Mary Jane

Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian

Sama Alshaibi was born in Basra, Southern Iraq, in 1973, to an Iraqi father and a Palestinian mother. Hers was a forbidding migratory childhood, as her family was exiled during the Iraq-Iran War. She now teaches in Arizona and roots herself in the future tense, at the fog’s edge; surefooted in her belief that there’s a dawning million-man fight for the people of Palestine. In her photographs, sculptures, and videos, the academics disappeared by Saddam Hussein during the Second Gulf War are summoned, an irretrievable Baghdad is reconstructed, the drought-laden Mesopotamian Marshes are enlivened. This is both a political action and a directional promise. Alshaibi possesses the alchemist’s prophetic assurance: when the summon, the reconstruction, and the enlivenment will in truth occur is indeterminate: the seeds remain idle dispersed underground. Through enacting these processes she is leading us toward the day of germination.

VK: I’ve been thinking about sabotage and counterrevolution. With serious terror. You read about Indonesia after the rebirth of the Partai Komunis, Egypt after the Arab Spring, and it makes you embittered, absolutely paranoid: how will my country betray the rhythm of history? This terror has led me to reconsider allegiances—where they emerge from, how they endure. Allegiance in that you report to a people, a cause, led by the conviction ‘I am many and not mine.’

I want to know your allegiances so I can enter your work from that angle, especially since we can’t presume an allegiance aligns with identity, ethnicity . . . There are infinite reasons to split from the soil you sprang out of.

SA: I’m fifty-one years old and have evolved into an understanding of allegiance as something that stems from a knowledge of self. At the beginning of my career my mentors framed what I was trying to say; I adopted their language, thinking it approached something more correct than what I intended to articulate: that I am Iraqi and Palestinian. They made me into an Arab-American, and I leaned into hyphenation but didn’t feel comfortable with it. This was a struggle as the art world willed categorization upon my work.

I’ve always pushed for an expanded space in my identifications, in my allegiances, but I can’t deny the defensiveness that happens when I’m asked to articulate who I am. I am very malleable, moving, roaming in my allegiances. I am on the side of humanity, the land and the Earth, the spirit of liberation struggles. What I resent is the divorcing: when I say I’m Palestinian and Iraqi, that isn’t divorced from my being an American citizen, it’s not divorced from my being a refugee. I’m not into the exclusion of people’s experiences; I won’t draw parameters. We must fight parameters.

VK: Traitorship is the antonym I’m choosing for allegiance, and I feel the act of traitorship politically is sabotage.

SA: The first film project I made as an undergraduate, “End of September,” includes a section titled Sabotage. It’s about the self-sabotage of not understanding one’s place, where people designate a place for you. You are always interrupting others’ perceptions. The script for “End of September” was written out of dreams. The traitor of the cause, khayin as we say in Arabic, comes in and questions: who’s the believer? It’s a terrifying problem for people with fissured identities. Across decades the forms for self-definitions changed, countering the last that came out. And so you’re always at risk of being a traitor as you reformulate your self-definition, as you figure out your role within the struggle. You can become the traitor, the saboteur. Is it always bad? It could be a necessary ingredient of being Iraqi and Palestinian.

MJ: Artists exist so avidly in institutions. We are almost always dependent on them. This is a difficult dependency. We want to know what role you assume within the University of Arizona—is your identity affected by it?

VK: Academics on the left often also say that they erode the university from within, eat away at the rind; there’s a parasitism or sabotage that can only be accomplished from the ‘inside.’ I agree with you, Varya, there’s a hostility almost inherited by artists holding a professorship in the United States . . . But I don’t know, I do believe in the university, the leaps it allows.

SA: Younger generations of academics are more comfortable speaking about their institutions in an accusatorial way. They do speak of sabotaging from within. This is particularly so at elite institutions. Their accusations have so much use. However, I can’t forget the fact that I’ve worked at the University of Arizona for nineteen years! I am the institution for many students, the only face they know besides their student advisor, the administrators at financial aid. I am trying to call out or push past the systemic problems at the University: I cast blame on it, the psychologies it produces, what it funds and forwards. But public universities create an entire workforce, hundreds of thousands of workers each year, and how those people are educated can shift an entire state. So I don’t see myself outside of the University, or in opposition to it: I’m not an independent contractor at a distance from the institution. Political criticisms of the academy are affected by the function of the university you work in and the students that attend it.

MJ: Are you content, then, at the University of Arizona?

SA: From the outside people would say, how could you not be content? You are a celebrated faculty member, you rose in your career at the University of Arizona; you wrote your entire tenure application surrounding Palestinian liberation struggles, about feminist interventions in the Dheisheh refugee camp; and you received tenure: the University rallied around you. I am privileged in that I've been allowed to translate my activism into my teaching. My colleagues at other institutions are amazed by that privilege. I am not so agitational, so inflammatory. That is part of how I got here. By nature I am diplomatic; I’ve come of age as someone who negotiates understanding, who is always putting things in translation. I'm a middle child and a migrant so translation and negotiation, that’s me. Maybe I don’t move at the pace or with the intensity that people want. I am not on the megaphone, and I can’t hurl insults; I’ll blow back. I don’t think we should be so inflammatory. I don’t think everyone should hurl insults. We all must find our place within the movement, and I’m better off working behind closed doors.

I’ll say that the support and protection I received from the University ended on October 7th, though. I’ve felt betrayed because I felt like they knew me and everything I was about, they extracted every part of my identity. Then they galvanized the harm and the attacks that were coming from members of the community and the outside agents that wanted to patrol activists and attack vulnerable faculty and staff. I am Palestinian and therefore well trained for this moment, all my life I’ve witnessed this, but it doesn’t diminish the disappointment . . . It is hard, but we’re not going anywhere. They’re the same old evil coming in with the wind, and they’ll keep moving from place to place. We’re rooted in our struggle, not necessarily rooted in our institutional affiliation. The institution is a space in which that struggle expresses and manifests itself. Evil is unrooted, it blows from one post to another, we’ve blown it away, you know? You can’t unroot us from our struggle.

VK: I apologize, that’s heartbreaking, that abandonment. There are so many hollow intermediaries for evil. I don't know how people hollow out, or how betrayal happens without batting an eye. There’s an inhumanity in that, and in the institution. . .

I am straddling this attraction to the immediate and this desperation for more indestructible interventions. These years, nineteen to twenty-something, are definitive in determining the angle at which you intervene—and figuring out the forms of intervention. Could you please tell us about these feminist interventions at the Dheisheh refugee camp?

SA: When I was in graduate school, I was blessed to travel to Palestine with my professors and some of my cohort. That was 2004, I had just gotten an American passport. Three of us women who did this program in Palestine imagined a collective, and we began it right out of graduate school with three other women: it is called the 6+ collective. The first thing we did was work with women artists in the Dheisheh refugee camp. We were artist-academics and what we could offer was an outlet: we were told to work with the teenage girls, the young girls in the camp—camps are conservative spaces and they lack a structure for doing things outside the home. Now, in the last fifteen, or twenty years, there have been more cultural cooperations with NGOs around the world, but that’s new. This is the early 2000s. The Second Intifada hasn’t finished, segregation is starting to impose itself onto the larger structure of the West Bank. We did workshops, we did bookmaking, journaling, and performing. Leaning on what the site of the camp permits, what can be sustained. This work was explained and exhibited tens of times across the world.

Everything I needed to know about being an adult I learned in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp. Creative ingenuity is an engine, it propels people. You can’t solve political problems militarily nor through multinational entities and their leadership. It will be through the people’s struggle, the creative means of the people. Creativity is in the way the camp is designed, there’s a material knowledge in the makeshift; creativity is in the folklore, the lullabies; creativity is in the work people make for themselves; creativity is in resistance tactics, in the way you evade the IOF; creativity is in the streams for disseminating information and their adaptive nature. I don’t teach through a referential, canonical model of making, tracing to someone you don’t know, who is not proximate to your experience. Your body, your senses, and the places you’ve inhabited are the instruments. How do you walk through a camp and only pay attention to sound? How do you map through touch? Think about the history of the Palestinian struggle, from the First Intifada through the Second Intifada, and the adaptability across that: this is a history of creation. This is groundbreaking for students because they think they have to go to a formal school and learn something then they’ll arrive at an artistic mode. You have arrived, wherever you come from. I forget the question. What did you ask?

VK: It was about the Dheisheh Refugee Camp. We were both writing down some intercepting questions and then they’d be negated by the next thing you said. We’re running after you . . . and you’ve arrived at our destination before we sent along the directions!

The history of art is full of collaborations and collectives. If you want to unpack what pulled apart a collaboration, it’s unfortunately traced to the art world's patriarchal-capitalist-notoriety structure. I was in this landmark survey exhibition at the Bronx Museum with the 6+ collective. We did a performance and participated in a panel. All the women collectives attended, and it was extraordinary, we would one after the other have conversations about how the art world focused on an artist to fame them out, about the attention personal work would get over the collaborative. Collaborations enrich one another, they’re constant negotiation and conversation. It requires daring one another. The art world can’t handle such daring. Collaborations can take the path of least resistance, as it’s the path that everyone can agree on. That’s the only problem. The art market undermines the power of collectivity.

VK: This aversion to individualism, the way the art world whittles collectives down to individuals to reinforce fame-minor culture . . . This challenges my thoughts about your portraiture . . . As of late, I’ve felt wingless, and this feeling was shed when I looked through your portraits in “Carry Over” and “Catalogue.” It’s odd to admit this, it’s almost a surrender, but I briefly sort of teared up, not out of sadness or even reverence but because I hadn't encountered such simultaneous vulnerability and invincibility in so long. It was startling: You startled.

There’s an insistent audacity in self-authorship; self-authorship is the word I go to when thinking about portraiture . . . Is that word fitting? For you is portraiture an avenue for self-authorship; or do you see your body as more of an instrument that you employ?

SA: Woah. I wish I was indomitable. In my portraits it’s my body, there’s my face, but it’s representative of a female figure, anonymous. Self-portraiture is about the way you exist out in the world, the way you want to. I can’t say that for my work. It’s approaching accuracy to say it’s a site or a place or an embodiment of a struggle or a representation of a community. It challenges or juxtaposes historical references, contemporary references. There’s no singular way of saying how the body operates in my work.

The body is sort of an absorbing and receiving instrument, a medium for information, or on which information is transposed. Experience is filtered through and embodied by me. I give a lot of weight to the imagination coming from dreams. I allow it to direct me even if I don’t understand, the understanding comes after creation. There’s a lot of disparate, scary threads.

There’s also a lack of physical context around the body that my works pronounce through barren spaces and backgrounds, to centralize the figure. It is an outcome I came to recognize in my work many, many years later. I believe this barrenness is because of the statelessness that I existed in for most of my life. My connection to land has been made abstract, hollow and empty. Critics say I have a minimalist approach, but it’s not minimalist. It’s a lack of context. Every place is every place, it has nothing to do with me.

The work that returns to my childhood trapped in war is rooted in place. My body was almost incarcerated by its position. It couldn’t get out. We had to escape, that’s a physical escape I mean, but anyone who escapes can say it’s still inside you afterward. You are there. You still have lost your land, been betrayed by it, and are wandering landless from place to place, an alien. I lived as an undocumented person in the United States for so many years and then was given refugee status. Still, we were trying to disappear, go unnoticed. Then my body was disappearing.

This, all the contradictions, all comes through in the work. All of these ways of seeing the body, being in a body. It was subconscious for the first ten years I made art. Then I went through tenure and had to fucking look at everything I had ever done. It was amazing: I printed everything, including four years of work I’d never shown to anybody, for my book with Aperture. I put it down and could step out of myself and see myself. None of this was accidental. It is about me, and it’s completely not. I will give you all those answers, those contradictions. You know I’m a Libra.

MJ: We are both Libras. We are born on the same day, within a couple of hours. Our day is October 14th.

VK: We’re such pendulums, swinging between every position . . . And contradictions, so many contradictions! All my friends no longer see a finality to anything I say. It’s hilarious to meet other Libra women and remember you aren’t alone in your irrationality. Libra women are always implicitly saying, Come back later, I’ll reconclude.

SA: I love it, I love it. Our cheeks, we all have the cheeks. In art, you can evade decisiveness. It could be that or this, or it’s neither. It’s not a guardedness, a way of being cagey. I’m not unwilling. The way we talk about our work changes across our lifetime: work documents an instant of creation, and all art is an artifact. You have to always look at artworks through a historical lens and an immediate eye.

MJ: I was noticing, as you already mentioned, that the space of your work is nowhere, you place yourself no-place; or every-place. At the same time, you’ve described a sort of contested existence, that you are more a physical presence in a place and that place does things to you, instead of you inhabiting it. I’m wondering about this perception of art as locatable. How do you reconcile the importance of specificity and the fact that people impose a specificity on you?

SA: The art isn’t mine. I have an intention and I make work out of it, and then there’s a person, or persons, who receive that work, and the art is something between us: I can’t control this receiving. Art does not exist in the world with running commentary right next to it, so I can put out as many statements, there can be thousands of critics, but people will receive it as they receive it. Sometimes, it means nothing; sometimes, its meaning reveals itself later when something happens in their life; sometimes, it’s revisited years down the line and there is a different relationship.

This has been interrupted a little by the internet. Authorship over art now enters the space where ambiguity or anonymity used to exist, and closes its openness, bringing specificity. Some artists accept this. Some make it more difficult with obnoxious language that doesn’t offer any windows or doors into the space of what they’re trying to think through. It is smoke. This comes when people are not challenged and when understanding is assumed. Those of us from the Global South are very good at articulating what our art is about because we’ve had to advocate for ourselves without supposing that people understand. The problem is: that formulates a tunnel, and we must break from the category that they position us in, that we title ourselves under to be recognized.

I don’t believe in a world that’s fair, I’m moving towards that. I know things are not fair and won’t give an illusion of fairness. I give access points to my work, but I don’t care to control how my work is interpreted. I want them to think. I don’t want to rewrite their mind. If I didn’t want to be met with new thoughts I wouldn’t share my work, I don’t need to make and share things. I could live with my dreams and talk to myself, but I have the impulse to be communicating, in an imagined dialogue. You put down your defensiveness, put down your ego, and hear what you mean to someone else, and it’ll catch you by surprise. It might coincide with the truth, or have an equal amount of incidences, or be completely the antithesis of what you’re intending.

One of my big challenges is that I’m coded in the Arab female body, and it’s impossible to break from the social visual code of history. I’m working against image history, visual history, and the framing of my body in films, media, memes, and cartoons. In “Carry Over,” for example, I wanted to show the absurdity. The scale and dysfunction of the burdens placed on Arab women through those large sculptures that are impossible to hold, to carry. You have to interrupt the social visual code so that people don’t interpret your work through their subjectivity. Art is an antagonism.

Again, I say this so much, and it is no less true each time: I learned everything in Palestine. The world’s going to frame you the way they’re going to frame you. In “Carry Over,” I specifically deal with the legacy of Orientalist images of the woman as Other, the Black, Brown woman as Other. I was in that defensive mode, and I resisted orientalism, but I didn’t stay in that mode. Palestinians never remain in the defensive.

There’s so much misunderstanding, so much simplistic and stupid trapping in the social visual code. People are now more eager to ask a question rather than tell you and this is extraordinary. This is the product of artists inviting questions, inviting challenges. Challenges are gifts to artists. You have an extraordinary breakthrough because you’re facing problems—financial, circumstantial, spatial, and material. Those are all opportunities, extraordinary fuel. This is why the extraordinary work comes from the Global South. My students want to hang their sneakers after looking at what I show them, they think they can’t compete, and they won’t come up with great ideas. I’m like, it’s not about coming up with great ideas, it’s not solely struggle and real shit, it’s about making the most sincere work you can make, right? You must be authentic, attuned to what’s happening, and welcoming of challenges.

VK: “The defensive mode” is brilliant. It’s more battling than reactionary. I might write to you about that because art as, primarily, agitation, that’s a path I fear; art as a rattling, stirring . . . I don’t understand this desire to encounter ‘the real,’ this forbidding intimidation by what has already been written. I felt so foolish, a while ago, when that way of thinking was first introduced to me by my peers here. ‘The real’ was blasphemous in its implication that there is an unreality in an experience, in adolescence. Cambridge exposed me to artifice. . . We are so blessed to be born so late into the history of literature, so much preceded us, and there’s so much to borrow: Imagine being there for the fundamentals! Oh god, Hobbes and Rousseau being contemporary. Imagine assembling the periodic table. Thank god so much has preceded today. But encountering ‘the real.’ There’s nothing desirable there . . . Who isn’t in flight from gravity?

SA: Yes! Yes, I reject that work comes from starving and struggling. That is not desirable. Anyone who has been hungry will tell you go eat. That takes such perseverance. Nobody should wish for that. Words can come from serenity. The serenity can’t be artifice. When you have pure peace and serenity, there are beautiful possibilities, and that’s a blessing too.

VK: Look at the time! We need to end! Let me tell you about this exchange in Aimé Césaire’s 

 between Ariel and Caliban. It is frightening in its offhand fatalism. Both were enslaved by Prospero and are arguing about how to go on: Ariel believes they ought to destroy Prospero’s serenity so he’s forced to acknowledge his injustice; Caliban cackles— ‘Prospero’s conscience!’ Ariel again insists that they must give him one, that a conscience can be acquired and their freedom is contingent on this acquisition. Caliban cackles and the conversation ends with him declaring: ‘You might as well ask a stone to grow flowers.’

This is hilarious though underneath it is haunting: Caliban’s is an undertaker’s humor. Is that what you call the man at the mortuary? Regardless, me and many of my peers can feel like such fools: there’s a David-Goliath comic futility in fighting against these fortified institutions, these cemented, ceaseless injustices. But also I could go my whole life whispering to the stone, Please, bloom. You are older, and I think have settled into the situation of David, how do you stay strong in that?

SA: Everything I’ve learned, I learned in Palestine. This isn’t true but it all returns. It all came to the surface there. It’s also how we’re raised: We will always be Palestinian, We are Palestinian, Everything is in Palestine. These are undeniable facts. You can’t feel like a fool: it’s foolish to drive a car knowing you could die in a car accident, or somebody could seize your school and shoot everyone. There are infinite possibilities for suffering. And then what—you don’t allow any of them? The feeling of futility is so overwhelming but also you can counter it by activating a bodily response. The body refuses futility. You march, you paint, all these strategies are felt.

I was six months pregnant the first time I traveled to Palestine. I couldn’t travel before because I held an Iraqi passport*, and it was staggering the difference between the Palestine described by elders, a Palestine of the past, another place, illusory and lost; and then this fresh view. This is not to say my family is wrong, but Palestinians in exile keep an outdated vision alive. These visions are always there even if invisible, abstract. I thought I would retrace their visions, find remnants, but that alluded me and instead, I found an active resistance, embedded into daily life. If the schools were shut down, they taught in the roads; if from your apartment building you saw a blockade, you called people to reroute them. Whatever it is, people worked around, worked through. Everybody was working. There was no walking out of it. The vast majority of people couldn’t fathom leaving, they didn’t want to, it was how to stay and thrive. It wasn’t about resurrecting a pre-1948 Palestine. They can’t afford nostalgia.

There’s a different struggle here, the struggle of erasure, forgetting, feeling stuck on the losing side, and adopting an easier political, social, and economic stance. Palestine isn’t historic, though, it will emerge on the international stage over and over until liberation. It’s seductive to walk away when you are afraid and fatalist, but people will always be pulled back. You’ll be forced to contend with Palestine. I return to Palestine every few months, at least before the last three years, and am friends with activists entrenched in the struggle. They taught me to work without hope. You have to do without change. It’s a long struggle, the struggle as it is today looks nothing like sixty years ago. It isn’t disappearing but evolving, and a choice to exit the struggle isn’t a choice. Once you know, you can’t unknow; once you see, your eyes are altered forever. You might move through certain periods of fatigue. You might be a little forgetting. But time and time again you will wind up back in the struggle, I cannot tell you how many members of my own family fought against me doing this work for years. Why are you doing it? Why don't you work on this? Why don't you work on local politics? Why? We’re Palestinians, but we occupy a range of positions. There are shifts from Democrat to Republican. To be on the side of the people of Palestine is nothing like that. It’s a human understanding. If you are human it’s there. You can’t avoid it.

VK: Absolutely. These things transcend the ideological. You don’t have a choice. Once you start thinking in terms of choice, it’s dangerous! It establishes a cruel hierarchy, there’s the wretched and the contemplative witness. . . . . . . I agree that it’s not about hope but persisting. Those are not so codependent. You have to be so militant in your persistence. In the summer I was in Ongata Rongai, nearly an hour out of Nairobi, and one of my cousins had gotten dependable work for the first time in two, three years. When maandamano, the mass demonstrations, began, many found it offensive that he rallied alongside friends. Their sons didn’t have work and here was this boy who spit at his blessings. We argued about this all the time. You can’t abstain from protest based on having a future, because, who doesn’t have a future? Whose death is weightless? . . . You can’t claim that one breathing man is no better than dead because of how he spends his days. In my eye, every young boy might as well be my brother. Every maandamano is a rehearsal, not in the theatrical sense, but rehearsal in that you are there, amongst the believers, in the scene that creates the possibility for revolution. You must have the courage to be on-site, even if it’s with branches, or even if it’s only with a bottle of water. You are approaching something, even if there’s no hope.

SA: Exactly. You are approaching something, and it’s not necessarily hope, but it arms you with all kinds of other tools. We all have different roles in our struggle, though, and it’s difficult because you have to rehearse in different scenes. Not everybody will do the same thing, not everybody will be visible, alongside each other. In the spring, during the Gaza Solidarity Encampments, everybody was all hands on deck. Nobody can sustain this kind of activism day in and day out. Not everybody has that steady consciousness or such intense humanism, many aren’t persistent in rage. There are different temperaments in a movement. People are so exhausted. I was working with an Iraqi friend and he said, You know, I can’t cry anymore, I look at Palestine and I can’t cry, we’ve all been on the losing end forever and ever and ever.

I don’t feel the same as him. People in Palestine live their lives each day, they eat and feed their children and they go to school Inshallah, they make art at the camps—all of this is a winning day. I am not a revolutionary leader, but I do believe everything is possible, I believe revolution is there all the time. We are all reacting, participating in a battle for Palestine, it’s a fight for the Soul of the World, for who we are. This is an injustice that is enacted daily. Not the aftermath, the reverberations, but ongoing, adding bodies every day to the death count. I know it sounds spiritual or irrational but Palestinians hold the heaviest of commitments. I swear to God I could’ve been from anywhere and been equally moved by the Palestinian spirit. Palestinians instruct everyone. I swear to God they will never get rid of it. On my second visit in 2005, there had been no communication with this part of my family since 1947, before the Nakba, and I managed to find my grandfather’s home and find family in that village. Then I took my aunt and cousins there. They can’t take out Palestine, all they’ve managed to do is make millions more Palestinians, people who carry the heaviest of commitments. They’ve made you a Palestinian, they impart it along with all the other identities you have. To be Palestinian is not necessarily where you were born or your family lineage but that conviction, that allegiance to justice, that persistence without hope, that fearlessness. I swear to God we are going to win this fight.

*Iraq declared war on the newly established state of Israel in 1948 during the Nakba; since then, Iraq has refused to recognize Israel as a legitimate state, and the two countries have no formal diplomatic relations. Due to Iraq’s historic allegiance with the Palestine Liberation Organization and outspoken opposition to the Zionist genocidal project, Iraqis are considered high-risk entrants to the Occupied Palestinian Territories under Israeli entry policies.

Mary Jane

Mary Jane

Features

Fall 2024 - Land

An Interview with Sama Alshaibi