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Collective Performance: Gendering Memories of Iraq

2015; Indiana University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15525864-2832412

1558-9579

Hayv Kahraman,

Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts

Let me share with you my memories.I remember once when my dad was driving in downtown Bagdad and we passed a narrow street that led into a larger square. I was in the front seat of the car and pointed up toward the demolished building and asked him, “What happened?”There was a foggy air around this once-tall building—now half its size—that made me recall the many dust storms that occupied the city every now and then.“It is because of the Iran-Iraq War,” he said with a low voice, as we turned the corner.That was the first time I had seen destruction of that magnitude.I remember clinging to my mother in the basement of my uncle’s house in Suleymania in northern Iraq. I remember my relatives curled around candles, waiting for the loud noises outside to stop. Despite my fear, a sense of solidarity prevailed: I was surrounded by my family, and somehow I felt protected as we all sang and played games in the dark.When the noises stopped, I went out to play with my friends in the hopes of collecting the most bullet shells or the biggest bullet shell to impress my peers. Somewhat golden in color and quite beautiful, I remember thinking. Then suddenly the loud sirens went off. I learned years later that it was the Thunderbolt 7000, to be precise. It was so loud that you had to cover your ears and run.These howling sounds shook me to the very core, yet they were part of my childhood. Now they serve as a memory that both jolts me to the ground and reminds me of my vulnerable past. A past that I cherish, because I lost it. I left my life behind. The house my father built, my friends, my school, my toys.The works in Let the Guest Be the Master are generated from a feeling of losing my childhood and the selling of my home in Baghdad.1 This was difficult for me, because I attributed that home to a tangible space, a space that encapsulated memories I did not want to lose. My childhood memories were interrupted because of war. My history was carved into those walls not only intimately but literally. Growing up, I used the four walls of an entire room as my canvas and filled them with characters, narratives, concerns, jokes, and discoveries. When our home sold, a part of me faded. We tried to hold on to it as long as we could, but my father has two daughters, and we couldn’t have inherited the house. The laws in Iraq prohibit a female member of the family from inheriting a property, so our home would have had to go to the next closest male kin. The house is also located close to the airport, where sectarian violence is high. There had been a few shootings around the location and on the property itself. Of course, there was the matter that we might return, but this was always dismissed by my family and me partly because of the political situation but also because of the growing dissociation with our home.Each panel work is based on aerial views of Iraqi homes with courtyards, some still standing, some not. The act of tracing these lines on the panels makes me feel that I’m archiving and preserving a history somewhat. Every line I paint corresponds to a tangible structure, a wall, a door, a room that was once inhabited and had a narrative in its own right. It might even still be there. I also sometimes imagine myself as an archaeologist, digging and tracing these lines to research and recover a past and perhaps a connection with it.I then started researching residential structures in the Arab region, which are engineered to segregate the sexes and conceal the private from the public. These houses are also broken into successive hierarchal sections that herald increasing degrees of semiprivate and semipublic spaces, and intermediary spaces where the boundaries are blurred, such as alleys, stairways, corridors, and screens. I also decided to use courtyard homes, which are built for and toward the inside, overlooking a central open courtyard, providing a little patch of private sky that the inhabitants can claim as their own. It is also a semipublic space structured to receive male guests, while the female members of the family conceal themselves behind mashrabiyya screens, or shanasheel in Iraqi dialect, usually located on the second floor surrounding the courtyard.The figures are all extensions of my own body, as I photograph myself and use these images to produce the figures. They are repeated over and over again in the work as a form of assertion and affirmation. They are painted transparently on the brown panels, resembling ghosts that are neither here nor there. You see, as an immigrant or refugee, I found that the best method to survive is to imitate, and maybe I did it too well, as I sometimes feel like I am between two worlds.Body Screen is an installation work constructed of shapes taken from a three-dimensional scan of my body. This was done by a somewhat performative act in which a laser scanner rotated along the perimeters of my nude body, producing more than eighty scans. The body was then sectioned, partitioned into the lattice screen, and placed between two rooms of the gallery. As an observer, you only have access to the works inside the other room by peeking through this screen. In the Arab region the mashrabiyya or shanshool screen is a curious mix of technology, cultural dictations, and ornamental design. Functionally, the lattice screen is a brilliant ecofriendly solution to the problems of regulating air and temperature in a structure while providing protection from the sun. It also creates an avenue for women to “observe” the men and the outside world from the privacy of their own homes. It is a way to see without being seen, creating an ambiguity in the dynamic of voyeurism. The women in this case can watch the men in secrecy, putting them in a quasi position of power as they become spectators.So, unlike the traditional place of the domesticated woman passively observing the outside world, this work confronts the viewer in a direct way and unveils the feminine body by affirming her agency and breaking the mastering gaze.• • •Let me share with you my memories.I remember that it was pitch black outside, and our car was finally packed. As we drove away, I could see my grandmother in the back window tossing water from a glass behind the car for good luck. As if that small glass of water would purify our journey through the night.That is when everything changed, and I somehow knew that I’d never be able to return home again.We had hired a smuggler to take us to a faraway land where it’s safe.I remember that when we reached Stockholm Arlanda—the airport in Sweden—my mom took my sister and me to the bathroom, ripped our Iraqi passports into small shreds, and flushed them down the toilet. The bits and pieces floated on the surface of the rippled water for a few seconds before sinking in and then disappearing quickly in a whirl. “Follow me,” she said, as she walked us to the immigration desk. It was around 3:30 in the afternoon, and my sister and I had to wait outside in the playroom while my mother talked to the police. I looked outside through the window, and it was pitch black again. Here I started my new life as a war refugee, marked by my black hair and brown skin among the tall blond kids in my class. This is my identity, and it will always be my identity. I had to learn the tricks of the trade. I was this peculiar creature walking in the desert snow of Sweden, but when they spoke to me, they became assured and comforted, because I made it a point to master their tongue. At least phonetically, I could cover myself and be in disguise. Yes, I did assimilate, I did adapt, and I did try my best to imitate them. Maybe they would see me as one of them if I acted more like them and forgot my old self. And I did forget for a while. But not much later I realized that bleaching my skin and hair and perfecting my accent weren’t going to help. No matter how hard I tried to erase myself, I’d always be the other person who carried her native home with her. I’d always be the refugee.War-aq is the Arabic word for playing cards. War-aq is a very personal group of works, as they are based primarily on matters my family and I have encountered.2 I wanted to combine the idea of a scattered deck of cards with the experiences of five million displaced Iraqis. Did you know that five million people amounts to 20 percent of the entire population of Iraq? Five million is a staggering number, and the loss of 20 percent of Iraq’s population has crippled the country, as these refugees include doctors, scientists, and teachers, the building blocks of a functioning community. And here I was, one of them, in Sweden. As I looked around me, I saw my father, once a revered linguistics professor at the University of Baghdad, now struggling to find a job, because nobody would hire a nonnative Swede to teach English in schools.Migrant 11 in the series is a contorted dancer that refers to the deformation of the self due to migration. This is, in a concrete way, directly taken from my personal past. I attended the music and ballet school in central Baghdad, and dance (specifically ballet) was one of my ambitions when I was growing up. When I fled to Sweden, I enrolled in classes but decided to leave due to the teacher’s racism. The work is a self-portrait of sorts, dealing with the emotive aspect of physical and psychological disfigurement.The figure in Migrant 3 is actively cutting her tongue (see the cover of this issue). She represents the critical loss of language and communication in the host culture as many struggle to learn and reconfigure their tongues to grapple with their basic needs.• • •Let me share with you my memories.I remember looking outside the car window and seeing a mirage and thinking how similar this country is to mine. Yet here I was, riddled with guilt and frustration about buying my groceries at Target.I was set to move again but this time farther away, to a country that is at war with my own. To a country that I never thought I’d set foot in, even though I spoke its language and felt somewhat familiar with its culture. You see, growing up in Baghdad, I attended an international/American school, so English and Arabic were equally integrated into my vocabulary. When I fled to Sweden after the first Gulf War, the American media was already ingrained in the culture. It was as if I were being followed. From Iraq to Sweden to Italy and now to the United States.But this was different. This time something happened in my identity as a woman. One day I started drawing a figure. I played around with the figure, and slowly she started emerging. It was all very natural, as if I’ve known her for a while. As if she’d always been there but had never surfaced. That day she finally did. She gave me a voice to speak about her. She told me that she was hanged in the name of honor. I didn’t understand. What did she mean? Her brother interjected and said she was raped and became pregnant. She has brought shame to our family and my father, and I had to restore and protect that honor. More than twelve thousand women were killed in the name of honor in northern Iraq from 1991 to 2007.But that’s not all. She’d rather pour kerosene on her body, pick up a match that she normally uses for cooking, and ignite herself. Eighty percent of women admitted to the Kurdish burn units are suicide attempts. These are women just like you and me. At the time I was one of them, but I didn’t know that I was. It was easier to speak about her than to look at my own life. Yes, I was asleep and deeply so. But they, these figures, these women paved an outlet that my deepest self needed to uncover. I needed a change. A violent change. I wanted to shed my skin and toss it in the trash and never look back again in the hopes that a new skin would eventually grow. I wanted to constrain it. To confine it. To restrict it to this rectangle. After all, that’s what I was used to. I was a worn body being beat to the ground. That is when I introduced skin into my work. It’s rawhide, the cow, skinned, dehaired, washed, and soaked in lime. It was sent to me neatly folded in a box. Interestingly, this material was once part of a living organism that moved and breathed yet now is fully detached, dead and fixed—not in flux anymore. (This work will appear on the cover of the next issue.)Six women extracting a cross-sectional slice of their own bodies encompasses the gallery space.3 Each woman becomes a manifestation of a crossbreed, hinting at the affinity of dismembered bodies with fragmented geographic locations. It’s a crude act, this detaching of a limb. The shape of each slice is derived from the digital, three-dimensional scan of my body that was then cross-sectioned into quarter-inch horizontal slices. What is expected to be seen as the inside of the body in each slice, such as organs, bones, and tissues, is in fact exchanged with skin or, more specifically, rawhide. The inside then transforms into the outside, where the skin, a protective shell that once engulfed a living thing, is now in the forefront. I wanted to reverse these roles and blur boundaries of dichotomous thought of mind/body, self/other, public/private, and masculine/feminine.There’s something very eerie and intriguing about working with skin. I actually had it shipped to me frozen from Texas.4 There’s a lot of preparatory work involved after receiving the skin: I first soak it thoroughly in water; then it is stretched, dyed, and left to dry. It’s an interesting process, as the skin changes when it dries. It contracts, gets thinner, and changes color, and the level at which it does this depends on the area of the skin. For example, the stomach contracts more, because it’s more flexible. It makes me think of a photographer in a darkroom developing an image that magically appears after the paper is soaked in chemicals.Of course, the sense of violence the skin transmits creates an array of hidden narratives that precedes it. The skin is now marked, reduced to a number, static, and confined to these very narrow parameters in a rectangular frame. Whom did this skin belong to, where has it been, and why is it inanimate now?I needed to extract my body: to dismantle it and to fragment it. It was the only way to wake myself up. As I stood there, my nude body being photographed by a man operating this scanning device, I felt a loss of agency. A resignation and submission that made me somehow feel domesticated, comfortable and … familiar. The results of looking at my body through a computer screen were cathartic. She became a surface to dissect and divide and analyze. She needed to be sectioned and the sections then reconfigured and nested onto another space. An icosahedron. A structure with the highest form of symmetry, as is said in Euclidean geometry. But it’s also a three-dimensional structure that Buckminster Fuller projected the world map on. The addition of each one of these horizontal body slices would form a whole.The violent and nonchalant aspect of plane sectioning a body speaks to a similar detachment and separation that occurs in diasporic peoples. But it was also something I needed to do as a woman. The depiction of these cross sections eliminated the “social” in the body for me and reduced it to mere function: object and flesh. It erased the embodied sociocultural experiences that I feel are contingent on our perceptions and views of the world. And so I needed to cleanse my body with water and scrub it down. I needed to erase my old body, and I needed to restore and rebuild it after waking up. Never will I let myself sleep as my brown skin grows back again.Am I a commodity? Are my paintings and figures a commodity? I pose in the nude and photograph my body to use as outlines for paintings. My figures then are visual transitions of my own body. The figures are rendered to fit the occidental pleasures. White flesh. Transparent flesh. Posing in compositions directly taken from the renaissance. Conforming to what they think is ideal. Neglecting everything else. Colonizing my own body to then be displayed gracefully in my rectangular panels. Carnal and visceral palpability. I provide for you in my rectangles. I know you like it. That’s why I paint it. To catch your gaze. To activate your gaze. I want you to buy me so you can look at me all day long. I’m your little oriental pussycat. You can pet me if you like.