SU: It’s interesting you mention your mother’s hands and the garments. Because, I was thinking about that detail, of it being important that your mother had a part in unthreading the jumpers that you used in that work. And it made me think about a gesture you made in another work, Uprooted Tree, where you returned to your grandmother’s village to photograph a scarf of hers in this place; a place she was not able to return to, after she left there. Both of these events, or performances, bring up, to me, an urgent waiting; passing time for lives and presences that continue in the wake of waiting for elsewhere – whether that is, waiting to return, to gain citizenship, to cross a border, to receive a document, to move out of what might seem like an absence. I’m thinking about the kind of beauty and life that happens in a kind of enclosure, as you mentioned. Your work seems to make material the traces of this waiting, at sites where these binaries might be enforced, and tries to reach beyond them, unthreading their logic. Holding these ideas, I’m hoping we can talk about presence and absence, in relation to your practice?
EA: I think presence and absence are quite evident in my work, both in poetry and in my visual work. As someone who was born in a village so far away from any city; it is literally beyond the mountains, in central Afghanistan, the time there is different. The time there is very slow in the village and is very peaceful. Although, back then, there was a civil war, but as a child, you wake up in the morning and through the window you see this mountain in front of you and your house is attached to this hill, and you’re hearing the sounds of the birds. Opening the window every day, every morning you’re seeing this vast landscape. Then this shifts. In a way, those landscapes quickly change, and you are in the waiting to get accepted to go to another country. In my case, I went to Iran. After months of waiting near the border, we went inside the country; we went to Iran more than 25 years ago, but the waiting continues in those 25 years. Waiting for permission to go to school, waiting to travel to other cities, waiting in queue to get yearly permission to stay in the country…etc.
When I visit some of my siblings and my family there, they’re still waiting with no certainty that they can, for example, stay there. Everything is temporary. I have siblings and relatives and friends who went through to Europe. They’re in that temporary state, that limbo state for years, in Turkey, in Greece, in Italy, in France, in Indonesia, and also in Australia. It is the absence of time that could be spent otherwise. When you are in a country like Australia, there is the perception that you are here and you are safe, and you are no longer in that waiting mode, but your psyche is still in different time zones. After living in Australia for I think thirteen, fourteen years, I am still living in two time zones at least. I know when it’s midnight here, it’s going to be afternoon in Iran and Afghanistan. I still maintain that. It may seem quite simple to others, but actually, it’s very important; there is a layer within your soul that says, I still want to be present. I still want to be there as well.
SU: It made me think about how maybe the time of waiting is an embodiment. Staying with lineage for a moment, I’m curious what, if any, is the place and use of familial, ancestral or collective memory. I’m also curious about which artists, whether performance artists, poets, visual artists you return to, and reference?
EA: My influences are so varied. The way I entered art was through poetry. Poetry was a way of, as someone who lived in Iran, with so many other doors closed, where I could not go to art school, or study at a university, poetry and writing were more accessible because it is literally just yourself. And too, poetry was always present. It literally shapes our life. As far as I can remember, we always had poetry books in our house. My father always valued poetry. He had his beloved poets, including Hafiz whose poems are very famous in Iran and Afghanistan, for Farsi speaking people. His poems, they have a ceremony; we have a ceremony; we call it Fal. If you’re in a critical situation, if you’re between two ways and you need to choose one, you go to this book and ask for guidance. The book will guide you toward what to do; that poem will guide you. This was, for us as well, the reason we left Afghanistan. There was a civil war, but we couldn’t, you know, leave, because it was so difficult to go with a big family, so we went to the book. We opened that poetry book and the poem started like this:
Bia ta goul barafshanim o may dar saqar andazim falak ra saqf beshkafim-o tarh naw dar andazim Come so that we can scatter flowers and fill the glass to brim with wine Split heaven’s ceiling with our powers and try a wholly new design
Then my father thought, this means that we need to go, we need to do a new painting. We need to leave; this is the guidance.
In terms of contemporary poets, I learnt by reading poetry by Iranian poets Forugh Farrokhzad and Ahmad Shamlou, the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Nâzim Hikmet, who is a Turkish poet, as well as Kurdish poet Sherko Bekas, and Octavio Paz, Lorca and Gabriel García Márquez. In terms of visual art, I like works of artists such as Arshile Gorky, Francis Bacon, Kader Attia, Marlene Dumas and Wafaa Bilal. I feel like in the West everything becomes something to be collected by institutions, it becomes a trend, becomes a way for profiting and selling, but artists like Bilal, they’re outside of this, and really influenced me.
I am also influenced by people. The people I know and have met and encountered quite magically and surprisingly. Even though they might not be poets, as in published poets, I feel their words and their way are poetry. I feel they are poets at heart. For example, I met this amazing family in Kabul. Their father ‘Ismail Akabr’ fought all his life for the freedom of his people, he was a rebel all his life. He became really fascinated by Sufism; he was researching Sufism. I met them in 2005 and after a few weeks, they became my second family and I lived with them for five months. People like them really influence me.
SU: Etel Adnan said this: ‘it seems to me I write what I see, paint what I am’. When I read your poetry (in translation from Farsi) there is this directness of the voice. I get this sense of someone doing something similar; writing to witness. Writing that is directly addressing someone else, at times, a ‘you,’ or a ‘sister’ or ‘my love,’ addressing away from the self. I’m thinking about the fact of a line of your poetry being written on a wall in Tehran as a political rallying cry. I will read the translation to English from Farsi.
As you draw water from a well and make tea with that water, doesn't it taste of blood?
In regard to this, you mentioned feeling a sense of giving up ownership over your words, seeing them marked on a wall, used in this directly political way – though the poem was removed by authorities, some marks remained. That was incredibly moving and striking to me, and it made me think about devotion—poetry as an act of devotion. Or maybe, what artist Hoda Afshar names a process of ‘unselfing’ – poetry/art making as a means with which to see yourself in relation with the world.
