‘You road I enter upon and look around,

I believe you are not all that is here,

I believe that much unseen is also here’ 

Walt Whitman

—

ALLIUM TRIQUETRUM 

It’s late April and, as we ascend wooden steps into Heane Wood, the life of the woodland is emerging from dormancy with a rude burst of colour, sound and smell. I have two co-pilgrims with me for this final stretch. Rasheeqa is a forager and herbalist, so within minutes we’re chewing on three cornered leeks and collecting garlic mustard leaves for lunch. I crouch low to the ground, senses attuning to the undergrowth. Upright again, my eyes adjust to the range of visibility. The woodland, though a small pocket, feels vast and rich. 

Crossing a stile out of the woods into open fields, we step into bright sunlight. I turn to the sky and close my eyes, orienting my face towards the sun by warmth. I can hear nesting rooks on the other side of the fields. As each car approaches, they crescendo then fade with its passing. Their feral symphony, unheard by the drivers, continues as my attention moves on.

GLECHOMA HEDERACEA 

We stop for another rest, luxuriating in the easy walking, bountiful fields and pilgrim conviviality. I stir a handful of ground ivy into a little kettle. As the earthy brew diffuses into my body, the word renewal stews in me, a prism through which to peer out at my surroundings and maybe, if angled appropriately, to look back into the dark pool of my own consciousness. 

The word feels like a leaf dropped into water, its overlapping contexts eddying gently outwards. Renewal as the search for stories that brings me here. Renewal as the shape-shifting grief patterns of recent years. As the flowering of the season around us. As the re-enchantment of the land that walking makes manifest. As post-Brexit cultural regeneration. As the window of recalibration briefly offered by the pandemic. As the systemic transition from modernity to who knows what. Renewal as the very act of pilgrimage itself, putting one foot in front of the other until I reach a destination which, of course, isn’t a destination but another point of departure.

PLANTAGO MAJOR 

Rasheeqa has made a pilgrim tincture of plantain, to counter inflammation of the feet, nettle, to help circulation and mugwort, for visionary dreaming. These three herbs are named in the Old English healing spell known as the ‘Nine Herbs Charm’ – mucgcwyrt, wegbrade and netelan. Plantain was known as waybread in old English because it grows best on trodden paths:

And you, Waybread, plant-mother!
You’re open to the east, yet mighty within:
Carts creaked over you, women rode over you,
over you brides bellowed, over you bulls snorted!

You withstood it all—and you pushed back:
You withstood venom, you withstood air-illness,
you withstood the horror who travels over land.

I am struck by how the plants in the spell are addressed personally as animate beings, as responsable entities, as allies in the struggle against the nebulous ‘horror who travels over land’ and realise how far we have come from such a foundational understanding. I place plantain leaves in my boots to stop my feet swelling and becoming painful.

Ingesting plants from the landscape we pass through, laying them on my skin, I approach an altered sense of human-ness, one that responds to environment, one motivated by sensing rather than making sense. Maybe it is the time of year and the elation of Spring, but my body feels more resonant. It seems to hum at the same frequency as my surroundings. I write the words ‘wild belonging’ in my notebook. 

FAGUS SYLVATICA

We sleep on the bell-ringers platform in the church at Barham. Waking early to the sun streaming in through stained glass, I muse on the day’s walk to Canterbury. The city has been one of Europe’s major pilgrim destinations for more than a thousand years, and it is likely that the route I have been following these months is one that committed European pilgrims would have trodden between Canterbury and Santiago De Compostela. This is not my final destination, but there is a wall painting in the cathedral that I want to see – a depiction of the life of St Eustace that inspired Russell Hoban to write Riddley Walker. The novel charts the progress of a twelve-year-old boy-seer through this same landscape that I have been walking, roughly two millennia in the future, ‘at the bitter end of the nuclear road’. Towards the close of the novel, the main character has a pilgrim epiphany in the ruins of Canterbury Castle: 

‘I cud feal some thing growing in me it wer like a grean sea surging in me it wer saying, LOSE IT. Saying, LET GO. Saying, THE ONLYES POWER IS NO POWER.’

The only power is no power. 

The words walk with me still. 

What if we really tried to let go of power? How could we go about disinvesting in modernity’s urge for human domination over a subordinated nature? What would it look like – this re-alignment of humanity within planetary cycles of relinquishment and renewal? 

What would it feel like?

The day’s walking is relatively short so we can make time for way marking rituals. My other co-pilgrim, Adam, is a musician and yoga teacher. He’s also an electrician and solar expert but that won’t help us today. Mid-afternoon, we are walking through lush bluebells that carpet Trenley Woods on the edge of Canterbury, when suddenly the flowers disappear in a marked line, as if a spell has been cast. Rounding the corner, we come into the presence of a huge beech tree, whose bark is covered in the arborglyphs of generations of lovestruck youth and godstruck pilgrims. There is magic here, whatever we mean by magic, so we burn some sage and I sing a song that I think of as magical because it finds its way into the lives of people I sing it to, and because that’s how it found its way into my life. It includes the line ‘Let grief be a falling leaf at the dawning of the day’, words that hold within them everything I am trying to say here. A few weeks later Adam is asked to sing it at a wake.

CORYLUS AVELLANA 

We reach Canterbury cathedral too late to be let in, but the gate guard takes pity and nods us through. We enter the cathedral just as the final strains of evensong are fading. It’s enough to feel the acoustics of the place, the sound of the organ reverberating in the caverns above. Even my hazel staff tapping on the floor sounds celestial. As I listen to its echoes, I remember there is a decision I must take. According to tradition, pilgrims to Canterbury throw their staff into the sea at Whitstable, seven miles away, but the act seems to mark an end that I don’t really feel. I understand, now, a pilgrim’s relationship with their staff. An alchemical reaction has taken place these last few months: this is not just a tent pole, chin rest, and bramble clearer, but also a quietly insistent teacher, reaffirming its woodiness in my sweaty hand, clacking against pebble, thudding on dry earth, locked into an ungainly but relentless collaboration with the rhythm of my feet, when rhythm is all that is left.    

ARTEMESIA VULGARIS

My feet crunch the pebbles underfoot and I look out onto a rolling brown sea. The end of my pilgrimage is a mysterious sand formation known as The Street, an ancient tidal pathway that stretches for a kilometre out into the Thames estuary at Whitstable. The tide is in when we arrive, and I need to leave before it goes out again, so the Street is neither visible nor accessible. I’m used to this kind of non-event at the end of pilgrimage; it warns me not to celebrate an ending without understanding that it is also a beginning. I’ll come back one day soon, when I can walk out into the middle of the sea at night, surrounded by stars and water, and think about where this road to nowhere goes next.

And so to mugwort, the dreaming plant. What do I dream of? What visions appear? It’s easy to imagine systemic renewal, less easy to place ourselves within it, or move towards it as an individual. We can gesture towards such goals by using less plastic, avoiding flying, or trying not to drive a car so much, but surely we mostly understand now that these small changes fall hopelessly short of the mark. They can only be rituals to ward off the darkness, to help us feel some agency. The best I can hope for is that we might collectively re-orient ourselves towards a way of being in the world that welcomes grief in, acknowledges entanglement, exercises care, foregrounds slowness, practices togetherness and seeks renewal. 

Renewal isn’t about the new. It’s about being able to revisit the familiar, the old, the ancient, even, with the benefit of what we’ve learnt in the meantime. Nor is it a new idea to revisit our relationship with the land. Yet pilgrimage allows us moments to step towards a more ancient future and holds fleeting spaces for us to re-imagine our place in it all over again.

The post Pilgrim notes: renewal appeared first on Untold.

I started to have daily walks. Finding in walking a form to reclaim the city, to reshape my relationship to it, and to inhabit it with my body and all that inhabits it. One plot, adjacent to Riad el Solh square, captivated my attention and became my chosen destination. Initially slated for a multipurpose tower designed by Jean Nouvel, the project was halted when an archaeological site emerged during excavation. The plot’s allure lay in its six-meter-deep sunken walls, revealing faint traces of a stone structure that proved elusive to decipher. Notably, scattered across a significant portion of the plot were recurring holes, uniform in size—a rectangle now serving as a makeshift pot for one or two shrubs.

During one of my walks on the site, I crossed paths with Togo, a protester hailing from Bekaa, who had pitched a tent next to the plot. Togo relied on this area throughout the protest, foraging for his daily ingredients. He graciously took me on a brief tour, offering his unique perspective on the location of the frog pond and pointing out areas abundant with chard, mallow, nettles, and more. Conversations with Togo left me in awe. While foraging had been a fundamental part of my upbringing, finding a way to migrate that knowledge to the city had been elusive—until now.

Among local practitioners, there exists a shared ethos when it comes to foraging: take only what you need, leaving the rest for others, and allow the plants to rejuvenate for the next year. This mutual understanding forms a cognitive community centered around the plants, emphasizing the necessity of utilizing them for survival while also preserving them for the future. It harmonizes with the transient nature of the environment. Foragers grasp that the availability of foraged ingredients is confined to a brief period each year. To incorporate these elements into their diet year-round, foragers recognize the importance of preservation. Consequently, various preservation methods come into play, extending the availability of these ingredients while introducing alterations to their original state—be it through drying, fermenting, pickling, making compost, or crafting jams.

In essence, attuning oneself to the seasonality of nature imparts unique flavors and dishes to every season. Reflecting on my childhood, each year unfolded through the lens of the food we enjoyed. For me, the annual cycle commenced with the start of school, coinciding with the busy period of picking olives and producing olive oil and soap within my family.

Following this, the snail season marked the onset of winter, initiated by the first rain after summer. The colder months were navigated with an abundance of stews and soups, complemented by various herbal teas meticulously picked and dried in anticipation of winter’s arrival. Transitioning into spring, chards emerged, dominating the landscape and finding their way into dishes like Kebbeh, Manoushe, and various cooked pots. Our meals became enriched with an array of shrubs, either cooked or simply dressed with olive oil and lemon.

As spring and summer unfolded, fruits became remarkably accessible, creating a vibrant palette of flavors. However, the scent of jams being prepared signaled the impending end of the fruit season. From that point on, apples took center stage as my primary fresh fruit until the next season arrived.

Togo rekindled my passion for foraging, inspiring me to re-engage with this practice. However, now I find myself in the city, far from the familiar habitat of my upbringing where foraging feels natural. While foraging in the village represents a connection to the wilderness and a harmonious relationship with nature and its offerings, the implications of foraging in the city take on a different nuance, and so did my walks.

Unlike many cities, Beirut lacks communal gardens, and its relatively small size and underdeveloped infrastructure have contributed to a scarcity of public spaces. Over time, these spaces have been systematically taken away, gradually stripped and privatized. This has made it increasingly challenging to foster communal interactions without incurring a fee. In the face of these constraints imposed on our daily lives, foraging emerges as a tool that allows us to weave together the disparate elements of the city. It’s a means of navigating through spaces consumed by entropy—be it an empty parking lot, a small patch of soil near a pedestrian lane, or an abandoned construction site.

Through ancestral knowledge;
We walk on the lookout for edible shrubs;
We create alternative cartographies;
And through ancestral gestures;
We reconnect to the city.

Ursula Le Guin’s insightful exploration in “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” resonates profoundly as I navigate the urban environment. Le Guin challenges the traditional hunter-centric narrative, proposing that our ancestors were gatherers first, emphasizing the significance of containment over conquest. This shift in perspective aligns with my foraging endeavors in the city—a quest not for a singular conquest but a continuous act of gathering and containing, mirroring the essence of a carrier bag. In this bustling urban milieu where communal spaces are elusive and privatization prevails, the act of foraging becomes a symbolic carrier bag, a vessel for weaving together the fragments of the city, a means of embracing the role of gatherer, and challenging the cartographer

As I walk through the Riad el Solh plot again I come across Inula, also known as Tayyoun. It’s the pioneering plant that emerges in areas where the soil has endured substantial damage. Inula Viscosa, aptly nicknamed the Wound Herb (عشبة الجرح), showcases its robust nature by flourishing unapologetically through the cracks in roads and walls. Characterized by thick, sticky leaves with pointed edges, Inula acts as a natural plaster, aiding in the healing process. When its flowers bloom, they resemble butter daisies, with petals that are thinner and longer. As the flower completes its life cycle, the petals gradually give way, replaced by delicate white fuzz.

A fascinating aspect of Tayyoun is its method of seed dispersal. Mere footsteps near these plants create a gentle breeze, enough to rustle the tops of their stems, scattering seeds in the process. Perhaps it’s not entirely coincidental that this resilient plant, found abundantly across Beirut, possesses healing properties for indigestion and respiratory problems.

As I daily walked back from this plot in downtown Beirut to my studio in Sin el Fil, the landscape transformed as I became increasingly aware of the shrubs and trees accompanying me along the way. Among them, the Eucalyptus tree (شجرة الكينا) stood prominently, a lasting legacy of the French mandate era when reforestation efforts reshaped Lebanon. The French strategically planted these trees on roadsides and in swampy areas to combat moisture. Over time, however, the environmental impact of Eucalyptus trees became apparent, as their extensive root systems not only dried the soil but also depleted it of essential nutrients.

Despite these drawbacks, the short period of Eucalyptus settlement in Lebanon left an indelible mark on its citizens. I reminisce about my grandmother lifting a pot of boiling Eucalyptus leaves, urging me to inhale the vapor believed to alleviate coughs. Her house perpetually exuded the fragrance of Eucalyptus, leading me to diverge from my initial destination and follow the path of the Eucalyptus tree laid out before me.

Along the way as well, in Karantina, situated on the western bank of the Beirut River, the vegetation transitioned again. Karantina is historically known as one of the earliest quarantine stations of the Ottoman Empire, it is today home to a diverse community of migrants and refugees. Over the years, waves of displaced populations, from Armenians fleeing genocide in 1915 to Palestinian refugees after the Nakba of 1948, have settled in this area. Karantina also witnessed a tragic massacre in 1976, a dark chapter in Lebanon’s modern history, where Lebanese Muslims and Palestinians were victims of a far-right Christian militia. The area continued to host Iraqi Kurds fleeing Saddam Hussein’s rule and, more recently, received the first wave of Syrian refugees in 2013.

As people from different regions arrived, they brought seeds and planted them around their homes, introducing a variety of non-native species. This unintentionally created a new ecosystem that migrated with its human carriers. Notably, a towering Jackfruit tree, separating a five-floor building from the general security office, became a symbol of Karantina’s resilience. The tree bears fruits reaching the size of watermelons, with a rough and thick outer skin displaying a bumpy or spiky texture, changing color with ripeness from green to yellow or brown.

Back in my studio, I reflect on the immersive walks I take each time I visit downtown Beirut, sparked by the protest that initiated this entire journey. These walks allow me to trace my path from the village to the present moment, delving into the insights provided by various plant forms and the rituals I’ve come to embrace. In doing so, I contemplate the impermanence of our surroundings and the rich stories they hold.

The post A Beirut forager’s odyssey appeared first on Untold.

In my second year living in Amsterdam, I started to suffer from extreme lower back pain. It was not new, I knew I had a herniated disk since I was 26. I had to do some check ups which recommended some physiotherapy for my back.

In the first session my physiotherapist told me that I walk “wrong”. Hah! What a weird thought. Did you ever think about your walk in terms of right and wrong? 

“We have to correct your walk,” she said. “It is affecting your whole body posture.” 

The chiropractor confirmed that too and showed me how the accumulation of walking “wrong” for years had shaped my posture, had shaped my body, had shaped me?

The explanation by the professionals was: 

My lower back muscles are weak, causing my pelvis to be misplaced and my knees to twist inwards. Which in turn affects my neck, which became now stretched to the front to balance my body. 

They showed me pictures, I saw the red line on my body showing my current posture vs the green line of how it should be.

The explanation made sense to me, I guess I heard enough comments on my walk before to understand what they are talking about. But, I also knew that I walked differently in different times and places. I changed my walk with every city I lived in. I just didn’t know that in a way I was changing my body too.

So at the age of 33 I had to re-learn how to walk. 

Every session, I get on the treadmill and walk slowly following the instructions of my physiotherapist: “Step, step. Left, right. Put your hands in your pockets, don’t use them to balance. Depend on your muscles, trust your muscles”.

I never thought that I did not. I wonder what made me lose trust in my muscles and in my body. 

My friend Sara, an artist who works with walking as an artistic practice, wrote once:

“My physiotherapist had a strong theory on the relationship between public gender-based violence and lower-back problems, which, she explained, a lot of Egyptian women suffer from. The swinging hip movement necessary to relax and strengthen such muscles are regarded by the male gaze on the street as an invitation for sexual harassment, and as women try to avoid it (having long been victim-blamed for sexual harassment) they use less powerful, less central muscles, leaving torsos weaker.”

Well, I can definitely relate.

This makes me think about how different genders experience streets and experience walking. 

Walking, wandering, drifting, steering…

And it makes me reflect on the concept of Dérive, which Guy Debord conceptualizes as an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants stop focusing on their everyday relations to their social environment. A technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences.

Dérive involves the awareness of the psycho-geographical effects.It is an anti-deterministic liberation according to the Letterist International. I remember as an artist, I was fascinated by how they saw walking as a subversive practice against power, against forced structures of control over our bodies. A way to claim back our freedom, in our cities. 

And walking is indeed subversive, but I find myself asking: for whom does this apply? What risks did Debord have to face in his walks around Paris?

When I looked into that, I found a list of obstacles that Debord collected which Dérive can be hindered by:

– late night hours

– stopping for banal tasks

– fatigue

– weather

But what about 

– sexual harassment

– dark streets

– the existence -or not- of sidewalks 

– what I am wearing

– the level of tolerance of the neighborhood to my sex and color.

– police blocking the streets

I guess we experience the city differently when we are walking, even if we are walking together. 

<<<< Simon – Mabsota / سيمون – مبسوطة  >>>>

Sometimes it strikes me how little I hear someone talking about taking a wake in my mother tongue, Arabic.

( آتمشي )

I looked for it in many movies and tv dramas. 

“تعالى ننزل نتمشى ونحكي”

“معلش أنا عايزة اتمشى شوية عشان أفكر”

When it is mentioned, it is either by groups of friends that want to take a walk to chat and catch up or by a  person who is heavy hearted and needs to be alone, or as a romantic act for couples. 

Is walking an act of self care? 

How much were you taught about self care in your childhood?

****

“طفح المجاري في حارتكم علمك رقص الباليه” 

“The sewage spurt in your neighborhood, taught you how to dance ballet”

A sentence by the poet Montaser Hegazy. A Brilliant image! 

I saw myself as a kid. The sewage from the neighbor’s house used to spurt. It always took days to fix and was always getting broken again.

That was common, and we always knew what to do, and how to walk over sewage: A lot of calculation, careful stepping, controlling the balance, measuring the distance between the stones, opening the legs and hhhopp.

Indeed it seemed like dancing when you think about it.

They say obstacles can shape the road, 

But, what really shapes our walk?

*****

Many thoughts rush in my head:

The privilege of walking,

The privilege in walking,

My walk shapes my body,

My privilege shapes my body,

My walk shapes my posture,

What is the posture of privilege??

****

I left, I walked away, I moved, I changed. 

I learnt new walks, and I improved my posture.

I don’t think I ever stopped to mourn my lost past, my lost walks. 

I needed to get over the pain, but my body decided to take slower steps.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

They don’t really come in order, I wonder how every stage affected my walk. 

I think I walked better in denial, while depression was always bad for my posture. 

Well, now I’m walkin’ down the line:

<<<< Joan Baez – Walkin’ Down The Line  [HD]   >>>>

The post The body keeps the score appeared first on Untold.

It has been a while since I have walked in nature.

The last time I did, it was someone else walking in my place, a stand-in.

Did you ever walk in someone else’s shoes?

Could you feel what they feel? Did your body remember what their body remembers?

I looked for a ‘stand-in’ after my residence permit, as a student in The Netherlands, was not extended by the Dutch authorities. I could object and they could reconsider their decision, but in the meanwhile, I had to wait in The Netherlands. I could not travel nor visit my home country Lebanon.

It took them a year and a half to revise their decision.

Waiting, the ground under my feet got radically unstable and I lost orientation. It felt like my body was clearly cast off the place where I am. A clear cartography of political powers and systems of exclusion brought itself back to the foreground, and my body got re-pinned on its pre-determined position on the map, there, where I am not.

I placed an advertisement looking for a stand-in: someone that would take my place in Lebanon for ten days, visiting people and places that constitute the idea home to me.

I chose Aitana, a Spanish choreography student in Amsterdam.

I gave her a notebook with150 pages of handwritten recollections and instructions of how to inhabit my place, how to embody my feelings and memories, and lists of what to smell, what to touch, what to look at etc…

She walked through my memories, physically and mentally. She made cartographies of love, loss, longing, grief, physical memory and entanglement visible with her presence, and through my absence.

My stand-in did not only perform actions that are initially performed by my body, but she also performed actions that were yet to be performed or cannot or will not be performed by me. This made Aitana alternately a stand-in and a body-double. She did not look like me, she did not speak Arabic and she was not my friend.

In preparation, I asked my best friend Bilal, if there were something he would like to do with me that he can’t do because I’m not there, or because when I go to Lebanon, I’m always busy with family and with getting myself together after being abroad for a while.

Bilal replied: “I’ve always wanted to take a walk at dawn, with you in nature; somewhere where we can step out of our daily routines and constructions. Somewhere where we can just be and communicate smoothly to bridge our distances and differences”. 

Which ‘nature’ will he take you to?

Does nature sound the same there, as you know it?

Bilal picked Aitana up one early morning and drove to the hills of Jezzine, an hour’s drive from my parent’s home in Saida, south Lebanon.

Bilal took me to a rocky area, with a few ruins of old houses, lots of yellow flowers, a huge excavator, and some abandoned buildings heavily shelled during one of the wars with Israel, my stand-in described. He had brought a bottle of red wine, Ksara, which they drank on the grass at ten in the morning, overlooking the hills.

I don’t think Bilal relates to nature from a Western romantic perspective, from a nostalgia for a oneness with nature that has been lost in our hectic, ‘civilized’ lives. He is keenly aware of the fact that “nature” is variously conceptualized and thus he took a risk.

I think back to a book that fascinated Bilal and I and that we have discussed several times, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. It explores the spiritual journey to self-discovery.

I believe Bilal relates to nature as a place where we learn to stop searching, and begin to listen, perceive and reflect. A place where what is “sought” (“artha”) can be “attained” (“siddha”) through letting go and unlearning the constructs of ourselves. Because nature is infinitely wise, infinitely complex and infinitely irrational, it reveals the reality of our being as we contemplate it, and that reality is change.

She walked in nature with Bilal. She made sketches of that in her notebook.

I walk through her descriptions and memories of that walk. Through an other I was able to access unexplored landscapes but also to investigate and listen better to the ones tread many times.

Follow us!

As I walk through her narrations, I sense the misty green grass brushing against my calves and wetting my pants as I shift the weight of my hips between the rocks and the small white and yellow flowers blooming between the cracks. Slowly my body awakens, at the same pace of the sun rising behind us, shining on all the details around us, drenching all the colors with its rays. I can almost hear the echo of the houses and see the trees whose branches rise like triumphant arms from the battered walls, defying a history of loss. I notice my eyes trying to fill in the bullet holes in the dilapidated houses on the hills.

Displacing my weight on the soil carrying me, between Lebanon and The Netherlands, I tried to listen to the stories it withholds.

Turbulent and complex histories, human and geological, shape both their landscapes. Histories of occupation, colonization, migration, paths of enslaved people, exiles, murder, victims, also resonate and disintegrate in a landscape. Not only in the landscape of our memory, but also in sand, peat, stone, salt and water. 

Does nature also experience pain or grief?

How does she grieve?

Looking at the bulleted destroyed houses, the memory of looking at Israeli tanks ravage the typical landscape of southern Lebanon; with its citrus groves on one side and the sea on the other, came rushing back to me.

A scene in which an Israeli tank destroys a banana plantation, while soldiers meanwhile jump out of the hatch, using their machine guns to perforate the landscape in one continuous stream of 360 degrees, floats through my bones to my skin. It is a scene from the animated film Waltz with Bashir, which I saw at Rialto cinema in Amsterdam.

I remember how my whole body felt devastated, how my shivers pierced the silence of the cinema hall, and how tears burst from my eyes and did not stop flowing in the weeks that followed. Somewhere in that scene, in the futility of the violence and in the abstraction of its representation in an illustrated form, was the signal for my war trauma to come to the surface and flood my body. With this particular landscape of the South, where I grew up, with all its lives, shapes, colors and smells, I feel a strong connection. It felt like they were ravaging my family.

Suppose we recognize the things we grew up with as family, as our non-human family, our heritage. Everything that grew in the backyard near you, or what you found on the beach, or in the swamp and among the rubble where you played as a child; everything that kept you company, that inspired you, that you could escape into, that could comfort you, that gave you courage, or literally nourished you, or revealed to you the meaning, the magic and contradictions of life. A flower, an insect, a shell, a stone, a patch, a stick, a mud puddle, the sound of a river, a mountain: your family.

In another scene of the film, the soldiers take a group photo on the tank, on a sunny, quiet morning in the hills of the South. Then they begin driving the tank through the countryside while eating candy. A Hebrew pop song louds as a soundtrack: “Lebanon, good morning. Too much pain to go on, Lebanon, good morning.”

One of the soldiers recalls, “It was really an idyllic, pastoral scene. We enjoyed the scenery during the slow drive. In a tank, you always feel safe.” And as he continues to repeat: “In the tank we always feel protected”, the tank drives over cars, crushes them, and turns the lovely landscape into a violated environment, a ruin. The song continues, “Lebanon, you bleed to death in my arms. You are the love of my life. My short, short life.”

For a moment nature grants the young soldiers her innocence, for a moment they seem free of their roles and what they represent. At the same time, danger lurks in nature: in the next scene a sudden change of power takes place, when a bullet shoots out of the landscape and hits one of the soldiers in the neck.

In yet another scene, the soldiers walk in front of the tank among the orange trees of an orchard to the sounds of classical piano music. A beautiful light dances through the leaves, enlivening their tense faces. And even here this serenity of the landscape is disrupted: a little boy hiding among the trees points an RPG-7 at the tank and fires. The classical music continues to play and stops only when the soldiers fire their machine guns and the little boy lies among the orange trees on the fertile ground, alone, in a pool of his own blood.

What is trauma made of?

And where does it reside in our body?

Can trauma become a residue, namely something that is ‘left behind’? Something in the residue of our actions and bodies that goes to live permanently in the earth and in nature? Or will trauma become a kind of fossil that can tell something about our era in the future?

Or do we exist at all only as residues? Residues of people who came before us; of histories, relationships and stories told and untold.

It seems so unnatural to need a permit to reside anywhere on this earth.

I walk towards the holes in the walls again, the morning sunlight radiating through them. I pass my hands over their skin, and my memory transports me to a dance therapy workshop I once had in Amsterdam.

At the workshop, each participant had to draw her body on a white A4 piece of paper.

I ran the tip of my pencil across the paper, lightly drew the outline of a body with wide-open arms; the lines of legs, arms, and belly extended to the edges of the paper, to the back, and beyond. On one side was my belly and on the other was my back. Then I poked holes of different sizes in my paper body with the tip of the pencil.

Can you tell something about your drawing, your body, the dance therapist asked? She tried to ask the question as neutrally as possible, but I could feel her holding her breath as she looked at it.

I like to think of my body as porous. As a body that longs to become formless or to be able to transcend its own barriers and forms, I gently told all the confused eyes and ears in the circle around me.

Aren’t our body boundaries necessary to mark our freedom and our individuality? Is repairing those gaps a way to heal, she exclaimed?

But I did not draw my wounds, these are the pores of my body.

I prefer the utopia of plurality to that of individuality.

A walk in nature: An ode to friendship, to absence, to presence, to change and to the multiple marked bodies, landscapes and histories that unfold.

A walk in someone else’s shoes: An ode to grief, to distance, to proximity, to the performativity of identity, to plurality, and to where we are not.

The post Memory landscape appeared first on Untold.

There has always been an inherent urge within me for nomadic life. In my walking pilgrimages, I followed a yearning for solitude or was it a desire for a connection deeper than oneself? 

The beginning of my last pilgrimage began in the Scottish Highlands, where I followed an undefined path from the Atlantic Ocean towards the North Sea.

On such journeys one never knows how the path will unfold nor what the body can endure.

Starting my journey by the water’s edge at Mallaig and having the hope to end it by the water again, gave my walking a sense of traversing. It felt like a process of moving myself from one condition to another. 

This pilgrimage seemed to allow my past to pass or shift from a state of oblivion to one of remembrance.

With each footstep, different thoughts and wonders started to echo, and as my body got deeper and deeper interwoven with the undulating terrain, relentless flashbacks began simultaneously. 

“Memory is inhabited by death”, words from Milan Kundera’s Slowness rose to the surface of my thoughts. “There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting”, echoed afterwards. 

Walking, I found myself slowing down, contemplating the inseparable link between memory and death. I realized how intertwined those dualities are, each one relies on the other for its meaning. Human understanding grasps forgetfulness through acts of remembrance, just as our comprehension of life is framed by death.

While I was wondering about Milan Kundera’s insight, I caught myself alternating between rushing my steps and easing into a slower gait. 

Could my walking rhythm unlock the secret to memory or forgetting? Why do carried memories of the past appear to be past lives? And if they were so, then each of us has had countless deaths and rebirths. 

My response to these questions were various memories mixed with a constant interplay of slowing down and speeding up, slowing down again to accelerate once more.

Slowing down …

In a small mountain enclave, high upon Damascus’s Qasioun, I was born for the first time. My first life was the longest, it lasted 28 years. Recollections of that life are but fragments, like my little body cavorting beneath a towering pine. 

That yellowish tree stood oddly conspicuous in its segregated neighborhood. Its presence was peculiar in those humble slums like an outlandish guest in their midst. 

Each day, like me, passersby paused by its side, offering silent greetings to its trunk, gazing at its bark and wondering how a pine could have thrived in such an unlikely place. 

In that space, my secrets were entrusted- like the story of my tears shed during a national civic education class, as I discovered that Syria is a ‘Third World’ country. 

Beneath its bough, Maher, for the first time, unveiled to me the mysteries of human intimacy. Later, he exposed me to the complexity of identity politics, introducing the distinctions of being labeled as Kurd, Arab, Sunni, or Alawi.

In that spot, my uncle whispered of life under a dictatorship, and my father, with a cautious voice, repeated a refrain familiar to many: ‘Walls have ears, don’t forget to choose your words carefully.’ 

My first life was not as long as what my social surroundings expected for me, I died at a young age much like that pine tree, which was arbitrarily severed at the hands of the Syrian regime because it became a refuge to protesters who fervently announced their desire for freedom and equality. 

Speeding up…

In Aleppo, I stayed alive for one single day. 

Each day of the Syrian revolution there, encapsulated a lifetime. Mere seconds before or after a bombardment or accidental explosion are the determining factor between dying and getting a new life. 

Surviving was a luxury beyond reach, and the stark contrasts in every aspect of life manifested vividly in daily encounters. Even the shattering daylight was interrupted suddenly by a full darkness. Life in Aleppo was a relentless journey of extremes.

I came into this life in the very place where my dead body was discovered, beside a burned tree, a victim of the devastating airstrikes carried out by Assad’s air forces. Beside me lay a young child who had sought refuge at the same tree while playing hide and seek. His sister kept counting for the next three days, holding onto the hope that her brother would reappear once more and stop hiding. 

Slowing down…

Far away from any land and trees, in the profound depths of water, which does not belong to any nation, where the sea’s resounding waves drown all other sounds, we were born all together in silence. In the moment when all of us decided to jump on the boat, our names vanished in the water and the sea gave all of us a singular identity: ‘Nafar’*.

We only had murmurs to attempt to break the darkness, but the sound of the sea breaking powerfully on the side of the fishing boat carrying us, had no ears to our murmurs.

Seated almost shoulder to shoulder on the floor of the boat were the majority, but the fortunate few like me, who managed to be on the boat a step ahead, were seated on the edge. 

Sitting on the edge, looking at the people around, there could have been no tiny room for any other weary soul. The boat seemed like a microcosm, a miniature world teaming with colors, diverse backgrounds, and beliefs, all navigating the expanse of international waters hoping to touch earth again. 

The advantage of having a seat on the edge of the boat soon proved illusory, for my feet were entangled amid the crowd, seemingly fused beneath the weight of others’ feet. Every attempt to free them proved futile, as if they had become one with an invisible force, an odd numbness resisting even the slightest shift. In this peculiar sensation, perhaps lies an indescribable feeling, an obscure sense of salvation or near death.

This life only lasted for three hours. We were exactly fifteen on that boat, everyone survived except me. I alone failed to reach the other shore. As the boat’s engine stopped working and everyone jumped into the frigid waters before it capsized, I found myself alone gasping for air, suffocating in a strange silence punctuated by others’ screams. While I was drowning, the last thing I ever heard were voices cursing at God and humanity, and other voices reciting verses from the Quran.

Slowing down…

As the sun almost went off on my day through the Highlands, I was ignoring some initial signs of physical tiredness. But nothing prevented me from ascending a hill that led me to a solitary pine. This tree, slender, weary, and gracefully curved, seemed out of place amidst a landscape dominated by sturdy oaks. Through the years, the wind had swept its form dramatically, a testament to its resilience while standing alone. 

Its solitary stance evoked a sense of familiarity, reminiscent of a chapter from my past life, a reminder of being born in isolation, much like this pine.

Walking, I remembered many past lives, but none so vividly as the most recent one that I was given, when an official of the municipality handed me my first Dutch passport declaring me as a Dutch citizen. Her words were more than mere formality: “Hopefully you will forget all death memories afflicted by your homeland, congratulations on your rebirth.” 

What if I want to remember? Is there another way of remembering? Or what resides between remembering and forgetting or even between speed and slowness? 

Between remembering and forgetting perhaps lies a complex terrain of temporality. A space where memories fade but linger, where fragments of the past stir emotions without full recollection. It’s a bittersweet mixture of longing and belonging but at the same time, a mix of displacement and alienation. It’s a liminal space, where the mind grapples with what it holds onto and what slips away, where movements occur neither too swiftly nor too slowly. It’s the spot where the temporal rhythm of daily life resides, offering a sense of numbness and sensitivity. Between remembering and forgetting dwells a body in exile. 

Beside that lone pine’s trunk, I decide to slow down my steps. I had a moment of introspection where I believed as if we were both ghosts hovering between a life in the past and another in the present, torn between holding on to what remains of remembrance or fades into forgetting.

Next to the pine, I admitted my survivor’s guilt of all those previous deaths, and I showed the tree how my body carries an identity that is different from the identity of my memory. One identity got the privilege of unhindered wandering, while the other persists in daily mourning. It grieves for people who don’t have the right of free movement to cross borders, and for places enduring daily injustice and oppression, facing ongoing loss, and overlooked tragedies. 

Then, I felt that the tree had sensed my unspoken thoughts, almost responding with whispering unforgettable tales of the ‘The Highland Clearances*’. It was as though its silent presence carried echoes of thousands of people and communities who were displaced forcibly out of their homes and ancestral lands.

At that moment, the only thing I wanted was to hold on remembering and to walk slower and slower and slower.

The post My body is a pine tree appeared first on Untold.

A year has passed. Was it very much like other years? 

No… 

Did it pass as quickly as other years? 

No.

Are you the same after this year as you were before? Also, no.

What happened?

I was walking.

I was?

I am still walking.

For as long as I remember, I was never in such uninterrupted, constant contact with nature as over this past year. Which means since I was obliged to leave my home in Beirut due to the economic downturn in Lebanon that saw my salary lose nine-tenths of its value and services like electricity supply collapse. 

I had found myself in a dark, indeterminate hole, so I left my apartment and a large part of my world behind and came without luggage, to a house that was not my home, to a small village in Mount Lebanon, with a view overlooking all Beirut.

But this journey of 20 miles hardly calmed me. I was wailing like a cow whose calves, weaned at its udder, had been removed. My heart was overwhelmed by grief and loss, by bereavement. My country was, and is, in slow collapse in a world prey to greed. When everything around is a wreck, personal defeats are enlarged as if under a microscope. My hope was shelled, my back was bent.

Surely, I had to be somewhere else in the world, in a haven in another country, or else I would rot with bitterness and be extinguished by disappointment. I had to move, to get away from all this nonsense somewhere, but where to? Anywhere might be the Qibla of disappointment…human catastrophes are everywhere.

Where was the escape?

I had to do something to rescue my soul. But despondency left me motionless, it offered me the temptations of surrender. Luckily, a generous neighbor with a diesel generator bestowed upon me the electricity that our rulers’ corruption and incompetence had denied us, so I could at least keep food cool and charge my phone.

I started to look around me, sniffing for the right exit. And I had the view down to the sea. I was able to share the sunset scene that pedestrians watch on the sea corniche in Beirut, while I also had the foreground of hills of trees and green slopes. 

Here I began to associate with the nature with which I have always yearned to unite. Here I found I can get away from the hell of the others. Here I can get closer to myself.

So, I raised my finger to warn my destructive self that was tempting me to stay in bed. I started to walk in the company of nature away from pollution and city crowds.

Well, in the beginning I walked with a hunched back. I was heavy. My feet scuffed the ground with all my load. But the more I walked, the straighter was my head, the farther I was from what I wanted to get away from, and the closer I came to nature, to the roots. As soon as I took a few steps, my chest invited me to take a deep breath, and with the fresh air infusing my entire body, my senses begin to wake up, I smelled aromas coming from every direction, I searched for their sources – I approached them, contemplated them, I touched them. I began to know their taste from their smell.

Here, where I took refuge, I witnessed the birth of flowers and plants, the fullness of their splendor, and their withering and disappearance, in a harmonious, magic-like sequence, to be replaced with another batch of flowers and plants of different kinds according to season. Continuous pregnancies, births and maturation… every day a surprise or surprises. Slowly but clearly surprise started to edge tragedy.

I watched the leaves of the trees falling, branches slowly stripping themselves bare, and then little by little their preparations for a new dress and a new pregnancy. I glimpsed how natural factors intertwine in the cycle of plants, trees, flowers and herbs, from the moment they cast their seeds until they open and then disappear…but what is this disappearance like? It is the origin of all change and renewal. 

I walk, I breathe, my chest opens. 

As my senses ignite, my imagination flows with my rising pulse, my brain begins to throw out thoughts, thoughts from here and there, ideas that may have no relationship with one another. A memory comes and goes. Thoughts generate feelings, which provide soil for other thoughts, for various moments of being.

While I was walking, September arrived carrying grapes and figs. As I was walking, October came carrying pomegranates, vines, and olives, and on its wall climbed the star flower. Then came November, carrying oranges and by December the winter jasmine had climbed the walls.

I walk and I see lightning and hear thunder, and rain and snow wash me. 

I walk and Snowdrops appear like a newborn piercing out his head from his mother’s body…

I walk and witness continuous celebrations – weddings of fruits, plants, flowers and trees – that vary as months begin and end, and sometimes even vary between a sunrise and its sunset. 

I walk and nature offers me aromas among which I have recognized the smell of the in between of my mother’s breast. Here are scents that can heal depression, that made me open my arms, in gratitude and worship.

I rejoice. I identify with the transformations of nature. My view of loss changes, as well as of death and annihilation. My views of myself and my concepts change too. Geraniums and roses teach me to love what I don’t have, and not to aspire to hold what I love.

Before, when I walked just on the weekend, I felt at home amid nature, among the trees, the plants, the soil, the birds, and the insects. I always felt at sunset like a child separating from his mother, I waited for the moon like a lover waiting for her sweetheart. I habitually greeted the dawn like a mother cuddling for the first time her new-born. I always had a strong, mysterious longing for something missing, which I could not identify. 

Fayrouz sings: فيروز – أنا عندي حنين | Fairouz – Ana andi haneen

I have nostalgia, I don’t know for whom, each night it kidnaps me, taking me away from those awake.

It makes me walk, it takes me far away…

I want to know who I feel nostalgic for, but I can’t find out…

Fayrouz could not help me. I couldn’t find out. But, hey, walking in nature led me to discover who it was I was longing for. 

How? 

Walking made me face a state of sadness that resulted from losses I felt deep inside. Facing sadness pushed me to mourn these losses. Mourning my personal disappointments, my grief for my country, my grief for humanity. Mourning for a love I lost, for a love I gave, for a love I didn’t find, for a love I lived. Mourning for what I didn’t do, for missed opportunities, for mistakes I made, for wounds I didn’t know how to heal.

Mourning for a lost homeland, for a human being whose technological development outpaced his human development, and who succeeded most in developing machines of destruction and never-ending ways of material gain.

Walking has called me into mourning, it has been the catalyst for the build-up of molten lava inside me. Sometimes the volcano erupted. Sometimes it sent forth a slow but steady flow of lava. Sometimes the volcano blocked itself. But the miles I walked shortened the distance between me and my depths.

This is how the core mourning absorbed all others, how the hidden mystery was revealed, and I knew for whom I had this deep nostalgia, this genuine longing that broke through all ways our Arabic language ties ‘mourning’, ‘hidad’, to cutting oneself off from loss. 

I knew that my greatest grief is not my disappointments, nor the misfortunes spreading in this world, nor the love I lost, nor the love I didn’t get. It is a grief that took root before I left my mother’s womb. It is the longing, the nostalgia, for the original womb, the source in mother nature that I left long before I left my own mother’s womb, long before my consciousness formed. This is the loss I have learned to mourn.

But sure, everything has the right time to mature, just as flowers, fruits have their seasons. Man in his autumn may be wise or senile. Perhaps nature taught me some wisdom as I walked, as patience replaced anxiety, acceptance replaced heartbreak, a search for solutions replaced despair, and as balance began to redress sadness.

I continue walking, emerging from obscurity, mystery opened to shafts of light. And as I walk, sometimes, I dance ….

The post Keys for ancient grief appeared first on Untold.

What if we try to walk with it? Wherever we are, yet together? 

Can we reach each other over different localities in a performative space, in a space of deep listening? 

Can we, through grief, imagine a place to dwell in together?   

These questions were central to the first part of the ‘year of listening’ that Dancing on the Edge festival had embarked on from September 2022 till June 2023, which I had the great pleasure of co-creating as an artist and curator. Dancing on the Edge is a platform for performing arts based in The Netherlands. It works cross culturally, building bridges between the Netherlands/Europe and West Asia & North Africa since 2006. 

Through the writing of six artists that were part of the ‘year of listening’, this dossier will reflect on these questions, and on the ways a cultural platform could work and produce in times of uncertainty and crisis.

After the pandemic and in the reality of the climate catastrophe, global wars and migration crises,  Dancing on the Edge made a radical choice to shift the way it works from production and consumption to listening and rooting. Listening to what matters to us as a team, to our network of artists and audience, to unheard voices, and through that enforcing webs of collaboration and solidarity. We slowed down and tried to follow the natural rhythms of nature, taking a year to dive into four themes: Grief, Birth and Death, Seeds and Togetherness. Together with a number of artists, we designed four public moments throughout this year timed around the equinoxes and the solstices. 

This ‘year of listening’ was like a pilgrimage to us, and audiences from different parts of the world joined our public programs of audio walks, artistic research, physical workshops and performances that happened online and locally in four different cities: Amsterdam, Palermo, Cairo, and Beirut. We did not fly in artists nor extracted practices from their context. We collaborated with local platforms and practices in the region we usually work with, and explored forms that could allow us to experience these practices in spite of the distance.

The first moment, Walking with Grief, unfolded as a collective performance where the public joined our walks over a week, wherever they were in the world, placing their bodies into a web of walkers, tracing our entangled geographies and realities. Each day, a different recording, in four different languages, was sent to us to listen to while walking. Each one was a proposal by a different artist to listen to. Walking is part of the practice of these artists, a form through which they reflect on their position and relationships to the worlds they dwell in and walk through and walk with. Each evening we held a multilingual intimate online listening space, for sharing and for stitching collective narratives together. 

In times of brokenness, our pilgrimage was in search for the commons, an ecological cultural practice, solidarity, decentralized visions and relations, and a place to dwell together- with you.

Much remains Untold when it comes to grief, and much feels unheard as we walk and connect to everything by our side. For this dossier, I revisited these recordings and invited four of the artists to re-work their recordings into written texts to share here with you. Additionally, I invited the artist Giath Taha to write a new text, while I wrote one myself.

In Keys to Ancient Grief, Zeinab Charafeddine takes us on a walk along paths interwoven between her inner landscapes of grief and the outer natural landscapes of transformation, in the village she has taken refuge in due to the economic and political crisis in Lebanon. A sensorial journey of mourning and healing.

Giath Taha invites us to a very delicate and intimate ritual in My body is a Pine Tree, where he sheds off his multiple bodies, mourns his multiple deaths and welcomes his rebirth as a pine tree. We accelerate and slow down, walking with him between memory and forgetfulness. A pressing question echoes through: Do we exist through our memories, and what remains of us if we would forget? 

In Memory Landscape, I depart from the act of walking in someone else’s shoes, experiencing how through an other, we could access imaginary and real landscapes of memory, grief and desire. I follow my embodied memory and that of the landscape, attuning to what is stored in my back, belly, hands, and knees as much as what resides in the soil, stone, wood, plants etc.. I am flooded with images. Where does trauma reside? And does nature know grief?

What changes when we walk in different cultural and political contexts? Which (un)privilege do certain bodies have to walk and wander? Dina Mohamed departs from her own embodied experience to explore these questions in The Body Keeps the Score. She listens to how grief had physically transformed her bones and muscles, and thus her walking posture and the experience of walking itself. 

Walking in Beirut, the plants disclose their knowledge and complex histories of colonialism and migration to Christian Sleiman, shifting his perception of the city. Sleiman walks to forage, and in his text A Beirut Forager’s Odyssey, he introduces foraging as a political act of reclaiming the city. He draws with his body and senses a route between the countryside where he grew up and learnt foraging and the city where he is living and working.

Ian Nesbitt shares with us his intimate encounters with a few plants and people along his pilgrimage route. In Pilgrims Notes: Renewal, these encounters seem like gifts or deep insights that guide him with questions he has about his human power position and perspective in relation to nature, and about grief, entanglement and care. As he walks, he wonders what visions of an alternative future appear through these encounters and how we can renew the ways we relate to and inhabit the world around us.

We invite you to walk with our grief, your grief, through these writings. Our societies have organized themselves to avoid grief or to demand from those grieving to do it fast and in private, in ways that would not disrupt the productivity standards, or require any forms of systematic care. 

Dancing on the Edge believes that staying with grief is a form of resistance, a way to insist on attending to the brokenness of this world, of our bodies, souls and minds, and a way to imagine alternative futures and have fair generative cultural practices.

Let us continue walking, for it is with this seemingly simple act of displacement, that communities, habitats, cultures were born. And it would take a lot of walking to unlearn and renew the stagnating concepts of identity, borders, time, gender, human/non-human, and nature that we embody and confirm.

The post Walking with grief: an introduction appeared first on Untold.