Poetry & Audiovisual
This project brings together years of poetry and experimental audiovisual work. The themes vary and travel through a wide-range of sociopolitical and intimately personal subjects. This year, I have begun selectively curating this work for an upcoming poetry collection and visual collection of autobiographical work.
Zen, Zendegi, Azadi
Honoring the intimate journey towards interior and exterior freedom.
To Love a Palestinian
The concept behind this video: Recently I came across a post that described how mothers were writing the names of their children all over their bodies so that they could be identified if their bodies weren't found in one piece. I went over that image again and again in my mind until I decided to act it out. In this montage, I imagine I am back with the Palestinian man I loved and lived with once in the Nablus. I imagine what it would feel like if I were in a position where I had to write his name over and over again, along with his blood type and where he was from. Even as a performance, it was so incredibly painful. To make this montage as honest as it can be, I mixed the painting scenes with real footage recorded from our time together in the past.
Poetry
Between the woman you witness
and the woman that lives in me
is a god you haven’t met
spinning on the ferris wheel
of my tired mind, reading
from the book of sins I wrote And never lived.
my exile—caramel in his mouth
and I found my prayers
floating candy wraps
returned to me in the wind
answering this howl for touch
with a god that writes desire
into a body that can’t move.
I could lie my way to a lover
in the dress of untruths I am desired
what use is the naked word
if it only give me my own company
to touch.
Emptied of her river she writes with the dry earth of her foot
standing where the stream once whispered
and she could swim the navel chord of a body
cut from the tribe's curse.
She’s come to sacrifice the poethood
to slaughter her words by the altar of the crow
teaching her how to bury breath --
she walks the cemetery of her new voice
reading the dates on the tombstone
of her last touch, her last laugh..
Above the headstone of her old life she builds a mosque
from the architecture of her body,
her breasts, two vacant rooms
under the neon lights,
eyeing the long country road
the fathers who stopped —
where confessions ended
with the curtains torn and bodies dragged to their baptisms.
I’ll teach him how to recognize your daughter in the dark!
Mosque of the open highways and black rooms.
Mosque of the migrant sons searching
for their country’s milk in flesh and prayer. Where have I gone?
I meant to write my way to god’s ear from this sinless room
where there was nothing to say
and no one to feed.
Collage & Sound
This piece is part of a new series that works with audio narration — that is, narrative that relies on sound without words spoken, and on visual memories without written exposition.