TO THE DEAD / TO THOSE YET UNBORN




Is reading an individual act? To read an event, say, or one’s fate, or an archive? To read a book, a novel, a poem? Is it the individual reader who performs these different kinds of reading?

One could resolve the unwritten slogans of a generation of Egyptian writers into the following formula: individualism or ideology. In the ‘90s we believed that only by holding tight to individualism would we be immunised against ideology: the second its thread slipped between our fingers and escaped, ideologies and identities would sweep us away. According to this authentically ’90s paranoid style, the act of reading meant proceeding from questions of an individual concern; otherwise it became an ideological process that would blind you to what you were trying to read. The formula was not a pose—it was a response to the demands of a particular historical moment—but time has long since overtaken it and it is in pressing need of root and branch revision. After all, individualism can be an ideology; it is, in fact, the neoliberal ideology par excellence: a non-ideology morphed into the most pernicious kind of all, one that is completely transparent and impossible to detect.

But to return to reading. There is a subjectivity which takes shape during the act of reading, just as there is a subjectivity which forms during writing, but neither reading or writing are individual acts, nor even collective acts. The subjectivity that operates in reading is a product of the act, not its starting point. It grows and forms through the knitting and sundering of its subject; it does not come fully-formed from outside it. We do not begin our reading with a complete self, accompanying it through the process with the complacent certainty that we cannot fall into the trap of ideology so long as our concerns and questions proceed from an individual perspective. Rather, it is through the act of reading that we reach this self; rather, by which we produce it. But the self we end up with is not an individual self, one which might belong to a given person or even a given group. The self we attain is non-individual, a self inconsistent with itself.

Reading is not a free interpretation of reality, nor is it the documentation of knowledge’s progress as it fastens its grip on its subject matter. Reading is deeply radical. It is the process of producing a self that is contradictory, neither individual nor collective, and one that is non-human, too, because it is inseparable from the objectivity that runs through it. To be precise, it is a self that is located in the flaws of that objectivity, the fissures in its surface, the places that can break and change. Whatever might be shielding us from ideology, it is not the reorganising of reality around another dominant principle—individualism, say—but rather the difficult work of tracing the cracks in this reality. Reading is simply a plan of action to activate, or generate, these cracks and fissures.



¶            FORGETOLOGY



Writing always contains more than what is put into it. It exceeds itself, bringing something beyond its authors’ intentions, and this ensures that writing can never settle into any narrow definition of its purpose. It produces this self-excess when connecting with a meaning or realising an idea or documenting a narrative, or any one of its many other possible functions. Even the writing which understands itself as free, purged of point and purpose, exceeds this abstract freedom, preying on a preexisting function or idea before moving on.

In other words, true writing is what happens behind writing’s back. It is the excess which writing produces while it thinks it is doing what it set out to do. It is a falling-into-contradiction, but it doesn’t yet know it. When it realises, it will see that what we write can only truly appear in the pleats and folds of writing’s contradictions, not in the universality of the picture that writing attempts to draw for itself. Take, for instance, the historian who imagines that in his narrative of historical incident he is describing the full face of the spirit of the age. But the spirit of the age isn’t hiding under layers of historical incident waiting for the historian’s writing to come and pull them back; it is emitted by the contradictions produced in the writing of these events, contradictions that can never be finally resolved. The spirit of the age which the historian seeks to know cannot be manifested in his writing as though it is something separate from it. It is the cracks in that writing. This is what the historian does not understand.

True writing, then, can only approach its subject when it forgets itself and allows itself to sink into the details of its narrative and their endless contradictions, in the hope that it can make its way back and remember itself, survey its own ruins and realise that the knowledge it sought exists only in the contradictions it produced. The spirit of the age sought by the historian is found only in the cracks in the spirit that are opened by his writing. To be precise, it is the crack itself. For writing to exceed itself, then, it must forget itself a little, so that later it might remember. And because forgetting will never submit to the conscious will, it is impossible to decide to forget in advance of the writing process. It might happen, it might not.

If writing cannot predict its excess, all it can do is write and write and write until it so happens (and it might not happen) that it remembers itself, and belatedly wakes up to the essential contradiction between what it writes and what it thought it was writing, and retrospectively appreciates the vital importance of this contradiction. Writing of this nature is not preexisting knowledge packaged in apposite words and sentences, but the exercise of what it does not yet know. Since everything it already knows is insufficient, it must forget it in order to become true writing.

These are the thing that writing does not yet know, even as it practises them: its excess, its impossibility, the refusal of the subject matter to submit to it, its internal contradictions. Writing is a knowledge perpetually deferred, one that cannot be accumulated. It forgets itself, then it returns and remembers, to know itself in retrospect. And it can only know this where it exceeds itself.



¶            AGAINST



‘Against Whom’ is one of Amal Donqol’s late poems, from his final collection The Room 8 Papers. The room in question was the ward at the National Cancer Institute where he was taken after being diagnosed with cancer, and where he died in 1983. It is a short poem divided into three short sections. The first section is about the colour white: how it dominates every aspect of the hospital’s appearance, stifling the poet with its weight. The poem asks if mourners wear black because it is the colour of being saved from death. The third and final section is about the poet’s life being divided between black and white, and a third colour, which he calls the colour of truth and which he sees in the eyes of his truest friends. He describes it as being the colour of ‘the homeland’s soil.’ But between these two sections are the following two lines; they deserve a moment’s pause:



            Against whom?
            And when will the heart, in beating, still?



What does that first question mean? Is its weight on the whom or the against? It might be worth looking at the final lines of the preceding verse:



            Is it because black
            is the colour of being saved from death,
            the colour of the talisman against time?



Is the ‘against’ of the second verse related to the ‘against’ of the first? I mean, does the poet take his question a step forward, as if he’s asking: ‘Against time?’ (or against the uniform white, or against the cancer itself?) Is it a reference to the sheer range of things that must be stood against, as if to say, ‘Against which of them?’ Or maybe it is a genuine inquiry about an antithetical relationship other than that of black and white? What to be ‘against,’ other than death? But what could this relationship be? He doesn’t tell us.

All we can say is that the question is no longer restricted to, ‘Whom is the poem against?’ Now it includes the antithetical relationship itself, which is generating these conflicting and contradictory positions. In other words, answering the question and naming the whom is not the question’s only ambition. More importantly, what are the social conditions which generate the things the poem is against?

It is impossible to prefer one possibility over the other—impossible to be sure, even, that there aren’t yet more possible purposes for the question. The poet is content with his formulation, so reduced and concentrated that the question almost ceases to be a question and is transformed instead into a sharp cry that echoes through the poem. In the cry, a protest against death is mixed with a protest against the dominant social conditions. The cry exceeds every meaning we try to fix in it.

Donqol never understood the political poem as a genre. There was only the poem. Its vision can be social, political, class-based, or personal, it might be home to existential moments, historical moments, or personal moments, say—but it is impossible to separate these moments and layers. The poem we are reading here is a good example of this conjectural poetic unity: it opens with a personal-existential stanza and concludes with what might be described as a socio-political position, as manifested in the idea of the homeland and its soil. Let us set aside the lyricism that is introduced by the link between politics and the soil of the homeland and stay with our fundamental observation about the poem: that the antithetical relationship which infuses it is one in which the aesthetic confronts the political, and that this relationship is connected to the way in which Donqol understands the work of the poet.

His understanding of this work is rooted in refusal, but a refusal more radical than traditional political opposition. The poet is not politically opposed in the simple sense, as a sloganeer. After all, this is the poet that Donqol rejects: the one who writes political poems. What Donqol calls a poet refuses reality as it stands, with its dominant political and aesthetic values, and writes a poem in which the political and the aesthetic are indivisible.

Back to the second stanza, and its astonishing final line:



            And when will the heart, in beating, still?



Once more we find ourselves facing a question, but this time a clearly rhetorical one. Implied here is a denial that the heart has ever been still or stopped its protest. In other words, every beat and pulse is a cry of protest, a fresh articulation of a protest whose causes never end. Life is the beating that breaks the stillness, that muddies the fatal clarity of white. There is no more eloquent description of refusal than Donqol’s question, because it locates it even in the beat of the heart, every beat a beat against, a beat that refuses and protests and strives for change; at which, inevitably, we catch the echo of the first question, ‘Against whom?’ and hear in the beating heart its rejection of all dominant conditions and what they produce. Out of the second question the first reemerges: every beat, every breath is a ‘No’ not limited to any one target—a pure ‘against.’

Donqol’s poem is a poem about antithesis, but the antithesis the poem speaks of is completely different from the dead, neutral antithesis of black and white. Black and white are the classic neutral pairing, the opposition that leads nowhere, but here they become part of something richer and ramifying.

No longer two opposed colours they have turned into a fluctuating magnetic field in which the spark of refusal is struck and leads us to question truth itself. Maybe what the poem tells us is that the antithetical relationship antecedes the antithetical parties; it may, in fact, be their foundation. Maybe it’s saying that this relationship needs no external cause against which to turn its protest. Life is a continuous protest against itself, an ongoing revision of its determining relationships and a refusal directed against its status quo. Even life stripped to the bone—preserved in hospital wards, kept running by medical teams—cannot escape these relationships of denial and antithesis, based as it is on a fundamental, and fundamentally irreconcilable, tension or contradiction. The heart which beats with life is not primarily a proof of life, of a basic contentment. The beating heart, the poem says, not only refuses to accept life as it is, it is ‘against’ it: it simultaneously asserts life and rejects it; it disrupts its static continuity with a vital discontent. Perhaps the work of the poet, as Donqol understands it, is to detect this heartbeat that runs through all things.



¶            THE TRUTH



I was sitting in my room, turning sentences about, now left, now right, now back to how they’d been, when Walid Taha walked in. He stood in the centre of the room and stared at me. Didn’t say a word. Then his legs suddenly folded under him and he sat, like a dog. At the time, I wasn’t speaking with living people at all, only with the dead and those as yet unborn. Every day I would travel to the underworld and return, clothes covered with blood, to sit and write what I had seen. It wasn’t easy, though; how to give a voice to those who’ve lost their tongues? How to recover all those lost bets, the great sums paid out? How to pass on these experiences to those who would inherit the past’s unhealing wounds without understanding their cause? Day after day, my sense was growing stronger that the people around me were simply dead souls, prisoners of the present moment and unable to see outside it.

Day after day, the weight of my task was growing harder to bear. I would move restlessly about, sometimes angry with people, sometimes hectoring them, until the day Walid Taha came into my room and I found myself setting everything else aside. The days he shared my room I couldn’t work. We’d flick glances back and forth, unable to meet each other’s gaze head on, and the room sunk into silence, a burrow or den in whose corners we would curl up without either of us ever approaching the other. Then, one day, Walid Taha got to his feet and I followed him. Walid kept silent as we went, even as I was learning to speak again. What he taught me was to give up honesty and tell the truth.

Honest writing is writing that thinks it can take hold of reality and portray it as it is: writing which has passed through some defining experience and wants to write it as it happened. But through its journeys down the rockiest of paths, writing learns that there is no separation between experience and the writing of experience. It is not that experience first happens, then writing comes along to portray it. No: writing is what makes lived experience experience at all, what creates significance out of incident. Writing, seeking to say something about an experience, falls between the particularity of incident and the universality of language, and no sooner tripped by this contradiction than it stumbles into another: between the experience’s present and its history. And so on, from contradiction to contradiction, to learn that the experience it strives to capture only exists in these moments of contradiction with itself and language’s mediation between them. This is the truth of experience: unknowable outside language.

Writing must make the attempt to say this about experience; that is, to tell its truth. But truth here is not content. Truth has no prior existence. More importantly, it cannot be separated from the act of speaking it. It has no place outside its utterance. Truth is, exactly, the work of language, not something that is passed on through it. It is the labour that language carries on its march from one contradiction to another.

To speak means to escape our self and surrender to another person’s understanding of, and response to, what we say. To speak the truth means resorting to the animal, the inanimate, the other, to everything that is not human. Our refuge is metaphor; the work of language. We cannot tell the truth on our own, self-reliant. We need a group. A collective of the living and the dead, of humans and animals, a community which speaks with a severed tongue. Honesty is too human, it just needs determination. The honest person doesn’t need anyone else to be honest. They depend only on their own strength, on their unshakeable faith in themselves. To tell the truth the stone must speak. And this is not just a metaphor.

The speaking stone is not fantasy. Walid Taha is a character in an old story of mine. He is a man who has transformed into a zebra the size of a cashmere goat—but he is not a falsehood. The stone and Walid are both parts of a collective arrangement which tells the truth. Truth-telling makes reality strange to itself in the attempt to save it from its estrangement; that same reality whose truth the honest person thinks he can grasp without metaphor, because he thinks truth is something pure and uncontaminated that he can reach directly, in a single bound, without passing through the labour of language. But those who tell the truth, know that it is distorted into beauty, covered with scars, because it is collective and the site of constant negotiation. They know that truth is the opposite of honesty, not its twin.

Telling the truth is an act of mourning necessitated by this daily accumulation of destruction. It is always more righteous to be truthful than be honest. Honesty just speaks itself. The honest person uses their capacity for honesty, their lack of lies, to deceive. The honest tongue boasts, Look at me, look! I have managed not to lie! You all lie; I do not. People like this are honest with themselves, are honest in what they do and say, and they align themselves with the truth. They are the paragons, the beautiful spirits, the martyrs, the pure of soul, the purged, the saved from sin. They are the ones who speak only to themselves, who have no other, who need no other to say a thing, who resolve the contradictions of their reality from behind the high walls of their shining, gated cities. They never tell the truth. Writing which rejects truth-telling is honest; ‘honest’ writing is idealistic writing, vain, wanting only to impress. There’s a lot of honest writing about these days and not much that wants to tell the truth.

I owe much to my still-ongoing travels with Walid Taha. I owe much to that meeting and I don’t even know who arranged it. To language, too, which brought me back to communication with people, with the people who have been born and are yet undead, because not speaking to them had left me without friends or allies: just another honest man. It doesn’t mean I have to stop speaking to the dead and those who haven’t been born, it just means that the only language I have to speak with my contemporaries is one that has passed through endless layers of loss to return, distorted, into beauty.



¶            SHAKALA



Form in Arabic is shakl. Ashkal is that whose form has been mixed with another. Water that is ashkal is water mixed with another liquid. Of a man, ashkal says that there is red in the white of his eye. The same root gives us mushkila and shaakila: respectively, a problem and a person or thing’s nature or character. In Arabic, then, there is a relationship between the ‘problem’ and ‘form,’ but what does this mean? If form means appearance, or, to be more precise, if it means the existence of an organising relationship between multiple instances of an appearance (which is to say, the shaakila, or nature of the thing) then the mushkila, or problem, means the confusion in the form of the appearance: the relationship in crisis. Eye-colour, for instance, has a settled form: the white surrounding the dark. But then the reddening of that white, and the eye is ashkal, variegated, and no longer in accord with its character, its shaakila. Mushkila signifies that the organising relationship of the form has broken down, that we are witnessing an exception to the general appearance. The man whose eyes are reddened presents an exception which suspends the general rule about the whiteness of the white of the eye. The mushkila, we can claim, is the moment that the universality of form crashes into the iceberg of individuality, or the point at which individuality resists being swallowed by the universal, when the latter has become nothing more than hollow structure.

If the mushkila is the crack in the organising relationship of the form, then what are we to do with this problem? One of two possible solutions, it seems. Either we restore to the hegemonic shakl its purity, relieving its shaakila of its flaw and slipping into line behind the fascists, or we take the side of the crack, and help entrench its resistance against the hollow universal. But how might we do this? More and more these days, you find the noun mushkila—plain ‘problem’—discarded in favour of a verb, either ashkala or the neologism mashkala: to problematise. We might say, for instance, ‘We want to problematise something,’ meaning that we want to interrogate it in order to bring out other, hidden and ‘problematic’ aspects of whatever it is we are addressing. But we are misusing the verb. Used properly, the verb ashkala takes a passive construction in Arabic: ‘the matter became problematised for me,’ the same way we say, ‘the matter became confused to me.’ What problematises is not us, but the thing itself. Our function is to receive and apprehend its complexities and confusions. The idea that we are able to introduce a complexity from outside is to overstate our capacity as human beings. In Arabic, the problem, the mushkila, is not at root a vertical complexity, which a person can introduce into a thing, but rather a horizontal one: a confusion in form that is a complexity in the subject’s own organising relationship.

Let us return to the idea of the mushkila as a question related to form, in particular as a crack created by individualism’s refusal to be incorporated into the hegemonic. Faced with the fascism of the universal, we do better to take the part of that crack represented by the mushkila and accept the complexities of its disruption, to insist on its difference. But what are these complexities and confusions? Isn’t every confusion like a slippage, reminding us that the current universal form is no longer sufficient and that the object of our interest needs to be reconsidered in light of this shift? In other words, that it needs to be linked to new relationships. Aren’t the complexities which define the unique (individual) state which caused the problem, and which insist on their uniqueness and difference, in reality simple an extension of the relationships which bind that state to what lies outside the established form? The mushkila of the man with reddened eyes, for instance, turns eye-colour into a form determined by absent, invisible factors: the forgotten tracery of capillaries that nourish the white eyeball. This is what makes eye-colour a living form, one part of a greater whole which is the constant coming-into-being of the physical body.

By focussing on the crack represented by the mushkila, we are returned to the form as an internal relationship between different moments, and from there to the universal—or rather, it drives us to revisit and reconsider the hollow structure of the universal in our attempt to create a new form and, from there, a new universal not predicated on exclusion.

But how does the universal become this hollow structure in the first place? Most probably when it ceases to be the manifestation of content; when it strips content of its complexities and makes it stable and uniform. The mushkila is appearance of a new content which contests the established form—whether literary or social or political—and draws out its contradictions. The mushkila is the historical moment generated by form’s movement. But the more important observation here is that to accept the mushkila as a question related to form and its flaws and confusions (as Arabic hints at) means that we cannot stop at this moment of individuality and difference, but must move forward to the new form which erupts out of it. Being a confusion of form, the mushkila seeks a new form which can assimilate the crack which has occurred. Differently stated, a mushkila is not in need of a solution but a re-formation. The task is not to repair the old form but to find a form for what was forgotten and excluded from the old. When we work on a problem we are extracting a new form which can accommodate the movement of its contradictions. In short, the concept of the problem in Arabic might allow us to cleave to the rigour of form without being trapped in its hollow skeleton.

One final surprise awaits us in the verb shakala, mother of all the derivations above. Quite simply, shakala means ‘to be dubious.’ In confusion. In other words, mushkila is the derivation most faithful to the verb’s sense. To find our way to ‘form,’ for instance, we must alter the verbal root’s patterning: shakkala (‘to form’) or tashakkala (‘to be formed’). The meaning of shakl is nowhere to be found in the root verb shakala. Linguistically, then, mushkila has precedence over shakl, and from there we glimpse the possibility of conceptual precedence: problem then form. That is, form itself may be founded on a problem, carrying with it the possibility—indeed, the necessity—of confusion. Form is not simply the organisation of the relationship between instances of appearance, it is the necessity of its crisis. A living shakl is fragile and fissured, a constant reforming that will lead, inevitably, to a mushkila. There is no point in describing the existence of a primal or original form, whose confusion constitutes the source of a problem. The opposite, rather. In the beginning was the problem or the contradiction, whether aesthetic or social and political, and from this came the form.



¶            NO



Where is writing found? Sohravardi tells us that there are lands beyond the seven regions of this mortal world, behind Mount Qaf at the very limits of the tangible, which he calls Na Koja Abad. This name is his coinage, a Persian compound where the initial Na means ‘no,’ Koja means ‘where’ and Abad is ‘land’—Nowhere Land. A place that is simultaneously real and unreal, midway between the imagined and the tangible, and where these two things are run into one another. It is a not a place you can inquire about by asking, ‘Where?’ It is closer to being a gap or a hole: the nowhere that surrounds us everywhere, whose chasm can yawn open at any moment, whose winds might at any moment sweep through the present. These winds come from the distant past bearing the desires of the excluded and the hopes of the forgotten and the speech of those without tongues. But Nowhere Land may be one of those places in which Sohravardi’s gnostic mysticism surpasses itself, for it reveals a space which rejects the real and confronts it with what it has excluded and forgotten. In other words, it is more than just a Sufi limbo, pure and removed from our profane world, nor is it an alternative world to which we might escape, but signifies instead a place on this earth, somewhere the ‘No’ can go to work, forcing fractures in the status quo.

No one used Na Koja Abad before Sohravardi, who wrote in both Persian and Arabic, and the usage never caught on after him, but though he does not always name it, the majority of his Sufi parables set out from or are set in this nowhere. It is a new metaphor, then, coined by a writer in order to find a form for an insoluble contradiction, embodied in reality’s divergence from itself and the impossibility of making reality internally consistent. One could say that Nowhere Land was a literary construct, brought into the real by writing. One could go further: that Nowhere Land is literature’s original home, which only unfurls when literature touches reality. In its folds, Nowhere Land carries writing’s fraught venture: creating a form for contradictions which are yet to find a form—and not to solve them. It is a gamble whose fate cannot be predicted in advance: it may succeed once; it may fail and be forgotten many times over. The chasm of Nowhere Land out of which these literary landscapes emerge (or which, to be precise, they dig ever deeper) is the point where writing meets reality, where the possibility of revising it resides.



¶            WORK



Where does the writer go between two projects? Where does the worker go between shifts? As understood by the employer, work is the expenditure of a given amount of energy for the achievement of a predetermined goal. The function of this energy is to overcome all obstacles to achieving the ultimate goal: the finished product. As soon as this product exists the exchange is concluded by the payment of a fee, after which the employer disappears. Operating the machine in the factory, for instance, is work that produces a packet of tissues; writing is work to produce a published text.

The employer only sees the employee while she is producing his product and receiving a fee determined by the market. Otherwise, she sleeps outside history. To her employer, as long as she is not working she remains a strictly abstract life. According to his zero-sum equation, ‘work’ means his product, and it ends with the payment of adequate compensation. He turns a blind eye to that part of the work whose fee is unpaid: Marx’s surplus labour. For the worker is working as she walks home, buffeted by the wind, and is working as she prepares her family’s evening meal, and is working, too, as she recovers the strength to operate the machine at the factory the following day. The writer works while she isn’t writing, just so that she can become a writer capable of writing her next work. Recovering enough strength to perform tomorrow’s task, supposedly achieved by compensating the worker or writer for their work, remains impossible, because structurally speaking the fee is never enough.

Literary work refuses the zero-sum equation of the bourgeoise imagination and insists on the impossibility of resolving the essential contradiction at the heart of the production process itself. Literary work is not a product for which every last particle of energy expended is recompensed. It exceeds this energy. Literary surplus value is a force from a past which refuses to pass away. The surplus that has not been given a home. The great costs that have not been repaid. Literary work strives to find a form for this excluded and forgotten surplus. As a result, the thing that defines the field of production known as literature, is that the work performed here does not seek to bring a specific product into being. The work done here is an insistence on the relationship between the work of the past (i.e. work that has been excluded and which cannot end with the creation of a product, because that would mean the end of history’s open-ended work) and the attempt to re-forget it. If we conceive of work as a compound of the different elements which constitute the product, as the employer does, or as a series of sequential steps which lead to the finished article, then we will arrive at a lifeless statue, an idol: surplus value will continue to upset our calculations, returning us to a past that does not want to pass away.

The writer is always working even when she is not writing. She is revising and deleting, contradicting herself, bidding herself goodbye. Writing is not just an activity practised at set times, it is the way the writer works at the history of her work and its determinants. It is the writer’s way of being a historical being, and this remains true even when she is not writing. She proceeds in her historical coming-into-being, dying and been born anew like all historical beings, whether or not she produces finished work. The work of writing is not just the effort expended in order for the writer to write a book, it is also what allows the writer to see, and learn from, the contradictions in her work, and what makes it possible for her to leave herself. Equating writing with completed literary work means depriving the writer of the capacity for self-contradiction, leaving her frozen and outside history until she returns with a new work that continues or completes what she began (and which does not differ from it). As though history stops in the intervals between her projects, just as the worker is cast out of history by her bourgeoise employer every evening and ushered back in the next day at the start of a new shift. She returns to history as left it, permanently suspended, her condition immutable.

To equate writing with its product is the death of writing. This stripped-down approach to writing as work for the sake of a product is not merely a misapprehension of the nature of that work, it also produces bad texts. If we blind writing to the open relationship with the past and the opportunity to find a form for what has been excluded, it falls into the delusion that the past is past and that writing always begins from the present moment. The texts produced by this kind of writing are texts that proceed from a sterile white emptiness, and no matter what they attempt they can never fill this void or cover it over. The blank will remain, overlying the writing like a sentence of death.



¶            ANTITHESIS



Writing’s page is pitch black, full of historical imperatives and crimes. All that can be done is to try to liberate some areas of this heart of darkness. Any number of cliches crouch over every page, vampires who live on the work of their victims. The writer worthy of the name does not write, so much as loosen writing’s bonds. She does not begin from the freedom to write what she wants, but rather from the pressing need to liberate areas of this dense darkness. The internal urgency of her work entangles with the ready-made imperatives and generates the struggle which propels the work forward. Without this struggle the work will not advance a single step.

Writing’s page is shining white. Its white is fatal because it has become normal: it is transparent; we do not even see it. It is the white of historical imperatives and cliché which present themselves as the natural state of affairs by which all things progress. It is a colonial white, its crimes forgotten, its consequences normalised: clean and gleaming, no trace visible of the violence which runs through it. That there are poor immigrants who want nothing more than to go to a wealthy place of exile is normalised: that this poverty and that wealth are not normal, but the product of a long and ongoing history of exploitation and despoilation, is a truth made invisible. The white of the page is fatal because it justifies and rationalises violence. Faced with this white, what can writing do but muddy it? Writing is the attempt to break the white; at the very least, to make it visible.



¶            LAYSA



Beneath the entry for the root Hamza-Ya-Sin (‘/y/s) in his alphabetically arranged Lexicon of The Standards of Language, Ibn Faris Al Qazwini writes,

The letters hamza, ya and sin are not a root in the proper sense and give only two words, neither of which I regard as Arabic in origin. I mention them here following Al Khalil, who says: ‘ays is a word which is fallen out of use, found only in the following phrase, ‘Fetch it whether it is ‘ays or laysa’ (that is, ‘whether it exists or not’), where its meaning is related to ‘being’ or ‘existing,’ with laysa a contraction of la ‘aysa, that is: ‘not being’ or ‘not existing.’

We are taught that laysa is the past form of a negative verb whose root is La-Ya-Sin (l/y/s); the word that negates the predicate of a nominal sentence: The man’s eye is not white. But the dictionaries tell us something different: that its negative function is the product of a compound origin; that the word’s negation is built into it. As Al Khalil explains, it comprises two parts, la and ‘ays, which is to say ‘not’ and ‘is,’ which is to say that the word means, in short, ‘is not.’ If we regard it as a single word, laysa, it has the single meaning of ‘not’, but if we take it as two words, la and ‘ays, then it becomes self-negating. It contradicts itself, asserts and denies.

And given that what is negated within the word is ‘to be,’ this means that it carries inside itself a broken state of being, and that what breaks it is an internal relationship of negation, the particle la eliding with the object of its negation, which is to say, ‘ays, or ‘being’—shunting it down the line and making a new word. The negated predicate here does not refer to any subject outside the word, but rather the subject-predicate sentence that is the word contains an internal negation, a fundamental contradiction which is ‘being’ working against itself. This being is then divided between the ‘being’ of any sentence of which laysa forms a part. When laysa encounters its sentence it transmits the self-contradiction of being-against-itself into this sentence. It does not negate the predicate, so much as open the possibility of its being contradicting itself, since ‘being’ itself, according to the word laysa, is internally contradictory.

Put another way, the laysa opens the way to a different interpretation of the negation it undertakes, other than the direct and proximate negation of the subject’s predicate. What laysa may be doing, then, is bleeding into its sentence, the way la bleeds into ‘ays, reminding it that negation is not epistemological content or a final ruling or even an antithetical state but rather the movement of an internal contradiction. Negation does not come from outside, but wells up from within. Thanks to its own internal contradiction, laysa touches on the contradictions within its sentence and creates a fissure there, shifts it out of place, revealing the form of its contradictory being.

The word laysa is a disunited unit: a unit of being with its negation. It is the presence of the absent, the existence of the non-existent. When we negate the predicate of laysa we also deny the uniformity of being, confirming the necessary contradiction represented in the presence of what is not, the presence of what is excluded, and we affirm self-contradiction as the only viable form for the co-existence of subject and predicate. Shall we take laysa as one of language’s gifts, a form that permits the impossibility of making a thing consistent with itself?

Laysa is a dialectical word: it retains what it denies. In laysa we find ‘ays, the word Al Khalil described as ‘fallen out of use.’ But the phrase he uses literally means, ‘left for dead.’ Laysa carries its dead with it in the form of its predicates. Every new predicate negated by laysa mixes with it, bleeds into it: laysa is heavy with all the cracks and fissures it has created, yet it remains as elegant and invisible as a razor’s fine edge. 



¶            TANGLE



I don’t work ‘in literature.’ I am not employed by any agency or organisation with pretensions to the literary. My relationship with literature can best be described as an entanglement and all my writing is an attempt to escape this entanglement. I have a plan, but it is not always successful. The plan is to become further entangled in writing until the writing takes on the form of my entanglement in the world. This is the only sensible way that I can see to get free, because any escape that does not involve passing through what we wish to leave is not an escape but a running away. True escape means becoming entangled down to the marrow in our bones.

Any piece of finished work is a farewell letter to a vanished writer. Having finished her writing, the writer has passed through her work on the book and moved on. Switching perspective, the book no longer needs the intermediary of its writer. Indeed, slowly but surely, it becomes evident that nothing links book and writer at all. There is no writer, there is no book, there is only the instant in which goodbyes are said, the parting of ways, a reality relocated to a different point of intensity through the shared work of writer and book. It is strange to have writers defend their books. To those who wrote them, books are the headstones of those who have left us, but live on in our hearts. These books can stand up for themselves because they are no longer ours. The books we write are not written so we can accrue personal capital, but are the hard work by which we shall be liberated from ourselves, even as we believe it draws us closer.

Writing is true experience, and like any true experience we cannot possess it, because we, the ones who have passed through it, no longer exist. The experience has changed us forever. The only thing we can accumulate, separate from ourselves, as though grafting external body of knowledge to our person, is coexistence. But there is no accumulation of experience. Experience is the break that happens to the experienced self: birth and death. Experience is a test, and the test is a boundary, and boundaries do not only divide: they are also penetrated. Radical experience is not that which is added to the self, but what lays a foundation for a new self, for a new era, for a new history.

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