Alif is For Awakening

Multimedia performance, 26 minutes

Made in collaboration with Anum Awan and Hushidar Mortezaie

Alif is for Awakening tells the story of a fictitious revolution through the eyes of a zombie. Inspired by the historical and current political state of the Muslim world, Sufi mystic beliefs in the afterlife and Necro-politics written by Achilles Mbebe.

The performance follows the resurrection of Faluda Islam, a drag queen turned guerrilla fighter during The Third Intifada, a global queer uprising that attempt/s/ed/ing to rid the Muslim world of western intervention, occupation, and dictatorship. Videos are used as memories to awaken Faluda’s consciousness as she slowly gains her senses and cognitive skills, the last and most difficult being speech and language. As soon as she gets close to speaking she is interrupted by two ghostly voices, the first being Sana Mahaidly, a Lebanese female freedom fighter whose martyrdom in 1985 serves as a mile stone in what is seen to be a queer revolution that has always been and will always be. The second is Faluda’s own living voice recorded in a farewell video, a love letter to queers past and present.

This performance also exists as a narrative video titled 533 ۵۳۳ also made in collaboration with Hushidar Mortezaie and Anum Awan.

A poetic excerpt from the video:

F: کیا تم عرس معنی جانتے ہو؟ 

A: ھاں وہ دن ہے جب ایک پیر کی موت ہو۔  

F: یہ وہ دن ہے جب ایک پیر خدا سےشادی کرتا ہے، اگر یہ موت کی یادگاری ہوتی تو ھم اسکو برسی کہلاتے۔ عرس عربی کا لفز ہے، ایک نہایت ہی رومانوی لفز  

A: یہ اب کیوں یاد آیا؟ 

F: ان آخری لمہوں میں، میں اپنےآخری آشق کو یاد کرنا چاہتا ہوں۔ 

A:کون ہے وہ؟    

F: میں اسکا نام نہیں جانتا۔

A: تمہارا دل کیا کہتا ہے؟ اورتمہارا روح؟ 

F: سرف سوال کرتا ہے۔ 

A: کیا ہم یہ وڈیو سولات سے شروع کریں۔ 

F: اور اگر میں جواب دینے میں ناقام ہوگیا؟

A: تو تمہیں کسی اور زندگی میں موقع مل جائگا۔

F: چلو ہم شروعات کرتے ہیں۔

(Translation F: Do you know what an Urs is?

A: Yes, it’s the day a saint dies. 

F: It is the day a saint marries God, if it were just a commemoration of death, we would call it a barse. Urs is an Arabic word, it is deeply romantic.

A: Why do you bring this up now?

F: In these final moments I want to think of my final lover.

A: Who would that be?

F: I’m not sure what name to use

A: What does your heart say, or even your soul?

F: It only asks questions.

A: Should we begin the video with questions?

F: And what if I fail to answer them?

A: You will have a chance in another life.

F: Let us begin.

My name is Faluda Islam and I am 29 years old.)

Brothers, Sisters and those who combine both,

How do you marry the earth? 

How do you crawl into mother nature’s bed chamber?

How do you await her embrace?

How do you marry God?

Saint after Saint, 

Guru after Guru,

They yearn to be one of God’s many lovers.

Dreaming of lying on a bed awaiting an incomprehensible being, 

Do not imagine what they look like, 

that would be sin.

Imagine instead an overwhelming feeling of desire 

churned with an incomprehensible love that 

only our creator could have for us.

Breath in Rahman  

And Breathe out Raheem,

Over and over again 

Till your body is ready to receive 

the size of your deliverance.

لَمْ يَلِدْ وَلَمْ يُولَدْ

الله ليس أمك او أباك

الله هو العشيق 

أما الأرض فهي الأم والأب و الأخت والأخ وكاتمة الأسرار ... والمعشوقة

نتكوء عليها عند الحاجة

فهي الرحم

موجودة تحت اقدامنا و في بطوننا 
ما هي تتطلب منا يا ترى ؟ 

و ماذا يحتوي عقد زواجنا

زواج اللحم البشري مع التراب ؟

(Translation: Do not be imagine God as the Father

As the Mother,

God is the lover.

God is the very essence of the lover.

But the earth is mother, father and lover,

Sibling and confident, 

We lean on her, 

She is the rahm,

She lies beneath our feet and in our bellies.

What does the earth ask of us,

What lies in the marriage contract between flesh and soil?)

“When I finally met Faluda in the flesh, she had long since died and was no longer a stand-up comedienne or the life of the party. She was in the midst of a revolution. This was a queer movement, a Muslim movement, a futurist movement – queer, as Bhutto told me in a later conversation, in the most fundamental sense of the term, taken from the architectural realm where something that is queer within a structure is that which is unexpected, or unaligned, an element that complicates, confounds, and subverts in its resistance to expected or patterned behavior. From there, it’s a short leap to the nonaligned political movements of the SASWANA region (South and Southwest Asia and North Africa) that are the inspiration and conceptual lifeblood of the imagined, anti-imperialist revolutions narrated in Bhutto’s performative Alif series. The chronicles of resistance fighters – from Bhutto’s own father to Palestinian Shaheed Sana Mhaidli, the “Bride of the South” – feed Faluda, the zombie, who chokes on, digests, and regurgitates their details as a composite memory of martyrdom and the missive for a revolution yet to come but that has already happened time and again. And in the figure of this undead guerilla fighter in the present tense, we witness the reluctance to fight, the desire to rest from this history which never seems to evolve past its foregone conclusion.

I hope that you will not mourn me and instead you celebrate me as a young bride and dance as if you were at my wedding because with my blood, I take root in my land.
- the words of Shaheed Sana Mhaidli as channeled by Faluda Islam

Densely woven into these narrative tapestries of flowers, blood, rotting limbs, and prophecy, we encounter also the traces of syncretism so fundamental to the spiritual fabric of South Asia, a thread which runs through all of Bhutto’s/Faluda’s work. In Faluda’s incarnation of Sana Mhaidli, we hear the echoes of the Sufi saints who celebrate the day of their death as the day they truly become living and complete, the urs, the union of the saint with the Beloved, the Divine. “

An excerpt from The Eternal Return

by Arshia Fatima Haq