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Haleh

@zeehaleh

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A vessel mapping the memory of grief between the material and the immaterial across space and time
A project of witnessing by @zeehaleh
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My marriage with grief has had its own southern oriented odysseys. Oscillating between indeliberateness and deliberation, I have unpacked memories of those I have loved and lost in the darkness of torturous nights. I have weepingly danced in tribute to those who have always loved like I have. I have sung songs in their memory. I sing. I dance. I weep. I live. I love.

On the days grief ventures a little northward, a smile blooms on my languid face, I paint hope on canvases that attach themselves to the walls of my home, which is in a perpetual cuddle with music. If I’m writing this now while dawn is slowly kissing the long night adieu, it amounts to mean something to my heart. And it does.

I have spent the last couple of weeks conversing about grief with various people, at lengths they have been comfortable with, after which I have completely failed at expressing the extent of gratitude within me for the share; the honesty. My sponge of a heart has absorbed the collective grief and yearns to do something about it. Most days I fail. Some days, when I’m brave enough to face the sun, I continue with the #accountsofgrief series. It might be a campaign—if you ask me what it really is, I do not know. Healing is a tricky process, endless, and you find yourself sometimes tasting different techniques to allow yourself to be. It is a deep desire of mine to partake in actions which, in good hope, will permit others to allow themselves to be too. And this is what the grief series is all about; a drop in the ocean of various techniques I indulge in to be.

I still shut myself down and treat myself cruelly, but I am learning. Learning to be better for myself, and for those I love. And those I will love. But first, for myself. That said, I will try to continue smiling with a bindi on my forehead, even if the heaviness of my heart trumps my will to keep walking. I will continue to talk to people about their grief and share a fragment of their thoughts in this confusing space, if their head and heart allow themselves to.

To attempts at healing despite disliking that word so much. To the power of art, interaction, sharing, and spirituality.

Love,
Haleh by @zeehaleh

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4 years ago

An account of grief (9) • “No, I do not believe this g3n0s!de should be sanitized. In fact, I want to shatter Western innocence. I want to detonate their delusions of morality, incriminate their alibis of self-defense. It is responsible and right to engage and amplify these images; there is no sensitivity worth protecting at the expense of the murderous truth.”

“WITNESS, in the English, usually carries connotations of criminal court. A witness is one who speaks to the veracity of an alleged event… Yet I have been pondering not the English, prosecutorial witness, but the Arabic. In this, our, language, the verb to witness comes from the root شهد . This is also the source of the much-maligned word شهيد, shaheed, which means, literally, witnesser, but is often translated as martyr. It is a word with many folds of meaning and history. It carries connotations not only of seeing, but of presence and proximity. To be a witness is to make contact, to be touched, and to bear the marks of this touch.”

“They allege the word martyr glorifies death for death’s sake. But in this context, it should be read as honoring the truth these brutalized bodies speak. Their flesh, marked by colonial violence, makes visible the wild injustice they endured. Which is to say, their martyrdom tells us the truth about our world.”

“In this strange, pseudo-intimacy of social media, the most revelatory moments are the least scripted. And they are certainly not expressed in English, however impeccable.”

“Our work as witnesses is to be marked; we should not leave it unscathed. We must make an effort to stay with what we see, allowing ourselves to be cut. This wound is essential. Into this wound, imagination may pour—not to invade the other’s subjectivity, but to awaken awe at the depth, privacy, and singularity of each life.”

— Sarah Aziza

#accountsofgrief #grief by @zeehaleh

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7 months ago

An account of grief (8) • “Sometimes I wonder what a parent’s last act of love is before their kids pass.

On the day we buried my brother, when everyone else left the qabristan, uppa stayed behind. He just sat there. That was all anyone talked about, how he wouldn’t get up. Was that his last act of fatherhood?
Or maybe it’s the way he still goes to the same mosque every Friday, pulls out the weeds from around my brother, makes sure his earth is cared for.

And my mother. I wonder about her too. What was her final act of motherhood?

Then I think about myself. What was my last act of being his sister?

I don’t know. One of the last proper conversations I had with him was about how I could pick my nose whenever I pleased but he couldn’t because of the cannulas taped to his hands.
We talked about it far longer than you’d think.
It was silly, dumb even.
Somehow, that’s what I think of. Athokkeya baaki ulle.

What will our last acts be for the people we love? Is love even supposed to end neatly? I’m aware it doesn’t end but, you know what I mean...

My most revisited memory with my brother, Paachi, is the time we danced to Queen on the beach in Dubai. We had just watched Bohemian Rhapsody and neither of us could shut up about it. I was neck-deep in my first heartbreak while he was dealing with a major turning point of his own- the kind I’m stumbling through now, though probably in a different flavor.
We laid it all bare, shared what weighed us down, eased each other, and then we danced to Queen.
It’s a tradition now- my own personal ritual. I dance to Freddie with reckless abandon. I could almost feel his momentary squeeze on my shoulder, his chin pressing on my hair, tugging it gently.
“He’s in a better place.”
‘Better place’ My ass.
You don’t know the stealth with which we loved each other, how we held each other, the resilience of it all. We were each other’s unguarded grace. I hugged him when I felt like it, danced with him when I felt like it. And then, I had to watch him fade away too.
Do you see where I am going with this?

(continued in comments) by @zeehaleh

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10 months ago

Some frames with their own distinct music as an ode to the musical month this october/rabi ul aakhir–jumad el awwal has been.
Interestingly, rabi ul aakhir (ربيع الآخر) in Arabic literally translates to “the last spring” while jumad el awwal (جمادى الأول), which follows right after, carries the meaning “the first of the parched land”. A moon in fullness that quickly transforms itself into a crescent is all that stands between these lunar months. This cycle of fullness and emptiness, emptiness and fullness.

And while the musicality reigns, so does remembrance and longing of all kinds. Fathima Zahra, daughter of the beloved, kickass rasool, was also believed by some to have transitioned through wafat during this month. Sometimes I think of how, Fathima and I, carry our sameness and unsameness – the sameness of our names. The unmatched unsameness of our love, grief and deeply impregnating softness and wisdom. Sometimes I imagine whether she would choose to be friends with me. Sometimes I imagine us holding hands in silence.

#halehwrites (yearns)

Slides
📸 08: @miqdadashraf
📸 12: @hanfloyou
📸 15: @shelsiaa
📸 20: @aarzurazakpaikkadan by @zeehaleh

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a year ago

Time in a bottle. by @zeehaleh

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a year ago

Haleh’s ode to 2020 Zahra
all that she had been feeling then,
and although she didn’t then know,
all that she would feel in the times that followed
And all that she feels at the moment.

Her, it’s for her
Me, it’s for me
And Nizar Qabbani 🌹 by @zeehaleh

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a year ago

If my usually deceptive memory is now right, this was one of the ’22 watches. I do remember because just like the suffix of the year came in two twos, everything else within and without me did too. In twos. Grief. Loss. Autumnal shedding.

I recall watching this part from ‘A Bread Factory – Part Two’ and feeling spoken to? I wasn’t the one being spoken to; it was mostly the littlest children parts of me that then recognised this language. This simple language. This simple exchange conjured within me the yearnings of my childhood to have heard or felt something like this from another human being perhaps. Art tore into and out of my veins instead, what I couldn’t receive or extend to a person. And art again it is from time to time that reminds me of the holes and wholes. Like this cinema, in ‘22.

A Bread Factory – Part Two (2018) @abreadfactory
dir: Patrick Wang @wangontheweb

#halehwrites (or something like that)
[cinema, child, void, fullness, art, threads, theatre, a bread factory, reflection, revolution] by @zeehaleh

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a year ago

Interpersonal family dynamics atop a motor vehicle. by @zeehaleh

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a year ago

Notes about psych ward

#halehwrites

Correction in slide 3: Institutionalisation of all kinds has its banes, and psych wards, for the most part, do* not fall behind at all.
slide 6: … after my unkempt hair was done by those women* by @zeehaleh

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a year ago

Faiz Ahmed Faiz
tr. Vikram Seth

[poetry, nazm, yearning, arrival, dawn, nightfall, faiz saab] by @zeehaleh

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2 years ago

Intergenerational trauma architecture by @zeehaleh

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2 years ago

Life cycle of a teardrop with Elizabeth Fraser from nose to sheets

[cocteau twins, cyclic, circle, convergence] by @zeehaleh

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2 years ago