| art.description.project | As a poet, I write in Swedish. Furthermore, Swedish is arguably the only language in which I might be able to write properly, which is to say poetry. The first language I learned, as an infant, and then later as a child, is Persian. I was first exposed to Swedish at an age of six, started to learn at age seven, and spoke fluently at age 8, at which point, Persian, very quickly, came to be dominated by Swedish in my everyday use of languages. If the experience of exile is “a condition of terminal loss”, as Edward Said has it, which is to say that living in exile is in effect living “the deprivations felt at not being with others in the communal habitation”, that is, if exile is fundamentally understood as living a loss, what does it mean to live the loss of that loss (as the philosopher Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback has once pointed out). What is the condition of a loss of terminal loss? This is not a play with semantics, it is the actual living experience of finding oneself estranged from one’s historical communal habitat, and still not being fully adopted by one’s potential future habitat. The condition of exile that Said speaks of is the loss of a well developed communal habitat, the loss of shared concerns, sounds, scents, cultures, worldviews, and so on, developed in the past – something in which one has once been embedded. But to evolve in proximity of that loss, in proximity of the stories, memories, and formulations of that loss, while being othered by what has the actual potential of being one’s communal habitat – is a different thing altogether. European-hyphenated identities are to a large extent embodied by people brought to Europe as children, speaking one language in the intimate spheres of their homes, but acquiring another as they grow up, the latter becoming their primary language. Given not only Europe’s history, but also the current state of fascism sweeping across most of the continent, it’ll always be hard to feel fully at home, outside of one’s home, although the narratives of societies, and the principles of democracies formulated by these societies, will say differently. The experience at the core of this predicament is not “a condition of terminal loss”, but rather a condition of perpetually suspended loss – a loss of loss; an ambivalent sort of exile.
The work “Aural Intimacies” explores the abivalent relationship of two languages, where the second one has been strengthened on the expense of the first one. The idea at the core of the work is that very basic emotions or states, learned in the meaning world of the first language, sometimes are at odds with their expression in the second language. As a poet, the practice of writing becomes endlessly entangled with translation, which might create the possibility of, as it were, transporting meaning from one world to another.
The work consists of poetry in different languages (mostly English), as well as a critical reflection performed, intertwined with a musical composition that connects and unveils the reverberation of the meaning-worlds’ material/sonic reverberations. | sv |
