Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South

(16 September 2020 to 30 January 2021)

The exhibition explored distinct ways of representing the body by five women artists from the Global South: Bharti Kher (India), Nandipha Mntambo (South Africa), Wangechi Mutu (Kenya/USA), Shirin Neshat (Iran/USA) and Berni Searle (South Africa). This was the first exhibition in our research theme Female Identities in the Global South.

How do contemporary women artists explore their own identity in their artistic practice? What are the fictions and frictions that arise when depicting the female body? The body as subject, and particularly its relation to Black subjectivity, was the thematic thread of this exhibition. The notion of Blackness was used in an inclusive sense to refer to a broad designation of people who identify as non-Western. The concept of hybridity was thus central to the exhibition hypothesis. It was revealed in the artworks and in the performed identities of the artists, and was key to countering notions of racial purity and extremism. Each of the five artists offered diverse and multifaceted representations of the female body, incorporating hybrids, warriors, martyrs and mothers, thereby affirming the inclusion of all of these within cosmopolitan modernities.

The exhibition was curated into three areas or “worlds” that amplified the conceptual connections and formal affinities between various artworks.

The First World – The Fall

The first world was configured around the Fall, which evoked the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, a realm where the natural and human worlds meet. It is a realm of the sacred and profane in which the human is enfolded.

The Second World – Hybrids

The animal–human hybrid figures represented the second world of the exhibition. Hybridity refers to the mingling of species, races or cultures, a crossing of one thing with another. The figures were both abject and powerful, beautiful and repulsive. This uncomfortable ambivalence was meant to provoke a response in the viewer, who had to consider the relationship between themselves and other, different subjectivities.

The Third World – Body

In the third world of the exhibition, the viewer was reminded that the body is real and embedded in race, religion and identity. The works offered an intimate depiction of women, who were transformed by the aging process, or whose faces were concealed behind Farsi calligraphy or veils of Belgian lace.

Conclusion

The artists in Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South explore the complexities of women’s subjectivity in relation to the body. In their work, the Black or non-Western body is transformed, inscribed and enacted upon in poetic ways so as to render visible the fiction of self. Their individual practices reflect on the personal yet resonate with overarching global cultural concerns while at the same time referring to home and place. Ironically, none of the women depicted speak any dialogue. Instead, gestures are created through silent articulations such as the gaze of the eyes or the pose of the body.

SCENOGRAPHY

The exhibition was conceived of as an other-worldly environment in which the design helped to generate an imaginary, dream-like world. Bridges act as metaphors for identity, connecting these worlds and showing them as constructed and tangible within the “natural” environment of the dreamscape. A statement by the artist Lorraine O’Grady, in which she speaks of her upbringing, inspired aspects of the conceptualisation of this exhibition:

“Because I was raised by West Indian parents in one of the most traditional areas of New England culture, Boston’s Back Bay, my childhood placed me at a distance from wherever I stood and required me to always build a bridge to some other place. One had to be several things at once … both Caribbean and New England, both African American and West Indian, both black and white … and to daily negotiate the differences …”¹

In light of this, the exhibition produced a theatrical space in which the audience engaged with the artists’ works. It provided an exploratory viewing experience rather than a passive consumerist transaction with the artworks. Through this experience, the “white cube”, as an exhibition mode that decontextualises artworks and mediates the visitor’s engagement to a particular way of looking, is usurped.

The post Curatorial Statement: Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South appeared first on JCAF Journal.

In this essay, I contemplate black skin as a form of landscape in the artworks of Bharti Kher (India) and Nandipha Mntambo (South Africa). Both female artists were recently featured in the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation’s inaugural exhibition, Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South, which opened in September 2020 during a global health pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. Together, they make the theme of black skin and white masks (a play on Frantz Fanon’s famous 1952 book) that much more relevant to the world as we now understand it in 2023. In other words, Fanon’s title and focus on psychic interiority lend themselves as a framing device precisely because they are so weirdly prescient of these two intertwined world-historical events in their aligning of black (skin) with white (masks).

Earlier that year, in February 2020, I was physically there, in attendance at Arjun Appadurai’s opening lecture for JCAF’s institutional launch, drinking chilled white wine, in a newly transformed, red-brick, industrialised space, in proximity to other bodies in the room, amongst friends and strangers, celebrating art and life. That moment of innocence seems so distant from where we stand now, after having worn white N95 protective masks over our faces for two years to save humanity, and watching from the safety of our homes as masked citizens took to the streets across the US to protest the violent death of a Black man named George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020. This would become a larger global movement appropriately called Black Lives Matter (BLM). These two planetary happenings coalesced, and we were forced to realise more than ever that we are fragile, gendered, racialised and sexualised animal beings caught in our own skin(s). 

It is from this post-pandemic, post-BLM vantage point that I now return my own female gaze to the powerful artworks of Bharti Kher and Nandipha Mntambo, two female artists who reflect my own Global South diasporic backgrounds of India (where I was born, but not raised) and South Africa (where I have lived since 2005).  Kher and Mntambo are always self-referential, employing their own black skin(s) and subjectivity(s) as their source of inspiration, point of reflection, as materiality, medium and canvas for their photographic and sculptural works. They too share the theme of the female physical body in its multiple forms – as hybrid creatures caught between animal and human, warriors, martyrs, mothers, daughters and, lest we forget, as artists at home in the world.

Kher’s oeuvre is subtle and complex in its approach to womanhood and femininity in relation to her own black skin. An early photographic work featured in the exhibit is entitled Self portrait (2007). It shows her posing for the camera with a sideways glance. Her eyes have a searching and searing look to them, and her face is a painted mask (to invoke Fanon once again), hiding, transforming her feminine features with a prosthetic, pink-coloured nose, enlarged lips, white powdered skin and heavy black liner surrounding her main facial features. Her look borders on being half monkey/half clown, half human/half animal. That is the point. Her hair is messy, pulled up into a hasty bun, with tendrils spiraling out onto her luminous skin in the landscaped folds of her neck and clavicle, down to her bare shoulders where the photograph cuts off the rest of her physical body.

“These two planetary happenings coalesced, and we were forced to realise more than ever that we are fragile, gendered, racialised and sexualised animal beings caught in our own skin(s).”

What is her message? “Keep looking at me” is what I see. It is a critique of colonialism, of Western ideals of feminine beauty, of race as a marker easily identified and based wholly on skin and facial features that she chooses to disrupt and disguise. The artwork is both comical relief and poignant self-reflection. The theme of black skin comes up again in her second piece in the exhibit, Warrior with cloak and shield (2008). This time, the life-size, sculptured female figure stands tall and proud, with an oversized banana leaf (a symbol of abundance and fertility) serving as a shield to her vulnerable naked skin. Her cloak dangles precariously from one of the snake-like outgrowths on her head, which can also be likened to tree branches. Akin to Medusa in Greek mythology, Kher’s warrior is a signifier of fatal beauty, only she is not a sole product of the West.

Kher’s third work in the exhibit feels different, of an alternate time and place. Entitled Mother (2016), it features a sculptural figuration of Kher’s real mother’s life-size body cast in plaster. It is an act of homage. This mother figure is encased in white rather than her own natural brown skin tone. She is almost featureless, without hair, and with pendulating breasts and belly, including folds of skin that reveal the landscape of an ageing woman’s body. This mother is also seated on a wooden stool, her hands resting on her thighs. She is comfortable in her own skin, a thing of abstraction, to represent all Mothers. Together, these three seminal works by Kher point to the power of skin to convey the multiple layered identities that women have taken on, past, present and future, and suggest the closeness of human, animal and plant pluriverses that crisscross the Global South.

Nandipha Mntambo’s artworks carry our imaginations on a different journey of black skin in relation to an overlapping set of gendered themes related to the human, animal and planetary, and which are very much in dialogue with Kher’s artworks. Her photographic work Europa (2008) provincialises this continent of white colonial dominance by turning the Greek myth of Princess Europa on its head. Far from being an idealised Western beauty, this female figure (Mntambo herself in disguise) has blackened, rough skin, hair and nose, and four large protruding horns. As in Kher’s Self portrait (2007), made one year previously, it is her piercing eyes that swallow you and suggest that we humans can no longer be moored to purely Western ideals, that we are almost fully animal, not so far from them (as Other). Here too, folds of luminous skin show off a landscape of neck and collar bones, and part of one protruding breast – all hints of her female sex. This is reminiscent of Kher’s photographic image of herself, thoughtfully positioned next to Mntambo’s work in the exhibit, both having pride of place on one wall.

Mntambo returns to her physical body as material and medium for her second piece, Sengifikile (2009), a reference to the isiZulu word meaning “I have arrived”. A bronze sculptural bust that uses her own corporeality is the foundation, only its half human, half animal figure is in the guise of a bull, with two horns and large, protruding ears. In Mntambo’s hands, this work upends the idea of an idealised European bust as a thing of natural beauty. Rather, this she-figure is both appealing and monstrous, suggesting that (self) love and (self) hatred are in tension with one another and perhaps not so far off relationally, yet another reference to the psychoanalytic framing of Fanon. The artist plays with the dual meaning of the word bust, as both a sculpture of a person’s head, shoulders and chest, and as a woman’s chest as measured around her breasts. Mntambo surprises us, however, by disfiguring this already atypical bust, lopping off the breasts and arms halfway whilst she is still held high on her pedestal. Her chocolate brown skin glistens while her serene, sculpted face with its closed eyes suggests the (almost) accepted fate of the human becoming fully animal.

“Kher and Mntambo are always self-referential, employing their own black skin(s) and subjectivity(s) as their source of inspiration, point of reflection, as materiality, medium and canvas for their photographic and sculptural works.”

What Remains (2019) is Mntambo’s third artwork in the exhibition. Similar to Kher’s Mother (2016), it feels like the product of a different time and place. It is a large piece of cowhide (a symbol of masculinity not only in South Africa where the artist is from, but globally) that has been manipulated to look like skin, replete with wrinkles and folds. There is a small, cast-metal horn on the lower, right-hand corner that reminds the viewer of whence it came. On one level, it stands alone as a powerful indictment of gendered and racialised human and animal worlds, its leitmotif of “remains” fitting, given that it was made in 2019, just before the global health pandemic and Black Lives Matter with which I began my essay. On another level, it works as a deeply textured and historical landscape set against the red brick wall directly behind Kher’s Warrior with cloak and shield (2008). The juxtaposition of these two pieces by Mntambo and Kher suggests a carefully curated continuous dialogue of Global South artworks. In addition, they jointly return us to the treatise that Fanon wrote 70 years ago, that of black skin and white masks, and to its appeal to recover our humanity regardless of race or skin colour, which has returned full circle, and ever more pressing. 

The post Black Skin, White Masks: Bharti Kher and Nandipha Mntambo appeared first on JCAF Journal.

Since she began making visual art, Shirin Neshat’s work has spoken about injustice first and foremost. The Iranian artist is known for art that addresses the political situation in Iran and, in particular, the plight of women there.

With the most recent uprisings in Iran that ignited in September 2022, Neshat has been inundated with requests for commentary, and to be a voice for her people. Though this is undoubtedly a very exhausting position to be in, the artist carries this duty with grace.

Speaking over the phone from her studio in New York, Neshat is calm, soft-spoken and humble, and generously shares anecdotes about her artistic process.

Born in the city of Qazvin in Iran, Neshat moved to California in the United States in 1974 when she was just 17 to study art. She left Iran just before the Islamic Revolution took place. She currently lives in New York in exile as it is unsafe for her to return to Iran. Her art journey began with photography and video, but she has made three feature films and now spends a fair amount of time working on opera. Common themes in her work include the female body in Islam, the struggles of women, freedom, landlessness and religion.

In 2020, Neshat was one of the five women artists in Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF). Each artist offered work that examined ways of representing the female body. Neshat’s works were the photography series, The Book of Kings (2012) and the video work, Soliloquy (2009).

The Book of Kings

The Book of Kings is a multi-layered work of black-and-white images of Iranian youth during the Arab Spring movement of 2012. Neshat’s photographs here, as in her later works, Home of My Eyes (2015) and Land of Dreams (2021), follow a particular theme in order to make sense of the context around the work. She explains, “When I work, I go after a theme and then a collection of images becomes a part of that narrative. These different themes often have a lot to do with history and political turmoil.” This has been true of her method since her first work, a powerful series called Women of Allah about the Islamic Revolution of 1979, created between 1993 and 1997.

In a similar way, in The Book of Kings, Neshat tries to capture the spirit of patriotism and nationalism in Iran. Here figures are represented as “Patriots”, “Masses” and “Villains”. For instance, Nida, one of the figures in “Patriots”, is portrayed with her hand on her heart, as a gesture of honour and a symbol of love. Pictured across from the ten images in “Patriots” are 40 images of young men and women in “Masses”. These represent the youth in Iran who are bystanders to the uprising. Finally, there are the “Villains’, comprising three images of men on which Neshat illustrates scenes of war painted onto their chests.

The series is about the contradictions in patriotism: that people love their nation and sacrifice for it, and yet violence and atrocities intersect with these actions and emotions. Neshat explains:

I was really interested in this idea of brutality and violence, and love and devotion – the hand over the heart or the very vulnerable faces of the masses and then this very strong image of these three men who are wearing illustrations of scenes of war where people are being beheaded.

As in much of her other work, the series borrows from ancient history. The title is taken from an epic poem known as Shahnameh (Book of Kings) written by the poet Ferdowsi between 977 and 1010. The poem comprises 50 000 couplets and tells stories of Iran’s history from the creation of the world to the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century.

The photographs are layered with sections of the poem handwritten in calligraphy over the subjects’ hands and faces. According to Neshat, Ferdowsi’s writing is about “the Arab conquest of Persia, with long poems about the heroes who were beheaded and murdered in their love for their nation. For me, it was like how history repeats itself. And now again, we have these beautiful young men and women who are being murdered because they love their nation.”

“The series is about the contradictions in patriotism: that people love their nation and sacrifice for it, and yet violence and atrocities intersect with these actions and emotions.”

Neshat refers also to the Green Movement of 2009, a major protest movement in Iran aimed at bringing about democracy in the country, but which was suppressed by the government. She also alludes to the recent Women, Life, Freedom protest movement that began in Iran in September 2022, but which has also since gone to ground.

Soliloquy

Soliloquy (1999), displayed as a two-channel video installation, explores the theme of Neshat in exile and the connection between Islam and Christianity. Beautifully shot amidst Islamic architecture and deserted scenery, Soliloquy presents a protagonist (played by Neshat) who moves between Iran and the US. Neshat observes that this work, “is about another kind of paradox. It’s about the theme of immigration and being a woman caught between two worlds, and the two worlds are not just different from one another, but in complete conflict with each other.”

What is constant in the two works is a woman dressed in black and silhouetted against the different landscapes. The video is highly stylised. Neshat says, “It was shot in a beautiful old city, Mardin in Turkey, because I couldn’t go to Iran. It had this beautiful mosque dome.” The other part of the film was shot in Albany, New York. One world in the film represents capitalism and projects a sense of power through intimidating and overwhelming architecture, while the other has beautiful Islamic architecture. Both, however, are claustrophobic and the subject is caught between them:

I think this was the most personal work, because it really touched on people who are caught in between these worlds. They’re never really whole. I use architecture in a very precise way to reiterate the difference between the logic of East and West, orient and occident, Islam and Christianity. It’s a work that still seems relevant because those conflicts are perpetuated today.

Poetry and calligraphy

Calligraphy and poetry are present in much of Neshat’s works. She comments that calligraphy was not something she learned during childhood:

I don’t come from a creative background. I’m not a trained calligrapher but I found my own style. Back when I started as a visual artist, I started to use inscriptions on photographs. It was a very conceptual approach [because] the women that I was portraying were passive and silenced.

This poetry became another way to use voice in her work. On closer examination, much of this textual integration refers to her upbringing in Iran. The way text is used, Neshat points out,

goes back to the history of Iranian, Islamic and Persian art, and architecture, whether it’s a sacred text or poetry incorporated into architecture, carpets, vessels. This integration of text and image is a fundamental part of both Persian and Islamic art. For me, it was more intuitive, like a contemporary adaptation of some of the ideas that are really classical but come back to very contemporary images.

Speaking of the connection between her images, poetry and text, Neshat says,

My images are very minimal. They’re very symmetrical. There’s a lot of abstraction that borrows from both Persian and Islamic art. This was not a strategy, but I grew up always looking at how text is included in everything, even our jewellery. Whether it’s a Quranic text or just poetry. Some of that found its way into my images. The images that I make are often very politically charged and disturbing. Yet there is the idea of using calligraphy or something beautiful.

She points out the contradiction between oppression, violence and discrimination, and the rich legacy of Iranian history:

Even my compositions are carefully composed and orchestrated [but with] this contradiction – dark, disturbing, sometimes very violent, and at the same time, beautiful. It’s at the very heart of my work. Whether it’s photography, video, film or opera, I’m very interested in things that are being pulled apart.

It relates to my own culture. We have two different histories. One is the current history of fanaticism and oppression and a very brutal fascist government, [the other] is this incredible, rich history of mystics and poets. The images embody that kind of contradiction in my own culture, the old and new.

The text in Neshat’s work is poetry written in Farsi transliterated into Arabic. “I’m very careful about what poems I use, which writer, which poet, what period, what is the meaning of the poetry. There’s a lot of research and work that goes into it.”

These nuances in her work, however, are often lost in translation when she exhibits to Western audiences:

This has been an issue for me from the beginning, because a lot of people in the West think that the text is from the Qur’an and galleries don’t always provide the translations. The work translates very differently to the people from Iran than to people in the West. Some people in the West think it’s just decorative, but it’s not […] That goes back to how much an artist can facilitate translation of a work that is very culturally specific but, at the same time, has universal value.

Similarly, if I make a music video, like ‘Turbulent‘ (1998), which became very popular among Westerners as much as anywhere else because people fell in love with the music. They had no idea that the words were by Rumi and what they meant. I can’t translate all of that. My feeling is that different people will pick up different ideas from the work and the artist can only do so much in a translation.

Iran has a long relationship with poetry. Neshat talks about her own background with the medium:

I think that Iranian people read poetry much more than anywhere else I can think of in the world. It’s just such a major part of the culture. It has been in the past, and it is today. People read poetry at home to each other. Often in gatherings, they use lines from a poem by Hafez or another poet to express something. So it’s very much part of our culture.

I left when I was only 17 but even at school I was always exposed to literature. And later, I became fixated on women, contemporary and modern poets and writers. I made a movie called ‘Women Without Men‘ (2010) based on a magic realist novel by an Iranian woman who is still living. I have done a lot of work and studied the significant women writers and poets. Even today, you see a lot of young people writing poetry.

Current work

In a video interview in April 2023 with NPR, Neshat expresses some of the pain of having not been able to return to Iran, and how the move to the US was never her choice. Her current relationship with Iran is that she hasn’t been back since 1996. “It’s not advised for people like me to go back, but every day I speak with my mother and with my sister.”

Neshat has a new body of work that will be shown at the Goodman Gallery in London in October 2023, and which has been travelling all over the world. The exhibition, titled The Fury, explores the female body as an object of violence:

The video and photographs called ‘The Fury‘ are about the sexual exploitation of women in prisons in Iran. But it’s very stylised. The images for the first time are all of nudity, and the video is of an Iranian woman who plays the main role who is dancing naked in front of a military man. It’s a very tough subject.

Neshat is also working on Aida, for the Paris Opera House, to open in 2025. This will be a revision of work she has made before. In addition to this, the indefatigable artist is currently spending her days writing a story for a new movie. The past year has been spent preparing the photographic and video work for The Fury, but now Neshat has time to focus her attention on film and opera:

Right now I’m working quietly on writing the movie script. I have no idea how long it will take for it or if it will ever materialise, but I’m really enjoying it because it takes off from where I left the video of ‘The Fury‘ with the idea of turning that into a feature film. With opera, I’m dealing with dramaturgists and music so it’s a very interesting challenge.

Commenting on her favourite medium to work with, Neshat says that video installation is the easiest, but that “I love movies, because I love the movie audience. I like the idea of making films that are for theatrical release, that go to film festivals and can be artistic, but still very accessible. I love opera because it’s live, there’s something powerful in that.”

With her movie and opera work, she often works in huge teams, but for her calligraphy and photography it’s usually solitary work, which she finds very satisfying too: “When you’re thinking of ideas, writing down a story or working on a single photograph, there’s something very satisfying about being alone and being with your imagination.”

We end our discussion with some valuable insight into artistic inspiration:

I always tell myself that you have to find your obsession and that’s unstoppable. That’s where ideas come from. Art should be about the internal world of a human being, and how and why that imagination or that internal world is significant enough for other people to stop and to pay attention to. I think it’s the only way – and also not to be intimidated by the art world – to trust yourself and your own intuition, your own obsessions, your own internal world, because the only basis for being an artist is your imagination, and being honest with yourself.

The post In Shirin Neshat’s Worlds appeared first on JCAF Journal.

No one thinks of the flowers.

No one thinks of the fish.

No one wants to believe the garden is dying,

that its heart has swollen in the heat of this sun,

that its mind drains slowly of its lush memories.

Our garden is forlorn.

It yawns waiting

for rain from a stray cloud,

and our pond sits empty.

Callow stars bite the dust

from atop tall trees

and from the pale home of the fish

comes the hack of coughing every night.

Our garden is forlorn.

Father says:  My time is past, my time is past.

I’ve carried my burden.

I’m done with my work.

He stays in his room from dawn to dusk,

reads History of Histories or Ferdowsi’s Epic of Kings.

Father says to Mother:

Damn every fish and every bird!

When I’m dead, what will it matter

if the garden lives or dies.

My pension is all that counts.

Mother’s life is a rolled out prayer rug.

She lives in terror of Hell,

always seeks Sin’s footprints in every corner,

imagines the garden sullied

by the sin of a wayward plant.

Mother is a sinner by nature. She prays

all day, then with her “consecrated”  breath

blows on all the flowers, all the fish

and all over her own body.

She awaits the Promised One

and the forgiveness He is to bring.

My brother calls the garden a graveyard.

He laughs at the plight of the grass

and ruthlessly counts the corpses of the fish

rotting beneath shallow water’s dead skin.

My brother is addicted to philosophy.

He sees the healing of the garden in its death.

Drunk, he beats his fists on doors and walls,

says he is tired, pained and despondent.

He carries his despair everywhere,

just as he carries his birth certificate,

diary, napkin, lighter, and pen.

But his despair is so small that each night

it is lost in crowded taverns.

My sister was a friend to flowers.

She would take her simple heart’s words

– when mother beat her –

to their kind and silent gathering,

and sometimes she would treat the family

of fish to sunshine and cake crumbs.

She now lives on the other side of town

in her artificial home, and in the arms

of her artificial husband she makes natural children.

Each time she visits us, if her skirt is sullied

with the poverty of our garden

she bathes herself in perfume.

Every time she visits she is with child.

Our garden is forlorn.

Our garden is forlorn.

All day from behind the door

come sounds of cuts and tears,

sounds of blasts.

Instead of flowers, our neighbors plant

bombs and machine guns in their garden soil.

They cover their ponds, hiding bags of gunpowder.

The school children fill their backpacks

with tiny bombs.

Our garden is dizzy.

I fear the age that has lost its heart,

the idleness of so many hands

the alienation in so many faces.

I am like a schoolchild madly in love

with her geometry books.

I am forlorn

and imagine it is possible to take the garden to a hospital.

I imagine I imagine

And the garden’s heart has swollen in the heat

of this sun, its mind slowly drains of its lush memories.

دلم برای باغچه می سوزد

کسی به فکر گل ها نیست
کسی به فکر ماهی ها نیست
کسی نمی خواهد
باورکند که باغچه دارد می میرد
که قلب باغچه در زیر آفتاب ورم کرده است
که ذهن باغچه دارد آرام آرام
از خاطرات سبز تهی می شود
و حس باغچه انگار
چیزی مجردست که در انزوای باغچه پوسیده ست

 
حیاط خانه ما تنهاست
حیاط خانه ی ما
در انتظار بارش یک ابر ناشناس
خمیازه میکشد
و حوض خانه ی ما خالی است
ستاره های کوچک بی تجربه
از ارتفاع درختان به خک می افتد
و از میان پنجره های پریده رنگ خانه ی ماهی ها
شب ها صدای سرفه می اید
حیاط خانه ی ما تنهاست

پدر میگوید
از من گذشته ست
از من گذشته ست
من بار خود رابردم
و کار خود را کردم
و در اتاقش از صبح تا غروب
یا شاهنامه میخواند
یا ناسخ التواریخ
پدر به مادر میگوید
لعنت به هر چی ماهی و هر چه مرغ
وقتی که من بمیرم دیگر
چه فرق میکند که باغچه باشد
یا باغچه نباشد
برای من حقوق تقاعد کافی ست

مادر تمام زندگیش
سجاده ایست گسترده
درآستان وحشت دوزخ
مادر همیشه در ته هر چیزی
دنبال جای پای معصیتی می گردد
و فکر می کند که باغچه را کفر یک گیاه
آلوده کرده است
مادر تمام روز دعا می خواند
مادر گناهکار طبیعی ست
و فوت میکند به تمام گلها
و فوت میکند به تمام ماهی ها
و فوت میکند به خودش
مادر در انتظار ظهور است
و بخششی که نازل خواهد شد
برادرم به باغچه می گوید قبرستان
برادرم به اغتشاش علفها می خندد
و از جنازه ی ماهی ها
که زیر پوست بیمار آب
به ذره های فاسد تبدیل میشوند
شماره بر می دارد

برادرم به فلسفه معتاد است
برادرم شفای باغچه را
در انهدام باغچه می داند
او مست میکند
و مشت میزند به در و دیوار
و سعی میکند که بگوید
بسیار دردمند و خسته و مایوس است
او نا امیدیش را هم
مثل شناسنامه و تقویم و دستمال و فندک و خودکارش
همراه خود به کوچه و بازار می برد
و نا امیدیش
آن قدر کوچک است که هر شب
در ازدحام میکده گم میشود

و خواهرم که دوست گلها بود
و حرفهای ساده ی قلبش را
وقتی که مادر او را میزد
به جمع مهربان و سکت آنها می برد
و گاه گاه خانواده ی ماهی ها را
به آفتاب و شیرینی مهمان میکرد …
او خانه اش در آن سوی شهر است
او در میان خانه مصنوعیش
با ماهیان قرمز مصنوعیش
و در پناه عشق همسر مصنوعیش
و زیر شاخه های درختان سیب مصنوعی
آوازهای مصنوعی میخواند
و بچه های طبیعی می سازد
او
هر وقت که به دیدن ما می اید
و گوشه های دامنش از فقر باغچه آلوده می شود
حمام ادکلن می گیرد
او
هر وقت که به دیدن ما می اید
آبستن است

حیاط خانه ما تنهاست
حیاط خانه ما تنهاست
تمام روز
از پشت در صدای تکه تکه شدن می اید
و منفجر شدن
همسایه های ما همه در خک باغچه هاشان به جای گل
خمپاره و مسلسل می کارند
همسایه های ما همه بر روی حوض های کاشیشان
سر پوش می گذارند
 و حوضهای کاشی
بی آنکه خود بخواهند
انبارهای مخفی باروتند
و بچه های کوچه ی ما کیف های مدرسه شان را
از بمبهای کوچک
پر کرده اند
حیاط خانه ما گیج است

من از زمانی
که قلب خود را گم کرده است می ترسم
من از تصور بیهودگی این همه دست
و از تجسم بیگانگی این همه صورت می ترسم
من مثل دانش آموزی
که درس هندسه اش را
دیوانه وار دوست میدارد تنها هستم
و فکر میکنم که باغچه را میشود به بیمارستان برد
…من فکر میکنم
… من فکر میکنم
….من فکر میکنم
و قلب باغچه در زیر آفتاب ورم کرده است
و ذهن باغچه دارد آرام آرام
از خاطرات سبز تهی میشود

The post I Pity the Garden appeared first on JCAF Journal.