Tati El Mallah
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Gardenias in Bloom Creative Writing
I’ve forgotten the scent of my favorite flower. Tattooed on my left hip, owed to a sixteen year old who found themselves facing a very sexy Frenchman with a very large needle, and a sudden inability to say no. It’s taken just three years to come to the conclusion that gardenias are quite ugly. With strange cabbagey petals in an alien spiral. Caricatured leaves a toddler would draw on the end of a spiral to make it a rose. I have an acute awareness of how wrong they look on my body. The buds warp and stretch when I stand straight. Lines have bled out or thinned. Parts of the stem faded into a blue-grey under my skin.
He’s tracing their pale blooming heads with his thumb. Grabbing the side of my face and pulling me in. Eyes dark and hungry, lying through swollen lips. Asking what they are, saying they're beautiful, that I am too. Then I’m outside under these covers. In mediterranean fields running through thick, damp grass and I’m smelling peaches on the trees and trying for the flowers and that hand is by my neck and that thumb is still tracing and I’m smelling and fucking trying. And I’ve forgotten the scent of my favorite flower.
They would bloom at the height of the Lebanese summer. Mid-July and burning hot, right outside the house in Baba’s garden. By browned pine trees that stretched up to little red roof tops on the mountains. Beneath I’d lie in the thick green amongst the harvest and the swarming flies. Around sweet vine fruit that rotted quickly and dropped faster, landing by my small knees. In the early morning, Baba would stroll through and pluck what he could find carefully from the stems. With each break he’d return to stand above ivory petals in the shrub. With a wrinkled hand outstretched, looking at each bud carefully. Shoving that protruding downturned nose into the bushes to catch the sweet stink. I followed, his persistent little shadow with a basket, catching berries tossed over his shoulder. Until forced inside. The birds would swoop down in the late afternoon and tear into what was left. Singing cries that filtered through glass panes where I’d sit in his study while he’d translate his newspaper.
His face was thin. It's somehow thinner now, life sucked clean from his features and left to his neck, spotted with ingrowns and thickened pores. I’d only very recently noticed how far up his facial hair grows, he had kept it quite clean in my childhood but had to shave very often. When he’d kiss my cheek I’d feel a slight sting from his stubble and shriek as though he’d pull away to a gash down the side of my face. He somehow found ways to indulge my dramatics. Placing me on his lap sighing
“Sorry binti ” with a greyed, furrowed brow and a sincerity clouded over the usual mischief in his eyes. The rare instance my father would apologize. Out loud.
He was a patient man. I had an abrasive knack for wearing that patience very thin. Two debaters who couldn't see the line drawn in the sand. Our conversations accelerated quickly and his volatility would usually accompany. Abrupt disputes that lacked conclusions. Sometimes I’d get a dismissive grunt, or a chuckle or a condescending attempt to convince me to be a lawyer. He had this tendency, after a shitty fight, to cut fruit from the garden, stand at my doorway and silently watch me eat it.
There were a handful of very special days, on the worst of days, when he’d exhaust his capacity with words that cut deep and a violence to his voice that the world had forced inwards. Suddenly that sandy line was crystal clear and it was a trough and I’d be standing on one end and he’d be gazing past that expansive ditch, vision still cloudy with red. It was on those days that tears in my eyes felt like home and the closest escape was the corner of my bed where I could pretend to sink into the thrush and stare up at the flowery bush. I’d watch pink filtered light bounce off misshapen petals at an imagined sunset. Shortly after, hear his quiet worn down loafers up the stairs. Turned away, I’d feel him slowly sit on the adjacent edge and displace my weight lifting me from the cocoon I’d formed. My room would fill with the mix of his aftershave and something sweet. He wouldn't say a thing. Perhaps he’d tap me on the shoulder, perhaps he’d simply leave. But when the heavy breathing was done and my face dried and salty, I’d turn around to find a cabbagey little flower laid next to me.
Laid down with his thumb still tracing, I’m back under these sheets. My mouth is swollen too and the answer feels heavy on my tongue yet I’m gasping Gardenia as I look down to my hip. Those leaves poke out from under his fingers and they’re so damn ugly, My head is foggy, my eyes are foggy. I’m crying. The birds are crying and I’m nineteen under his hands and I’m sixteen under a needle and I’m ten years old under an ivory bush and the air smells like the words I’m sorry.
Reflections on Light Essay/Memoir
‘Haptics … commence the moment we feel weight, open their pages, or inhale the musty smell of worn, aged, or deteriorating paper, plastic, or hide.’(Tina M. Campt, 2017).
And then I saw the walls covered in stuff, work, art and my place here felt real.That my hands felt they had done something effective, fulfilling. There is clay under my nails and in the invisible webs of my skin, as though I am the thing that is ready to print. And though, in minutes to come I will wash it, it will stay with me, this impression. These filthy affects, laden with dust.
I want my affects light soaked - memories bare and thin.
I’m enamored by the smell of peoples houses, by what food and skin and dust has fallen to the floor, what has taken up space in the air. what cleaning agents and dusters have been used in futility or in success to create this knowing of someone. This scented membrane that envelops you and stains you and subsequently calls you its own. I like to sit where the sun filters in through the window and watch the particles move. Often I move with them. Twisting and turning like fine paper, the most beautiful of things. When I close my eyes and let sightlessness take me over, I am stunned at the tilt of the floors and the ill fitting gaps of air between my feet and shoes. Reminding me that often blindness reveals as much as light - think about tactility.
If ‘Quiet is a modality that surrounds and infuses sound with impact and affect,’ (Tina M. Campt, 2017). Does blindness do the same? What remains there when seeing doesn’t?
I think in that space is where touch becomes powerful, when I begin to allow my hands to know, as they always have done. And when I feel that heat on my palms and I branch out I’m reminded once again that my skin is a river in which things float and sink. That my body is permeable, proliferating, ecosystem. That sense is dimensional, physical, particle. That light is a boundary-crossing, boundless, concentrated. Think of hyper objects, ‘massively distributed in time and space’ how we are “we are always inside” (Timothy Morton, 2014). of them, part of the vessel. If light is a hyper object it is one of the most fickle. Coming and going, strong and fast, but equally generous. Not only in her ecological essentialism, not only in her sensory pleasure, but in the way we’ve used her to paint our memories on paper.
The way that slowly over time after we’ve taken images, she slowly strips them away. Bursting highlights, graying shadows and obscuring details. When I think of myself as a photographer I long distanced it from the kinds of fine art that create new realities. I am not a maker, no I am a presenter of things that have existed, even if they were just for a moment.
I marvel at how new worlds reveal themselves to me.
The Body as a Site of Reproduction: The Performer as an Isolated Body
Essay/Memoir
Whose white walls remain stoic and unfeeling, splashed upon them works, measured to the height of my eyes, no, the eyes of someone larger.
The maturation of art viewership within the Western world beginning in the early 19th century was a solitary one. An isolationist approach to both spectatorship, as well as performance formed by the peepshow model of viewership (Crary, 2002). One that presents the optic as a hegemonic sense and distances art consumption from the tactile. “The prioritization of visuality was accompanied by imperatives for various kinds of self-control and social restraint, particularly for forms of attentiveness that require both relative silence and immobility.” (Crary, 2002, p. 9)
The gallery was henceforth established as a touchless space, where bodies moved in a controlled orderliness. Beckoned to approach the work with a subdued demeanor, and an illusion of privacy. In this ongoing shift into the 20th century, accessibility and the digitization of the photographic image “freed the hand of the most important artistic functions” (Benjamin, 1935 , p. 2). Ushering in an age of mechanical reproduction. Coined by Walter Benjamin, mechanical reproduction pertains to a reductive nature of the photographic image in that it is emancipated from the ‘aura’, that “the unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence” (Benjamin, 1935 , p. 3). The cinematic and photographic were enabled to be presented in any form of context without the need for physical travel, no impressions of time or transport left upon a body of work. Placed against stark gallery walls, or perhaps the encompassing darkness of theatres, simultaneously and with ease.
The propellant of technology and the trained conditions of artistic consumption culminating in the 1960’s and 70’s boom of sexual exploration. “Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order” (Mulvey, 1975, p. 4). Laura Mulvey’s formative Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, poignantly outlining the inclination of the image within the context of this time to prey on the isolated, sexualized and objectified female body while failing to address the feminine unconscious. Equally this push established gendered roles to the spectator-performer relationship.
The female body is one to look upon.
The male body is the looker.
I am pinned upon the white wall and know now whose eyes meet mine. My feet so slightly risen.
The body is a site of spectatorship, one replicated through the eyes of men, the body is a site of loneliness, preyed upon by viewership. The body is a site of reproduction, whose touch is erased.