انفجاري المسجدين، كنت اضطر إلى مواجهة بكاء نسوتها من أمهات بعض المفجرين، الجهاديين المفترضين، ملاحقاً قصصهم في بيوتهم الخربة. كنت لا أرى الشعر مثلما كنت لا أرى البحر. كنت هناك في الزواريب أخيط ألمها ووحشيتها ودمويتها ومقتلتها. لا مكان للشعر في المقبرة. في المقبرة تعداد ووصف وسينما. الشعر يكمن خلف أسوار المقبرة أو ما تحاول هذه المقبرة أن تفرزه. واليوم في خيالي عنها أعتقد أني أريد لهذه المقبرة أن تخرج ما عاصرته ونسي. أو تم طمسه عمداً او مع مرور الوقت. أحاول أن استخرج أسماء مشايخها، مجانينها، كتابها، نسائها، عاملات الجنس فيها، العابرين والعابرات جندرياً فيها، و"طانطات" التل، مرتادي سينمياتها وصالات البورنو والموتيلات، ذاكرتها المسحوقة بأصابع ثوارها: علي عكاوي، دولة المطلوبين. روادها من الأقضية الذين جربوا الحياة فيها وانصهروا بخيوطها. أنا أبني في الخيال ما كنته فعلاً، أرمم جثث المقبرة وأشياءهم وذاكرتهم، وربما من دون قصد قد تفلت مني قصيدة متفجرة بالدم، قصيدة طويلة وطويلة جداً عن مدينة تحيا في جلدي ولم أتخلص منها.

ف.ع.

المدينة الميتة تغذي خيالاً وكتابات كما يفعل الموات بالأرض. لكن المدينة أيضاً ـ وهذه معضلتها ـ حيّة ولهذا فهي تعاني. آخر انتفاضاتها في ثورة تشرين كانت مبهرةً للكثيرين، لكن ليس لمن كانوا، مثلنا، على اطلاع بنسيجها الداخلي، أي بكونها تتضمن عناصر المدينة من اختلاط وأساطير وعصبية وتاريخ وقهر واكتمال الصدفة الهندسي الذي يشكل علاقتها وعمارتها المتنافرة.

يمكن أن نعدد إلى ما لانهاية هذه العناصر، وأن نجري حصر الإرث لما تركته في نفوسنا أو في كتب الرحلات إليها التي ما عاد أحد يقرؤها. لكننا نعرف أن في رثاثتها بهاءً نتزود منه. معضلتها النافرة دوماً في قلقها المستمر، في كونها شامية وسورية وشمالية وبحرية ولبنانية بحساب لم يتفحصه أحد، في كونها إمارة من المهمشين والناقمين والطيبين.

بحرها ليس شعراً، فاطمئن. البحر فسحة الهروب، الشعر كما أفهمه مواجهة. أما لماذا ينبجس فيك الشعر في باريس وليس في طرابلس فذلك لأن الألم يتعتّق ولأن طرابلس منحتك الجرح الذي ترمي عليه ملحك حتى تلعقه. وانت تشكرها كثيراً في روايتك.

الرواية فسحة أخرى، ليست مواجهة ولا هروباً، هي فرط العالم لعله، عندما ينهار، يصبح أكثر قابلية للسكن فيه. وعندما تفرط طرابلس، كما تفرط رماناً، يتناثر دم كثير في روايتك.

في كتابتك وكتابتي ربما محاولة لفرط ما يبدو للناظرين بديهياً عن هذه المدينة، أي الكشف عن مياه تجري تحت أساساتها، على اختلاف ما بيننا. هنالك، وراء الصورة، عائلات ونزوح، ومثليين وعشاق، وحروب ومجازر في الأسواق وعلى المداخل ونساء هن قوة خفية، وهنالك روابط مستمرة تشد طرابلس إلى الجبال وإلى حمص وأرواد واللاذقية وقلعة الحصن، في حين لا يكاد يرد ذكر بيروت إلا مرفقاً بشعور الغبن العميق.

ربما علينا أن ننظر، من المسافة التي يوفرها لنا بعدنا بحراً كاملاً عنهما، إلى الكيلومترات الثمانين ونيف التي تفصل هاتين المدينتين، لنرى ربما من مأساة كل منهما ما قد يربط بينهما بشكل خفيّ ومناقض لكل تصريحات الوحدة الوطنية.

ص. أ.

أعدتني إلى القلق، قلق المدينة المستمر، في هوياتها. لعلني أضيف أنها أيضاً تقيم، كما حال المدن القريبة من الجبال، في ريفية مدينية مندمجة خسرتها معظم المدن. قد نظل نجد في المدينة خياط الشراويل الآتي من بشري، واللحام الآتي من الحدث، ومنجد الصوف النازل من حصرون والخياطة الماهرة الآتية من كفرعبيدا، وبياعات اللبن الآتيات من سهل العبدة وبياعات القرصعنة النازلات من جرد عاصون.

ولأن طرابلس بقيت إلى وقت قريب، منعطفاً لا بد منه لسكان أقضية بشري وأهدن وزغرتا والكورة والمنية والضنية وعكار، وإلى وقت ليس ببعيد لسكان البترون، فإن هذه الخاصية أضافت لها ما يمكن أن يجعل من الكتابة عتها أشبه بصناعة جادة عن فهم طبقات المدينة فهماً يشابه فهمنا لمدن "عاصمية". أي مركزية. ومن هنا ربما لما لم يجد الريفيون أحلامهم التي بحثوا عنها في طرابلس، فإن المدينة توجت كإمارة للمهمشين والناقمين. ولهذا وجدناها ثائرة ومتجددة بتثويرها وخطاب ثوارها، ومبتعدة عن خطاب حزبي وشللي.

وتثويرها شارك فيه نازحون، سوريون وفلسطينيون يشكلون جزءاً هاماً من نسيجها الحديث وخلفيته كنسيج حاضن. نحن في هذه المدينة نتفاخر أن معظم امهاتنا أو جداتنا سوريات. كما أننا على تماس مع الفلسطينيين الذين نزحوا إليها بين مخيمين هما على تخوم هذه المدينة: البداوي والبارد، وعائلات طرابلسية تصاهرت مع الفلسطينيين. هذا الخليط يجعل السردية الطرابلسية سردية غنية لكنها مهمشة، ومكملة للتهميش الذي تعاني معظم مدن لبنان. ربما صار الوقت لإزاحة هذا الخطاب الذي يلوم العاصمة والذي كنت أنا الطرابلسي أعاني من وطأته سابقاً. فنحن في الداخل الطرابلسي نتحدث عن بيروت كقوة صراع مع طرابلس وهو ما بدا لي لاحقاً مغلوطاً. المدينتان على ما تقول أنت بحوار دائم. ربما علينا أن نحكي عن هذا و"نفصفصه". أعذرني سأضطر إلى ملاحقة طبخة اليوم، الشيش برك. انتظر رسالة منك.

ف.ع.

علينا ربما أن نفصفص أولاً مصدر طبخة الشيش برك! يقال ان كل الطبخ باللبن أصله من آسيا الوسطى وجلبه الأتراك. أنت تعرف أيضاً أن المطبخ أحد مصادر تشاوف الطرابلسيين على البيارتة.

بالطبع، هنالك اعتزاز طرابلسي يستمد من التاريخ ما يستثمره في تعويض بؤس الواقع، فطرابلس المدينة المملوكية الهامة، وقبلها إمارة بني عمار، ومن ثم كونها طويلاً مركزاً لإيالة عثمانية تمتد من حدود حلب إلى جبيل حتى منتصف القرن التاسع عشر، كل ذلك يتم استعراضه باستمرار في مقابل حداثة عهد بيروت العربية بالعز الذي يتم ربطه تحديداً بأنه أخذ من حصة طرابلس، وتحديداً منذ رسم حدود لبنان "الكبير"، أي لبنان الجبل الذي كبّره الفرنسيون باقتطاع الجنوب والبقاع وبيروت، وطرابلس وجزء من حدودها السابقة، أي بعزلها عن مداها السوري المعتاد. من هنا عادة يرسم الطرابلسيون مسار انهيار مدينتهم الاقتصادي، في لبنان مكرس لخدمة بيروت والجبل، يأخذ منهم دور المرفأ والتجارة مع سوريا، ويمنحهم وعوداً لا تتحقق، أو تتوقف مبكراً في مصفاة نفط ومعرض دولي.

ربما حان الوقت لتجاوز الكليشيه البيروتي عن طرابلس التي هي مقصد للراغبين في الحلويات فقط، خصوصاً بعد مرحلة ٧١ تشرين حين كانت طرابلس الأكثر لمعاناً في الاعتراض وحيويته. لكن أيضاً ربما حان الأوان لننظر بشكل مختلف إلى المسافة بين المدينتين، وربما إلى انواع المسافة بين المدينتين. فهنالك مسافة في الواقع، جغرافية، حيث الأرض بعد لكنها أيضاً مجال التماس واللقاء، وهناك مسافة في التصورات عن الذات وعن الأخرى. لم يعتد الطرابلسيون قبل ٧١ تشرين التفكير في ما قدمه لبنان لهم، على علّاته الكثيرات، ورغم إفقار المدينة النسبي خلال دولته التي اكتمل قرنها الأول، من تعليم وحرية واختلاط شكّلت جميعها بعضاً من الحماية ضد ابتلاع الوصيّ السوريّ للمدينة وأنشؤوا لها سينمات ومجلات وجرائد ومقاهٍ وجامعات ربما تكون أنت من أكثر الناس دراية بتواريخها. وكانت بيروت بالنسبة إليهم غالباً منقسمة بين البيارتة الأصليين، النسخة الأفقر مطبخاً وأكثر حرصاً على المال منهم، والآتين إليها من كل صوبٍ مما يسمح بالقول مع أحد الشعراء الجنوبيين إن "ما في مدينة اسمها بيروت، بيروت عنقود الضيع"، وإنها بالتالي هجنة واختلاط مريبان، ونسوا بالطبع أن طرابلس نفسها مدينة مختلطة وهجينة ومشرعة منذ قرون للبحر كما للجبل، مثلما نسوا أن حرمان لبنان لهم كان في جزء منه أيضاً انعكاساً لرغباتهم في التعالي عليه والانقطاع عنه حنيناً إلى ماضٍ أكثر "امبراطورية".

أما بيروت فربّت صورتها التي قفزت فيها من العهد الروماني ومدرسة الشرائع، إلى كونها عاصمة ومرفأ مشرعاً على البحر والغرب والحياة الحديثة والمصارف والمستشفيات والملاهي والاختلاط الذي أثار حتى ريبة البيارتة القح مثل عمر الزعني الذي تحسر على أفول بيروت وغروب شمسها في حين انها لم تكن بعد قد عرفت عصرها الذهبي. ترافقت صورة بيروت عن نفسها مع الصورة التي رسمها كل الآتين إليها من المناطق ومن الدول العربية كواحة للحريات، فريدة عواصم المشرق ودرّة المتوسط الوهّاجة، والتي كان عليها طبعاً أن تكسف بالضرورة أي نور قريبٍ منها، فلم تعترف بأي فن أو ثقافة أو تاريخٍ من خارجها يحمل أسماءً أخرى، وانزوت في هذا الخطاب أي مساحة متاحة لما هو غير الاسطورة (البعلبكية أو الجبلية) فلم تكن خطابات العشق والهيام ببيروت لتتقبل كلاماً عن طرابلس أو البترون أو النبطية أو صيدا أو عكار. طمست سردية بيروت، التي كأنها وُلِدت من ذاتها، سائر المناطق واكتفت بالنظر في مرآتها، حاجبة البلد حتى الحرب الأهلية، التي أعادت اكتشاف تواريخ المناطق الخاصة، فظهر مؤرخون للجنوب والنبطية وطرابلس، وظهر شعراء كتبوا عن صيدا وصور والنبطية ودير قانون النهر وغيرها. بمعنى ما، كانت سنوات الحرب الأهلية الأولى سنوات التحرر من أحادية بيروت، لكن هذا التحرر لم يدم طويلاً. هؤلاء المتحررون من بيروت ما لبثوا ان استسلموا لمقاهيها وجرائدها، محمولين على جناحين متعارضين ومتكاملين: بيروت المقاومة أساساً في وجه الاحتلال في ٢٨٩١ ومن ثم بيروت الفينيق الاقتصادي مع سنوات الحريري الأب.

هكذا كانت بيروت عندما عرفتها في ٥٩٩١ مجدداً تختطف كامل السردية اللبنانية وتختصر فيها كل الروايات والحكايات، إلى حد أن رواية عن زغرتا كانت تبدو بمعنى ما فلكلورية أو اكزوتيك كما روايات ماركيز، أما الحياة فكانت في المولات والجامعات والأسواق والحداثة التي كانت تتقدم غير متنبهة إلى عدم لحاق سائر البلد برأس العاصمة الذي أصبح أثقل بكثير من القدرة على حمله. لكن بيروت التي عرفتُها كانت في هذه الحركة بالذات تقبل من يفي بشروطها ويلعب اللعبة بحسب القواعد التي تمليها. فكان سهلاً عليّ أن اعثر فيها على أشباهٍ لي من كل المناطق، هم في المحصلة من صاغوا وجه بيروت الثقافي والفني في تلك الفترة. لست أعلم كيف كانت تجربتك أنت فيها، لكن على أية حال أحسب ان هذه السردية قد انهارت تماماً الآن، بسبب الدور المتنوع الذي لعبته المناطق في ٧١ تشرين واختناق بيروت نفسها بفعل الانهيار المالي والخدماتي وانفجار المرفأ، وطردها لعدد كبير من أبنائها الذين فقدوا أعمالهم أو بيوتهم أو مستواهم الاقتصادي. في مثل هذه اللحظة، قد يكون مهماً أن يعاد النظر في علاقة العاصمة بالمناطق وبسردياتها وتواريخها وروايتها بل وفنونها. قد لا يكون هنالك إمكانية لاستبعاد بيروت بالكامل، لكن إعادة تركيب لبنان على قياسها أصبح وهماً محالاً.

ص. أ.

عليك أن تخبر خالتي ليلى، التي عاشت في بيروت ردحاً من الزمن عن الطبخ البيروتي. هي إلى الآن تتندر (على طريقة معظم الطرابلسيين) بأن مطبخ بيروت هزيل. "شو بقلبو شحودتي؟" على ما تردد دوماً ساخرة. ولكني اكتشفت أن لبنانيين كثراً لا يعرفون شيئاً عن مطبخنا الذي يتشابه مع المطبخ السوري واليوناني والتركي وحتى البلقاني والأرمني. وهو مطبخ اندمجت به كل الوصفات بفعل التمازج الذي عاشته طرابلس كمدينة تاريخية عامرة بالسكان والنشاطات الإنسانية على مدى قرون. هذه الوصفات التي حدثتها النسوة الطرابلسيات على مدى عصور. هناك وصفة على سبيل المثال تتناقلها خالاتي من أمهن اللاذقانية ندى، التي انتقلت في ثلاثينيات القرن الماضي إلى طرابلس، وأخذتها من جارتها الطرابلسية في حي المولوية حول إعداد الملوخية، والتي إلى اليوم اعتمدها في شقتي الباريسية. أجيال تتناسل وتتوارث وصفات مطبخية وتقدسها. ومن هنا ربما يفتخر الطرابلسيون أنهم حافظوا على أن لديهم وصفاتهم الخاصة، وهي بطبيعة الحال وصفات معدلة من مطابخ حلب ودمشق وإسطنبول ومدن عريقة، في أزمان كان الجميع يعانون من استعمار الأتراك عليهم ويتلاقحون مع ثقافات وأقليات وأثنيات تقاربت فيما بينها. مثلاً يتفاخر الطرابلسيون أنهم عدلوا على نسب الدهنيات في المحاشي عكس الشوام والحلبيين، وزادوا الثوم في طبخات اللبن عكس الطبخ الاسطنبولي، وتكارموا بنسب الكزبرة في البامية، وتفننوا بعجينة الشيش برك التي تسقط فوراً باللبن من دون قليها، وهو أكبر تحذير طرابلسي قد تسمعه من طباخيها.

دعني أعبر عن انزعاجي من اختزال طرابلس بحلوياتها من قبل بعض البيارتة واللبنانيين. بقي كثر ما قبل ثورة تشرين يخبروننا عن أطيب كنافة طرابلسية والبوظة العربية الدق، باختزالنا بهذا الحيز الضيق كأننا مدينة الأنتيكا الأخيرة في لبنان التي فيها حرف قديمة وصابون بلدي ومصانع تعمل بالبديهيات وأكل محلي يشبه مآكل باب الحارة الدمشقي. وهو اختزال استخدمه مثقفون لبنانيون في كتاباتهم عن طرابلس باعتبارها مدينة الأصالة، والتي إلى الآن لا أعرف ماذا تعنيه هذه الأصالة. كأن هذه المدينة ليست لبنانية بالأصل بل هي جامدة وأشبه بمتحف جليدي، ومكاناً لا حياة فيه سوى لتذوق الحلو العربي، والذي أيضاً يعد التفاخر الطرابلسي على مدى عصور.

ومن هنا سأنطلق من فكرتك عن التلاقي لا عن التفريق الذي بقي هو الخطاب المعلن حول علاقة المدينتين. لكن من دون أن أنسى أن علاقة جدلية تربط الطرابلسيين ببيروت كمدينة، وهم بمعظهم مياومون وعمال وحرفيين وشغيلة ورش من بلاطين وكهربجية وشباب في شركات الأمن الخاصة وعساكر وجنود، كانوا على تماس مباشر مع علاقة اجتماعية، طبقياً، تشعرهم بالنفور والعداء والغضب من بيروت النامية والمزدهرة. وهو شعور لا دخل لبيروت فيه ولا لسكانها، بل هو نتيجة سياسات الحكومات التي تقصدت كثيراً تهميش طرابلس من أي دور وأي تفعيل لاقتصادها المحلي (قتل مرافقها الرئيسة من مرفأ ومعرض دولي ومنطقة اقتصادية حرة ومطار القليعات ليس بعيد عنها ومصفاة بترول متوقفة). وهناك دور اقتصادي غير مرئي نما على عكس ما يظن كثر وساهم البيارتة أنفسهم في تثبيته. سأتحدث عن هذا لاحقاً. لكن أدعني أفسر أكثر فكرتي عن الباص الذي هو الرابط اليومي بين المدينتين، كأنه سفر بالزمن. بين مدينة متطورة وحديثة وأخرى قابعة في النسيان وما يجده هؤلاء الجالسون على مقاعد مهترئة في رحلاتهم اليومية من فروقات في العمارة والفرص وتسرب الحياة نفسها ومظاهرها، وهي أيضاً مظاهر لم تكن لكل البيارتة ولا الوافدين اليها. وهو ما سيولد حقداً دفنياً ومشاعر اللاعدالة. لكن في الحقيقة توجد بيروتات لا بيروت واحدة، كما يوجد مدينتين طرابلسيتين داخل طرابلس يفصلها البولفار. هذا السفر اليومي جعل الهوة بين المدينتين مفتعلة، قوامها الغضب الطبقي والذي هو جزء من دينامية محركة في الحياة الطرابلسية وجزءاً من خطاب أهلها ونقمتهم. لهذا كان التفاعل الطرابلسي ما بعد ثورة تشرين معبراً بالعمق عن الصراع الطبقي وعن مطالب الشارع اللبناني تجاه الطبقة الأوليغارشية الحاكمة، والتي تتحمل مسؤولية تفجير بيروت الرهيب الذي اعرف أننا كطرابلسيين تحسنناه في قلوبنا وأجسادنا كما تحسسه سكان هذه المدينة والذين مصيرنا من مصيرهم، في نهاية المطاف، ولا دلالة أعمق عن هذا التلاقي الشبابي الذي حدث بعد الثورة.

وعلى الرغم من المسافة الجغرافية كان التلاقي الاقتصادي له وجوه ثقافية بين المدينتين، باعتبار أن طرابلس جذبت الطبقتين الوسطى والفقيرة بيروتياً إليها. كانت أشبه بسوقهم الأسبوعي ومقصداً لرحلاتهم أيام الآحاد. ربما هذا التلاقي لا يعرفه جيداً أولاد جيلي، وهو ما ميز طرابلس كثيراً قبل مرحلة معارك الأسواق منذ بداية العام 2012. أي أن هذه المرحلة التي بقيت منذ إعلان الطائف إلى نهاية العام ٢١٠٢ تخيط علاقات اقتصادية وثقافية بين المدينتين. إذ عدم موات الحرفيات التقليدية، وهو جزء من التراث المادي للمدينة وثقافتها المحلية، بقي شغالاً بسبب البيارتة الذين شكلوا زبائن أساسيين لشراء السجاد المحلي وفرش الصوف والنحاسيات والصابون البلدي والمفروشات وإنتاج الأراكيل المزخرفة على يد حرفيي المدينة القديمة، الذين كانوا يصممون لشركات بيروتية ومطاعم وعمارات ناشئة في بيروت. بيارتة كثر كانوا يعتبرون طرابلس مزارهم في أعطال الآحاد لـ"شم الهوا" والتسوق الأسبوعي لبراداتهم من لحوم وخضار وفواكه. كانوا عصباً اقتصادياً مهماً للمدينة. زبائن أساسيون ساهموا كثيراً في إنعاشها. يشترون لحومهم منها، فهي أرخص وطازجة، كون المدينة مفتوحة مباشرة على أقضية: عكار والكورة وزغرتا والمنية والضنية وعلى المناطق الحدودية الجردية التي كانت المراعي فيها تصدر الذبائح يومياً لكل من سوق نهر البارد ومخيم البداوي وسوق القمح والتبانة وسوق العطارين والرفاعية. عدا عن أن زبائن سوق النجارين الذي يضم كبار حرفيي المدينة، اعتمد إلى وقت قريب على البيارتة لتصميم الصالونات وكنبات غرف الجلوس وغرف النوم، عدا عن سوق الخياطين والأقمشة الذي كان مقصداً للبيارتة لـ"الجهاز" والأعراس. وهذه العلاقة غير المرئية وغير المحكية في السردية بين المدينيتن شكلت صلب التعاملات بين البيارتة والطرابلسيين، الذين راحوا يزدهرون في تطوير مطاعمهم وصالاتها كي تستقبل الوافدين من المناطق.

أعتقد، يكمن خلل النظرة من قبل أبناء جيلي إلى بيروت كونهم لم يتعرفوا عملياً إلى ما قدمه البيارته أفراداً وعائلات لاقتصاد المدينة المتردي، والذي بقي يعيش على رحلات الأحد وينعشها، لكنهم لحظوا بشكل عميق الفرق بين مدينة بيروت المتحركة نسبياً وبين مدينتهم الميتة. فطرابلس لا ليل لها جذاب لأبناء جيلي ولا فرص عمل. ففي الوقت الذي بنت بيروت حداثتها، عزلت طرابلس نفسها وعزلتها الأحداث الكبرى وعزلتها طبقتها السياسية. المرحلة الكرامية جمدت حياتها السياسية وطبعاً المرحلة الحريرية قضت عليها ثم جاءت الميقاتية والصفدية لتحول المدينة إلى "سوق تسول" كبير من خلال فتح جمعيات ومرافق هدفها انتخابي بامتياز. لم يعد هناك ما يلفت النظر إلى أولاد جيلي ومن جاء بعدهم. حياة متخثرة، شبه ميتة. استغل المتدينون والأصوليون هذا التخثر وزادوا في بناء المساجد وزاد الخطاب المذهبي وقتل المرح. في طرابلس عشنا ترومات كثيرة لم تعشها بيروت. ففي الوقت الذي كان الناس يرقصون في جبيل والبترون وفي بارات الجميزة ومارمخايل كان الطرابلسيون ينامون على أصوات الهاون والقذائف. عشت جيداً هذه المرحلة وأعرفها. عدا أننا كنا الحديقة الخلفية لمجريات الحدث السوري. نحن عانينا من شبكات النصرة وجند الشام وداعش وعانينا من تحريك الخاصرة بين الجبل والتبانة. المدينة قُتلت حقيقة. هناك جيل كامل ولد على الرعب اليومي ورصاص القناصة. جيل لم ير نوراً وفكر أن بيروت قد تكون ملجأ للأحلام. بيروت لم تعد هذا المكان. وطرابلس بعيد الحرب لم تقفز قفزة حداثية لتفتح بواباتها وتشرعها لأولادها. وأعتقد أن أكبر رمزية تدل على أن هذه المدينة تقتل أولادها هو ما شهدناه مراراً على جسر البالما (فوق شاليهات المدينة) من حوادث سير قتلت فيها أرواح شبان في أعمارهم المزهرة، يعودون من سهراتهم ويقتلون لأن المدينة لا سهر فيها، إلا في السنوات الأخيرة التي شهدت افتتاح بعض البارات في شارع مينو (شارع يعقوب اللبنان في المينا). كان الشبان يموتون في سياراتهم، لأن المدينة تحاكمهم على سهرهم. المدينة لم تعد متسامحة. بل تعاظم دور الدين ونسب الحجاب جعلها مدينة محافظة ومتشددة بمحافظتها ومتفاخرة بكونها لا تتقارب مع الحداثة الغربية، باعتبارها عروبية وناصرية وقبل كل ذلك لها امتداد سوري، جعلها كل ذلك تتعود أن تنام باكراً. تغلق الأسواق والمحلات والمطاعم وتبقى بعض المقاهي الصغيرة شبه المعتمة وهي لا تجذب الشباب. عدا أن غياب المرأة شبه الكلي ليلاً من مشهدها جعلها مدينة رجالية بامتياز. نرى فقط الرجال في الليل. مقاهي الرجال الصغيرة التي تعج برائحة التنباك العجمي والاصفهاني ورائحة الزمن الغابر. لم تعد المدينة مفتوحة للجيل الجديد الذي راح يلتفت إلى بيروت، بما احتوته من انفتاح سمح للجيل الشاب الطرابلسي القادر بالطبع على الرحيل أو الاستقرار ببيروت، على العيش خارج القيود الطرابلسية التي تظن أحياناً أنها ليست مدينة بل قرية. فالكل قادر على التدخل بخصوصيتك أو انتقاد تصرفاتك بينما بيروت كانت ملاذاً، هناك لديك حيز لأن تكون غير مرئي.

من هنا سأعرج على علاقتي البيروتية وهي علاقة مركبة. عشت حرية ما في بيروت، خصوصاً حياتي كمثلي وفرصاً في التقدم صحافياً. هذا ما كانت طرابلس عاجزة على ان تعطني إياه. لكن طرابلس حين أنظر إليها اليوم من مكاني الجديد أجد أنها فتحت لي، وهذه مجرد تجربتي أنا فقط، ملاذات ومساحات لم تكن بيروت قد قدمتها لي، منها الحياة السفلية والسرية لحياة العابرين والعابرات جندرياً بين ساحة التل وشارع عزالدين، الحياة المثلية المتسربة من صالات السينما والحارات القديمة. وأعتقد أن هذا توفر لي كوني آتياً لا محالة من طبقة اجتماعية عاشت حياتها وعلاقاتها وخبراتها من المدينة القديمة التي كانت خلف الأسوار. الجيل الجديد الذي نشأ في مدينة "حرق البساتين" وعلى أنقاض أشجار الليمون وزهرها، لم تنشأ أي علاقة بينهم وبين هذه المدينة التي تغلق وتصير مظلمة. وهي التي أثارتني شخصياً واندمجت فيها وتعرفت إلى أشباحها.

أعتقد أن كثراً وانت منهم حتى من جيل يسبقني لا يعرف أيضاً هذا المجتمع الذي هو برمته مجتمع سفلي وقاعي، كما قال حسن داوود يوماً، لكنه مجتمع رجالي بامتياز ولا مكان للمرأة فيه للأسف، ولم يخلق أي علاقة مع النساء. فبقي منغلقاً على علاقات سلطة وذكورية. ربما.

ف.ع.

أعتقد أن طرابلس أيضاً لا تختزل إلى اثنين، ففيها إضافة إلى اختلاف ليلها ونهارها، وفقرائها وأثريائها، وعائلاتها القديمة والقادمين الجدد إليها، والتنوع الإثني قديمه وحديثه، وميناؤها وقوامها الداخلي، وضواحيها ومعرضها.. الخ، مثلما أن بيروت أيضاً لم تعد تقبل الاختزال.

لدي انطباع وقد أكون مخطئاً بأن بيروت التي عرفتُها قد انتهت قبل سنين من انفجار المرفأ، فالمدن هي الحكايات عنها والصورة التي تصنع لها بتكلفة هائلة، وقد بدا لي أن أحداً لم يعد مهتماً بصنع سردية أو صورة لهذه المدينة التي طردت باستمرار من فيها. لهذا أحدس بأن السرديات والصور الآتية من المدن الأخرى بات لها مكان في صناعة صورة لبنان، وربما دوره المقبل. لم يعد ممكناً اختزاله في العاصمة، ولا النظر إلى العاصمة بعد دمار مصرفها ودولتها ومرفئها وإهراءاتها واحتلال مطارها وطريقه، إلا من خلال علاقتها بداخلٍ لبناني كانت تتحاشى النظر إليه، وإلا من خلال ربطها بواقع مقيمٍ حولها كانت تتعالى عليه مقنّعةً إياه بأحجبة التخلف والتطرف والذوق المتأخر.

أقصد أن سردية ما، أعقد وأغنى، وصورة أكثر جاذبية وألواناً، قد تتركب بالضبط من التعالق والارتباط بين ما لا يمكن اختزاله من المدن المتشابكة والمتعددة الوجوه. حين أسافر إلى هناك، ورغم التعلق بالعادات المكتسبة، يظل الواقع قادراً على اختراق اعتيادي البصري وعلى إظهار هذا التعدد والتشابك. لكن ربما هي المسافة ما يسمح بذلك، المسافة في المكان، والانفصال في الزمان عن ذلك البلد المتعوس.

وربما كان هذا قدرنا، نحن لبنانيو الخارج، وفينا من كان خارجاً وهو فيه، أن نعيد من جديد صياغة احتمالات للبلد، تحجبها المعاصرة عن عيون المقيمين فيه والمنكوبين به، مثلما يحجبهم القرب عن النظر إلى تنوّعه وتعقيد نسيجه. لكنها صياغة على صورةٍ غير جبرانية هذه المرة، على صورة المدن لا القرى، وعلى لغة بوليفونية لا تسعى إلى فرض تناسق أوحد معياري على تناقضات البلد. وهي أيضاً ليست لغة حنين ونوستالجيا. الحنين غدار بالضبط لأنه يريد إقامة الدهر على لحظةٍ عابرة من الزمن بعد أن نقتّها الذاكرة من شوائبها وآلام جراحها. لكننا لسنا في وارد الحنين، فعدونا ليس الزمن ولا النسيان. وغياب القدرة على نسيان البلد والانشغال بحياتنا الحالية، الأوروبية، منبعه في رأيي ليس الشوق، بل بالضبط المسافة التي لا تسمح بمحو الخوف، بعكس معايشة الخطر مباشرة والتي تنسيك إياه. فبعضنا لا يزال يذكر أن الحرب التي عاشها بجسده كانت أقل تخويفاً له من الوضع اليوم. الخوف من آلات حربية مدمرة تدمر الحيوات والأبنية والمؤسسات واحتمالات المستقبل ومصادره الممكنة. الخوف هذا يمنع من الانفصال عن واقع قبيحٍ، لكنه لا يزال يضم بعض حياة... ربما إلى حين. وكتابتنا هي فقط محاولة لهدهدة الخوف والقول بأن لهذه الحياة ربما دوراً لا يزال ممكناً وحكايات يجب أن تروى وصورة يمكن لحياةٍ قليلة ومركّبة أن تتمرّى فيها فترى أسباباً كثيرة كي تستمر. هكذا، الخوف والبعد يصبحان منتجين، ربما، ويمكن لنا أن نستثمرهما لأجل الحرية والحياة.

ص. أ.

ربما لم يعد لدينا سوى هذه المقاومة، التي تستدعي أفعال الكتابة والاسترجاع والتذكر كونها أدوات ضد توحش الحياة نفسها ووحشة الغربة والمنفى وضد الخوف الذي يترصدنا كوننا وطئنا أوطاناً تعايش مخاوف أخرى لسنا بمعزل عنها بل هي في صلب وجودنا ونسيجنا المستجد، وأيضاً ليست بمعزل عن خوفنا المحمول في أجسادنا القديمة التي جاءت من هناك والمتعايشة مع كل الخضات والانكسارات والانهيارات والخسارات الشخصية والجماعية الناشئة اليوم في بلدنا ككل.

للحقيقة هذا التدوين المستمر عن مدينتنا وتوليفها إن عبر الشعر والرواية والمقالات، ليس سوى أداتنا الوحيدة لمواجهة خوفنا من خسارتها، على الأقل بالنسبة لي. فأنا لم ارجع إلى المدينة بعد، ولم أعاينها منذ فراقي لها، ولم أتمكن من تحسس الظلم المضاعف فيها اليوم. هذا الخوف الداخلي، تبدده الكتابة عنها، كأننا نصوغ ألوانها وروائحها وشوارعها، وجوه أهلها وشجونهم، كي لا تتفرفط الشهادة الحية عنها يوماً.

دوماً أحس أني ملتزم تمام الالتزام، بمسؤولية دفينة، أن أكتب عنها حتى لو صرت بعيداً عنها ملايين السنين الضوئية. كل يوم أتحسسها تمرر مشرطاً في لا لتخرج دماً، بل لتتأكد أني أنزّ رائحة ليمونها الذي كلما شممته في أي مكان في هذا العالم، أتذكر أن المدينة تشدني لأكتب عنها، لتحررني من الذاكرة كحنين ونوستالجيا، لتصبح هذه الكتابة مقاومة للنسيان ومقاومة لتجميد الذاكرة وقبل كل شيء توكيداً على الحياة، على أنها تجري مثل نهر أبو علي، ولو ببطء ومع أوساخ كثيرة.

ف.ع.

ربما كان هذا بالفعل أشد مقاومة ممكنة للمنفى ولكل من تسبب به: الإصرار على أن الحياة لا تتجمد فيه، ولا الزمن يُقفَل، بل تظل تنزّ في اتجاهات مختلفة وتسري، ولو سراً "والليل كاتمه".

صهيب أيوب، روائي وصحافي لبناني مقيم في فرنسا. عمل في صحيفة "الحياة" اللندنية وأسس مشروع "تعا نكتب" الهادف إلى تعميم الكتابة الإبداعية بين أوساط اليافعين في مدينته طرابلس، وينشط في مجال حقوق الإنسان والجندرة، ويهتم بالعلاقة بين الجنسانية والأشكال السياسية والاجتماعية. ينشر حاليا مقالاته بشكل مستقل مع "ميغافون" و"رصيف ٢٢"، وموقع "درج". صدرت له رواية "رجل من ساتان" عن دار هاشيت - نوفل في العام ٢٠١٨، وستصدر له في نهاية هذا العام رواية بعنوان: "بناية هرغول"، الفائزة بمنحة "المورد الثقافي".

فادي العبد الله، (طرابلس، لبنان، ٦٧٩١) كاتب وحقوقي ومحاضر وشاعر وناقد موسيقي. تتنوع مقالاته بين القانون والموسيقى والأفلام و النقد الأدبي والفن المعاصر، وقد نمّى اهتماماً خاصاً بالموسيقى العربية التقليدية وصلتها بالأنظمة الاجتماعية والاقتصادية المحيطة بها، محرر فخري في مجلة معازف المتخصصة في الموسيقى. أشرف على كتاب "سماع الشرق" (بالفرنسية، ٠٢٠٢) في مناسبة المعرض الذي قدمه متحف MECUM (متحف حضارات اوروبا والمتوسط، في مارسيليا) بالتعاون مع مؤسسة البحث والتوثيق في الموسيقى العربية (أمار) وشارك في ندواته. نشر خمسة دواوين شعرية وشارك أيضاً في عدد من معارض الفن المعاصر وورشه في بيروت وحول العالم.

مصدر الصورة: رانيا الرافعي

١

أصفار

دوائر، ثقوب، علامات ترقيم، وضعيات حسابية.

العربية، الفارسية، البشتوية، الدرية، الأردو، الشاه مُكهِي. أرقامٌ هنديّة.

الصفر في نظام العد العربي الشرقي – المعروف أيضًا بالعربي الهندي – يشبه النقطة: ٠

علامة عشرية، رتبة خالية، لا أهمية لها ولا شرعيةً قانونية.

يشبه الرقم ٥ في العربية الغربية الصفرَ في العربية الشرقية أو الحرف O: "إذًا فهو مشوِّش للعين غير المدرَّبة – عند النظر إلى المخطوطات القديمة على الإنترنت أو عندما ينقر طفلٌ على أزرار الاتصال عبر الهاتف."

تشكيلات مجدولة.

نقطة، صفر، الخاء – "خواء"، صفر، خالٍ، زيفيروس، زيفيرو – الريح الغربية.

خيبو قديم، مصنوع من الحبال، معقود، أرقام أنديزية (تعود لجماعات الأنديز)، حيث الصفر مجرّد غياب، غياب العقدة في نظام عشري.

(لم أبرع في الرياضيات في صغري ولم أتعرّف إلى الخوارزمي في المدرسة، ولكنني أحببت الرسم وتأمّل الرموز. يضاهي تعلُّم الكتابة من خلال رسم أشكال الأرقام العربية الغربية والعربية الشرقية مسار تطوّر التعلّم في المرحلة الابتدائية بشكل أو بآخر. أو ربّما يضاهي أسلوب التعلّم من خلال التصميم أو الترميز الموضعي في النظام العشري.)

(الخمسات والأصفار خصوصُا. معها تعلّمتُ كتابة الأبجدية العربية. كانت أمّي تعلّمني كيف أصل نقاط الأعشار من اليمين إلى اليسار أو من اليسار إلى اليمين، لا فرق. فهمتُ أهمّية ذلك لاحقًا. كنت أتتبّع النقاط كي أصنع الحروف، كي أقرأ، وكي أكوّن المعنى. وكنت أجد متعة بالغة في كتابة الرقم ٥: ٥. كان ذلك سهلًا. طريقة بسيطة إلى الخارج وإلى الداخل، يزيدها فن الخطّ جاذبية.)

(يستحضر الرقم خمسة "٥" في مخيّلتي مشهد الحركة الدائمة.)

ا. أَلِفٌ. أَ. الأبجد. الألِفُ هو الحرف الأوّل في الأبجدية العربية – "هكذا تعلّمت" – وهو يمثّل الرقم ١، يليه حرف الباء وهو الرقم ٢، والجيم – ٣، والدال – ٤، والهاء – ٥، والواو – ٦، والزاي – ٧، والحاء – ٨، والطاء – ٩، إلخ.. حروف. يليها تمثيل الأعداد التسعة الأولى في خانة العشرات ومن ثمّ المئات: ياء للرقم عشرة، كاف للرقم عشرين، قاف للرقم مائة، ووصولًا إلى الألف. أصفار وأصفار.. "نفر"

(نفر)

إلّا أن الأصفار ليست قديمة العهد. أو لعلها كانت عنصرًا نائبًا في النظام العشري. وكان الأغريق يضعون نقطتين (. .) فوق شكل بيضاوي.

(شكل بيضاوي (أو ربّما قلب؟) تتفرع منه صعودًا قصبة هوائية متّصلة بالخط المستطال الشبيه بالمريء (𓄤)، نفر ومعناه: رمز جميل ومتناغم. كاسمي الملكتين نفرتاري ونفرتيتي. أوّل ما رأيته ظننته العنخ، مفتاح الحياة، الدلتا، النيل بضفتيه الشرقية والغربية وفياضاناته الموسمية.)

٢

أغنية

قصيدة ٣٣.

والعالم مقلوب رأسًا على عقب
مشاعر كثيرة تتعاقب وتستعر
وفي صدري تختمر
تارة يتّقد فيه الحب، وتارّة يستعر نداء الشرف
وأنا هنا، أنا هناك، ألبّي
(..)

(جون غاي، "بولي"، ٧٧٧١)

كانوا يقولون عنه في ما مضى "النهر". كان مجراه صلة الوصل بين إحدى عشرة جماعة متناحرة تتشاركه. كان رافداه الأساسيان نهرين آخرين يلتقيان في بلد واحد. أوّلهما، وهو المصدر الرئيسي للمياه، يتغذّى من المياه الراشحة من بحيرات عدّة تتوسّط إحداها عمق القارّة. خلقت بحيرة أخرى من تلك البحيرات نبعًا جوفيًا تحت سطح الماء هو المسؤول عن قوة التيارات التحتية والحركة التي تدفع المياه إلى المجرى الأساسي. اختبأت تلك البحيرات في أعماق القارة ودفعت رحّالة كثرًا للبحث عنها على امتداد قرون سعيًا للوقوف على منبع النهر ولكن بلا جدوى. أما الرافد الآخر فقد حمل معظم ترسباته البيضاء إلى المياه المفتوحة.

لم يكن الرافد الثاني بطول وسعة الأول، كما لم يكن بنفس قوّته وأهميته، ولكنه كان أغزر في عطاياه. ينبع من المرتفعات إلى الجنوب الشرقي من النهر، ويفيض بانتظام مفتّتًا الصخور وناحتًا الرمل والطين، حاملًا الطمي المتحوّل بفعل الهواء والمياه إلى ترسّبات أكسبت النهر لونه الأزرق الداكن، أو الأسود (سيطلقون عليه فيما بعد النهر الأسود). آلاف من السنين، سعى خلالها الملوك والملكات إلى السيطرة عليه وفرض الضرائب على استخراج الموارد والزراعة عند ضفافه. واستحوذوا على ملكية الأرض المطلقة وتحكّموا بخصوبتها وقسموا مجتمعات القاطنين عند تلك الضفاف وأجبروهم على العمل. كان البعض منهم يُنبت المحاصيل والبعض الآخر يبني العمارات باسم الآلهة. إلا أن البنى التحتية التي صنعها البشر والطوبوغرافيا والقوى التي تحكّمت بمنبع النهر ومصبّه لم تكن وحدها المسؤولة عن تغيير العلاقة مع المياه على امتداد التاريخ. بل إن الصلة بين المياه ومفاهيم التعاون والسلطة هي ما ساهم في صوغ الأنداد في الحرب والسلم، لا الطبيعة الهيدرولوجية للنهر.

كلّ ذلك حدث قبل أن تكلّف الملكة فيكتوريا رسّامي الخرائط بوضع خرائط هندسية لاستعمار الإمبراطورية البريطانية لقارّة أفريقيا. كان ذلك أيضًا قبل استعمار الهند والمشروع الهيدرولوجي الذي حوّل مسار النيل إلى الأبد. إلى الأبد – وقبل أن يصبح القطن المصري "قطنًا مصريًا ١٠٠٪" في تعبير عن رغبة بالية أُعيد إحياؤها لاحقًا عن طريق صيحات الموضة العصرية. قام نفر ببناء السدود على النيل. امتدّت تلك السدود إلى مصر العليا متجاوزة حوض فيكتوريا في السودان والذي تتوسّطه مدينة الخرطوم وصولًا إلى الرافدين النيل الأبيض سريع الجريان وموسمي الفيضان والنيل الأزرق المُحمَّل بالطمي.

وكان ذلك أيضًا قبل إنشاء مشروع قناة السويس بعهد طويل وبداية صراع المستعمِرين على مستعمَرات بعضهم البعض – البريطانيين ضد الفرنسيين وسباقهما على عبور البوابات إلى البحر المتوسّط ليلًا. تصفيق حادّ ولا شهود.

علامة منفردة. ليست عنصرًا نائبًا مكوّنًا من أجزاء تعكس دواخل الجسم. الصفر، موطن الأحاسيس، أتحدّث عن القلب، الحسن والقبيح، المَحسوس والمُراد. تعلّمت رسم رمز هيروغليفي ثلاثي الأضلاع، (𓄤)، آلة عود أو قصبة هوائية في آخرها شكل بيضاوي يمثّل القلب ويليه المريء. أستنشق النفس.

وكان ذلك بعدما "أعيدت قراءة الأوبرا كنمط مسرحي يتقدّم فيه مبدأ التصويت الأنثوي بين الحين والآخر على مبدأ العقلانية الذكري رغم ميسوجينية النص الأوبرالي." (كافاريرو، الجسم الصوتي من موسوعة فلسفية عن الجسد، ٢٠١٢).

٣

"في يوم من الأيام، ابتكر المرء الصفر"

الكتابة عمل وحداني. لا سبيل لسماع دفق الأصوات إلّا من خلال طبيعتها العابرة. تسافر وتتردّد في فضاءات سماعية تدنيها من بعضها البعض وتصل الأجساد التي تؤدّيها. يردّد الصفر ذاته (خصوصًا عند درجات حرارة منخفضة). ويخلق صوتًا غير مضغوط كسواه.

عندما كنت في الثانية عشرة من عمري، سافر والداي إلى نوفوسيبيرسك. كانا قد أنجزا لتوّهما ترجمة مجموعة قصائد لفيسوافا شيمبورسكا. أذكر قلقي عليهما من البرد مع أن الفصل كان صيفًا. ترجما أكثر من خمسين قصيدة في ربيع ذلك العام، وجلّ ما أتذكّره هو صوتاهما المتسلّلان مع رائحة الدخان والقهوة من تحت باب مكتبهما. أذكر قصيدة واحدة بالذات، لا نصًّا بل تلاوة، بصوت أمي وهي تلقيها على أبي، شارحة بعض الكلمات البولندية كي يترجمها إلى العربية. كانا يمضيان الساعات معتكفين في مكتبهما، يحلّلان أدقّ تفاصيل النص، يقسّمان الكلمات إلى مقاطع والمقاطع إلى حروف إلى أن يخرج المعنى من التوليفات ذات المقاطع الخمس. كنت أسمعها كالآتي:

(...)
Był so-­bie raz. Wy-­my­ślił zero.
W kra­ju nie-­pew­nym. Pod gwiaz­dą
dziś może ciem­ną. Po­-mię­dzy da­ta­mi,
na któ­re któż przy­się­gnie. Bez imie­nia
na­wet spor­ne­go. Nie po­-zo­s-ta­-wia-­jąc
po­ni­żej swe­go zera żad­nej my­śli zło­tej
o ży­ciu, któ­re jest jak. Ani le­gen­dy,
że dnia pew­ne­go do ze­rwa­nej róży
zero do­pi­sał i zwią­zał ją w bu­kiet.
Że kie­dy miał umie­rać, od­je­chał w pu­sty­nię
na stu­-gar-b­nym wiel­błą­dzie.

عن أنه غفا.
في ظل نخلة الأوّلين. عن أنه سيصحو
عندما ينتهي عدّ كلّ شي،
حتى آخر ذرّة رمل. يا له من رجل
يتسلل من الشقّ بين الحقيقة والخيال،
يغافلنا. مقاومًا
كلّ مصيرٍ. يخلع عنه
كل هيئة أعطيها له.
قد أُطبق عليه الصمت، لم يترك صوته ندبة.

(فيسوافا شيمبورسكا، نقلتها المترجِمة إلى العربية عن الترجمة الإنكليزية ليوآنا تريتشياك، ٩٩٩١)

كان ثمّة شيء تحرّري في تلك العملية وفي طريقتهما في لفظ الحروف O وÓ وU المضمومة والواو وL وŁ. أتذكّر صوتيهما كما لو أنهما يتكلّمان الآن في الغرفة المجاورة، ذاكرةٌ ترتبط بالحركة المادية للصوت-الذكرى. تمامًا كالأصفار (الباردة) يتعايش هذان الصوتان في فضاء معرفي مشتَرك ينحصر في فعل الترجمة وبناء المعنى في لغة أخرى مختلفة. كان جسدا-صوتا والديّ متلازمين، وبالرغم من اختلاف لغتيهما فقد ركّزا على الإيقاع وتعمّدا تجريد الكلمات من قوامها اللغوي من خلال الترجمة. تحوّلت القصائد الأصلية بين أيديهما وتطوّرت لتعبّر عن المعاني من خلال الماديّات (غير) المنطوقة التي تشاركاها في غرفة الترجمة. اللغة والصوت ينبثقان معًا من خلال مفردات النطق. والسمع والنطق المتلازمان والمتخفّفان من الرقابة يسكنان جسدين في حركة دائمة. وقد لازما هذا الثابت الجسدي، "يقبعان هناك دائمًا، وهنا في الوقت عينه، يحدّد هذا التجرّد نوع الاجتماع الذي ينتميان إليه." (باتلر، ylbmessA fo yroehT evitamrofreP a drawoT setoN، ٥١٠٢).

غيابهما بات يشبه الأفق،

الأصفار تكتب ذاتها.

ياسمينا متولي فنّانة وصانعة أفلام تقيم بين القاهرة وبرلين، وهي عضوة في تعاونية مُصِرّين لتصوير الفيديو والتوثيق. تعمل في صناعة الفيديو والأفلام، كما عادت مؤخّرًا إلى الرسم. يرتكز عملها على الأداء والمسرح والسينما، ويتمحور حول السيرورات في الممارسات الفنية التي تتّسم بوظيفة اجتماعية هدفها خلق التوتّر بين المشاركين/ات والجمهور.

Cover image source: Frances W. Pritchett, "The Abjad System," Columbia University.

An earlier version of this text was conceived as a response to a collective reading initiated by Katrin Mayer as part of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme

This text was commissioned and translated with the generous support of Goethe-Institut Lebanon.

I

Zeros,

circles, punctures, punctuations, arithmetic situations.
Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Dari, Urdu, and Shahmukhi. Indic numerals. Arqām hindīyyah (أَرْقَام هِنْدِيَّة).

In the Eastern Arabic—also known as Arabic-Hindu—numeral system, a “Zero” resembles a dot: ٠

A decimal marker, a null, with no consequence and no legal validity.

The Eastern Arabic numeral 5 resembles a Western Arabic zero or O-like shape: ٥ for the indiscriminate gaze, it’s that of confusion—looking at ancient manuscripts online, or dialling the telephone as a child.

Tabular arrangements.

A dot, a zero, the word “kha”—an “emptiness,” sifr, empty, Zephyrus, Zefiro—the wind from the West.
An ancient Quipu, a cord device, with knotted bits, Andean numerals, where the zero is indicated by absence, the absence of the knot in the encoded base of a ten-integer positional system.

I never excelled in math as a kid and did not learn about al-Khwarizmi (Algorithmi) in school, but I liked to draw and look at symbols; learning how to write by drawing shapes of the Western and Eastern Arabic numerals somehow corresponds to the way learning progresses in primary education. Or perhaps it corresponds to that offered through a design or a positional notation in the decimal system.

The fives and the zeros especially. With them, I also learned to write the Arabic alphabet. My mother would teach me to trace the dots of the decimals from right-to-left or from left-to-right—it didn’t matter. Understanding its significance came later. I followed the dots to form letters, to read, and finally, to construct meaning. I found deep pleasure in writing the number 5: ٥. It was easy. A simple way out and in, made all the more welcoming through the art of calligraphy.

The numeral five— ٥ —always makes me imagine something in perpetual motion.

ا. ʾAlif, Āh. Abjad writing system. The first letter in the Arabic alphabet is ʾAlif—I learn—and it represents 1, the following letter, Bāʾ is 2, Jīm — 3, Dhāl — 4, Hāʾ— 5, Wāw — 6, Zain — 7, Ḥā — 8, Ṭāʾ — 9 … Letters. Followed by the representation of the first nine intervals of 10s and those of the 100s: Yāʾ for 10, Kāf for 20, Qāf for 100, ending with 1000… Zeros, followed by more zeros… nefer

(nfr)

But the zeros were not there for a very long time. Or perhaps they were, as a placeholder in the base-10 decimal system. Greeks would place two dots ( . . ) over an oval.

An oval (a heart perhaps?) with a windpipe stemming upwards out of it, attached to the extended line resembling an oesophagus (𓄤), a Nfr, meaning: a beautiful, harmonious notation. And also, the names of queens Nefertari, and Nefertiti. The first time I saw it, I mistook it for an Ankh—the key of life, the delta, the Nile, with its East and West banks and its seasonal floods.

II

Song

A I R XXXIII.

Since all the world's turn'd upside down.
Tho' different passions rage by turns,
Within my breast fermenting;
Now blazes love, now honour burns,
I'm here, I'm there consenting.
(…)

(John Gay, Polly, 1777)

Once upon a time, they called it "The River". It connected eleven rivals who shared and lived by its stream. Its major sources were two other rivers that met in one country. The first of the two tributary rivers was considered the main source of water draining from several lakes, one of which centered in the heart of the continent. One of the other lakes created an underwater spring responsible for the power of its underlying currents and movements feeding into the primary stream. These lakes hid deep in the continent, letting travelers wander for centuries unable to find the river's source. The other tributary carried most of its white sediment into larger waters.

The second source was not as long and wide, nor powerful and prominent, but much more potent in terms of its offerings. It emerged from the highlands of the south east of the river, regularly flooding, weathering rock and eroding sand and clay; the make up of silt that could travel along with the wind and water gradually turning into sediments that tainted it a darker shade of blue, or black (they would later call it the Black River). Millenia of kings and queens controlled and taxed resource extraction and cultivation on its banks. Through ultimate ownership of the land and its fertility, they broke down communities and forced them to labor. Some would cultivate crops, others construct buildings in the names of their gods. Yet it is not only man-made infrastructures, topography, and upstream and downstream powers that have historically changed the relationship with water. Ultimately, it was the relationship between water, cooperation and power that forged rivals in conflict and in peace, and not the river’s hydrological character.

That all happened before Queen Victoria commissioned cartographers to draw geometric maps of the British Empire colonizing Africa. It was also before the colonization of India and the hydrological project that forever changed the course of the Nile. Forever—and before Egyptian cotton came to be known as “100% Egyptian cotton,” a desire outdated and later updated by fashion trends today. Nefer proceeded to build dams on the Nile. They extended all the way to Upper Egypt, passed the Victoria basin in Sudan, with Khartoum at its heart and into the two tributaries, the white speedy Nile—with its seasonal flooding and the blue Nile packed with silt.

It was also long before the Suez Canal project and the colonial conflict over one another’s colonies—the British versus the French, to first cross the gates to the Mediterranean at night. A standing ovation without witnesses.

A stand-alone notation. Not so much a placeholder consisting of different parts that reflect the inside of the body. Null, in the home of feelings, I refer to the heart, the good and the bad, the felt and the intended. I learned how to draw a trilateral hieroglyph, 𓄤, a lute (or a windpipe?) leading to an oval shape, representing the heart, followed by trachea. I breathe.

And that was after when “opera has been interpreted as a theater in which, despite the inevitable misogyny of the libretto, the feminine principle of vocality prevails, every once in a while, over the masculine principle of rationality.” (Cavarero, “The Vocal Body” in A Philosophical Encyclopedia of the Body, 2012)

III

Once upon a time, one invented zero

Writing is a lonely activity. Flows of sound are only tangible through their transitory nature. They travel and echo through acoustic spheres that bring them closer, connecting the bodies that carry them. Zero sounds itself (especially at low temperatures). And it creates a sound that isn’t compressed like others.

(...)
Był so-­bie raz. Wy-­my­ślił zero.
W kra­ju nie-­pew­nym. Pod gwiaz­dą
dziś może ciem­ną. Po­-mię­dzy da­ta­mi,
na któ­re któż przy­się­gnie. Bez imie­nia
na­wet spor­ne­go. Nie po­-zo­s-ta­-wia-­jąc
po­ni­żej swe­go zera żad­nej my­śli zło­tej
o ży­ciu, któ­re jest jak. Ani le­gen­dy,
że dnia pew­ne­go do ze­rwa­nej róży
zero do­pi­sał i zwią­zał ją w bu­kiet.
Że kie­dy miał umie­rać, od­je­chał w pu­sty­nię
na stu­-gar-b­nym wiel­błą­dzie.

that he fell asleep
in the shadow of the palm of primacy; that he will awaken
when everything has been counted,
down the last grain of sand. What a man
Slipping into the fissure between fact and fiction,
he has escaped our notice. Resistant
to every fate. He sheds
every form I give him.
Silence has closed over him, his voice leaving no scar.

(Wislawa Szymborska, “Wiersz ku czci,” trans. Joanna Trzeciak, 1999)

There was something liberating about that process, and its sounding of the O’s and Ó’s, the closed U’s, the Wāw’s, the L’s and Ł’s (eł). I remember their voices as if they were just in the next room, in my memory, linked with the physical movement of that memory-voice. These voices, like (cold) zeroes, would only coexist in a shared space of knowledge in acts of translations and meaning-making in a different language. My parents’ bodies-voices were inseparable, and although spoken in two different languages, they emphasized rhythms and the intentional linguistic disembodiment of words through translation. The original poems changed and evolved, conveying meaning through the (un)spoken materialities they shared in the translation room. Language and sound produced together almost instantaneously through the Lexicon of the mouth. And the uncensored—the 'inseparable' faculties of listening and speech hosted by bodies that are in perpetual motion. They remained in their bodily constant, “always over there, yet here, and this dispossession marked the sociality to which they belonged.” (Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 2015)

And their absence has taken on the look of the horizon,

Zero writes itself.

Jasmina Metwaly is an artist and filmmaker based in Cairo and Berlin, and a member of the Mosireen video collective. She works in video and film, and has recently started drawing again. Rooted in performance, theater, and film, her works focus on process-based practices that have a social function generating tension between participants and audiences.

Cover image source: Frances W. Pritchett, "The Abjad System," Columbia University.

An earlier version of this text was conceived as a response to a collective reading initiated by Katrin Mayer as part of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme

This text was commissioned with the generous support of Goethe-Institut Lebanon.

كان يا مكان في قديم الزمان زوجان عجوزان يعيشان في كوخ صغير في الغابة
وفي يوم من الأيام أتت ساحرة و قالت
ستنجبان بنتا وستكون
خارقة الذكاء
متقدة العينين
لديها قوى خارقة
ستجوب
شوارع المدينة
وتخلق المستحيل
وتحقق النبوءة

*

*

*

*

[1] أستلهمتُ فكرة "التعايش مع الانقطاعات" من مفهوم "ظروف الميدان الضاغطة" الذي أطلقته مجموعة Ethnography as Knowledge (الإثنوغرافيا والمعرفة) التي أنتمي إلى عضويتها. تستدعي الظروف الضاغطة أنماطًا كتابية تعكس الصعوبات والظروف المرافقة لعملية البحث بدلًا من محاولة تخطّيها. (يرجى مراجعة Contemporary Levant 2, no. 1 (2017); ومشروع Ethnographic Diaries من تنظيم مزنة المصري وميشيل عبيد لينشر بواسطة Rusted Radishes).

[2] .(جبور الدويهي، سمّ في الهواء (بيروت: دار الساقي، ٢٠٢١

[3] Robert F. Murphy, The Body Silent: The Different World of the Disabled (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987).

[4] Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower Vol. 1 (New York: Open Road Media, 2012).

[5] Herta Müller, The Fox was Ever the Hunter (London: Portobello Books, 2016).

[6] Lamia Moghnieh, "Infrastructures of Suffering: Trauma, Sumud and the Politics of Violence and Aid in Lebanon," Medicine Anthropology Theory 8, no. 1 (2021): 1-26; Ibid., "‘The violence we live in’: reading and experiencing violence in the field," Contemporary Levant 2, no. 1 (2017): 24-36.

[7] Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents Vol. 2 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998).

[8] Rebecca Wanzo, “Apocalyptic Empathy: A “Parable” of Postmodern Sentimentality,” Obsidian III (2005): 72-86.

Outline and notes for Parable of the Sower, ca. 1989. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Copyright Estate of Octavia E. Butler.

This essay was commissioned and translated with the generous support of Goethe-Institut Lebanon.

Back in 1993, I had a dream that I was struck by a mysterious illness that led me to progressively lose my eyesight. I was eleven at the time, and in the dream, I was trying to read a book. The illness first made it difficult for me to recognize specific letters. Words and sentences soon faded out, and later, entire paragraphs slowly became blank. I tried to adapt to my condition by reading without seeing the letters g and d, struggling to understand unraveling phrases only to be faced with more disappearances here and there in the text. The sense of loss I had in the dream was not caused by my inability to read, as much as by the temporality of the condition itself: a gradually transient but recurrent state that incrementally wrecked my love of reading, and that—once I had learned to live with the damage it has caused—incited new ones.

I was a 'post-civil war kid' at that time, barely beginning to trust the outside world, and its promise of permanent safety. I had figured out how to put an end to my sleepwalking episodes and night terrors by hiding my anxieties and fears, the same way grownups would sweep weapons, bodies, and massacres under many rugs. I had also began writing my first novel نبوءة تتحقق (A Prophecy Comes True). The story narrated the prophetic birth of a girl who, through magical powers and following a series of extraordinary challenges in her life, manages to rebuild her city Beirut into a fun and lighthearted place. After the dream, however, something held me back from writing. What felt like an effortless, playful, and immensely voracious activity, became somewhat of a heavy burden, and I found myself unable to write past the first part of my novel. It was as if the condition I had in the dream was itself the prophecy of ruin to come, and of my inability to bear witness to it and adapt.

This was my first experience with interrupted writing, what is usually called writer’s block. All that remains from my novel today are several notebooks with introductory passages written on their first pages, the promise of a prophetic story without an ending:

كان يا مكان في قديم الزمان زوجان عجوزان يعيشان في كوخ صغير في الغابة
وفي يوم من الأيام أتت ساحرة و قالت
ستنجبان بنتا وستكون
خارقة الذكاء
متقدة العينين
لديها قوى خارقة
ستجوب
شوارع المدينة
وتخلق المستحيل
وتحقق النبوءة

Writing from and in various landscapes of violence is never an easy task. While most efforts go towards overcoming the block, the state of the interruption itself can emerge as a productive and generative set of affect and knowledge-ethics about the world we live in.¹ In other words, perhaps we should not overcome the block and just sit with its excruciating, and sometimes repetitive, interruptions. For some, writing in-itself becomes an urgent path to overcoming violence, and when one knows they won’t be able to survive, a way to document the experience of dying. I read Jabbour Douaihy’s last novel, سمّ في الهواء (Poison in the Air),² as a practice of writing in death and dying, where the narrator aimlessly dwells in spaces outside the margins of social institutions in Lebanon. Anthropologist Robert F. Murphy’s quasi-autoethnographic text, The Body Silent,³ documents his own deteriorating spinal condition that later led to paraplegia—a form of paralysis—his recordings countering the slowly growing silence of his body. Others prefer to sit with that violent silence, staring in awe at their world as it falls apart. When I think of being a silent observer in the face of catastrophe, a video comes to mind of a man at the beach in Thailand in 2005, staring at the tsunami as it is about to crash onto him. Someone turned the video into a GIF, and this moment now circulates online in an everlasting loop.

*

On July 20, 2024, on the eve of her fifteenth birthday, Lauren Olamina started chronicling the events unfolding with her family and small community in South California, amidst climate change, resource scarcity, and severed social relations. Lauren first wrote about random occurrences in passing—her dreams, and how her feelings for the community priest, her father, and religion were changing—while scattered ruptures in the outside world would leak into her gated community: the day she saw headless homeless people; the naked and dazed young woman she encountered in the street; the abandoned houses; the rise of political extremism in American elections; the fires, rain, tornados, epidemics, and floods; and the increasing robberies, rapes, suicides, and murders in her community.

Lauren records all this multi-leveled and episodic disintegration in an obsessive and uncannily cold manner, almost like a scientist classifying different animal species. She is a Black American teenage girl who is well versed in living-in and adapting-to a world of perpetual violence, mistrust, and socio-environmental collapse. Yet, two things were unique about Lauren: For one, her hyperempathy syndrome, otherwise known as “organic delusional syndrome,” a condition that makes her share and completely feel the pain and pleasure of other people as if it was her own, rendering her most vulnerable in times of conflict—“I’m supposed to share pleasure and pain, but there isn’t much pleasure around these days.”

The other unique attribute of Lauren is that she writes because she knows she lives on the threshold of the apocalypse, and wants to respond to its immense social and ecological changes. While her parents had lived in the 'old and more solid world,' Lauren has only witnessed and learned to live in a collapsing fragile world. Unlike the others in her community hiding and waiting for the old days to return, she had been preparing for the catastrophic moment to strike and for the walls to fall. Much to her family’s dismay, she had assembled a grab-and-run pack and had been secretly studying “three books on survival in the wilderness, three on guns and shooting, two each on handling medical emergencies, California native and naturalized plants and their uses, and basic living: logcabin-building, livestock raising, plant cultivation, soap making.” So, when the walls finally fell in a fire accompanied by a massacre of her community and family, Lauren found herself alone on the open road, in the terrifying outside. Violently uprooted, she travels with her survival pack and books, and continues to write what starts to take shape as a philosophy of change and rebuilding a new world in the aftermath of catastrophe.

*

Lauren Olamina was the protagonist of Parable of the Sower, the 1993 Afrofuturist novel on life in the apocalypse by Octavia Butler.⁴ I came across the novel in the summer of 2015 when I was writing my dissertation on trauma, violence, and the politics of suffering, at the break of what was later called the garbage crisis in Lebanon. My feminist community in Beirut had asked me to bring copies of her novels from the US. Intrigued, and unaware of who Octavia Butler was, I started reading the novel on my flight to Beirut. Unbeknownst to me, the day of my arrival was the day the Lebanese army opened fire on a peaceful protest in central Beirut, igniting several protests that would last for several months. Jetlagged and pumped with adrenaline, I would return home from the protests every night and read the novel.

This was the frame of mind in which I encountered Lauren. It wasn’t until much later that her diary sank in as a roadmap for survival and a guide on how to rebuild a future. What I found particularly unsettling was its absence of any portrayal of traumatic emotions and sentiment caused by violence and disaster. Despite Lauren having lost her family, community and entire world, Butler seemed adamantly uninterested in dwelling on the massacre and loss. Instead, Lauren pragmatically walks down the California highway, collecting tools for survival, still writing and journaling as a strategy for survival in a shattered world.

But what about Lauren’s suffering? The twentieth century has been preoccupied with the politics of the wound and its various subjects, identities, and retributions. This form of politics became more institutionalized by the end of the 2000s, where trauma, the universally shared wound, became a framework through which suffering produced by violence is made legible and recognizable. Trauma postulates suffering subjects, and when these subjects are not suffering from violence, they are trauma’s binary opposite: resilience. In Lebanon, my research has focused on unraveling the infrastructures of suffering from political violence and Israeli wars to explore how different economic and techno-political discourses and assemblages enable and constitute articulations of trauma and sumud (a subject position of resistance and steadfastness that is irreducible to resilience, yet contains many of its features).

How we suffer in Lebanon, whether in terms of trauma or sumud, is a very political matter. To borrow from Herta Müller’s framing,⁵ the sectarian-communal nerve runs deep into the land and calls for “شدّ العصب” (to stretch the nerve), serving to constitute steadfast and non-suffering, non-collapsing subjects who carry the status quo. The Beirut port explosion not only blasted the city, but tore open the infrastructures behind the discourse of resilience, emptying it of meaning and privileging trauma as a position of witnessing violence and calling for justice.

*

Yet, is trauma still the critical and urgent concept through which we can think about and recover from the violence we live in? Does it capture our affective experiences today? To put it differently: what happens when we privilege healing and rebuilding over suffering? In my work I have argued that we move away from the trauma/resilience binary towards writing about, accounting for, and theorizing on various acts, tools, and strategies for survival.⁶ It is a move that invites more attention and knowledge production around embodied acts of walking, cooking, planting, eating, making communities, reading violence in everyday life, and adapting. I see Lauren as an embodiment of this survivalist subject. She is neither traumatized nor resilient, because she is not preoccupied by the event of violence in and of itself. She does not stand in the face of violence, write about it, or stare in awe at its effects—but adapts to the new world that it has produced. This is not because she is apathetic from her hyperempathy. On the contrary, her abundant emotions—of empathy, pain, and pleasure—are actively and purposefully employed in the service of survival and communal rebuilding.

This is the kind of witnessing that Butler invites us to undertake in apocalyptic times, when the world-as-we-know-it ceases to be safe, familiar, and knowable. Octavia Butler inspired my thinking on how to be flexible in, mend with, and survive from catastrophe—all of this within the temporality of the everyday—how to change and transform, rather than attend to the aftermath of events. This privileging of doing rather than suffering opens our critique to generative and material ways of reading violence and disaster. It shifts focus on the future rather than the past–present. But also, Butler says, “to survive, let the past teach you.”⁷ The past becomes not just a painful and traumatizing event that requires healing, but also a place for deep communal knowledge, learning, and resources that we can use.

The move from suffering to doing is not an invitation to abandon the emotional and focus on the behavioral (thereby creating new binaries). It is about attending to a new kind of affective belonging in a collapsing-world, of inhabiting the threshold of the apocalypse, a kind of “apocalyptic empathy”⁸—a radical form of affect directed towards rebuilding, survival, and recovery.

*

I am much older now—in fact, I am about to turn forty. I have written and completed many texts. Sometimes I intentionally leave typos in them so that I can watch my writing break a little. I have had my share of interrupted writing since my first unfinished novel, and I still take prophecies seriously, even though they stopped manifesting in my dreams. Three weeks after the Beirut port explosion, I came back to Lebanon. When I called my mother to check up on her, she said our apartment was the only one in the building whose windows did not shatter. She said it was because the civil war had taught her to always leave the windows cracked open. When I came back, I was astounded to see that, contrary to what my mom said, nothing looked the same. Dust creeped into our closets and mattresses. The rooms suddenly looked worn out, kitchen cabinets seemed as if they were violently snapped and put back together. My parents, friends, and neighbors all looked incredibly old. It was like returning to a dwindling world, or to an altogether new one composed of ruins, dust, and blasted infrastructures. Inhabiting is not the same as returning, however, and the world might seem different from each position. All I know is that adapting to this new world, rebuilding communities, and recovering, extends far beyond how we have deeply suffered from it.

[1] Sitting with interruptions is inspired by the concept of the “overbearing conditions of the field” coined by the Ethnography as Knowledge working group of which I am a member. Overbearing conditions invite forms of writing on the hardships and conditions faced in research rather than overcoming them (See: Contemporary Levant 2, no. 1 (2017); and the Ethnographic Diaries project organized by Muzna Al-Masri and Michelle Obeid, to be published by Rusted Radishes).

[2] .(جبور الدويهي، سمّ في الهواء (بيروت: دار الساقي، ٢٠٢١

[3] Robert F. Murphy, The Body Silent: The Different World of the Disabled (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987).

[4] Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower Vol. 1 (New York: Open Road Media, 2012).

[5] Herta Müller, The Fox was Ever the Hunter (London: Portobello Books, 2016).

[6] Lamia Moghnieh, "Infrastructures of Suffering: Trauma, Sumud and the Politics of Violence and Aid in Lebanon," Medicine Anthropology Theory 8, no. 1 (2021): 1-26; Ibid., "‘The violence we live in’: reading and experiencing violence in the field," Contemporary Levant 2, no. 1 (2017): 24-36.

[7] Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents Vol. 2 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998).

[8] Rebecca Wanzo, “Apocalyptic Empathy: A “Parable” of Postmodern Sentimentality,” Obsidian III (2005): 72-86.

Image source: Outline and notes for Parable of the Sower, ca. 1989. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Copyright Estate of Octavia E. Butler.

Lamia Moghnieh is an anthropologist and mental health practitioner. She received her PhD in Social Work and Anthropology from the University of Michigan and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Decolonizing Madness project at the University of Copenhagen. Her research explores the dynamics of psychiatry, suffering and patient narratives in Lebanese society and the MENA region.

This essay was commissioned with the generous support of Goethe-Institut Lebanon.

The scales of the world have been knocked out of balance. Numbers have filled the air of our rooms, and continued to multiply there. Numbers of the wounded and numbers of the dead. Aid packages and lockdown dates. A return to nature is humankind’s only escape from numbers, its only means of preserving what little sanity it has left. Some go to the river, while others prefer to walk in the forest. I find what little nature I need in strolling along the canal that runs parallel to the river. On my way there I pass the skeletons of new buildings where construction has halted. Then I walk through a narrow strip of land where scattered elder bushes grow. Until three decades ago, it was a wasteland that divided the city in two, and people called it the death strip. I have no time to go walking other than at weekends, because my work never stops. I stroll for a while with the elders, noticing how the plastic tents between the trees, where those who have lost their homes live, have proliferated. Then I cross a few streets to reach the canal and walk amid the weekend bustle until I reach a quiet spot shaded by a line of weeping willows, and there I sit down under one of them.

The trunks of the willow trees incline towards the canal, and their branches, like braids, trail into the water. Delicate creatures swim around the submerged branches, and insects glide across the surface, such that the branch gives the impression of being a coarsely woven cord that connects beings of the water with beings of the air. Sometimes, on the bank, a small beetle walks the line between water and land without ever falling in. One day I was sitting alone in my favorite spot, watching the canal as the color of the water changed from dark green to grey under a volatile autumn sky. A steamboat went by, throwing out music and the sounds of exaggeratedly celebratory voices. The boat sliced the water, sending waves towards the banks, each one slapping at the concrete wall then falling back. Gradually the water mended itself as the boat moved away, the surface became still again, and the boat’s wake and its noise were gone. The sky had clouded over now, covering the sun and pressing down on all living things. It was still and white-grey. Just then, an outstretched hand appeared from the water. I stared hard at the hand until all my doubts had been dispelled. Its fingers were extended and splayed apart, like those of someone appealing for help. I stayed where I was, breathing slowly, until the current brought the hand closer to the bank, and then I got up and reached for it. Everything around me froze for a second when I touched it, but it bobbed away before I could catch hold of it. Glancing around, I noticed a few dried branches, so I quickly fetched the longest one. Then I took hold of one of the willow tree’s dangling braids for balance and leant towards the hand so as to nudge it to the bank with the stick, but each time I tried, I failed, because the hand was difficult to maneuver. From where I stood the roots of the willow tree were huge and knotted and sunken deep in the water. A whole world lay concealed below the surface. I noticed that the hand was moving away from the bank and drifting gradually further into the channel, so I leant out as far as I could, holding fast to the willow, and my eyes were fixed right on the hand when my grip slipped, a fraction at first but then more, and then I gave up my grasp on the branch altogether, lost my balance, and fell into the water.

It was an entire forearm amputated at the elbow. I lifted it out of the water, returned to my spot, and placed it on the grass next to me. We were both soaked and dripping canal water. There was a pungent odor in the air, like the smell of a swan when it comes onto land. I drifted off, staring into the canal, which was now a leaden grey, and thinking about a city that was unknown to me going up in flames and about the number one trillion, which exceeded my mind’s powers of comprehension. Then I turned to the hand and asked, “Would you like me to bury you now?”

Its fingers were slender, and bluish at the tips. Torn flesh hung from its amputated stump. Its skin was slippery, but it was clean and unblemished. Its bones were bright white. A few moments went by before I heard its wavering voice reply weakly: “…decapitated her before tossing her body into the water … thousands of eyes being eaten by the fish … 1919 … mountains of sugar … hills of coffee … rivers of rum … 1859 … they’re still laboring down below … 2,500,000 … thrown into the water in their manacles … 1786 … women with their bellies slashed open … Ibrahim Salim … A’isha Abd al-Razzaq … 2003 … Umar Diyalo … Al-Hasna Barri … 120,000 … tons of nitrate … oceans of petroleum…”

I picked up the amputated forearm to soothe its delirious ramblings and placed it in my lap beneath my own right forearm, so that I had two forearms coming out of the same elbow joint.

A woman said, “I want to break up.” A man said, “I got stuck in an anti-vaxxers’ protest yesterday.” I was starting to shiver, and I noticed that passersby were looking at us. I wanted to throw the hand back in the water and go home. But the hand in my lap said, “Please help me.” It spoke with difficulty. “I must get back to my work.”

“What is it you do?” I asked.

“Writing,” it replied. “I’m the hand of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ. What city is this I’ve come up in?”

I told it we were in a city called Berlin. The questioning looks from around us were increasing, and I started to get anxious, so I stood up, hid the hand under my shirt, and zipped my wet coat all the way up. I shuffled away through the passersby who were staring in astonishment, leaving two wet patches on the grass, one much larger than the other. Two dogs barked somewhere behind me. When I’d got some distance away I happened to glance back, and I saw clearly the crown of the willow tree I’d been sitting under, despite the grey-white flatness of the sky; it looked much taller than I had thought. Its silhouette would remain imprinted on my memory forever.

I fell straight into bed feeling feverish. I was swallowed up by an impenetrable darkness that glimmered with images I did not recognize. I saw laborers digging up the earth. I saw fish floating on the surface of the water. I saw weeping willow branches wound around bodies, strangling them. I saw arms and legs. I saw ears and bones and eyes. I saw white smoke rolling over the water, suffocating all who breathed it in. I saw huge cargo ships crossing oceans. I saw my mother’s face as I saw it for the last time. I saw all these things then returned to the darkness. I don’t know how long I remained ill. Now and then I got up, with great difficulty, to drink something hot, then returned to the chasm of my bed. And whenever I got up, I saw the hand on the floor beside me, writing. I don’t know how it got hold of all that paper. There was paper all around, and it was at the center, writing. Writing and writing and writing. I saw it from a distance as I stumbled back to my bed, in thrall to the whirling fever, and tumbled over and over into the darkness of the abyss.

I jerked frantically awake in the dark, fear perforating my head. Looking at the alarm clock next to me I saw I was late for work, so I quickly got up and got dressed. The hand was still on the floor, writing. I grabbed my keys and my things, and without saying anything left the flat and closed the door behind me. The city was still deep in slumber as I walked. My head was spinning and my body exhausted. A faint ache was starting up in my right arm. I arrived at work. We were building an enormous Prussian palace in the heart of the city. I swiped my electronic card quickly over the reader at the metal gate and entered the construction site, heading towards the cement mixer. Ignoring the throbbing in my arm, I greeted my colleague, who was standing by the mixer feeding it sand, water and cement. Then I went up to the first floor, and said good morning to the workers who stood there smoking. They told me they needed window frames and heating pipes, so I went down to the forklift, my head pounding, and started the ignition.

When I first started work, they told us we were rebuilding an old royal palace destroyed by the war. My friend Fadil, who helped me get the job, told me that the land where we were building the new palace belonged once to a country named East Germany that now no longer existed, and that its parliament had met here until the building which stood on the site was demolished after unification. Work on the site was highly regimented. Each work gang had four or five laborers led by a ganger, and when a gang was given a task, the ganger was left to direct work as they saw fit. Fadil was one of these gangers, having been chosen for his good German and his ability to translate what needed doing for the Arabs we worked with; most had arrived in the city after the revolutions of the past few years, unlike Fadil, who had been here for around fifteen years.

I could always distinguish the sound of Fadil at work amid the clattering and noisy machinery on site. The sound of nuts being tightened on the girders of the façade was unmistakably Fadil. He always gave the nut an extra turn for luck, where his workmates made do with tightening it just enough. In Fadil’s hands, the metal produced a short whine that sliced through the site, a ringing declaration of the precision of his workmanship that neutralized any possible criticism. I set about moving the huge metal window frames to the first floor with the forklift. At just the moment when I needed to stop the fork, I felt an agonizing rush in the bones of my arm. The pain was unbearable, and it was rapidly getting worse, worse than the dizziness in my head, but I managed to keep the machine under control. It felt like fangs were tearing my arm from my body. I couldn’t understand the excruciating pain and tried to distract myself with the unusual comings and goings taking place on site that day. Many vehicles had appeared and left again, and finally a large lorry had arrived carrying a huge bronze angel which it deposited in the central yard. When it was almost time for morning break, I switched off the machine and went to where the laborers gathered, crossing the open space where the angel stood to get there. My workmates, staring, remarked that I was pouring with sweat. I sat down among them to rest, the pain getting worse and worse. I couldn’t keep on top of it any longer; my vision blurred, tiny white stars appeared before me, and I cried out in agony.

When I woke up at the hospital, I’d lost the feeling in my arm altogether. A doctor injected me with a painkiller, and said, “Don’t worry, you’re going for a CT scan now.” I found myself on a wheeled bed, on which I was moved to the scanner room and then returned to the room where I’d awoken. The painkiller had started to take effect and I left myself to its torpor. When the intense pain disappeared it gave way to an emptiness that was even more dreadful. Then a doctor arrived and introduced himself as a neurologist. He looked at the scan, and asked me to tell him what happened. I told him. He was quiet for a few seconds, then asked, “Has anything been bothering you recently?” I told him no. He was quiet again and then said, “We’re all living in exceptional times, unlike anything we’ve experienced before. But you should see the glass as half full: at least you haven’t lost your job, like so many other people have. In any case, everything looks fine to me. You just need some rest.” I tried to move my arm but it wouldn’t move, then nodded at the doctor to affirm what he’d said. When I left the emergency department, Fadil was there waiting; he put his arm around me and spoke to the doctor to find out how I was doing. He asked me to go back to his, where he and his wife and their two children could look after me, but I preferred to go home, and so he drove me back.

There was paper all over the bedroom floor when I entered. The hand was still writing. “What is that?!” shouted Fadil. I explained it was the hand of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ. He was even more amazed at that. “What’s it doing here?” he asked. It had been a long day, and I was too exhausted to tell him the whole story, so I just said, “It came out of the water in the canal. I’m tired, I’ll explain later.” Fadil was rooted to the spot for some time, but he finally left once he’d reassured himself that I didn’t need anything. I sat quietly in my room. I imagined that I felt a twinge in my arm, so I tried once again to raise it, but it didn’t move. Then I picked up one of the pages from the floor, and read: A leg … many legs … a small leg next to a larger leg … those who have lost their names … left forgotten in forgotten waters … who will never arrive … who will never return … who will never awaken … a hand looking for another … lungs cured in salt … an isthmus between two shores … souls escaping their owners … a slow movement … this way and that … fingers are paralyzed … throats dry out … the abyss grows wider … salinity under the skin … clothes that no longer clothe … surface of the water … rope trailing in the water … hand clutches rope … the roar of an engine … leg growing weary … a rucksack slipping away … and swirling into the depths …

Five shocks, each delivered by a metal pad. One on the side of the neck, one on the forearm, one under the shoulder blade, one on the curve of the thigh, and one on the heart. The technician pressed the button on his device to start the current, then left the tiny room. I closed my eyes, imagining I could hear a vibration but not feeling a thing, and then the session was over. There was no progress after two weeks of electrotherapy, but the pain was gone, along with any sensation connecting me to my arm. For those two weeks I had trudged the streets with an arm that hung limply from my shoulder. The world had gone dark before me. I would lose my job now I’d lost my arm. I’d have to manage my life with only one arm. How had this happened to me, at this age? Even my former life, working off the books in construction and constantly running from police inspections—I couldn’t even return to that. I walked and walked through the cursed city, asking myself what had brought me here. I didn’t know where to go or who to confide in. Memories of my family home in Basra, which was no longer standing, rained down on my head, and I fled from them. I would return to my room, shattered, at the very end of the night.

One night I went back to my room and found Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s hand waiting up for me. It said it had an idea. The next day I rang Fadil and we arranged that he would come over immediately after his shift. I proposed the idea to him with great enthusiasm the moment he arrived. But Fadil didn’t seem persuaded.

“Let’s give it a go,” said the hand, “we’ve got nothing to lose.”

Fadil looked at it doubtfully. “I’ve never seen a talking hand before,” he said.

“Look, Fadil,” I replied, “I don’t have any other choice. I’m clutching at straws here. You know it’s not just myself I have to support. And you’re the only person who can help me.”

Fadil was hesitant for a long time, then he took hold of the hand and warily gave it a once-over. He held it against my dead arm to compare them for size, turning both of them over once or twice. When he’d done that he was quiet for a minute, then he put the hand back on the floor.

“I can’t attach it myself,” I pleaded. But he didn’t look at me. He got up and said he would be back shortly.

He was back in my room in under an hour. He’d brought a piece of sturdy fabric with buttonholes in, some compression bands, and a length of strong elastic cord. He placed my arm in his lap, then wrapped the fabric around it, catching Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s arm underneath it. I couldn’t feel anything, but I could see the back of the hand touching my own palm. He cut the bands into narrow strips and used them to fasten the hand’s fingers to my own, threading them through the buttonholes in the fabric. Then he looped the cord over my shoulder and used it to pull the fabric tight. The hand was much thinner than my own, and the forearm weaker. Anybody looking at it from above would hardly notice it was there. When he was done, Fadil removed my arm from his lap, and it hung quietly at my side. We held our breaths for a moment, and then Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s fingers began to move gently, along with my own, then rose slowly through the air till they were level with my eyes, as was my own hand, for the first time since I had fainted at the building site. I was overwhelmed with happiness and gratitude towards the hand. Fadil took a deep breath, then smiled. “Maybe we’ve got luck on our side,” he said. “We’ll get you some baggy work clothes, and some extra-large gloves, so your arm doesn’t look any bigger. Tomorrow I’ll sort out the fabric and adjust that strap for you, and if everything goes to plan, you’ll be back at work the day after tomorrow.”

And I was. The bronze angel I’d left there before I became unwell had become eight angels who towered next to the water tank in the middle of the construction site. They were identical reproductions of other angels who had once stood atop the old palace. The angels held their arms in different positions. One pressed its palms together at its breast, another had both arms outstretched before it, a third had its right hand clasped to its chest and its left held aloft; they looked like actors in an eternal tableau. What they had in common was their wings, polished metal feathers that fanned out from a point in their backs and glittered at the tips like sharp blades. I stood before the angel which held its palms together, the one I had seen before my fall. It was at least twice my height. Its face was silent, and the look in its eyes stony, as if in its fall it had come down in the wrong place. These, then, were the angels which would bear the golden cupola, and upon it the orb and cross. The cupola which was to crown the palace and be its device, one which no eye gazing upon the city’s skyline could mistake. Just then, I heard Fadil calling me, so I went to the forklift to get on with my work.

My return wasn’t easy: manipulating the controls still felt clumsy, and I often had to support the one hand with the other. Fadil took care to keep me in his gang each day and give me straightforward tasks to do. He never let me out of his sight. Operating the forklift required me to be very delicate with the fork; one false jerk of the lever could lead to disaster. My hand used to know its own way around, but now its movements came from some point in my stomach; I could feel it producing a tension inside me that Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s hand received as a signal and attempted to execute. The work was utterly exhausting, but I managed not to attract any attention to my appearance, and that meant I had a decent hope of keeping my job. The first day went by, albeit slowly, without incident. But as I was getting ready to leave the site, I noticed two young women in blue work clothes. Their hair looked damp, and they weren’t familiar. They appeared to be observing the progress of work in great detail as they walked through the site. They glanced at me and stopped. Our eyes met for a moment before I quickly hurried away.

Later the hand asked me if it could remain attached to my body that night even though work was over, because it had missed the physical connection. I had no objection. I also asked what had happened to its owner. It told me that Sufyan ibn Muʿawiyah, a governor of the caliph Abu Jaʿfar al-Mansur, had torn him limb from limb and cast each part into a roaring furnace before his eyes while he was still alive. The hand fell silent.

“So how did you survive, then?” I asked.

“I escaped being cast into the oven by jumping into the river Tigris,” it replied. “I’ve been in the water ever since.”

“And what did your owner do to deserve such a gruesome death?”

“He made dumb beasts speak,” said the hand simply. “He was a writer in the caliph’s court. The caliph became enraged with him one day and accused him of heresy.”

“And what about you?” I asked.

“I’m searching for a way out.”

I wanted to know more, and to hear how it had ended up here, but I could see it was not fond of talking and understood that whatever it wanted to say, it preferred to write. That night I slept deeply for the first time in many weeks, and when I awoke I found that the hand had written many pages while attached to my body, so I picked one up and read in astonishment.

Water snakes glided among thick stands of reeds. One emerged and slipped quickly across the water, then returned and hid itself in the reeds once again. The sky was clear, and in the distance black curtains hung above the flares at the oilfields. Four young men crowded into a canoe with a curved prow amid a silence disturbed only by the flashes of passing fighter jets. One of the four stood up in the middle of the boat holding a long pole. He plunged it deep into the water till it pushed against the bottom, then pulled it out and plunged it into the other side. They approached a small island surrounded by rushes, and they saw the fire consuming its huts, so they continued on their way until they arrived at an inlet cross-hatched by reeds. They brought the boat closer and slipped in behind them. Here the reeds grew thick and wild in an intricate maze. They floated past the puffed-up bodies of dead water buffalo and rocket debris sticking out of the water. They continued until they reached the thickest part of all, and there they stopped and concealed themselves in silence. The previous day, the women in the city had run, looking for their sons, and the men had stood before the city’s government offices in anger. Soldiers returning from the desert had horrors to tell. The police opened fire but the people were unafraid and remained on the streets. They said they wanted their sons who had been destroyed by the war, and a dignified life. Hundreds upon hundreds of souls came out and filled the streets. But the governor sent for huge reinforcements. They would tie up the young men and fasten a stone to their chests and push them into the water. When the boy had returned from school the day before, his mother had hidden him, because they were going round the houses taking away the young men. And that morning she had prepared him a handkerchief tied around some food and told him to hide in the marshes with the others, so he would be saved. Time passed slowly in among the rushes, and the waves of heat became more and more intense. The sky was split apart by the roar of an engine in the distance. A helicopter appeared and assumed a position in the heart of the sky. It came so close that the young men feared it would come down on their heads. The earsplitting noise it made was like the pulse of artillery fire. Then they heard bullets vibrating past them. Screams went up all around. It was the day of gathering and judgment. An age went by before the helicopter left. The boy plunged the slim pole deep into the water then, and the canoe moved slowly away. The water was dark when they came out into the open channel.

It takes a person a full five minutes to walk from the western façade of the palace which overlooks the canal to the eastern side which backs onto the river. In breaks the laborers would make their way, chatting loudly, to a distant corner of the ground floor which looked directly onto the river, and there they would eat and smoke. My arm became more agile as the days went by, and I became accustomed to my new life, in which the hand of a man who had died nearly one thousand years earlier was the intermediary between my body and the tangible world. Without it, my world would have fallen apart. I began to feel safe among my workmates again, since none of them seemed to have noticed anything and instead offered to share their food and asked how I’d been doing since the day they’d seen me fall down among them. But one day the air turned suddenly tense when a special lorry, guarded by a convoy of cars, arrived on the site, and we realized that it carried the golden cupola and the orb and cross. We hurried back to work.

The cupola was accompanied by men in brown work overalls different to the blue ones we wore. They were frowning. They immediately took over management of the site and began giving orders, and everyone was on edge lest they make some mistake; it was clear that these angels and the golden cupola they were to carry were the priceless essence of the palace. The first step involved the forklift drivers lifting the angels onto their plinths, which were spaced around a low circular balustrade made of heavy steel set upon a concrete base. Next the angels were to be fixed in place. Each angel weighed approximately half a ton, and together they would carry another ten tons of cupola, orb, and cross, on their heads. The weight of the world. I saw my life imploding before my eyes as I watched my first colleague at work. The task was inordinately precise, requiring him to maneuver within a very limited space. The first angel was hung from the tines of the forklift with a thick rope. The tines inched into the air and the angel swung gently, followed by the people in brown overalls yelling directions at the driver. Hands grasped the swaying angel and attempted to guide it into place, but in an instant it slipped and collided with the side of the plinth. The driver was sweating profusely. He embarked upon a second attempt. Just then, Fadil came to the rescue, and sent me to rearrange boxes in the store. I could see the frown on his face as he walked me there. I asked him if everything was ok, and he turned to me and said that he’d been thinking a lot about my situation. “Things can’t go on like this,” he said. “We got away with it this time, but who knows what could happen next time. I won’t always be able to cover for you.” He looked me in the eye. “You ought to put the hand back where it came from. It belongs to another world, and it has no place in yours. It’s the cause of your problems, not the solution to them. It’s keeping you prisoner, and when you free yourself your hand will be yours again.”

Positioning the angels took a full week’s work; the night shift laborers weren’t allowed to work on the task because it was too delicate. For the duration of that week I went immediately to the store when I arrived at the palace, and sat in my forklift lifting boxes up and bringing others down. I thought about what Fadil had said. We had been friends since my youth. He was with me in that canoe, and we were together when we left Iraq, still not even twenty years old. I owed him a great deal. He’d always been there for me as we moved from city to city, and even when we parted ways he was never stinting in his assistance. It was thanks to him I’d got this job three years ago and been able to straighten out my life after a time on the streets in Leipzig. His life was settled now he was in his mid-forties, having worked like a dog for years; mine was still teetering on the brink. Perhaps that was why he couldn’t accept the strange turn my life had taken now. But I couldn’t afford to let go of the one straw I had to hold on to. A patched-together life was better than a non-existent one. And I’d got used to the hand; it had become a part of me.

One day as I was preparing to leave the site, the two young women I’d seen before approached me. “We’d like your assistance,” said one of them.

“What is it you need?” I enquired.

“We need the keys to your forklift,” replied the other.

“What for?” I asked in surprise.

“So we can drop the golden cupola into the water,” said the first. “Because this building must not be completed.” I was dumbfounded. I thought I must have misheard. “This is our last chance before it’s put in place,” she went on. “Give us the keys to your forklift.”

“Who are you?” I shouted at them. “I’ve never seen you working here before.”

“I am Happiness,” said one.

“And I am Loss,” said the other.

There was silence then; our eyes were locked. Finally Loss said, “Many died in captivity. They are still toiling, while their killers grow rich. But they are resisting.”

“Did you know that during the revolution of 1848, many people were killed at the gates of the Hohenzollern dynasty’s residence which you are now rebuilding?” asked Happiness. “Did you know that what you are building is a museum which will house stolen human remains from long ago? They were stolen by settlers and antiquities traders.”

I simply stood there, stunned, not knowing what to say. Loss broke the silence.

“The battle is still raging, and the dead are still searching for a way out. Do you understand?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t understand, and I don’t want to, and I certainly won’t give you my keys.”

I left them. When I got home, the hand asked me about the conversation that had taken place with the two young women, so I translated the gist of it, still dazed at what had happened.

It took three further days’ work to place the golden cupola onto the angels’ heads, and the orb and cross on top of that. I was no longer obliged to hide in the store. Numbers filled my head once again. No sooner would I find myself alone than I would return to thinking about the staggering number one trillion, once a unit of debt and now the unit in which aid packages were distributed. It was a value whose dimensions I could not comprehend no matter how I tried. I imagined it as a colossal cloud blotting out the horizon whenever I contemplated it as I drove the forklift. I shrunk smaller and smaller under the pressure of that white cloud until I became a red blood cell or a drop in the ocean or a grain of sand. Just a zero in a long string of zeroes. The day went by, and it was time to hand over to the night shift. I was about to go and change and get ready to leave, but as I was still standing next to the forklift I found Happiness and Loss in front of me once again. I tried to walk away but they stopped me. “This is the last chance,” said Loss. “Tomorrow the golden cupola will be set in place on top of the palace. If the roof closes over the dead once again, they’ll be suspended there forever, and they’ll never be able to escape.”

“You don’t know anything about my life,” I told her. “I have enough problems of my own without your dead. Why don’t you ask one of the other drivers?”

At that very moment, my hand went to my pocket, lifted out the key, and handed it to Loss, who took it and jumped immediately into the cab of the forklift with a cheery “Thanks!”

It all happened too fast for me to follow. I raised the hand. “How could you do that?” I said to it in fury and disbelief. “I’ll be fired now!”

Loss switched on the ignition and the forklift set off towards the angels. I tried to run after her but the hand grabbed the water tank and wouldn’t let go, preventing me from moving at all.

It was clear that Happiness and Loss had studied the site carefully, and that Loss was a skillful driver. She had already gotten the tines of the forklift into the balustrade upon which the angels stood, and was proceeding carefully towards the hoardings that ran along the edge of the canal. Happiness, meanwhile, was watching like a hawk, waiting till she was needed. She tore away a section of hoarding, exploiting the momentary confusion. She was quickly moving everything that stood in the path of the forklift. The load was far too heavy for the forklift, but Loss had worked out how to maneuver it. She was heading for the edge of the water. The dome was listing to one side, almost slipping, but she swiftly lowered it, drove the fork in at a different angle, and continued on her way, with Happiness walking alongside. The angels were trembling at the repeated jolts of the journey. Suddenly, one of the angels swayed wildly, came away from its plinth, and toppled toward the ground. And then—that was the moment I lost my senses altogether—the uppermost feather of the angel’s steel wing plunged into Happiness’s foot and she let out a blood-curdling scream. Everybody on the site froze. Then all hell broke loose and laborers were running in every direction, until they found Happiness lying crumpled on the ground with the fallen angel above her, and Loss standing beside her attempting uselessly to heave the angel away. Happiness’s heart-rending scream was still echoing down the palace’s empty corridors.

I finally managed to wrench my hand free of the water tank, and ran towards the forklift. My mind was gone, but I knew what I had to do. I quickly tied some rope around the neck of the angel that had speared through Happiness’s foot and leapt into the cab. I started the engine and my hand ran smoothly over the controls. With every centimeter that the angel’s pointed wing feather ascended, Happiness’s screaming became sharper and more agonized. She howled and howled until suddenly she stopped. The angel’s fall had been terrible. When finally it lifted free of the ground, we saw Happiness’s foot, separated completely from her leg, hanging from the tip of its wing: a trainer with ankle bones and torn flesh protruding from it. Everybody shouted and screamed, and floodlights flicked on. My eyes were glued to the woman’s bloodied foot; I wanted to switch off the forklift and leap up and rescue the foot, I wanted this endless pain to stop. Instead I found that the forklift was aiming for the hoardings that ran along the canal side, my hand working the controls swiftly and confidently. It moved to the main lever against my will and gave it a decisive flick, and the inert angel slid instantly from the fork and plunged into the water, taking with it Happiness’s foot.

Holding my breath, I pulled my body toward the bottom, moving through impenetrable darkness until I made out the angel’s eyes glimmering in the depths and swam towards the faint source of light. For several moments I circled the angel, groping at it from every side, but I couldn’t lay my hands on Happiness’s foot. I was sure it had been pinned on the wingtip on the side where I was, but there was no trace of it there at all. I circled the angel again and again, but my breath was running out so I brought myself slowly to the surface. No sooner was my head above water than I found spotlights trained on me. Policemen lifted me out of the water then stood me up and held me tightly by the arms. I saw paramedics carrying away an unconscious Happiness on a stretcher. Then the police led Loss and me to their cars. We walked in silence, one of the policemen propelling me along with a plastic-gloved grip on my arm that sent a rush of pins and needles through me. I looked down in surprise and it slowly dawned on me that my old arm had come back to life; and then, too, that Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s arm had not come out of the water with me. I squeezed its old place to be sure, but there was no sign of it. For the first time in weeks, I could feel my own arm. There it was, tingling in the spot where the policeman held me as he pushed me along, water cascading from my body. For some reason Loss glanced at me then, and our eyes met for an instant before each of us was taken to a different police car.

Haytham El-Wardany is a writer and translator and the author of How to Disappear (2013) and The Book of Sleep (2017). In a pocket-sized format, How To Disappear, part of the Kayfa-ta book series, explores the potentialities of passivity and unproductive action. The Book of Sleep offers insight into the dialectics of sleep as it relates to resistance, change, and revolution, and was translated to English by Robin Moger and published by Seagull Books in 2020. He was granted the award for Best Short Story Collection at the Cairo International Book Fair for Irremediable, currently being translated to English.

This short story was commissioned and translated with the generous support of Goethe-Institut Lebanon.

-1-

-2-

الفن المعاصر، نتاج الانتقال إلى ما بعد الإشتراكية. نجد في البلدان ما بعد الاشتراكية، أي بلدان أوروبا الشرقية سابقًا، القابعة على تخوم العالم الغربي، أرضيةً خصبةً لفتح نقاشٍ مطّلع تاريخيًّا حول الفن المعاصر. فقد شهدت تلك المنطقة التجلّي الأكثر وضوحًا للنواحي "المادية" للمعاصر — التي تُفهَم في هذا السياق على أنها الممارسات المرتبطة بتكييف ومأسسة أنماطٍ معيّنةٍ من السلوك الفني. ولا شك في أن مأسسة الفن المعاصر في الغرب قد مرّت بتاريخٍ حافلٍ، إلا أنها تمّت في سياقها الزمني (كشأن عملية التحديث التاريخية الغربية بصفةٍ عامة) وفي إطار تقاطعاتها مع صعود مجتمع الاستهلاك في حقبة ما بعد الحرب الثانية. أما الاختلاف الجذري في ما يخصّ ظهور الفن المعاصر في بلدان ما بعد الاشتراكية فيكمن في نقل ممارساتٍ جديدةٍ وغير مألوفة من السلوك الفني وإسقاطها على المشاهد الفنية الموجودة في عجالةٍ شديدة. وهذا النقل المؤسسي المباغت هو ما يجعل كل ما يسمّى بالفن المعاصر في تلك المنطقة موضوعًا للتناول النقدي.

-3-

-4-

-5-

العمل الفني المعاصر كوثيقة. تنجم الاختلافات بين المؤسسات الفنية المعاصرة والاشتراكية عن افتراقٍ في النظرة والمقاربة. ويتمتّع كلٌ من النموذجين ببرنامجٍ وبهيكليةٍ مؤسسيّةٍ خاصين بهما. فتختلف مراكز سوروس للفن المعاصر عن الاتحادات، على سبيل المثال من الناحية الإدارية، في أن الأنشطة الفنية في الحالة الأولى لا تخضع للمنطق الداخلي لما سُمّي منذ القرن الثامن عشر بالفنون الجميلة، أي للتقسيمات التقليدية التاريخية لأنواع الفنون إلى رسمٍ ونحتٍ وتصويرٍ والتي تخضع بدورها لتقسيماتٍ فرعيةٍ تراتبيةٍ تمايز بين "الفنون الجميلة" و"التطبيقية"، والفنون "الراقية" و"الشعبية". إلى ذلك، فقد عمدت مراكز سوروس للفن المعاصر تطبيقًا لروحية التكافؤ الديموقراطي والسوق الحرة إلى إزالة القيود عن الإنتاج الفني ولامركزته عن طريق نبذ التقسيمات بين الفنون والوسائط والإصرار على أن المساواة بين مختلف الأساليب الفنية هي من قواعد المجتمع المنفتح والمستنير. إذًا فالمعاصر يقتضي المساواة الزمنية وبالتالي فهو لا يخضع لأي سلطة سواء كانت مستمدّة من التقاليد والأعراف أو من التاريخ، يأبى دعم أو تفضيل أي أسلوب أو وسيط أو تيّار على حساب آخر (علمًا أن معظم مراكز سوروس للفن المعاصر — والكلام بيننا — قد واظبت ضمنيًّا على تشجيع وتفضيل استخدام أحدث التقنيات والأنساق الوسائطية ولا سيما تلك المعتمدة على أحدث المعدّات والتكنولوجيات الغربية المتاحة في المتاجر ومراكز التسوق القريبة لقاء مبالغ نقدية أو ائتمانية). ولا يحدّد المركز ما بعد الاشتراكي للفن المعاصر عمليّاته وفقًا للمنطق الضمني للفنون الجميلة أي وفق مسارٍ تاريخيٍ محدّدٍ للاحتراف والحرفة الفنية التي تنتج في المحصّلة أغراضًا جميلةً كما هي الحال في الاتحادات، وإنما يُنَصّب نفسه فوق حقل الإنتاج الثقافي برمّته بما يتضمّنه من أساليب وأنماط وأشكال للتعبير، فيعيد ترتيبه وفق تصنيفات معيّنة لأنواع الأنشطة والمشاريع.

"في معظم الحالات، تندر المعلومات الموثّقة عن الفنانين/ن الذين/اللواتي تختارهم/ن مراكز سوروس للفن المعاصر أو تنعدم تمامًا. لذا، تعمل مراكز سوروس للفن المعاصر على صياغة بيان وافٍ عن عمل الفنّان/ة المختار/ة بما في ذلك السيرة الذاتية والمراجع البحثية إضافةً إلى نسخٍ من المقالات ذات الصلة والفهارس المنشورة.. ويستفيد من هذه المعلومات كل من الفنان/ة والمقيّمون/ات ومؤرّخو/ات الفن والزوّار..."¹⁸

-6-

الخطّة والمشروع. تقودنا صناعة التوثيق الفني التي عمّمتها شبكة مراكز سوروس للفن المعاصر إلى مسألةٍ ثانية: الاختلاف ما بين الذهنيّتين الفنيّتين المعاصرة وما قبل المعاصرة.

تختلف المشاريع التي يقدّمها الفنانون المعاصرون اليوم بشكلٍ جذريٍ عن مشاريع الفنانين غير المحدّدة التي كانت في السابق. فقد كان الفنان في السابق عندما يُسأل: "ماذا تريد أن ترسم أو أن تصنع؟"، يجيب بهدوء: "سأبدأ العمل وسأرى لاحقًا". وعن سؤال: "متى تنتهي؟" كان يجيب: "إنها صيرورةٌ مستمرّة.." أما اليوم، فإن أي مقدار من الغموض في المشروع هو بمثابة إعلانٍ للهزيمة."³⁶

-7-

اختل ميزان العالم، وخرجت الأرقام لتحتل هواء الغرف، وتتكاثر فيه. أرقام المصابين وأرقام المتوفين. حِزم المساعدات وتواريخ الإغلاق. وباتت العودة إلى الطبيعة هو طريقة البشر الوحيدة للهرب من الأرقام، والحفاظ على ما تبقى لهم من صواب. فمال البعض إلى الذهاب إلى النهر، في حين فضّل البعض الآخر التمشية في الغابة. أما أنا فاكتفيت من الطبيعة بالسير على طول القناة الموازية للنهر. وفي طريقي إليها أمرّ بهياكل المباني الحديثة التي توقفت أعمال البناء فيها. ثم أسير في أرض ضيقة تتناثر فيها أشجار البيلسان، كانت حتى ثلاثة عقود مضت أرضا جرداء، تفصل بين شقي المدينة آنذاك، ويسمونها شريط الموت. لم يكن لدي وقت آخر للتمشية سوى في نهاية الأسبوع، لأن عملي لم يتوقف. أسير قليلا مع أشجار البيلسان، ألاحظ تزايد الخيم البلاستيكية بين الأشجار، والتي يعيش فيها من فقدوا مساكنهم. ثم أقطع بضعة شوارع حتى أصل إلى القناة. عندها أظل أسير وسط زحام نهاية الأسبوع، حتى أصل إلى موقع هادئ يظلله صف من أشجار الصفصاف، فأجلس تحت واحدة منها.

This short story was commissioned with the generous support of Goethe-Institut Lebanon.

The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal.

[…] we must, on behalf of this alignment, refuse that which was first refused to us and in this refusal reshape desire, reorient hope, reimagine possibility and do so separate from the fantasies nestled into rights and respectability.

— Jack Halberstam

Halberstam’s quote, taken from the introduction to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, describes the journey to a place of wildness. Not the social margins, which have already been drawn and are piled up with the lives and experiences of being in them, but beyond that, to what Moten and Harney call the surround – a spatial metaphor for the act of existing before the interruption of a colonial settler building a fort and establishing it as a centre. The surround is the space on the out-side of relating to a centre. Engaging with the surround comes with the realisation that we were always on the out-side, but are now refusing to get pulled in. Refusing to let it refuse and marginalise us, and thus creating a magnetised boundary of mutual forces acting against each other, delineating the states of dispossession and self-possession.

I thought about this a lot after my last move from where I had lived for seven years, adding one more permutation to a sequence of displacements. Propelled forward by one refusal after the next, I realised that the physical distances my movement drew were only a dramatic illustration of being in the ever-present outside. Through this text, I’m sharing a more intimate research journey, tying in the areas of my work – technology, magic, and art – to the political reality of being in the world. Placing the theoretical, artistic experiments described here in the context of the histories they draw from and in relation to the spaces they contend with. So before we get into magic and technology, I had to take a moment to leave, or – staying with Moten and Harney’s analogy – to look away from the proverbial fort and towards what lies beyond: the out-side.

Jane Bennett, in Vibrant Matter, offers a description of the out-side that populates the spatial metaphor of the surround, into a space animated with things. Many things, all those that are not figured into the narrative of the rational, sensible human story. To look away, is therefore not to look at emptiness, because the notion of finding an empty space is itself predicated on the erasure of the surround. But to look towards a full, cluttered, vibrant space brimming with the unintelligible, unassimilated and unaccounted for — the outside could be where we find everything else. Populating the surround de-emphasised the imagined need for “new ideas” and instead highlighted the need to work with the mess of all the everything out here already.^[1]

Bennett notes, that the out-side is an intentionally unintelligible space where things exist as a recalcitrance to rationalism’s claim over other modes of knowledge and understanding. Within this framing, we can begin to place magic, which is one of the older systems of unintelligible knowledge and possibly one of the earliest presences on the out-side. There is no singular definition of magic — approaches from anthropology, history, theology, and the history of science all contend with what magic is or isn’t in relation to either religion or science. These approaches all place magic at the beginning of the streamlined colonial narrative of the so-called evolution of the species from a primitive, closer to nature, magically inclined people to a civilised, faith-based and science-driven people. I don’t attempt to define magic. However, I work with this somewhat throwaway descriptive found in the edited Arabic version of Ghayat Al Hakim (or the Picatrix), which describes magic as the knowledge (or perhaps, the pursuit of the knowledge) of things unintelligible and un-present — al-ghamidh wa al-ghayb. Ultimately, magic can be described against everything that it is not, and towards everything that it doesn’t know.^[2] In this sense, magic is a continued tension across this magnetised boundary between the centre and the out-side.

Historically, the practice of magic was forbidden by the prevalent religious orthodoxy. But as the authority of the church gave way to that of the state, which, in turn, gave way to that of capital, being accused of witchcraft became more than the social delineator it was, and instead became a cause for state-sanctioned punishment.^[3] The legal persecution of practicing magic did not become a systemic part of law enforcement until capitalism was established as a state-allied and church-backed economic system in Europe.^[4] Regardless of whether or not the administrators of the law believed in magic, there was a unanimous and historically sustained understanding that those who do believe in it, tend to engage in activities that do not uphold capitalist and state priorities.^[5] Today, the few countries that still have such laws are similarly less concerned with whether magic is real or not, and more concerned with regulating faith-based actions through the official religious bodies who propagate the legitimacy of the state. Situating magic within the relation between the centre and the out-side is important for highlighting the political history of magic and contextualising my research as an effort to re-problematise magic in the present.

One of my first experiments with the out-side was a text-based work built on a combinatorial algorithm. Combinatorial mathematics is mostly a recreational branch of mathematics concerned with the arrangement of, operation on, and selection of discrete elements belonging to a finite set; it is concerned with counting, arranging, and rearranging elements within a given microcosm. A combinatorial approach allows for the world to already contain a messy clutter of everything, and within that, we can refigure its components to make different arrangements, tell alternative stories and reconstruct myths. This work took as input, a short story divided into four main events. The order of the events was indexed in sequential ascending order: 1 2 3 4. It was then programmed to output all the possible permutations of this order, effectively producing all the alternative timelines possible, that are packed inside (or outside?) the starting timeline of the story.

Part of the rules of this algorithm is that the combinations produced do not repeat, and that they are output in ascending order per sequence. So if the first order is 1 2 3 4, then the next one must be 1 2 4 3, followed by 1 3 2 4, always keeping the next smallest number first. Procedurally generating alternative sequences of events from the closest to the origin, to the most chaotic at the 12th-14th permutations, and then eventually returning to the linear opposite at the final, backwards permutation of 4 3 2 1. This structural/mechanical manipulation of a narrative brought to light a different approach to speculation. The possibility space of a story can be procedurally taken apart and put back together without consideration for meaning or sense-making. It allowed for sidestepping semantic concerns or whether an alternative reading would be realistically possible. Instead, meaning is asked to reclad itself around the new structure.

I found out later that this algorithmic technique of rearranging words was used in text-based hermetic practices to subvert scripture. Despite the rationalist effort to place magic at the primitive beginning of a linear trajectory towards civilisation, there is in fact an essential shared technical principle between magic and two of the dominant structures of civilisation, namely religion and technology. I don’t delve into the specificities of religious systems, but will draw out these parallels between magic and technology. For one, both exist in text-based cosmologies, where worlds can be created if they can be symbolically notated. The order of letters, regarded as symbolic of a divine body, was in many ways considered the order of the universe they describe.^[6] Similarly, all of technology runs on executed syntax, and its worlds are systems built from blocks of code arranged into an order of operation. Secondly, they both rely on assigning function to their language, as the body of the letters and symbols act as a mediator to bring about an effect. In essence, the way in which prayers, spells, and code work are fundamentally the same.

Florian Cramer’s Words Made Flesh, charts out a history of code as an ancient tool of syntactical and semiotic power. Though Cramer’s focus is on Latin and English speaking practices, some of these practices, namely combinatorics, has a long history in medieval Arabic mathematics and in the Arabic language “occult”. One of the earliest applications of combinatorics was a mathematical puzzle called wafq al-a’adad (wafq for short) — generally interpreted as the harmonious disposition of numbers.^[7] They came to be known in English as Magic Squares because they were transmitted to Europe through the magic related manuscripts as opposed to the mathematical ones. A wafq is solved by rearranging numbers in a grid until you arrive at the arrangement that produces this harmony: when the rows, columns and diagonals of the grid produce the same sum.

The earliest record of Magic Squares originates in 190 BCE, however, I follow their Arabic tradition where they were studied as mathematical novelties during the 10th and 11th centuries CE and later were used in magic practices, namely within the practice of talismanic magic. Working with Arabic also opens up an exchange of meanings between words that bring out some of the political implications of magical practice. The word talisman is itself a phonetic transliteration of talssam الطلسم, which in turn is the backwards spelling of the word mussalat المسلط, meaning that which is cast onto or directed towards.^[8] Talismanic magic is the practice of imbuing bodies – symbols or objects – with a higher meaning and equipping them with the intention of carrying out an action in the world. I’ve come to understand it as a kind of action-based-semiotics, identical in functionality to coding languages, but with a few levels of abstraction above.

Another word related to talismans is the Arabic word ‘amal, which is the noun form for the word work, but also refers to the physical form of a talisman. The body of a crafted talisman, usually a piece of fabric with a wafq square accompanied by inscriptions, becomes a work. The phrase “a work” would be —
and still is — the shorthand for referring to an amulet or a talisman in Arabic. Given the historical relation we drew out earlier between the illegality of magic and the centrality of labour within capitalism, I propose to place the Arabic word ’amal عمل to re-problematise magic as practice that creates a contentious conception of work/labour.

This led to a second experiment in combinatorics; I started by building a programme that generates awfaq. It began as a crude code that shuffles numbers at random until it reaches a wafq arrangement. Eventually, this piece was refined to use a combinatorics algorithm to parse through all rearrangements of the numbers, procedurally arriving at the wafq arrangement, while also keeping a record of its own process. I worked with the smallest square possible, which is the 3 x 3 grid, to keep the number of permutations (somewhat) manageable and to avoid getting entangled in the complexity that emerges with larger grids.

Throughout, a conversation emerged between the analogue and the digital computational processes.^[9] The Squares were not here to reveal a new object of fascination or uncover the “magic within the machine”. Rather, it was as if they were keeping the machine in check – or giving it a different set of priorities. I had to discard the notion that I was augmenting or improving the mediaeval object, and in doing so allow for it to direct the process in ways that were not always the most efficient from a technological perspective. The aim of the project was not to find the fastest way to solve a Magic Square, or to generate all the Squares in existence^[10], but to go through the process of making and thinking and reassembling through a new heuristic. What can technology create outside goal driven processes? How much is lost when prioritising efficiency? What modes of productivity are engrained into technology? What does it consider work?

Combinatorics is a relatively naive algorithm that took up so much time and generated so many “useless” permutations of numbers that were not the correct sequence to create a wafq. In a similar process to that applied to short stories described above, the code moved in a linear fashion from the first set of numbers – this time 1 to 9 – through all possible rearrangements, until arriving at the other end, 9 to 1. Of the total 362,880 permutations that the code generates, only 6 are a wafq arrangement. On finding a Magic Square, the programme highlights it in a different colour, and continues generating permutations. When it reaches permutation number 362,880 it would have generated pages and pages of small grids and black lines, rarely getting interrupted with a spark of red. The sheer statistical unlikelihood of a Magic Square or wafq does evoke a sense of fascination, and perhaps it is this sense of wonder that makes magic magical. But once the programme arrives at the first one, that is the shape it traces from that sequence is now no longer a shape, but a sigil; a symbol harnessing the power of wafq al a’dad^[11], and the surface it is lying on now has the potential to become a ‘amal or a work.

At the same time, the process of the programme auto-archiving its progress, raised questions around archiving: what is worth keeping? What is refused and by who? What is the difference between archiving a process and archiving an end product? In many ways, the manuscripts that gave us the studies on constructing awfaq are also a kind of process-archive. Combining instructions with annotations on the process of making spells and potions and compiling it into text book style manuals is also the practice behind making grimmoires. The automated self-archiving of my programme combined with the magic it was finding was how the project eventually came to be titled programmoire.

Highlighting the functional proximity between magic and technology not only challenges the narrative that technology is a result of rationalism, but by integrating technology into the cosmology of magic we allow it to leave the reactionary space of conversing with the centre. We can forge an alternative history for technology that highlights its magical roots, co-opts it from the hands of rationalism and opens it up to be an intentional, procedural generator of the unintelligible. Conversely, magic also can here reclaim its roots as a space holder for worlds outside and before centres of colonialism, capitalism and states, and that it can and does exist in deliberate and executable ways – modes that capitalism claims to have invented. Magic is and has been used by power structures within the centre, and it is part of the way in which power reaffirms itself and channels what is and isn’t permissible to practice and at what times and places. So it is not that magic became forbidden and neutralised because it is or isn’t real, but because if left unregulated, it may afford people on the out-sides of centres to take matters, and matter, into their own hands.

[1] The constant search for the new was a tendency I knew came from the techno-positivist obsession with innovation.
[2] Ghayat al Hakim, Copyright The Warburg Institute
[3] Mauss, Marcel. A General Theory of Magic (Routledge Classics). 2nd ed., Routledge, 2001.
[4] Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch Publisher: Autonomedia. Autonomedia, 2021.
[5] Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch Publisher: Autonomedia. Autonomedia, 2021.
[6] Cramer, Florian. Words Made Flesh. Code, Culture, Imagination. Piet Zwart Institute, 2005.
[7] Hallum, Bink. “New Light on Early Arabic Awfāq Literature.” Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice (Handbook of Oriental Studies: Section 1; The Near and Middle East), edited by Liana Saif et al., Illustrated, BRILL, 2021, pp. 57–161.
[8] Ghayat al Hakim, Copyright The Warburg Institute
[9] The story of this dialogue is narrated in its own work.
[10] Weed, Jared. (2016). Applications of AI for Magic Squares. It is not yet possible to generate all magic squares even with the processing power we have access to today.
[11] The notion of harmony itself was attributed a divine and magical power, but in addition to this, each size square was later attributed to certain elements, foods, and most importantly planets, which would be used as part of magical applications of the awfaq.

Batool Desouky is a computational artist and researcher working with magic, technology and archival material. She was speaker at CTM Festival's Research Networking Day (2021) and was part of the Systems residency with Arebyte Gallery, London (2020). Batool is co-founder of online bilingual publication platform Tariff | تعریف and was previously programme coordinator and curatorial assistant at Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE. She is a graduate from Goldsmiths University of London (2020), and is currently based between London and Kuwait.

For the victims of racial violence, gun violence, state violence, and the families that endure.

The charcoal drawing above is based on one of my favorite pictures, that of my cousin Khalid carefully and elaborately tangled in a mess of USB wires. He loved computers, especially the process of building, rebuilding, and endlessly tweaking every component and accessory of their hardware. To this day, whenever I see tangled computer cables, it makes me think of him, an everyday occurrence since his life was taken.

Khalid Jabara was murdered on the doorsteps of his family’s home on August 12, 2016 in Tulsa Oklahoma, the victim of a hate crime. Khalid was Lebanese American, South Lebanon Orthodox, and had always been the most handsome cousin; his skin was darker, with a deep chiseled jawline, doughy almond eyes, athletic build, and cousin could sing too. He lived with his parents while helping run the family catering business and caring for his terminally-ill father.

For years, the racist neighbor hurled racial slurs at Khalid and his family, projecting Islamaphobic and xenophobic slurs that didn’t even make sense. But his parents had an accent, they were different enough to hate and to not be taken seriously by the police. Over time, the slurs became increasingly more belligerent and violent, reflective of the heightened tensions instigated by the Make America Great Again rhetoric of Trump’s election campaign.

This was one of the challenges of living in a hostile environment where just being makes you suspect, less than, a threat. We instinctively knew this growing up, assimilation 101. His family was uprooted from Beirut at the height of the civil war, and settled in Tulsa in the mid 1980s. Khalid immersed himself in computers and music as a way to fit in, and be seen. In chatrooms, he could be himself or be anonymous; he could just be. When he was away from the keyboard, he used humor and music to disarm people, specifically early 1990s R&B which he loved singing; it helped him express himself.

One of his favorites was Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s One Sweet Day, especially the key change, the one on the last bridge with Mimi’s riffs, extra thick vibrato on the ‘ands’, melismas with a stank face. He’d switch octaves singing both Mariah and Boyz II Men, switching from falsetto to bass on a dime. I remember his rendition as somehow both beautiful and gut-wrenchingly hilarious; this was the genius of Khalid’s humor. Mariah wrote that song as a eulogy for her friend and collaborator David Cole, one half of C + C Music Factory, who died in 1995 from complications due to AIDS. (Khalid also had a notorious beatbox routine for EVERYBODY DANCE NOW.)

Whenever I listen to One Sweet Day, I hear Khalid, but it doesn’t make me think of just one specific moment, it’s more of a blur, of all the times I’ve heard him sing it over the years. Songs can help trigger memories of shared listening moments that stay with us on extended repeat.

Less than a year before Khalid’s murder, in 2015, the racist neighbor ran over Khalid’s mother, Haifa, with his car at full speed, which left her hospitalized and with injuries that she’s still rehabilitating. Reportedly, the police had allowed the man to finish chugging his beer next to the bloodied car before he was apprehended. Despite having prior felonies, he was repeatedly shown leniency. The ongoing American epidemic of the white male murderer is propped up systemically. During the bond hearing, the Tulsa County District Judge (and former Mayor) Bill LaFortune initially granted the neighbor bail of only $30,000. Only after strong rejections by the family did the judge reluctantly raise it to a mere $60,000. There are BLM protesters that have had higher bail set for simply disturbing the peace. Even more infuriating was the fact that the neighbor was allowed to move back next door with the simple promise that he would eventually relocate;. There were no requirements for an ankle monitor, no drug/alcohol testing; basically unconditional freedom. A few months later, Khalid found out the neighbor had gotten a hold of a gun. He called 911 twice to no avail, called his mother to tell her not to come home, and was shot dead, while on the phone.

Negligence, egregious errors by local law enforcement, and gross failures by the state were all culpable accomplices. The tragedy was reported by all major international news media outlets, with headlines like “Son Killed by Neighbor who called him ‘Dirty Arab’” and “Did the System Fail Them?”.

Two of the images that were widely used in reporting on the tragedy were photos I had taken of Khalid while testing out a new camera lens over Christmas break the year before. Khalid was a year younger than me, also a middle child of three. We were friends by default growing up but ended up connecting on so many levels; we were blood. His image is my image. I revisit my photos of him often. Recently, maybe as a way to process my rage, I’ve started drawing them. I sit with Khalid’s image.

Trauma-informed care acknowledges that no matter where we turn, there are reminders all around us. The trauma of systemic violence, like the kind that led to Khalid’s death, is constantly being triggered with every subsequent act of racial violence, state violence, gun violence. Every hate-filled speech Trump riled on emboldened toxic behavior and normalized crazy. And this extends even beyond the borders of the US, to Beirut amidst the troubles, to all the places I carry inside me, and to all the places influenced by US criminal justice, diplomacy, and militarized police tactics.

These kinds of abuse tactics can take many forms, from outright violence, to creating conditions where accountability is not possible. Despite the high publicity surrounding the tragedy, Khalid’s murder went unreported in the Federal database for hate crimes. A glaring omission, negligence as a form of brutality, part and parcel of a problem that extends far beyond a count, to the families and communities these absent numbers impact. The Jabara family has gone on to tirelessly campaign for bond reform, victim rights, and accountability, helping to establish the Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer National Opposition to Hate, Assault, and Threats to Equality Act (Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act), a reform bill meant to address this disparity in hate crime data collection. It was introduced to US congress in 2019 but was never passed, and as I write this, is being reintroduced in light of the recent massacre in Atlanta and rising incidents of anti-Asian racism.

A lot of the other songs Khalid loved singing–Bone Thugs and Harmony’s Tha Crossroads, Faith Evans and Puff Daddy’s I’ll Be Missing You–were also eulogies. For some reason, it was a whole vibe back then. Pop songs on mourning were leading the charts in the ‘90s, across all genres of music. One Sweet Day topped the Billboard charts for a record-breaking sixteen consecutive weeks, an accomplishment that wouldn’t be surpassed for over 2 decades, that’s how popular it was. There is no equivalent song of mourning capturing so much of our attention, now, when we need it most.

When I see the photos below, when I draw them as a way of reclamation, I can’t help but think of these songs.

All that I remember of this photo is now tangled with the news reports that used this image.

Screenshots taken from news clips reporting on Khalid’s tragedy. To focus on the headlines, the photos are muted.

To unmute this image, to allow for the complexities and emotions to shine through beyond a single sensationalized headline.

How can we immutably embed the context, care, and love that goes into each photo. Is there a space to include this as a kind of emotional metadata?

Joe Namy is an artist, educator, and composer that often works collaboratively across mediums, in sound, performance, sculpture, and video, focusing on the social and political constructs of music and sound.