E(xilic)ncounters
Loulwah Kutbi
EDITORIAL, S&T RESIDENCY, ARCHIVE
"Friends
I grow more convinced
that the poem
can only ever be
a dialogue
made of live flesh and sound
that stares you straight in the eyes
even if the poem has to cross
the cold wasted of distance
to finally reach you"
— Letter to My Friends Overseas (1980), Abdellatif Laâbi
I grow more convinced
that the poem
can only ever be
a dialogue
made of live flesh and sound
that stares you straight in the eyes
even if the poem has to cross
the cold wasted of distance
to finally reach you"
— Letter to My Friends Overseas (1980), Abdellatif Laâbi
Encountering cultural memory through the entrails of links, open access archives, and the proliferation of "archival fever(s)" allows us to grasp how the abstraction of its figure(s) is now in perpetual manipulation, particularly when looking at the representation of home or the homeland through digital media, mediation and digital archival impulses. Exile is polyvalent; it splinters subjectivity and spacetime and usually begins at "home", the origin of deterritorialisation. The concept of belonging is thrown into flux when we ponder exilic art. The exilic is a state shaped by subalternity, by a traumatism from an encounter with forces of modernity, that shapes an Other through national exceptionalism, sketched through the sacrifice of community and solidarity towards self-interested subjectivism, limited by Cartesian conceptions of the self. Who has the right to belong to the future, and who is condemned to disappear? The production of "exilic optics" emerges from embracing an exilic ethic1 formed out of a lived experience where the referent of "home" is obscured by acceleration and tele-technic dislocation", a dislocation from the "ontology", or politics of recognising one’s self through an "inevitability of being-and-belonging by the nation, a mode of experience and existence" (Bhaba, 1999, p.11); where the mould of the nation ceases to provide a complete answer to the question of identity. Employing an exilic optic or ethic entails reconsidering the coordinates from which art, media, or "mediation" can unveil structures and realities, reaching beyond representation as narrated by the nation. Looking at Arab art through the lens of movement acknowledges Arab cultural history as a series of ebbs. It originates from a seed of love and estrangement between the visible and what dwells in the optical unconscious, between willed remembrance and involuntary memory, and between official and effaced memories. It wraps itself in the motions of ‘el bahr’ in Arabic—a word that means both sea and poetic metre, a set (or entanglement) of metrical feet on which lines of poetry are structured. Becoming through diffraction or encounters, ‘Bahr’ also entails a history in which the grouping of disparate parts morphed into a symbolic collective womb that incubated the idea of Arab cultural identity, pan-arabism, and Al-Aruba. In Arabic poetry, "belonging" found expression in transit. Roaming nomads inscribed home and collective identity through poetry, never to land, territory or possession. Belonging was forged through a process of re-territorialisation2 rooted in shared meanings. An unceasing movement between one place to another, between the registers of the past and present, framed pre-Islamic poetry, a nomadology of ancient times. Unsurprisingly, the Arabic translation for verse is Bayt or home.
Film theorist Laura U. Marks describes Arab cultural history as a past that "is archived unevenly and [is] difficult to access... many precious original images have been lost or destroyed; nonexistent archives are the most common archives in the Arab world" (2015, p.172). Mark’s observation raises the question of what can be considered an archive without written/recorded history. Can any archive truly stand as an objective representation of the past? What are the pitfalls of understanding history if sanitised from socio-political coordinates of experience? What truths come from these representations? Letter exchanges draw a time-space for cultural histories erased by nation-state articulations of identity and culture; they bring back the elaborate on memory and space where memory and space are no longer; like ruins, they are sites inhabited by the expelled subject of memory, the antithetical archon of the archive whom Walid Sadik calls the non-posthumous survivor: "not an over-liver who aimlessly questions the significance of his brute survival but rather a witness who knows too much." One could consider Fī adab al-ṣadāqa as a figuration of Sadik's survivor and a model of history writing that holds epistle literature as undead memory, living in the present through omnipresence, in fragments. The letters, if understood through the lens of the archive as a subject (in the absence of objective archives), are essential representations of lived experience, of the human taint that colours resistance. Abdelrahman Munif (1933-2004), a writer and critic of Jordanian-Najdi origin, and Marwan Kassab-Bachi3 (1934-2016), a Syrian-German artist from Damascus, exchanged around 140 letters between 1990 and 2003, between Damascus and Berlin. The essence of these letters continued even after Munif's passing in the winter of 2004 through Marwan's renditions of them in his art, reshaping the affective properties of the letters by reproducing them aesthetically until his passing in 2016.
In 2012, their letters were published in Arabic as a book titled Fī adab al-ṣadāqa4, retaining some photocopies of the original letters with Marwan and Munif's pen and brush overlapping, telling their story of a writer who reaches out to an old acquaintance he met in Damascus in the early 1950s after meeting by chance in Berlin sometime before 1994. By then, both were distanced, experientially and physically, from the political realities and topos that shaped the impetus behind movements like pan-Arabism5, articulated by a commitment to producing political sensibilities and ‘oneness’ through art and cultural production in dialogue with anti-imperial mobilisation and the critique of cultural hegemony produced by the asymmetrical realities traced by colonialism. The 1950s and 60s stood as a graveyard of dreams after 1967. Many artists and writers who sketched pamphlets, manifestos and tableaus of liberation in the cultural capitals of Beirut, Baghdad, and Damascus had to abandon hope by the 1960s-70s as the reality of Arab nationalism drifted further away into nation-state hegemonic battles, consumed by its thirst for power. Where politics failed, the injection of life beyond the rule of necessity was found in art, literature, creation, and imagination. The will to imagine otherwise, of which one could include letters as poetic dialogues, conversations—attempts to find a common language for others also to pick up. They met again in Berlin in 1990, starting a long series of letter exchanges. The letters shared between Munif and Marwan defy categorisation. They are explicitly archives (as a representation of historical moments) or non-archives because they orient themselves towards cultural memory of history characterised through the abject(ed) subject. This generation of Arab modernists mobilised in arts through the lens of politics. In their entrails, we can trace the space-times lost to the techno-accel-dislocation of our present. After the Naksa of 1967, dreams and political imaginaries were replaced by a sense of melancholia that carried a generation of modernist intellectuals, writers, artists, and poets from sociopolitically constituted bonds into a position of reflecting on the hope and hopelessness that engendered political failures and hauntings.
Munif spent the majority of his life exiled in different European and Arab cities until he finally settled down in Damascus in 1986, Marwan’s hometown. He found it increasingly challenging to write fiction as the West waged its war on Arab culture in the name of projecting a so-called "new International order" that consolidated a "transnational" world engineered by neoliberalism and focused towards insurrectionary acts of writing memory; he shifted towards non-fiction writing and writing biographies of friends and militants who had passed away.6 On the other hand, Marwan left Damascus for Berlin in 1957. His sedentary exile in Germany led him to alienation (as the letters tell), where he had to reassemble fragments of his past life in his new home, the adopted home that housed his life as an artist in exile. The letter exchange is a testimony in its own right of the importance of creation as an embodied, interdependent and dialogical practice of connection/reconnection. The first letter starts with a writer who says, "I can no longer write", followed by a letter from a painter who, instead of figuration's rootless and boundless path, wished to write himself into a sense of anchorage. The letters also chronicle the memory of forgotten people who were effaced to the margins of amnesia, Munif and Marwan’s contemporaries who did not ascend into the light of the Euro-American sphere of visibility.
The space of marginality shared by both Munif and Marwan transforms friendship into a site for radical exposure and thinking, as Aristotle's Nicomach ethics evokes. Their art and writing practices were upheld in their dialogues; Marwan would oscillate memory and process as he unravelled the flowers that reminded him of the Gardens of Damascus, while Munif inquired about relations, people and the obstacles of writing in exile. As the letters progress, we witness them both push one another not to resign to defeatism or reject historical melancholia, to remain loyal to their crafts and become a testimony of the late Arab Renaissance or Nahda of the late 20th century. In the sense that, despite intellectual or artistic currents that sought to please power, Munif and Marwan symbolised a generation that sought to use art as a tool for enlightenment, as an instrument from which to probe society and ascend into engaged position. The letters show the relationship between art and literary production, text and form, and the need for intertextual synthesis in the wake of discontinuous histories; in darkness, we need friends; we rely on them to find light beyond the abyss. Their refrain, "Hukima A'alyna al Nour!" – "We have been condemned to follow the light!" – exemplifies this mutual commitment to light, not as a symbol of resolution but as a flickering path amidst darkness. Marwan reflects on the light in the book's preface as he reflects on the first flame that ignited the Arab Spring. The light, fragile and contingent, carries the weight of what remains unfinished: what is to be sought by others.
Marwan tended to the modernists and revolutionary figures of his time when he drew portraits of political militant and “engaged” artists like Munif Al Razzaz and Bader Chaker al Sayyab and veiled portraits of Palestinian fidāʾiyyūn in the 1970s. Marwan created numerous works featuring figures whose faces were obscured by keffiyehs, veils, scarves, or simple squares of cloth folded as head coverings. These paintings, blending traditional and contemporary elements, juxtapose the revealed and the concealed. They emerged during a pivotal moment in modern Arab history following the 1967 Six-Day War. The imagery directly references the concept of the fedaa’i—a person who sacrifices themselves for a cause: "They are not the cause, but an indivisible part of it.” The fully covered faces evoke the keffiyeh-clad Palestinian fedayeen, symbolising resistance. These works convey a sense of withdrawal from the outside world expressed in Marwan’s art, through the opacification of the figure of the face, he performs a gesture in deconstruction that critiques the limits and politics of representation. The central figures appear absent, anonymous, and stripped of individuality. Munif, on the other hand, wrote fiction through the relationship it occupies between culture and power. Usually, he centred his characters on people from the margins of society to articulate the human cost of economic and political upheaval before modernity clashed with tradition, which, for Munif, was due to the region's encounter with oil. Munif and Marwan were listened to and partially understood in the West and their own (home) societies. The first lived without nationality and turned to fiction and essays to latch on to Arab figurations, moving through archival fabulation and fictional personages as an anchor(s), while the second focused on gestural paintings of the face, borrowing the term "landscapes of the face" from Syrian poet Adonis'7 work. Mawran's face landscapes complimented the disappearing landscapes Munif dedicated his life to memorialising through the lens of postcolonial literature, eroded by the oil encounter. After their dialogue, many of Muif’s book covers were re-published with Marwan's drawings. Marwan went on to acquire German citizenship but remained a perpetual outsider, as dictated by his nostalgia for home, despite his success as an educator and artist at the Akademie der Künste.
The letters describe a political sensibility that has enveloped itself in the shroud of collective cultural amnesia. In one letter penned to Marwan in 1994, Munif expressed the need to try things out in form and experiment with things unavailable in the language. He writes, expressing how affect and emotion need to permeate the logic behind work through the light of friendship, dialogue and the embedded collectivity of art in the Arab context, which, to him, spoke of art's capacity to :
"Qualify things, including time, with new meanings and symbolisms. We occupy positions stronger than the tide of atrophy that shapes every passing day. Art needs to express this; art needs to be transmittable to others. They only need to make sense of it as a presence, art does not need to be immediately understood in its totality, but as a thread, a sign to follow, something conjured, signs that have no relation to linear time – but to speak of our time, a time antithetical to the structure of calendars, in the durational passing of days and years" (2012, p.56).
Bound by a logic of irreconcilables, the exilic optic/ethic unveils the unconscious and contingent realities of experience through interruption and acceleration through the traumatism of failed modernities, where time weighs on the conciseness of its forebears, like a nightmare, evoking again the non-posthumous witness of history. Marwan and Munif tried to help each other grow by finding relations in their practices that allowed them to make sense of commitments and directions to build community through dissonant commitments. Between fact and fiction, we search for a language that captures the movement of love, a love born from ruptures with the image of a nation's "pure" stock. Searching, selecting, and reinterpreting documents in the archive—orphaned by hegemonic culture—enables the emergence of new (re)narrations. In exile (internal and external). Maurice Blanchot describes "essential solitude"—an exile from the world, a state of (un)belonging caused by awakening from the myths of utopian nostalgia. The process of re-territorialising begins by enacting homecomings and finding familiar strangers—others we encounter in the spaces of relation birthed by diffraction, in the space of the withheld speech, until utterance can find a voice again.
Footnotes:
1. First interpreted by Homi Bahba in the preface to "Home, Exile, Homeland" (Hamid Naficy et al, 1999).
2. For a definition of exilic subjectivities and deterritorialization (first coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 1972) see: Hamid Naficy (1991) Exile discourse and televisual fetishization, Quarterly Review of Film & Video, 13:1-3, 85-116.
3. Commonly known by his artist name, Marwan.
4. The publishing of the book was Initiated by Marwan and Munif’s family.
5. Pan-Arabism is a political, cultural, and social ideology that advocates for the unity and solidarity of Arab nations and peoples, emphasizing their shared linguistic, cultural, historical, and geographical heritage. It emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, gaining momentum in the mid-20th century, particularly during the era of decolonization and anti-imperialist struggles in the Arab world.
6. Munif’s publication published A’wra Al-Zaman Al Bahi (عورة الزمان الباهي) in 1999 to commemorate the passing of Mohammed Al Bahi (محمد باهي حرمة) a Mauritian and Moroccan writer, modernist, poet and political essayist who passed away in 1996.
7. See Attasi Foundation: Marwan Kassab-Bachi (Biography) : https://www.atassifoundation.com/artists/marwan-kassab-bachi
Sources:
Naficy, Hamid. Home, exile, homeland: Film, media, and the politics of place. 1999. Routledge, 2013.
Marks, Laura U. Hanan al-cinema: Affections for the moving image. MIT Press, 2015.
Munif, Abdelrahman and Marwan Kassab-Bachi, Fī adab al-ṣadāqa. Dar Al-Tanweer and The Arab Institute for Research and Publishing. 2012.
Sadek, Walid. "When Next We Meet: On the Figure of the Nonposthumous Survivor." ARTMargins 4.2 (2015): 48-63.
Readings on Abdulrahman Munif and Marwan- Kassab Bachi:
Banaji, Jairus. "The Subversive Universe of Saudi Exile Abdelrahman Munif’s ‘Cities of Salt." The Wire (2020).
Hodaifa, Nagham. “Between two worlds” Features: Marwan Kassab-Bachi. Translated by: Robin Moger
CONTRIBUTORS:
Loulwah Kutbi is an independent writer and researcher based in London. She has a background in cultural studies, political philosophy and visual anthropology from Birbeck, University of London and UCL. Her research/writing practice concerns itself with notion of exilic optics, the politics of location, archival interventions and ethnographic forms of witnessing as seen through visual and literary mediations of migration and exile. She has written for Mathqaf and worked on audio and media research projects in exhibition contexts; focusing on non-centralised archiving practices emerging from public testimony and participation as a means to navigate the tensions between memory and history.