Recently, I was invited to speak about ekphrastic poetry at Open University’s ‘Other Worlds: Contemporary Ekphrastic Poetry’ symposium. Below is an edited version of my talk on responding to The Unbearable Halfness of Being by Palestinian artist Jumana Emil Abboud. I hope both the talk and my poem do Jumana’s work justice, but I accept if they don’t. I also hope you will view Jumana’s artwork and read her gorgeous lyric essay/open access article, Hide Your Water.
Summary of talk: The Water Library: On Witnessing – In 2023, Alycia Pirmohamed was invited to write a poetic response to the exhibition The Unbearable Halfness of Being by Jumana Emil Abboud, at Cample Line gallery in Scotland. The exhibition explored water sources in ‘Ein Qiniya as spirited places,’ which connected with themes of water and spirituality in Alycia’s work. This talk will reflect on questions concerning ethics, respect, and responsibility to the artist while writing as a witness.
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I’ll start with an Ars Poetica about writing ekphrastic poetry. ‘Interlude’, is an extract from a longer ekphrastic poem, ‘Vessel,’ that I wrote as part of Art Walk Porty 2023:
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Over the last five years, I’ve seen how my most accomplished and exciting response works are born from a collaborative methodology – a process that involves working directly with an artist and entwining our practices. Ideally, the entwinement happens both ways: the artist and myself as the writer are both influenced somewhat by the project, and the dialogue between us appears in the work. In this way, ekphrasis is reframed almost as co-creation. This is not everyone’s approach, and it isn’t the only way I write ekphrastic poetry. I know that, realistically, writers aren’t going to be able to work directly with artists all the time. Ultimately, who and what we respond to has a bearing on the kind of methodology we employ as well.
In creating and responding to other artists’ works – whether the medium is poetry or sculpture or choreography – I’ve found that I discover and am able to pursue new facets of my voice as a writer. Even the way I approach the themes that I have always written about – heritage, faith, womanhood, nature – changes, as does the style and structure of my writing.
One of my first serious attempts at ekphrastic poetry was in 2019. I worked on a poem titled after the short film You Know it but it Don’t Know You by Welsh-Gambian artist Tako Taal. This was a collaboration between visual art, film, and poetry. Along with the exhibited work itself, the poem was also influenced by Taal’s artistic processes and her raw materials – by notes and photographs dotted all over her studio space – as well as by our conversations. From my memory, I recall that we talked about fathers and saliva and the fractures that accompany growing up with a sense of cultural dissonance that spanned continents. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I remember coming away from her studio at the Edinburgh College of Art that day with the knowledge that this poem would incorporate water. So much of our work orbited water in different ways, specifically the waters between elsewhere places. The poem I wrote ends with the line there is no irrigating a wound if that wound is the great sea.
But what I did not expect were all the ruptures in poetic form. My response to Taal’s work pulled from me a different exploration, a structural one, where temporal and geographical distances – where memories, real and imagined – bled outside poetic imagery of water and more explicitly onto the physical margins of the page.
The shape of a poem is itself an articulation, which I came to understand even more starkly through the confluence of text and visual art. I was surprised by the formal and structural risks I took in this collaboration – for some reason implementing structural experimentations I’d never thought to try before. All of this reminds me of an interview with poet Bhanu Kapil, where she asks the question: ‘How can the poem’s form – the shape that it takes, and the limits of that shape – tell the truth (or one of the truths) about what it is like to be a human being in a given world?’
I still often think about the shape of one part of the sequence in particular. It materialised as a diptych where half the lines were in strikethrough text. Before then, I had never formatted my own poems using this visual strategy in a sustained way, though I had seen it in other works. I was learning that when writing ekphrastic work, I have to let the art guide the writing too. The strike-through effect doesn’t compel me the same way in my other writing, but feels exactly right in this ekphrastic poem. Even now, many questions linger in my mind about this piece and the there-not-there effect on those words. They all orbit this central inquiry: how does one voice silence? And what does it mean to use a visual cue that will deliberately draw attention to the text that I supposedly want to hide away.
For me, the quality and context of the work changed when addressing Taal’s artwork explicitly in the text, and after having had meaningful conversations about the creation of that work. This introduced a layer of intimacy on the page and forced me to consider the contours of meaning-making with not only the varied interpretations of an anonymous audience, but also an active participant, the other artist herself.
At this point, I invite the audience to answer or merely think about the question: what are the responsibilities the writer has to the artist and to the artwork they are writing about?
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I want to move to Jumana Emil Abboud’s work now and talk through my process of writing a response to her exhibition. This is the project that I really want to talk about, though it’s difficult to approach it. In fact, I don’t quite know how to talk about this work, given how the current context – one of violence and genocide in Gaza – is constantly changing, constantly escalating. This work, almost every, day has a different weight to it; it reverberates in ways I can’t predict and could never have written into the project itself. It’s also difficult to talk about given the culture of silence around the genocide in Gaza in institutions, especially.
What I want to get at is the responsibility I felt while writing ‘the water library’ – and the inadequacy I also felt during the process. But, more than that, I want to talk about Jumana’s art, and my response to it, in a way that does the act of artmaking, her work, and the exhibition itself justice. Incidentally, these are thoughts that I also had while writing the piece itself.
The previous context about my process is, I think, helpful in understanding my approach to ekphrastic writing and ultimately how this approach ruptured when the climate changed between July 2023, when Cample Line gallery invited me to write the piece, and December 2023, when it was completed.
Jumana Emil Abboud is a Palestinian artist currently based between Jerusalem and London, where she is completing her PhD. Her practice is grounded in the Palestinian cultural landscape and she draws on the traditions of folklore, mythmaking and storytelling that once animated community life, particularly around times of family or community gathering. She works across drawing, installation, video and performance, often collaboratively, exploring personal and collective memory and practices of sharing and re-telling as ways to address experiences of loss and longing and the impacts of decades of dispossession and annexation (Cample Line).
The Unbearable Halfness of Being is an ‘exhibition of drawings, embroidered textiles, talismanic objects, wood carvings, video and neon light works.’ The exhibition opened on 7 October and ran till 17 December.
It’s important to note The Unbearable Halfness of Being was first presented in 2022 as part of Documenta in Germany. And Jumana began to develop The Unbearable Halfness of Being in 2020 as part of a residency based in Ein Qiniya in the West Bank, where her research focused on seven endangered natural water sources in the Abu al-Adham hillside.
I want to draw attention to the fact that, although the exhibition was showing at Cample Line from October to December 2023, this showing wasn’t a conscious decision made by any of the participants in light of the most recent bombardment of Gaza; it was coincidence. This was an exhibition that was created before October 7th 2023. It felt important to honour this fact in the writing, while also working against my initial impulse once the context of the exhibition changed: to write what was explicitly and solely a poem of witness.
I think ‘the water library’ becomes a poem of witness, given when it was written and published. This was out of my control. But I was eager to honour the narratives of the artwork around, between, and outside of that as well.
I was invited by Cample Line to work on this project for Book Week Scotland. The brief not only involved writing an ekphrastic poem, but also a weaving together of mine and Jumana’s work. It included a reading from my collection Another Way to Split Water in the gallery exhibit itself, in the context of The Unbearable Halfness of Being. I would be looking to intentionally draw connections between our work, both of which emphasised actions of halving, splitting and dividing, themes of spirituality and ancestral memory, and of course, the motif of water.
In my early correspondence with Cample Line in the summer of 2023, I was put in touch with Jumana to talk about the exhibition and the process of creating The Unbearable Halfness of Being. She sent me links to films documenting her collaborative work around haunted water sources (spirit-waters) across the West Bank. She also shared the text of several folktales that inspired her exhibition, many of which serve as the titles for different artworks within. Indeed, the title of the exhibition itself is named after one such folktale, Half-a-Halfling.
From late September to October, I was on a residency at the Library of Africa and The African Diaspora in Ghana. The final version of ‘the water library’ was written after I finally saw the exhibition in person, but during the initial drafting phase, I worked almost exclusively with photographs and video links of the exhibition. The first etchings of my poem were written largely using these materials, which were sent over by the gallery, or which Jumana sent me through email. I started to think of this ekphrastic piece as a ‘long distance poem’.
When the context around the exhibition shifted last October, and over the subsequent weeks of witnessing horrors and war crimes committed by the IOF, I searched for a way to piece together the drafted material I had already written in the previous months with new material – with writing that was under a different pressure, and that felt wholly inadequate in its articulations. Additionally, so much of Jumana’s work captures the landscape of Palestine, specifically that which is connected to its water sources, and every day we were (we are) waking up to news of a changed landscape, a brutalised earth.
The contexture and the resonances of certain words, images, phrases – which had always existed in the poem’s drafts and in the exhibition elements itself – manifested as a new response. I grappled with the complexity of trying to integrate these new echoes in the piece, of trying to be purposeful with them. I was attempting to reconcile working with these echoes in ‘the water library’ with what felt like a need to let them exist without my manipulation; to let these moments draw and elicit feelings and suggestions that were tied to the political climate.
For example, the reference to ‘October’ in one section of ‘the water library’ was first written solely in reference to olive season, and in reference to the olive wood sculptures that are part of the exhibition. In the final version of the poem, I left the couplet ‘in the topography / of October’ with its visual isolation, with its clear linebreak, its clear pause, even though I expect that now it recalls more than the olive wood sculptures it first alluded to.
Even though the occupation of Palestine began decades ago, long before October 7 2023, this date now rings with its own associations and discourses; it evokes and encompasses a very particular kind of rhetoric in the media. This all remains layered with olive groves being destroyed as an extension of the genocide of Palestinians, as a purposeful evisceration of culture, tradition, and legacy.
In an excerpt of her written work on water sources in the West Bank, Hide Your Water (above), Jumana Emil Abboud lists the sites of spirited water sources, and then goes on to write:
Many were off-limits, inaccessible, lost in gamble. Demarcation walls, military zones, Israeli settlements got there first.
Often only traces were found — or discovered. Stepping on bush-covered earth only to uncover the remains of stone; Palestinian homes. Graveyard. Stories were once told here. Now, it is the ironic intent of occupation to reduce the storytellers themselves into the myth.
I wanted ‘the water library’ to represent the exhibition, to be in dialogue with it, in a way that stayed true to the stimulus and inspirations of Jumana’s work but did so without neglecting the political context, the most recent devastation of Gaza, and the forced displacement of Palestinians over decades. As demonstrated in ‘Hide Your Water,’ this has been a current beneath Jumana’s art and field work. I started to think of my ekphrastic poem unlike others I’d written: a bit more like a translation or trans-creation. That is, more than any other ekphrastic pieces I’d attempted, I felt a greater ethical responsibility to stay true to Jumana’s artwork. To not misrepresent or misrecognise it. To remain faithful to the original while also bearing witness.
Ultimately, I decided for me, the way into the artwork – the answer to that initial question of witness and responsibility I posed earlier on – was entering it through folktales. Folktales – the rhythm of them, their repetition and didactic properties – became the spine (the shape, the truths) of the ekphrasis poem. From the very first moment I approached the response piece, it had struck me how influential these folktales were to Jumana’s body of work. Thus, in the structure of this poem, I attempt to employ and experiment with the narrative of a folktale, the rhythm of a folk song, and to unearth some of the imagination that’s so clearly guiding Jumana’s hand.
For my talk with the Open University, there were many things I wanted, but couldn’t (for the sake of time) talk about. One of these things was commodification – the way poetry and poetry of witness, or poetry about faith, is ultimately presented to audiences as an object. How, despite the way it tendrils into difficult spaces of ethics and responsibility, the exhibition and the response poem ultimately exist to be consumed. And I found it challenging to write into that space – a space that simultaneously felt voyeuristic and yet of utmost importance. Because it is totally and completely and absolutely important to bring attention to Jumana’s work, to centre it, to spend time with and attend to its multiplicity.
It was strange to think of this ekphrastic piece, which I feel exists so far outside of the margins of my regular work as an artist, which feels so much bigger than me, which doesn’t feel like a poem at all in some ways, would exist exactly within the normal realms of the poetry world.
Some of this is why it felt right that Cample Line asked to make ‘the water library’ into a small pamphlet that is now available to all who want it, with an accompanying donation to Medical Aid for Palestine.
If you would like one, please do be in touch with the gallery. See bottom of linked page). You can also email them directly about the pamphlet here.
Note: this talk pulls from written work from an interview in Intersectional Feminist Research Methodologies and my lyric essay ‘Trigger Notebook’ in Critical Muslim. Thank you to Daisy LaFarge for inviting me to respond to Tako Taal’s work in 2019, and to Tom Jeffrey’s for inviting me to respond to Art Walk Porty in 2023.
Thank you for sharing this work which is thoughtful in many different, generative ways, as well as being so very sadly timely (though perhaps in some ways it always could be) and important.