Shirine Saad: Freestyling Arab Apocalypse (Now): Decolonial Feminist and Queer Poethics After the End of the World
January 30th, 10 am Pacific Time
At the onset of the Lebanese Civil war and in the wake of the Nakba (disaster), as the Palestinian struggle began to define the postcolonial realities of an Arab world in flux, Etel Adnan prophesized the end of the world with her epic illustrated poem The Arab Apocalypse – initiating a radical poetics of the surpassing disaster, as Jalal Toufic noted. In her broken, exploded, catastrophic verse, fueled by the lethal sun, she created a noise poethic of global feminist and queer decolonial solidarity and resistance that continues to resonate.
In this teach-in, we will freestyle and remix on The Arab Apocalypse Now, Mesopotamian Trans love, apocalyptic epics and aesthetic theories, sacred Noise and lesbians in Ancient Egypt, Sufi poetics and ecstatic rituals, Zar, the Neo Nadha and Free Verse movement, Intifadas and Arab Uprisings, and ongoing genocide and disaster burning through the Levant. We will riff on artists including Samia Halaby, Mona Hatoum, Larissa Sansour, Andrea Abi-Karam, Nadah el Shazly and many more. Lovers of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Edouard Glissant, Edward Said, Jasbir Puar, June Jordan, Frantz Fanon, Fred Moten, Nadira Shalhoub Kevorkian, Stefano Harney, Sylvia Wynter, and decolonial feminist and queer theory, join us in reimagining what collective liberation feels like. This is not a lecture but a collaborative session for all of us to reflect on urgent questions and come up with some provocations and actions together. (www.shirinesaad.com)
Suggested readings and media:
Abi-Karam, Andrea and Kay Gabriel, We Want it All : an Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, Nightboat, 2020.
Adnan, Etel. “Arab Apocalypse,” Middle East Report, No. 160, Turkey in the Age of Glasnost (Sep. - Oct., 1989), pp. 32-33, Middle East Research and Information Project
Conner, Randy P, David Hatfield Sparks, and Mariya Sparks. Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol, and Spirit : Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Lore. London ; Cassell, 1997.
el Shazly, Nadah and Elvin Brandhi. Pollution Opera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1TpTxSSFWE&list=OLAK5uy_nKZRn7d6T2PS9Zs_X10jrA4C9Hj6arwrs
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” The Black Scholar, 44:2, 81-97 2014.
Ferreira da Silva, Denise and Valentina Desideri, The Sensing Salon. https://www.thesensingsalon.org/about
Halaby, Samia, A., “Reflecting Reality in Abstract Picturing,” Leonardo, 1987, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1987), pp. 241-246, MIT Press
Hatoum, Mona. Variations on Discord and Divisions: https://fb.watch/xaxshRL-eo/
Sansour, Larissa: https://larissasansour.com/WORKS
Villa-Ignacio, Teresa. “Apocalypse and Poethical Daring in Etel Adnan’s ‘There: In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and of the Other.’” Contemporary Literature 55, no. 2 (2014): 304–35.
Questions to consider:
What happens if we think of history, philosophy and aesthetics not as beginning with Antiquity, but with other civilizations such as Mesopotamia, Persia, Ancient Egypt, Africa, native lands as interconnected networks of knowledge and life?
What happens if we refuse the current white cisheteropatriarchal family structure that upholds society and let go of our attachment to straight white joy?
What happens if we build our intellectual and cultural praxis on poethics of interconnected struggles grounded in the earth?
What happens if we move past our attachment to aesthetics and become attuned to Noise instead? What would a queer, feminist decolonial Noise poethics feel like?
What happens if instead of self-improvement, self-care, self-realization and success, we build our praxis around collective improvement, care, justice, solidarity and liberation?
How can art overcome the violence of institutions and politics, and dismantle the very systems that perpetuate oppression?
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