Women of the Eastern Diaspora: Poetry Reading and Discussion of Exhibition

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.

**********