Ornament and Narrative: A Poetry Reading and Discussion of Art by Women
of the Eastern Diaspora
M.A.R. Habib
Rutgers University, Stedman Art Gallery
December 6, 2012
I’d
like to begin by thanking my colleagues Martin Rosenberg and Cyril Reade in
the Department of Fine Art for inviting me to read my poetry in the context of this
splendid exhibition of art by “Women of the Eastern Diaspora” which includes
female artists from Iran, Morocco, Egypt, Israel, and India. I would also like
to thank the many students here for their interest. I will focus on two of the
artists and read some poetry which I think might intersect with their concerns.
Before doing that, I’d like to offer some initial observations on the
exhibition as a whole.
It
seems to me that all these artists, often concerned with the boundaries imposed
upon women, are also challenging the boundaries of representation. They seem to
coerce the visual medium toward the conceptual, for example, by portraying writing as an image, by
divesting it of its signifying power and reinvesting it with meanings absorbed
from its new visual surroundings. One of Najla Arafa’s images uses repeated
inscriptions of the Arabic word for “Arab,” whose initial legibility and
ontical status as pure ideality, as pure sign, blends by degrees into the materiality, the
very substance, of a hijab:
Roya Akhavan also appears to use
pattern and repetition to evoke differences in meaning of the “same’ image,
differences resting on spatial relation and metaphorically on relationality itself:
Naomi Safran-Hon’s images of
deserted homes evoke the beauty and tragedy of a centuries’ old existence which
has been exiled into the desert. Again, the images gesture beyond themselves,
their visual nature betraying itself as it calls to philosophy and ethics for
self-completion: the images invoke a dialectic of presence in absence, of time
in space, of exile in the very cement of habitation (she actually uses a
mixture of lace and cement):
I’d like to talk a
little about the Moroccan feminist Muslim artist Lalla Essaydi, who once made
the following statement: “In my art, I wish to present myself through multiple
lenses -- as artist, as Moroccan, as Saudi, as traditionalist, as Liberal, as
Muslim. In short, I invite the viewer to resist stereotypes.”
Essaydi makes a
poignant statement about her use of space: “The traditions of Islam exist
within spatial boundaries. The presence of men defines public space, the
streets, the meeting places. Women are confined to private spaces, the
architecture of the homes. In these photographs, I am constraining women within
space, confining them to their "proper" place, a place bounded by
walls and controlled by men. Their confinement is a decorative one. The women,
then, become literal with this visual confinement, I recall literal
confinements.”
Essaydi then goes
on to say how she subverts this confinement. Firstly, she subverts its silence;
secondly, the use of calligraphic writing, a sacred art form strictly confined
to men, is an act of rebellion; finally, to write with henna, traditionally a
decorative form for women, heightens the subversive situation. She states that,
while she carries that house of her childhood within her, she also carries an
interior space of “converging territories, informed by the space she inhabits
in the West, a space of independence and mobility. Yet she uses this very
independence to undermine Western Orientalist perspectives. Significantly, the
writing in her images is autobiographical.
What I see in this
art is a female appropriation of
writing, much like Christine de Pisan’s appropriation of the concept of reason
for women. Traditionally, in Islamic theology, it is God who writes, God who
inscribes the books of destiny. The religion of Islam was born with the word
“Read” or Iqra’ and the very first
verse of the Qur’an commands Muhammad to read or recite the verses from God who
taught humankind “by the pen what it knew not.”
Read, in the name
Of your Lord, Who created—
Created humankind, from
A clot of blood:
Read! And your Lord
Is Most Bountiful,
Who taught by the pen—
Taught humankind what
It knew not.
Writing then
becomes the province of the male, both literally, as in the calligraphic tradition,
and metaphorically, as in the inscription of laws and the various narratives
that create the content of gender.
But in these
photographs, the women are both writing and written upon; they bear the marks
of a history of oppressive writing; and they are actively writing in their very
confinement, actively redefining the very space imposed upon them; by
inhabiting that space with letters and words, by bringing language within the
space they are giving voice to the very habitation of silence, they are
reconstituting the concept of silence from within its own unexplored depth in
an inaugural inversion of inside and outside, female and male, imprisonment and
freedom. This is silence calling from within itself, defying its own essence,
whispering through the veils of an imposed absolute. This is silence walking in
complicity with its shadowed self, pretending to be itself, emitting no voice
yet flowing over into its constituting medium, that of writing.
We witness in
these photographs by Lalla Essaydi a language being born, a new language, in
the very medium of suppression. The language is new because it does not merely
represent or embody what had gone before, whether external or psychological. It
explores, it is still (always) being written but refuses to be read in any
linear or conventional fashion. To read the words would require a bodily
manipulation impossible to the viewer, an unraveling of sheets forever rendered
impossible by their containment within art, a deciphering that would dirempt
the words we see from their indelibly marked contexts; for example, certain
words appear on hands or face and cannot be lifted into the requisite degree of
ideality to facilitate intelligibility. Language itself is the statement, torn
from meaning, reinscribed so as to be legible only in the most secret places. Where,
on the bodies of these women, does the writing ever stop? No-one can know,
except the women themselves, in the privacy of
what Nietzsche might call their Socratism. Hegel says that painting
frees art from the spatiality of material things by restricting visibility to
the dimensions of a plane surface. So we might add that the painting of writing re-embodies the word
within the dimensions of spatiality, within, and upon, and flowing from, the
body, which is a woman, now the supreme embodiment of writing. Here are three
brief poems, the first about the mysterious authority of Qur’anic writing, the
second relating to woman as writing, and the third to woman as harem:
Veiled Letters
Alif. Lam.
Ra. These are the
Letters
that will not yield. They
Stand like
before and after,
The
unremitting, unreturning
Face of
time. Inscribed in
Uncomprehending
hearts,
Unyielding faces,
they are
The traces
of eternity, returning
To
language, overshadowing
Viewpoint
and perspective
With higher
harmony, notes
From sacred
spheres, intoning
Veiled
letters, trailing an
Invisible
journey, trace
Of
Otherness, whose sign
We read but
cannot know.
Writing
This writing
will go on forever, from
Mother
through daughter and son,
It will
always be begun again in
New minds,
new tribes, always
Circling
outward and inward,
Spiralling
through eternities
Of
beginnings and ends, etched
On papyrus,
paper, marble, stone,
On memory
and imagination,
In the very
dimensions of sense,
Its letters
never dead, always
Risen,
always written
While being
read.
Harem
It is no windswept
Cloak on a
Saint=s shoulder.
It was not
built
Around you.
You
Were born into
it,
It grew
from your
Bones, from
inside
Your blood.
And
Now you
wear it,
Walk with
it, stare
Through it.
And
None can
know how
To break
it, for you
Too
would rend. None
Can show
where
It begins.
And
Where you
end.
When I look at the
work of the Iranian/American artist Soody Sharifi, one of the first words that
strikes me is hybridity, and, as she tells us, she explores the seeming paradoxes
of living between two cultures, especially for Muslim youth. She highlights the
contrast between public and private spaces.
She of course
welcomed the democratic movement in Iran because she always wanted to show the
West what was really going on beneath the media stereotypes. Interesting, she
credits the repressive measures of the Iranian government with generating much
more art than usual. She states: “actually, when there’s a repressed
government, there’s always much more art coming out. It’s like when I was
studying Spain and Franco – how culturally and artistically they so flourished
at that time. And you know, Iran’s art and film has been much more developed
after the revolution, just because they were repressed. There’s something going
on when you have to read between the lines and work against the government and
show and express yourself. That is just amazing, and that’s what the artists
are doing.”
A salient feature
of Sharifi’s miniatures is the uniform or blank background, as in this image of
women playing basketball:
But so imposing is
this background and, like the Persian miniatures it is based on, so without
depth or perspective, that it also offers itself as a foreground. The human
figures appear to be abstracted from all context; but this abstraction, like
the abstraction at the first stage of the Hegelian dialectic, draws overwhelming
attention to itself as artificial and indeed unreal; indeed not real but ideal.
And so this background, this abstract context, is fraught with the possibility
contained in nothingness. The scene could be a park in America; but it could
also be a park in the new Iran. We notice that the girl on the very left is depicted by a photograph, whereas the
other two figures are drawn upon traditional miniature paintings. Let us call
the girl on the left Xena. Xena is wearing a hijab over conventional American
clothes; she is laughing and enjoying herself; though she is not athletic in
her appearance she is about to throw a definitively American ball. The two
Persian women, traditionally dressed, are trying to stop her. Xena is naively
real, inasmuch as photography can claim a naïve realism, and the basketball
hoop, also captured in a photograph, has the same degree of reality. The two
Persian girls are imported from a past tradition. What is the symbolism here?
Blankness embodies
the abstraction of an entity from all context; yet one blankness is not the
same as another; the choice of different colours by this artist indicates that
the so-called starting point or beginning is itself retrospective, dependent on
its own engendering of perspectives, its harbouring of the germ of reflection.
Another painting adapts the story of the tragic love of Farhad for Shirin (told
by the Persian poet Firdausi in his tenth-century poem Shah-Nameh); here, the potential lovers are dressed in modern
attire, casually talking. And the background is light green, warmer and more
convivial than the intense maroon landscape on which the basketball players
move. I have travelled to many Muslim countries and it is noticeable that while
young women wear the hijab in many distinctive ways, they always find ways to
express their beauty, as this poem attempts to convey:
Hijab
It is all
hidden, I know.
But it is
not what you
Show to the
world that
Shows you.
It is the way
You show,
the way you
Don’t quite
hide beneath
Your scarf,
your veil, a hair
Askew,
hanging loose, as if
By accident
or some hurried
Task or
movement. And what
About those
painted nails,
Both hands
and feet, sometimes
Red and
once dark green. And bangles
Too, and
small gold anklets, as if
You were
some fairy princess
About to
dance, in some glass
Realm,
where your nimble form
Could roam
free. I won’t even
Talk of
your lips, darkly rouged,
Perfectly
poised, as if expecting
To open for
some mythic visitor.
Finally, here is a poem
which depicts a traditional male in the act of worship, embodying a
conventional relation to words and the
Word. I believe that this scenario embodies much of what the women of the
Eastern diaspora are reacting against:
Vacancy
Piety
clothes him as he rests his forehead
On the rug,
in the deepest phase of prayer.
Since he
was small, he was bowed in worship,
Not knowing
what his words meant, or who was there.
And after
all, they are not his words, passed
Down from
ancient lines, family commands.
The moment
of union, the focused love,
Drilled by
submission, into vacant form.
There is a
vacancy in his grey soul,
Greyer than
the beard which marks his faith.
What one
says no longer matters, mere rites
Through
which we lose a right to speak.
It no
longer matters, to him, if words
Which house
ancient souls, ancient schools of law,
The thought
of endless scholars and preachers,
Glide over his
life, his deeds, like mist, like breeze.
Untouched,
no word ever comes from his soul,
No thought
to add to the old body of thought;
Just
silence, as he breathes in, breathes out,
In rhyme,
words that lived in another time.
And who
will judge him if in his silence
He should
mock the very Word he should love;
If, bound
in the endless words of others,
His tongue
cannot strive for the Word above.
The vacancy
he has grown to live with,
Will die
with: and the deeper emptiness,
The
deadened fear that there is nothing, here or there,
Beneath
words, rite, silence: night.
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