Thick gestural brushstrokes on a pane of glass and on aluminium reveal a liminal space between sight and blindness, darkness and light. This was a life long concern of the pioneering Iranian artist, Behjat Sadr (1924–2009), who remained largely in obscurity in the west for the duration of her life. A new exhibition at the Mosaic Rooms curated by Morad Montazemi traces Sadr’s oeuvre by contextualising her work in relation to three different cities: Rome in the 1950s where Sadr completed her training as an artist; Tehran in the 1960s and 1970s, where the artist lived and worked, and Paris from the 1980s, where she moved after the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

The exhibition begins by untangling her friendship with the poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad, whom she travelled with between Tehran and Rome. Together they shared the same muse, ‘blackness’. Could it have been that their positions as women in the 1950s Middle East (however liberal) formed a camaraderie that was anchored around the shadow of invisibility? This friendship was clipped short when Farrokhzad was to die suddenly in a car accident in 1967 at the young age of thirty-two. Sadr animated the trauma of this loss in a piece called Forough’s Corpse (1967). Here, a shell of a body bleeds blackness into the ground: the paint is at once thick and wet as it is dry and soft. The cocoon-like figure seems to swell and crescendo into nothingness: a life hollowed.

The on-going solemnity of this artwork resounds in Sadr’s paintings from the 1970s, often created with a palette knife on diverse media –paper, board, glass and metal. A deep long canvas with a thick line running through its middle seems to unfurl an interior pit: is this a grave? This untitled work from 1977 sees the artist’s aggressive brushstrokes retreat to the sides of the canvas, as if she is clawing the darkness away from the grave, attempting to usurp a fallen figure, a wayward soul that lies beneath, in the ground. This obsession with darkness might have had to do with Sadr’s tumultuous mental states. In a postcard of the bay of Naples, on view in the gallery’s first room, the artist writes this is, ‘where I once wanted to drown myself. But the joy of the water was such that life seemed so beautiful to me’.

Perhaps these psychological rises and falls had to do with an insistence on performing a male persona? She noted in a diary entry from the 1990s, ‘As a woman, I had the vigour of men. I passed through stones, and every so often, the pebble made me sore…my clothes are mostly black.’ Sadr’s lyrical diary entries, postcards and photographs filled the Mosaic Room’s opening gallery with a cornucopia of melancholic emotion.

But those moments are punctured by the colourful lure of Untitled (Circa 1975), a painting that threw me back to L.S. Lowry’s industrial landscapes of Greater Manchester. Its multi-layered impressionistic textures in yellow, black, blue and red, at once look like a sun, industrial buildings, sea, and earthly fire, evoking a built-up environment. But let your eyes fall away and these constituent elements become formal fragments that echo a geometric abstraction that is as concerned with lived experience as it is with our physical comprehension of the world’s visual makeup.

Sadr’s abstractions although meticulous intentionally fail to hit formal precision. The paint is cracked or often looks incomplete, hurried, conceptualised and created as if by a rush of emotion. Waves as buildings, darkness descends, knives on aluminium breed new geometries that echo Byzantine and Islamic architectural considerations; cross-stitched geometric forms created in dancing methodical unison collectively hint at a world in free fall, waiting to be sutured and sewn back together.

I’m obsessed with this specter of a man
Who I keep texting, tweeting, insta-stalking, IM’ing, emailing
And he won’t respond
He’s breaking me down
To the elements

I want to fucking run
Watch the skin fall off

I think about my BFF and how he’s the prettiest of them all
I wonder if the guy I am stalking only got close to me to be close to him?
Or if it’s because he wants a piece of what my career can offer him?
Why do I always have the hottest BFFs?

I wonder if doing a David Foster Wallace will get me the attention I deserve
Even if it is beyond the grave?
Pure Enigma

I’ve ingested so much caffeine that my body is trying to spit it out
Spurts of sweat shoot from my right armpit onto my leg
Dandruff in the keyboard
Dandruff in the keyboard
Dandruff in the keyboard

They’re coming alive
They’re coming alive
Staring at me
With their melancholic faces
Those eyes
Oh those eyes

Answer some emails
Clear that inbox
Clear that inbox
Make it clean
Make it clean
Like when I wet my ass with seven wet wipes
And there’s nothing left to see except

White
White
The whites of heaven
The whites in his eyes

My shrink says that Theodre Roethke was bipolar
And that I should find calm and solace in this
That I should eat his pain and devour it
To overcome
But I am tired
Of searching for those wayward souls

I want an expert Lego block maker
To teach me how to organize the blocks

REFRAIN
A sweet refrain

I’ve un-followed him, blocked him on all social media
I won’t let him get to me

I keep scratching my scalp
No more dandruff in the keyboard
No more dandruff in the keyboard
NO MORE

I loved him
Until he became the only one inside.

I’m googling myself

Did I tell you that I Google myself everyday?

My parents have been stalking me and I am afraid of being kidnapped.

In Masr: Om El Donya (Mother of the World) we care a lot about what is eib (rude) and what is not.

Autocorrect: Omar Mir Seddique Mateen.

MASS MURDERER

The Thing that thrilled them
Was the thing that killed them?
David Robilliard
Intense Desire

[I wish I wasn’t such a quitter]

But I do not have the right to be an activist
I turn off the TV

Titan Atlas is holding us
Carrying the weight of the world
But the weight of our bodies is too heavy
Annihilate my body

In Plain sight

Why do you bear the same name as me?
Does this mean I was born out of you, or that you were borne out of me?
Plaster my name.

But not as public enemy number one. I was always an ugly duckling. I’ll be number two. Three, or even four.

Did you swallow them because they were “other” like you?
Did you eat them because they came in so many different shades?

I think of the cancer that is slowly eating my bowels from the stress and wonder if the only place to escape to is the bar?

Solace in community
Solace in dancing
Solace away from your fancy, well-paid “day job”
Solace in the provincial notion of a community

Specialist bars are now more profitable than ever. Straight-owned. The Abbey in Los Angeles is the most profitable bar in the country, or say they say. Omar Mateen would have filled it with fags drinking watered down vodka-sodas the day he killed so many.

Time for a Solidarity March

And with that a social media trend

#TwoMenKissing

White men. Ripped out of issues of Men’s Health Magazine.

Sometimes bears, sometimes cubs. Always White. Dishevelled facial hair.

The Barbarians are Coming, distinguished orators, the Barbarians are coming!

I see wild, wild, wilderness everywhere: a misalignment as concrete as the flayed anchor that is the spine of my back.

We have landed in hell.

MASS MURDERER

You are the biggest killer in history!

‘Po Boy

Your po Mama and Papa

America’s victims:

37

Nations

I am sorry — where does evil lie?

Afghanistan
The U.S. is responsible for between 1 and 1.8 million deaths during the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, by luring the Soviet Union into invading that nation. But some lives are worth more than others.

PEOPLE ARE ANGRY THAT YOU KILLED SO MANY A LATINO

That you swallowed your own queer self is but your only redemption

Deaths by Americans in Latin America

Bolivia
400 — Hugo Banzer the dictator aided by AMREEKA

Chile
3,000 — Salvadore Allende aided by AMREEKA

Cuba
The Bay of Pigs — circa 2,000–4,000 bodies wilted and weathered, to ash

Dominican Republic
U.S. Invasion 1962: 3,000 Dominicans died

El Salvador
$6 Billion in U.S.A. aid: A Civil War: 75,000 killed.

Guatemala
C.I.A. coup. Thousands dead

Haiti
Millions in C.I.A. subsidies: Potentially 100,000 dead

Honduras
C.I.A. again. 400 turned to dust

Operation Condor: Latin America
60,000 back into the ground

Who dust will rise now? (I steal this quote from Michael Rakowitz)

I won’t talk about Afghanistan

You guys are hollow

Your Al Qaeda blew up my beloved Buddha’s of Bamiyan

What is today’s vocabulary?

I am attempting resistance through words but they seem to carry no weight at all

I feel as though I am living in a time that was once only mythologized

Piss Christ

Andreas Serrano

The end of the NEA

Executive Orders

Everything swallowed

This is just a memory lapse

I have finally started to realize my white-ness

Like the first time I touched down in Venda, South Africa and they called me Makua and rubbed my facial hair as if it were gold

Now that same experience repeats.

In South, East and West sides of American cities

Arab, Middle Eastern populations buried into corners, divided by class, escaping the collapse of their homes, from Civil Wars, instigated by American forces. I am nothing like them.

A BARRICADE

A CNN News Story: A Syrian family finds hope and jobs in America.

But they want to go home, don’t they? They need to go home.

How do we end this war? Bomb them some more!

Scratch a little deeper, and it’s an Armenian family, a BLUE EYES family, and a Christian family. You are a facile family.

We cannot be there for each other

Because we are nothing alike

Our likeness has been transposed by others

But Omar Keeps Haunting ME

I will carry him to my grave

At every party

Every time I show a whiff of that ID card

I’ll carry him with me.

It’s 1966, a year before the end of the first pan-Arab spring. Collective consciousness will be bludgeoned by war in 1967.
Andy Warhol is screen printing images of cows in his studio. Sized at 116.7 x 74.5 centimetres.
I wish I was more animalistic in my nature.

The bitter winter depresses me.
I comfort eat to warm my soul
Waiting for the Rite of Spring to take its toll.

A sheath of canvas folds out over me.
Acrylic and crayon textures bristle and rub against my body.

I try to sleep, to be at one with nature. I am informed this is something that one should aspire to. This is post-ecological disaster thinking: one should be more sensitive to the outdoors. One should drive solar-powered cars. One should walk up hills in an attempt to encourage the fight against child obesity, etcetera.

A parade of women marches towards me. Their faces are made out of plastic and their arms out of bamboo, with torsos of prickly long stems. Each wears a wig as white in colour as a ghost.

Each melts off and falls into the grass as they hurtle forward. They descend into the earth: nature’s first time machine.

1910. The year started with a Saturday. The 1910th year of the Common Era, Anno Domini, of the 2nd millennium. The first aviation meetings are about to begin. International Air meet in Los Angeles, California. While Aristarkh Lentulov is painting his Bathers, he has no idea that the biggest race — the one that will engulf our world with its carbon emissions — is about to begin.

Enjoy your image of utopia, friends. Jostling as semi-abstract figurines in some drug-free euphoria.

While in February that year Boyce founded the Boy Scouts of America — a truly emblematic endeavour that was to link ‘manhood’ with the philanthropic act of simply ‘gettin’ out there and doing some darn good!’

A prime minister is assassinated somewhere in North Africa. He was its first native. All the while, another pilot licence is awarded in France. Slavery in China, a country that will eventually become the world’s largest economy, is abolished.

Zeppelins fly. Commercial passenger planes roam and rove. A few months later, the Vatican enforces a compulsory oath against Modernism. Nevertheless, the influence of such institutions starts to diminish. Photography is invented. And with it, everything begins to look like photo surrealism. What is indoor and outdoor is blurred as we float through time; scenes that took minutes to capture look like hours and vice versa. We all begin to look the same.

1998. The Year of the Ocean as designated by UNESCO.

In the East, inflation needs to be controlled. A bomber is sentenced to life imprisonment. This world is too ephemeral we realise and so we continue our search for new places to breathe. We will reproduce those Green Trees, meticulously mapping it out onto the contours of the moon. From Yosemite National Park to The Smokies, our land will be re-fabricated and re-imagined. But the ban on human cloning is still a subject in want of discussion.

Another massacre, another war from the Middle of the East to the East of the East. The threat of terror begins its imagined act of omnipresence. Powers of Horror. We write essays on abjection, the sickness and pain of others. Earthquakes abound, manmade earthquakes. Titanic wins Best Picture and breaks box-office records. The year of monumentality. Google is founded. A new space, a noun, a verb is created. The world is brought closer together.

Hate crimes, Matthew Shephard is murdered. Nuclear disarmament begins. Space shuttles continue to effervesce around the planet, staking new communes.

The 1990s signalled the end of a particular kind of nature. No more waterfalls, the end of grunge and riot grrrl, and the rise of banal girl bands: The end of purity.

The dominance of the Eurozone.

A new kind of collage emerges; sampling becomes de rigueur. Institutional Critique is re-claimed as .net art (not web art). Meanwhile Gary Hume continues quietly transforming enamel onto aluminium in his garden paintings.

We are consumed by new behavioural natures. The way in which we understand Mutual Relations is now devised by the ‘friends
in common’ function on social media. Wild connects to Hippy connects to Gangsta connects to the simulated profile of a house animal: Woof. Woof, which of course, belongs to a Playboy pin-up. They are all subjects of an interstellar network bound by a lust for intangible proximity. So ethereal is our sense of the real that Jaan Toomik is spending his days Dancing with Dad at a gravestone, awaiting transcendence.

Everything has become incongruous. Machines are talking about me behind my back.

We are in an era:

Of slippage. Of contingency. Of time running out too fast. Of merely crossing things off of a to-do list. Of never dancing, of never sleeping.

We are in the age of: Everything, Everywhere.
Where you don’t need to worry about being lost any more. You are as trackable as I am traceable.

But I suppose no one can really get a handle on what goes on in the mind when we pause to look at a pair of still life flowers — the bright yellow blossoms of sunflowers, the kind whose subtle fragrance pierces through the frame and lingers forever.

It’s Saturday morning. I am at my home in London because my appendix has recently burst. Encouraged by the doctors at Whittington Hospital to avoid travel for the foreseeable future — I am missing a biennial opening around the Mediterranean. My alarm sounds off. It’s 7.15 am. I’ve chosen to ‘lie in’ today. I pull a pillow over my face and screech, a cry of anguish. My to-do list forms in the corner of my eye as an imagined hologram: this is an addiction of my own making.

CUT TO:

I am rummaging around endless stacks of books and photocopied excerpts from exhibition catalogues, searching for a biography of the hyperactive technology mogul Elon Musk –given to me recently by my most energetic and excitable of friends, who has recently informed me of the ‘urgency’ of such a read. A self-made man, also African, also an émigré, Musk made something of himself (TESLA, PAYPAL, SPACEX, to name some examples) with little means. I hope that inhaling a few pages might propel me into a daily course-a schedule that has developed its own freewheeling agency without my own consent (or so I think at least).

FLASH FORWARD:

1.5 coffee shots later and I am running or shall I say jogging half-heartedly, stop starting along the semi-peaceful local park in a torn t-shirt and my partner’s swimming trunks: my thighs chafe at each angled swerve. The thick clouds overhead gradually dissipate giving way to a beating sun. With this, a foray of carved male figures transpires on my jogging trail. To avoid another pang of self-loathing, I close my eyes, pull up my shorts over my love handles and stagger forward to the sounds of a female vocalist whose 5–7 octave vocal range serves as my mantra. After 3 minutes I give up, hop onto a park bench, and open up my gmail –archiving messages into folders is the most soothing and satiating of daily activities.

JUMP BACK:

I’m checking my PayPal account: I’ve spent £600 in ubers in one month. I need to walk to more places I tell myself. I start to chase invoices: Greater Manchester Arts Centre (still within the 30 day waiting period), Camera Austria (cannot find invoice), Villa Stuck (Overdue), Rhizome (not invoiced), and etcetera.

PUSH FORWARD:

I am still on a bench, relieved that one my inboxes has been cleared. I survey my surroundings –couples, endless streams of them are picnicking. I never much liked picnicking: a nostalgic, over-romanticised act. Often leads to pins and needles. A wet buttock cheek or two is almost always guaranteed.

INT. Shower — DAY

I am singing, ‘men, men, men, men, men, men, men, many… many …MEN!’ Vocal warm-up.

My aunt was a well-known Egyptian singer and actress called Shadia. She was very famous in the Arab world in the 1950s and 60s especially. When I lived in Scotland as a child the only way for me to keep in touch with the image of Egypt (where I was born) was through watching my aunt’s films on VHS; my grandmother used to record them for me when they would air on television. I would sit miming the words wishing I could be transported from the bitter isolation of my Glaswegian childhood into the moving images. Later I was to live in Saudi Arabia, a place where most moving images were banned at the time, and so I retreated into music — I trained myself to sing by listening to the same cassette tape over and again, stop starting, attempting to understand each vocal technique.

My time in the shower ends up lasting for 45 minutes. I practice 6 of my standards: At Last (Etta is an idol), Out Here On My Own (FAME!), Everybody Here Wants You (Buckley’s dying words…), I Will Always Love You (the Parton variety), Endless Love (the Duet), Crying (K.D. Lang version), followed by 3 attempts at Tim Buckley’s Song to the Siren.

I realise I am late to meet an artist arriving from Los Angeles.

I pull out an un-ironed shirt from my closet and jump into the maroon trousers I have worn to work for the last two weeks.

I know I should avoid ubers, but I have no choice, plus it will give me a chance to dig for productivity tips in Musk’s biography.

CUT TO:

Laptop studio visit: I am with Zach Blas and we are discussing the development of Contra-Internet since he first coined the term in a book that we produced together. We mull over strategies of resistance and discuss the disenchantment that engulfed by native country since 2011. We discuss my grandfather, an activist who passed away following a stroke suffered in Tahrir Square.

We carry on: drinking coffee and beer simultaneously. We are double fisting, fighting Zach’s jet lag and my own restless neurosis, which emerge as a response to the day’s tasks ahead.

JUMP TO:

Bus stop.

I am green. Green. Green. Ecologically free.

I am back in my email account and I have just received another LinkedIN request. I decide this is the time. Time for the monthly check-in! I log in and wade through over a 100 professional contacts who want to ‘connect’. Some are students, some artists (shall I trust an artist who has a Linkedin profile? Jeff Koons seems to have one), but mostly it is design and communications firms looking for business. I shut down. And finish off Musk’s biography.

INT. OFFICE — AFTERNOON

I go through my curator mail (the physical kind) before heading down to the galleries to install two exhibitions. The artist for one of the shows has refused to respond to my Skype or emails and so I am installing her work through my own scenographic design, taking initiative. That’s what curators do. They tell stories, I tell myself. She won’t be able to challenge me on arrival. No sir-e, bob! It would cost too much; too much time. We are all too time poor.

Next door, my colleagues are installing a salon hang: 40 paintings from the turn of the twentieth century. I spend an hour and fifteen minutes instructing: higher; centred; left-right; left-right. Please. Thank you. Please, thank you. Please, thank you. Please, thank you.

Another uber becomes urgent. I have a meeting on the other side of town in 15 minutes –at a flea market. I’m working on a commission between an artist and scientist and we need to gather materials. I am mystified as to why Portobello market will hold the treasures required, but I haven’t been there in a while and so I pursue this task with moderate enthusiasm.

As the artist-scientist duo talk to each other in rhythmic tongues I begin foraging through ‘vintage’ vinyl record. Vintage here is denoted by the upended price tag. I am John Cusack in High Fidelity I tell myself. I have been taken over by Retromania. I walk out with 6 records. We complete our conversation consuming frozen yogurt at Frae despite my lactose intolerance, I then chase this with two green teas.

EXT. Outside Restaurant — Early Evening

I am waiting for a patron who is visiting from one of the so-called Levantine states outside of an Indian restaurant near Shoreditch High Street. It is a chain, as much as this place likes to think of itself as a boutique kind of outfit. 20 minutes pass. I refuse to go inside: my body fidgets involuntarily when too many people surround me, and I am without someone to make eye contact with. I check my emails. Fuck! I am in the wrong location –had the patron been more patronly he would have chosen a locale that was unique, one of kind, non-confusable!

The patron will call in for the night. The chance to raise funds for my next project will have to wait for another day.

I call two friends, ‘creative types’ who spend their days and nights tap, tap, tapping away at keyboards in Shoreditch’s only private members club. Before long I am summoned upstairs where they lay on their laptops drinking sparkling wines on sun loungers on the pool (despite the fact that the sun has all but nearly set and an autumnal chill has made its way across our bodies).

‘I just did the most amazing Skype Studio this morning!’ one of my friends tells me.

‘He was an artist who worked with bio-metrics whose work was actually aesthetic!”

I turn down and peer at my phone, open iCAL. I still have two essays to complete by Monday: two artists who are exceptionally different. Both male. One Anglo; one Semitic. Both hot. Both straight. Both married, one with kids. Could these biographical notes offer an entry point into my narrativization of their artistic practices?

I elide the hipster swarm and East London’s ever-ending commoditization. As I scurry to the Overground I become focused on the Boxpark construction that has emerged as a skeletal body enrapturing the train station. Thick black shipping containers are lined up: a modular system, various loads and volumes cater to different brands: fair-trade coffee, American backpacking gear, GAP, gourmet Falafel, #BEDHEADHAIRSPACE, #IMARNINAILS, #JUSTHYPE, etc!

Could these containers be an allegory? A cabinet of endless commoditised curiosities? Are they the cavernous portals of the mind: each containing a different desire?

INT — HOME –EVENING

When I get home I feel confronted by my own mortality: all the books that I will never read; all the books I will never write. All the films I will never experience. I wish I was Tilda Swinton in Only Lovers Left Alive –I would rub my fingers against the edges of my books, gently caressing each page and with this gesture I would ingest its contents. My eyes: one of the reminders of my corporeal shell shall not be perturbed.

How can one find a container for such voluminous desires of consumption?

If architectures function as containers of our memories: we must find vessels to hold them (to keep them alive as our environments continue to outgrow themselves).

I throw up. Three times.

It comes out thick and fast: like Baba Ghanoush.

This is adrenaline and sleep deprivation –an enmeshed set of physical forms; my body is backing up.

There is nothing to stop me.

I throw up again.

I try and surrender to self-help.

A close friend gave me a book by Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: “From the author of the internationally bestselling author of HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE.” It looks like an out-dated romance novel. Cut-rate design. But I need to stop suffering. I remember, my father, whose hobby was to psychoanalyse me would say: you are addicted to suffering that is why you do what you do. In this art world of yours there are far too many tortured people. That is not good. Remember: Your suffering is only relative to those suffering around you.

Part One in a Nutshell

By Dale Carnegie

If you want to avoid worry, do what Sir William Osler did.

Who was Sir William Osler? What about 50 Cent, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Pink: how did they do it all? I wish I could be comfortable (not at the expense of others?)

A coffee shot.

A green book sits before me: The Liturgy of Nichiren Buddhism.

I flip it open:

Myo jo ren ge kyo

Hoben-pon. Dai ni.

Niji seson. Ju Sanmai. Anjo.

I remind myself that I am against the act of prayer.

I check my emails. I had asked a colleague if she wouldn’t mind attending a meeting on my behalf on Monday morning. Her response: ‘I am not your assistant or your PA (same difference, douche bag!). I wish I could help but then I don’t have anyone to help me and it is not fair that I help you when I have no one to help me, maybe if you could get someone to help me, then I could help you more with things like attending meetings on your behalf. Have a great rest of Saturday/Sunday.’

I take my laptop into bed. This is the domesticated home for my machine: our symbiosis.

My hands ache. I have developed a severe case of RSI. This is a body without organs. Brain without body/body withOUT a brain.

I am constantly being data mined.

Made subject and instrument of Soft power.

I escape my commitments in Amazon TV. I binge watch How to Get Away with Murder. I am Viola Davis. I am Sasha Fierce.

I am not the thing but the thing that gets you to the thing.

Time for Songs for Sleeping: I want to start a movement around sleep.

Authored: 2015 (re-print from an un-published volume).

I look down at my lap, sitting in Business Class, I notice a packet of nuts that the air stewardess laid out for me, ‘Out of Africa’, they read, ‘A peanut selection made especially for you.’

I conjure up the book cover of Out of Africa that my mother gave me with Robert Redford and Meryl Streep on the cover. A sun drenched moment.

I miss this life, I think.

I turn to a stranger who looks like Joan Crawford –Joan would have flown First.

I pull down on my trousers, down my legs as I swallow the dregs of the nuts; they scrape down the back of my throat. I then turn to Joan Crawford and look down her neck, below, below, into her bosoms, in order to prove to my fellow passengers flying back with me from Egypt that I am no fag indeed.

It’s July, and I am hot in my seat. The ass sweat has congealed and my passport is slipping out of the back pocket of my Paul Smith trousers.

I am watching a musical on the plane, which reminds me that I have a voice, a voice to sing. I clear my throat loudly as I prepare to use my Baritone for a performance.

An air stewardess turns round as she waltzes by: Bug-eyed.

I open up the Business Class goody bags that they hand out.

‘Win a stay a stay at a Caribbean hideaway.’ But it has expired.

I dream of walking on a beach with sterling jewelry ingesting fresh air and breathing in the sea.

I pause on my footsteps to examine myself:
Religion
Color
Size
Shape

None of the features of the man I had wanted to be.

My mother said that I always exaggerated –that I always connected to a sense of race, of color that was non-existent so that I could glean attention. ‘People are not racist against white people.’

She always believed brown people to be white.

‘Turn your back on your people and you may die,’ was what my grandfather said. I liked his approach, his belief that we were different.

‘Every (body) wants to eat you.’ He would then growl at me.

High tea at noon. On Sunday, with my aunt. All this anxiety, it all fades away.

I dream of my mentors, both official and unofficial and I wonder why I cannot be as great as them.

Put me in your union, your union of tricksters.

Take me down to the Louisiana Bayou and tell me, ‘baby, you won’t ever be alone, we be here for you…’

An image of my father conjures up in my mind, as it always does when I feel a sense of inadequacy. I look at him and say, ‘I want to make my country free!’

Tears would then roll down his face. Joy. Pride.

I would then begin to weep. And I would not be able to stop.

The story of an ‘Arab’ in ‘America’

Bloody. Come hard. The penile sting.

I make my way to the bathroom on the plane and cover up the piss-stained toilet seat. I sit down and weep uncontrollably.

I feel my body consumed by raging paranoia. What if a security official was to hear me, maybe she or he would taser me? I have been in here a dangerously long time.

Could someone see my innocence, or rather would they see as nothing more than grotesque?

I want a metaphor for power.
What is a metaphor for power?
White is not power.
Come together, my leviathan, come together, into the nunnery.
North and South.
Stop inventing words and worlds that you cannot live in.
I scratch my head and the piles of dandruff fall down my shoulders, my neck, my back, my crack.
I rest my hand amidst the gap.

Some might say that there is much good writing in the world. Enough, already with your ideas! But I want to read none of it. Why? Because I can see the method even in that which is dubbed ‘experimental writing!’ Mimesis!

Free me and us from Mimesis!

These are not the words of a jaded person. But rather, an open invitation to think through ‘other means’; it is time for a new publishing mechanism. This platform alone, the blog format, as Douglas Coupland has professed is ‘futile’. Where to from here? Say I find the money, a backer for an imprint, a press, something that so many have done, what use is it to this world? These forms simply mimic each other: How can a platform generate material like the corporeal body itself? I think of the artist Ian Cheng’s animations here –the ways in which they are programmed to determine their own narrative function and existence. They are automated to grow from an algorithm, a proposition that the artist has produced; yet any formal narrative does not restrict them.

What if one could produce a press that grew purely out of algorithms, out of the choices that people make? Magazines, journals, and books that become maps of desire, a desire fulfilled? A form of ultimate liberation? What if a literary press were to take on a form of augmented, or indeed virtual reality? What if a story became as animated as Jon Rafman’s Trandimensional Serpent (2016), whereby we are cast into an alternate universe, where ‘experience’ is more important than the explicit form of narration? I am thinking, dreaming, maybe, the time has finally come for an entirely new form of writing.

I would like to think that I have learnt something from this human fiend
Of the virtues of patience
Of not responding
Of sanctuary
But peaceful solitude this is not

I want to start a project
But I don’t want to do it using someone else’s fire
Am I not deserving? To sign a byline using nothing but my own name?

Am I not entitled to invent my own grammar?
To speak with the forked tongue that I was forced to live with as a constant émigré?

Shuttling from carriage to carriage, do I carry on?
Trying to get this simian creature to fall off, will it ever disappear?

I’m enraptured by a saccharine melody
I am in lust with a meek personification of “roughed up”
I am woman –ginger, autumnal, a fine picture –a cross between sex and innocence

I’ve lived this life in fantasy mode for so long
So much so that when I see other people’s fantasies played out I descend into interiority so dark that I cannot claw my way out of it

Feet thumping stumping
Rhythmically fail
Flat feet
Fall over the mountaintop
Bodies
Emit gas
In need of Probiotics

An exhaust pipe
A nostalgia trip
A dream of a life lived
A heart swollen and diseased
Five to ten years of life expectancy

A ghost
A shell of a body
Let’s get up the sea
A baby boy, a baby girl
A black dress
Backless
Strapless

I’ve fallen into a coma
As I always do on planes
The salt from my eyes sullies the wounds