An audiovisual experiment using sensuality as a compass, in Spain

“The closer you are to God, the less I see of you... it comes from an ideology that wants to hide women. ”

— Mona Eltahawy, Seven Necessary Sins

“We need to go back to the pre-religious institutions era...pre-Adam, pre-Eve, pre-angels, pre-demons...pre-god.”

— Joumana Haddad, Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman

God, before he had a name.

I’m jealous of the first woman who went in search of god, who had only the trees and the sun and the moon and the grass to ask — who had only the vessel of her body to use, to walk the borderless earth in search of something that had no name, who carried the urge to look for what couldn’t be explained to the ones who took her in, who anyways knew better than to ask such useless questions. The search, for the sake of itself, unsure of the end of the journey, and if there was an end, only, that it had to be done. A movement that revealed the divine with every step to the one, who, in searching for god as a fixed figure to be found someplace discovers the air of god moving towards her moving towards him …

I’m jealous of the woman who lived a time not knowing anything about god, and whose love for the unknown lived unconquered by black fabric and airless buildings disguised as ‘the house of god’. Who passed through her life with an unquestioned knowing of the divine as a feeling in the body, a voice that spoke outside of the bordered script of language.

I’m jealous of a time when questions could be asked and nobody could say it was already answered. Before god’s voice became occupied territory, on paper, where only the ghost of his essence remains, disguised as the full essence itself.

I want to run in a territory of god stripped of your man made rules and masculine voices. Where the minaret is a woman calling you to god, and into nature. Where men are veiled and their voices muted in the name of sin…

I want to be her, who in searching for a poem to write stumbles on god in the orange breast of a bird reappearing in the garden. She who’s not ashamed of the long search, and the crumbs she returns with, crumbs that took all of her to find…

“No one speaks for God — not even the prophets (who spoke about God).”

— Reza Aslan, No god but God

“Answers happen as movement, not stasis.”

— Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson

God, named and waiting

It’s urgent, so urgent it feels there’s no time to write.

I promised my art, and life, would no longer be a fight against but a movement towards what I am dying from the absence of in this world.

I want a world in which a woman’s proximity to god and her permission to speak with him is not determined by the amount of fabric on her skin. a world in which a woman’s life and lover is not a paper in the hand of a man with a long beard who has never touched life or love

I want to distribute the freedom of a shameless hour as if it were a sweet I could pack and slip into the pocket of every woman passing. One hour with no poison in her belly, one look in the mirror without the memory of disgust returning you to you, distorted and untrue.

I want land, open to the women in need of it and locked with a hundred divine locks against the men of god attempting to enter. I want the safety of unseeded soil, new, desiring, waiting for its first farmer, its first lover.

I want the god of a seven year old girl trying to read his poetry in the unlit room of her stepfather’s house. I want the love of she carried for a mother who ran away, a love that endures betrayal, that forgives the silence, that, when given the chance, runs in the direction of what has left her. Because love. Because love…