Alif is for An(n)als

50 minute collaborative multimedia performance

Words by Gabriel Christian, jose e abad and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

An Excerpt from Speak: Beyond Gravity

As artists across phenotypically brown diasporas, we three must allow ourselves the breadth of narrative usually denied us in front of audiences used to witnessing only a myopic entanglement of bodies and stories. Working in San Francisco has been instructive to us about the kingpin of survival methodologies for (brown) artists: transdisciplinarity. Gabriel, Zulfi, and jose each metastasized through the arts until, by fate, we collided. Since then, we have collaborated in every permutation of a duet, but never as a triad. We have varying relations to Gravity, either having been commissioned, fiscally sponsored, or brought in as a collaborator.  

Our work/world initiates in the aftermath of our envisioned global queer revolution of apocalyptic proportions. Flaring up in the Middle East and the African continent, this uprising eventually made its way to the center of the plutocratic, apathetic empire – the United States – spreading first like wildfire from the thousands of redlined neighborhoods of black Americans. Having successfully dismantled Western imperialism, ecoterrorism, colonial-settler projects and white supremacy, new leaders emerge in this blighted terrain.

Faluda Islam (Zulfikar), a bearded Muslim drag queen guerrilla warrior was one of those martyred, killed by American-backed rebels and, miraculously, resurrected using Wifi technology. Her resurrection confuses the borders of time, asks us to suspend our expired mythos for her arrival. Her survival is contingent on Black Bussy (Gabriel), a night/mare born at the ruins of the Stud Bar in San Francisco, and jose, a necromancer and re/cycler, as no future can ever truly be a simple, solitary project.

What does the world post-radical-liberatory-revolution look like when its players are queer as fuck, high femme, high glamour and more extra than terrestrial? Do we make the same mistakes with each other or do we correct the pains inflicted on us by those who came before: straight white men with a narrow sense of fashion, politics, desire, time and space?

This dystopia emerges from the Quran and the Day of Judgement, symbolism associated with the Arabic letter Alif, storytelling traditions in South Asia and the Middle East, Afrofuturism and memories. Most importantly, however, these past-futures are a distorted way of returning us to our predecessors, those wound up in the movement of the 1950s, -60s and -70s, in which Black radicalism reigned in black leather and the Islamic bloc of nations held less of a religious identity and more a leftist and anti-imperialist one. Many blamed the death of these movements on the neo-liberalism or neo-conservatism of the 1980s (and are they really that different?), but could a simpler reason have been heterosexual hubris?  

“I am maybe trembling just a tad as I write this because this…this is the magical realism, the afrosurrealism, the queer futurity, the delirium, the fight, the fantasy, the new narrative. Gabriel, jose, and Zulfi know the ways that we’re not free and they know why. They collage their/our dreams and nightmares into a multi-disciplinary performance that gives us all time and space to go way down the rabbit hole of just what the widespread implications of our systems actually are, what they might be next, and how our only way to survive it all will be to push in basically all directions with our words, our bodies, and our most vicious and far fetching imaginations. Freedom ain’t free, ya’ll.”

Excerpt from If Freedom, then…

Words by Jesse Hewit