Dear readers,
Think of reading as a way of adding more words to our vocabularies, and many more worlds to our imaginaries. As a tool to permanently rescue and restore narratives. As a chance to reclaim time, space, silence, and critical distance, and ponder how language, when it moves past the compulsive binaries that violence imposes upon it, can hold multiverses together.
Language, otherness, hope, desire, and exile are recursive words in this issue. In her essay “To Write in a Foreign Language,” 1
Etel Adnan recalls how, as a child, she tried to learn Arabic by copying the exercises from an old grammar book, often without understanding the meaning of some terms. Yet she enjoyed the act of drawing each letter, as if through that magical gesture, she could master and reinvent the language of her father—the same action carried out, as an adult, by artist Lin May Saeed (the protagonist of our Survey) to shape more-than-human conversations. Turning codified signs and formats into something “else,” something that disobeys disciplines and formats and calls for other tenses of possibility, like so many artists and writers do across these pages, articulates a “refusal of compulsory service,” as poet Simone White writes in her column.
Many years later, Adnan found the freedom of expression she was longing for in two new languages, painting and poetry, “an open brotherhood open to women, men, trees and mountains.” In a neat passage, she notes: “Do I feel exiled? Yes I do. But it goes back so far, it lasted so long, that it became my own nature, and I can’t say I suffer too often from it. There are moments when I am even happy about it. A poet is, above all, human nature at its purest. That’s why a poet is as human as a cat is a cat or a cherry tree is a cherry tree. Everything else comes ‘after.’ Everything else matters, but also sometimes does not matter. Poets are deeply rooted in language and they transcend language.”
We could read resistance as a poem.
Mousse