*excerpts from a work in progress
“You and I, our verging inward
Maps, folding old futures in, Might we
Be eaten and eat, my dear? As pomegranates
quicken awhile longer, come, inside me, you”
-Trish Saleh “Wanting in Arabic”
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Floating some place above my physical form - I look down on the body I’ve made. A place of worship. Built by the memories of ghosts related by both blood and spirit. Every apparition that inhabits my altar body is crucial to its architecture. I set out food for these ghosts. An offering of pomegranates, halawa and rose water.
The question that’s been haunting me since I first read the words - “How do we care for the ghosts that take such good care of us?”
I care for my body with the knowledge that it is the culmination of so many who’ve come before me.
“Our ancestors prove to us that our lives are livable because they have in fact been already lived.”
I can wake up with the knowledge that these eyes have opened before. And will open again. I’m always existing in the middle of a past I’ve never seen and a future I will never know.
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I write to shed light on a subject that's been haunting me for every year I’ve been alive.
This body is not just mine.
I’ve shared it with countless lovers and every ancestor whose memories live within me. I’ve offered it as an example. A blueprint, an archive on my flesh of someone (like everyone else) trying their best to get free.
I glance down to my altered skin. Almost every inch is filled with pictures.
Like a client's mother once told him - after seeing the tattoo I made on her son
“Its like graffiti on a marble wall”
Only words a mother could say. What she doesn’t know is that we are constructing the temple we’ve found ourselves inhabiting. Finding more and more presence with every alteration.
I wasn’t born knowing myself. I’ve learned about myself by studying my history. A queer arab transsexual history. The lived reality suggested in the studio portraiture of Hashem El Madani. A diasporic struggle that bubbled up through my bloodline. A map to the surface.
“The past is in the present in the form of a hunting this is what about other things we imagine for queer history since it involves openness to the possibility of being haunted even inhabited by ghosts”
Carla Freccero “Queer Spectralities: Haunting the Past”
Or as Jose Esteban Munoz describes “a backwards glance that enacts a future vision”
My body is an archival work.
But it was my Jidu who taught me about poetry. Khalil Gibran (the “g” pronounced as you would “Jidu”) was his favorite poet. Years after he died I found his copy of the prophet. With only a few words underlined.
“Let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook
that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own under-
standing of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.”
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The definition of magic is ritual with intent
Each tattoo is a ritual and the best tattoos I’ve made were not made by me at all but rather uncovered. Letting the magic do its work. Letting the image organically unfold. Some of the most valuable tattoos I’ve ever made were absolutely free.
A gift with more intention poured in than if it were bought.
Someone asked me if I was sick of tattooing pomegranates already. Repeating the same image. It's only repetition in the way that ritual is.
Each time I am grateful. Each time I am grateful.