Poetry Performance with George Abraham and Fargo Tbakhi

Nabra: That’s really exciting, and I have a couple follow-up questions, which is, first of all, how did you find out that you both are obsessed with Paradise Lost? And also what does it mean to be obsessed with Paradise Lost is a question I have just as a human, and then the other thing is that I’ve seen you’ve described as a “necropastoral”— in Paradise Lost, being within the pastoral genre—but if you could talk about what that is, if you have maybe coined that term. I’ve never heard that before. I’m interested in that term. We can give you credit in this podcast if you’d like it, but I’d love to know more about what that term is or how you’re really defining the piece genre-wise and structure-wise maybe.

George: I guess I could answer. Yeah, I could take a stab at those questions. Maybe starting with the last one, yeah. I guess necropastoral is… Credit goes to Joyelle McSweeney, brilliant theorist and poet herself thinking about, I guess, like what is the contemporary evolution in a really messed up way of the pastoral tradition and genre within the necrotic waste landscape of modernity? And she defines this within anti-colonial tradition, posing it within like Césaire, Kim Hyesoon’s work as two examples. Another big touchpoint is the World War I poet, like anti-war poets like Wilfred Owen for example and just thinking about… These are the sites at which she says the pastoral of today or whatever, actually is more of a haunted landscape, of one that operates on viscera and the question of flesh is just very different right now because of this sort of spiraling catastrophe that is global modernity under imperialism.

So, for us, I guess it was an entry point in some ways. It opened up some curiosities, and this touches on the first question of obsessed with Paradise Lost because I think people have just long been weirdly obsessed with Milton and not just obsessed in a… like, “Okay, there’s the boring academia. Oh, we’re going to devote ourselves in our entire research careers to studying this one line break in this one poem,” or whatever kind of forms, but more of like after Milton’s death, like years later, his body was actually exhumed and his bones were taken out of his grave and sold on the black market of England.

So, there’s a kind of necrotic-driven obsession to the point of a necrotic point with Milton that Fargo and I found very… This story is always increasingly fascinating every time I return to it, and another kind of key touchstone of unlocking thought in the project, Joyelle McSweeney was one kind of earlier touchstone thinking about when we think about Palestinian exile: what is that necrotic pastoral landscape of that exile and that loss, right? That’s one kind of thought entry point, if that makes sense, for the projects that we’ve had, but another kind of point was an amazing recent biography of Milton. Joe Moshenska wrote a really, really incredible thinking about it, called Making Darkness Light, thinking about Milton as an embodiment of multiple selves and this weird botched embodiment of what does it mean to even love a poet? Milton is such a weird figure life-wise, historically, when thinking about how we even remember or canonize poets.

He was in one way prophet. He really, truly thought himself as messianic and thought of himself as a really, really, really rigorous, like, “You need a PhD in theology to understand what the hell I’m saying,” type figure on one hand, but then on another hand, he’s so incredibly weird and mystic and was part of a failed revolution himself that ended in the beheading of King Charles III, but also then just years later, the British monarchy reinstated itself; empire warped in, adapted and continued in its form, and actually evolved in its form. So, in a way, Milton was an accessory towards getting at the heart of what we’re thinking about, of like what does it mean to keep going in the midst of an empire that is actually actively adapting and actively shaping and reforming itself and remaking itself and reinventing itself, and then thereby reproducing these catastrophes that so many of us, definitely Palestinians, definitely feels that we are living and surviving and resisting miraculously despite…?

So, yeah, I think that in a way, like Fargo said, there’s the hashtag representation like “OMG. Paradise Lost with a falafel instead of an apple” or something. I don’t know, and that silly entry point, but more of it’s actually, no, it’s really funny that you brought up McSweeney and the necropastoral with this. The entry points actually were and still are the end of empire and what that really means, I guess. I also would say, I don’t know if I would call Paradise Lost a pastoral. Oh, it’s an epic poem for sure, but I mean it has pastoral elements. Yeah, I guess it’s also definitely not a… Yeah, it’s a term I wouldn’t use for Paradise Lost specifically, but yeah. It’s logic. The logic of the necropastoral is definitely in our thinking right now, and I think we’ve dropped it as a subtitle because we don’t even need a subtitle. I mean, it’s just EVE. It just what it is, and as a source, text change, et cetera. Yeah.

Nabra: Along those lines, I’ve also seen it described in different locations as a play, as a poetry performance, maybe performance art piece. Definitely a multidisciplinary piece in some way. Can you talk about form as well, especially since this whole season we’re talking about performance art, which is such a nebulous idea, but largely because we are finding ourselves breaking down the concept of theatre the more we do this theatre podcast. So, we were like, “Okay, it’s time to really go all the way.”

So, we’d love to know about this more as a example, perhaps, of where performance structurally might be going and where we’re seeing theatre, maybe looking like as it evolves into a more multidisciplinary space that’s, I think, being innovated by performance artists like yourself.

Fargo: Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, for me, I think a lot of the messiness or confusion or slipperiness between, “Is it a play? Is it a piece of experimental theatre? Is it an installation?” These are mostly marketing terms. They don’t really describe things in a way that’s useful to people outside of telling your donors what’s in the new season. So, in our approach to it, there are a couple of things that maybe like our two positions: George as primarily, like, a poet and a very writerly person who also has a slam poetry background, so, comes to the writing from that lens of performance; and myself, as someone who does a lot of solo performance, the things that maybe become different in even approaching the question of doing a project like this might be an approach to narrative that is not really there.

We’re not necessarily interested in following the shapes of traditional play structures. We’re more interested in bringing in various kinds of voices, like the voice of a particular historical document that just becomes text that people on stage read. So, in our experiments so far, as part of crafting what the project is: we’ve done puppetry. We’ve done shadow puppetry. We’ve done abstract movement pieces, and I think what that has allowed us to do is focus more on sensation or more on a more holistic understanding of how performance communicates rather than trying to focus on character motivation or the spine of a play, the superstructure of a play, right? We’ve allowed ourselves to not even consider those things.

So, that also maybe leads to thinking about the “characters” in Paradise Lost, not as characters, but as positions that a person can take, and in doing that, we can keep spinning out the connections that we’re able to make using the text or ideas or already laid groundwork of Paradise Lost and bring it into borrowing images or texts from Jean Genet’s posthumously published book Prisoner of Love, which recounts his time with the PLO in the seventies and eighties, and marry that with just borrowing pieces of the British Mandate’s Defense Emergency Regulations for Palestine, which were instituted in 1945 in response to revolt and then became the legal basis for the State of Israel’s Construction in 1948.

So, the ability to access these various kinds of registers in the performance is a kind of freedom that we might not have if we had approached this and said, “We are going to write a play.” It also might have meant that we didn’t ever explore performance, that we just wrote a script and then gave it to a director, and then they do the rest of the work, but actually bringing our performance experiments into the process of constructing the project. So, it gets a little bit close to devising somehow, or sometimes, but even that can have more of a defined structure and process, and I think we’ve really tried to always be open to radical revisions or letting things not be text at all, which might be our instinct as writers that are approaching a performance project and instead just trying to consider the vocabulary of performance as another tool that we have in actually writing the project.

So, those are maybe just a few thoughts. There’s not really an easy way to describe what it is yet, partially because it’s still in process. We don’t necessarily know what the final project will look like. I’ll say that for myself in bringing a bit more of the performance lens sometimes to our work, one of the things that I keep coming back to as an inspiration for the kind of thing this wants to be in my instinct is the work of Reza Abdoh, who was an Iranian playwright and experimental theatre maker in the 1990s who made these very unclassifiable pieces of extreme performance that were very fast paced and very disjointed. There were oftentimes a lot of short flashes of things that were woven together or not woven together, and I find his work really beautiful and meaningful in the ways that it reflects the way we live, the way one might live inside of an empire and foregrounding some of the cruelty that comes with that.

So, all of this, I think, is to say that we are trying to let the development of this project avoid falling into a certain category. If it starts to feel like a play, let’s do something else. If it starts to feel like a piece of devised theatre, let’s get very writerly all of a sudden, and I think what that is doing is just trying to stay true to the primary concerns we have with the project, which is going back to this question of why we were so drawn to Paradise Lost in the first place. I think for both of us, there was something about the language and the way Milton writes it that communicated this profound sense of loss in a way that many people have thought about and written about for centuries, and our question became, “How can we borrow that and try and force it into as many configurations that feel true and useful to where we are right now as we can?”

We are thinking about loss in a revolutionary context and how to go on.

George: Yeah, and I think something about this question of form and failure is… I don’t know. It’s something I’ve been wrapping my head around too, because as a poet coming from… Like yes, I come from spoken word and slam, and I’ve always loved and been interested in performance my whole life as a… I was a pianist through all my childhood and whatnot, and I think that this idea, like for me, I guess, as a poet myself, form is actually a site of play and playfulness, and it’s a site of failure as well, and a space where failure can actually be generative. Like let’s take an inherited form, sestina, sonnet, et cetera, these all having their own historical context and whatnot, and let’s push it in somehow. Let’s push it to the point of failure. Let’s push it to the point of breakage. Let’s see what happens when we apply any kind of pressure to any kind of its constraints and whatnot, and that’s something for me that my poetry has always been interested in.

So, coming into this both as a way of studying performance art with Fargo, and in some ways, like because of and alongside and with inspiration from Fargo. I love studying my friends’ work, and I love studying how my friends think and make. I think that’s been one of my biggest joys in this process, actually, is learning from Fargo and learning with Fargo, but as someone who also is very, like I will always describe myself “formless” as a poet. I think that it’s been really fun actually seeing these spaces where poetic form, for example, can take over, like Fargo gave me a prompt in our most recent week-long performance workshop with Silk Road Cultural Center and was like, “Let’s think about the sheer totality that EVE is trying to resist in this moment in the project, and why don’t we name it?”

And I was like, “Okay, so a list poem. Gotcha,” and I’m like writing this list poem and I’m like, “Well, one of the things in Paradise Lost that is so intriguing is his… “ It’s so small and so simple, but writing a poem in perfect iambic pentameter, that then breaks that iambic pentameter, that overflows. Like his lines are so incredibly enjambed, which means overflowing into the next line. For this day and age, it’s very rare to see such a hyper formal container in one way that consistently gets broken as much as it does, and it’s one of the things that Paradise Lost, I guess, within the poetic canon or whatever is known for and revered for actually is. So, in a way of itself, Paradise Lost, like on a formal level, is an overflowing. It is a failure of form as much as it is a success of it. It is a text that consistently reinvents itself and revises itself. So, taking that spirit, but refracting it through today’s lens.

So, I took that blank, heavily enjambed verse. I just tried writing as if it was a Miltonian experiment and started with one line from Paradise Lost and just went off and wrote a whole monologue in perfect iambic pentameter, and I’m like, “We don’t speak that these days.” Writing in formal metered verse is not something as a poet that I ever do, but in the context of a performance, experimental, interdisciplinary project, I’m like, “Oh, this was a fun exercise in writing in an older mode that I would’ve never done in a poem, honestly.” So, in a way, it’s coming full circle where I love being a part of the process where the performance questions actually cause new writerly questions and then vice versa, too, and the performance and the text are consistently shaping each other.

To me, that makes a lot more sense as a poet than the inherited models of poetry within institutions that we’re given, and I think I’m a better poet because of this project collaboration and because of its non-committal to some weird, restrained imagination of what a poem is, but instead of what a poem could be and what a poem could offer, and also what a poem fails at and where failure itself is maybe the point. That’s something I’m also thinking about within my artistic practice as much as I am, my political orientations to world as well, but yeah.

Marina: I love that. I mean, I love the refusal to be restrained, the refusal to be bounded by different terminology that has been around for whatever length of time or reason. It just sounds really exciting, and it leads me to my question.

Nabra and I started as friends in theatre and then began collaborating in different ways on the podcast, on different writings together, and yeah, it feels like such a gift to get to collaborate with a friend in different ways and we were curious, like, what does your collaboration look like? I mean, ours takes on different shapes in different ways for different projects. So, I know it’s a large question to ask, too, but I was curious if you could offer us any insights.

Fargo: Yeah. Well, I’ll certainly echo what George said, which is that it is a joy, and as you said too, Marina, it’s a real joy to be able to bring friendship into artmaking and vice versa to think about the ways that we can both contribute to one shared project and one shared experience, and I think in terms of our collaboration, I think one of the things that makes it work is that we’re very different, and we have very different approaches to artmaking, I think. As one small piece of evidence that we just heard in the last answer to your last question is George really likes form, and I hate form, and I think oftentimes the tension of those two things can produce pieces that neither of us could have done by ourselves. So, the real discovery of working together at all is finding something that I never could have made just working on my own.

And primarily in my own practice, I do just work on my own, I think. So, carving out the space to think together with George towards this project and towards understanding how both of our strengths and both of the places that we are not as experienced in can come together and fill each other in and catch each other when one of us falls. It’s a really lovely experience and in terms of the concrete practicalities of how we’ve collaborated on this project, when we first started and experimented with creating a DIY performance first draft of this piece back in 2021, a lot of it looked like George writing something and following a particular thread, and then me wondering how we could stage it, and part of that was a allowing George to not write towards performance at all, to just write what you might write as a poem and trying to figure out how do you stage this with just the two of us and two hundred bucks in this giant concrete room at the Arab American National Museum, and it really led to things that I wouldn’t have made by myself.

It led to, okay, I’m going to spend four hours making fifty tiny paper puppets of an Adam figure that we can use for shadow puppetry with an overhead projector that we borrowed from someone, and as we’ve developed, I think, that balance of one of us writing something and then giving it to the other person to revise or to ask questions about or to riff off of has been really generative. One thing that I’ve noticed, I think, is that I don’t really think, actually, that there’s been much that we have written together, if that makes sense. There’s not a lot of sections or pieces of the project that we’ve sat down and said like, “You write a line and then I write a line,” or, “Let’s think together about where this is going to go.”

A lot of it has been having conversations together and mapping out needs and saying, “Why don’t you take this part and I’ll take this part?” And then we come back together, and sometimes from there we’ll switch and give a written piece to the other person to edit and to think about how it fits in or doesn’t fit in, and I think that has clicked for us in a way that’s really useful. So, as someone also who’s worked in theatre in various capacities, like the more proper theatre industry, collaboration is very fraught often, and it can look a lot of different ways. So, it’s been really useful. I think that we’ve had the amount of time to work on this project that we have had because it has allowed us to not only understand what the project is, but to understand how we work on it together.

Those things don’t immediately come. It’s not necessarily an easy thing to figure out with someone. So, I think we’ve been able to take our time and to move slowly and to have periods of time where we’re not working on it at all, and I think all of that has been really useful in, number one, making sure that we don’t get off at each other very often in the making process, that we have a clear set of understandings of how we work together and what needs to get done when and when someone needs to put on more of a driving hat and when someone wants to sit more in the passenger seat and being able to balance that has been really useful.

George: Yeah. In a way, it’s taught me different modes of collaborating because with slam poetry, when we’re writing group pieces, that’s the collaborative thing. It is more of like, “Oh, you write one line. I write one line. Then you write one line,” and then that’s how… but that’s not really… Yeah. It didn’t feel as useful here just with our interests, and I don’t know, and exploration. I think that’s the whole thing, too, about this that it’s like once we learned each other’s rhythms. We learned what that meant in terms of how to explore together and with as opposed to, I don’t know, this whole imposing something onto the text that is not going to be useful for the project, if that makes sense, and taking a person, and sometimes it’s like, “Oh, no, I have this personal interest I’m super excited about.”

And it’s like, “Oh, well, actually maybe this project isn’t the vehicle for this,” and getting moments like that, being like, “Oh, yeah, actually, no. This is just some other thing that I’m thinking about,” but sometimes those random thoughts are actually really useful too, but it’s also interesting too, I guess, thinking that like in a way, this was birthed by the pandemic as a catastrophic mode of time that we are still obviously in and thinking about and surviving and navigating collectively, and also failing to navigate collectively, but also genocide—time of escalated genocide.

These are two really catastrophic eras that have been super imposed on to each other and this project in a lot of ways. This started as a pandemic weekly group chat call check-in that then we applied to residencies where we were like, “Oh, cool, first residents back in person at the museum after many years,” and then museum isn’t even open still and navigating what it was like to be a resident at a museum that’s not open, for example, versus now, it’s like, yeah, we are thinking about loss in a revolutionary context and how to go on. Of course, those that just sharpened our lived experiences in resisting this genocide, the various fears Fargo and I are in touch in, of course, that is going to come in and that is going to affect how we make a play/performance/project that thinks about revolutionary time and how to keep going in this.

I think what Fargo has called in a recent essay like the “long middle of our revolution”/just the cultural Intifada writ large. So, I think that in a way, this project’s collaboration is unfortunately, but in a really meaningful way for me at least, a result of catastrophe and a result of responding to how do we go on in catastrophe as well and how do we support each other in catastrophe as well? A lot of poets went very, very, very solo and were like, “I’m going to sit and be alone in the pandemic and write my fucking novel, and some of them are out. Some of them are really, really fucking good right now,” and I don’t know. It was just interesting being one of the poets who was not doing that. It was like, actually, it’s cool how this time made me more of an impulse towards prioritizing collaborative projects like this.

Me and Noor Hindi are just finishing our Palestinian poetry anthology, Heaven Looks Like Us, which is titled after a Fargo poem, and that collaboration also in a lot of ways was a product of the pandemic, as the ongoing pandemic as well, and was our structure that kept us going in some many ways and in conversation. Yeah, I don’t know. So, it’s just also an interesting… to think about and how individualistic, especially literary, because coming at it from a more literary position and experience, we’re so used to just an individualistic mind of creation when we know creation actually always is collective. It’s about how do we think about that practice and the difficulties of what that means to engage in the collaborative process?

I don’t know how to exist in the world except to make something in service of a collective.

Nabra: And speaking of creating art in times of catastrophe, especially thinking what’s on the forefront of our mind, of course, is the current and ongoing genocide and, in Palestine and in Gaza. I know that Fargo… Well, both of you are doing work, including EVE, that engages with that right now. We’d love to hear about the other work that you’re working on now, whether it has to do with responding to the genocide or responding to yourself within this time of catastrophe or otherwise, and especially if either of you have other collaborations that you’ve worked on or are working on currently.

George: Sure. Yeah. I guess for me, I… Yeah, so I’m editing Mizna, a journal of Southwest Asian and North African writing. We are in our twentuy-fifth anniversary right now, which is amazing being like, “Wow, truly one of the only SWANA print journals that exist in the US,” like we’re able to survive for that long and have the kind of abundant community we have. That’s incredible, and working for Mizna has been just a really, really, really lovely reminder of this, I don’t know, false local-global binary in a way of like… Just as like when EVE has developed a process of refracting through every community we enter, whether it’s Dearborn or the Museum or Chicago and Silk Road, there’s also another way of Mizna being such a local Twin Cities, like, community-centered space that also has this kind of global reach being distributed throughout the US and Europe and the SWANA region and stuff where… Yeah, I don’t know.

I’ve just been thinking about how it’s like when shit hits the fan, Mizna has such a tight coordinated alliance of other community spaces in the local region that are willing to just jump in and support at any moment, and also vice versa, and especially Minneapolis as a site of one of the biggest racial riots in US history and uprisings and a site of so much revolutionary potential and so many amazing Black and Brown SWANA communities in and of that area. So, it feels really special to be working in that community in some way, but also we have a platform enough to be able to respond and actually publish work directly from Gaza and any kind of excuse we have to just funnel money into Gaza is where we’re at right now.

We’ll publish whatever. Give us an excuse to give you all money truly and redistribute money from within the empire to outside the empire and towards its victims. So, yeah, it’s been a really, really hard time for Mizna, but it’s been a time of also a lot of community gathering and abundance too at the same time. So, I think that that’s been really taking over a lot of my work as of late. I mean, I am working on my own creative project. I’m working on a memoir. I’m working on essays. I’m working on another poetry project.

The anthology, I think, is taking less time now, but that was really for, like before this year, more of like the last years leading up to, like the past four years kind of time window. Editing this global anthology of Palestinian writers for the past four years with Noor Hindi, who’s like a sister to me, has been really meaningful. And just again, connecting with Palestinians across the world, like that was always the goal. I guess the question being like, “Why are we so disconnected from each other?” To be very, very clear, it’s a US problem, first and foremost. So, many Palestinians around the world make so many attempts to get in touch with Palestinians here, and it’s like the reverse direction is much less seen. So, how can we foster greater collaboration with our siblings in the homeland and in other countries and in other exilic contexts? So, Noor and I went into it with this. It’s always been this ulterior motive like, yes, it’s an anthology or whatever, but the more ulterior motive is like, “Hey, why don’t we give each other this concrete excuses and venues to meet and co-conspire and be in greater connection and conversation?” So, that is just beginning in a way because the anthology comes out May of next year.

So, we’re in the mindset of like, “Okay, here we’re at the pivot point.” We’re going to be like, “Let’s create opportunities for us to gather, let’s make those spaces, and let’s collaborate with places like Mizna and Haymarket and RAWI, Radius of Arab American Writers, and MENATMA, and all these SWANA-centric spaces and actually get the fuck together and break bread and whatnot. So, yeah, it’s my collaboration era for sure, and again, I don’t see how catastrophe can produce anything else for being a Palestinian. I don’t know how to exist in the world except to make something in service of a collective.

Fargo: I am, similarly, I think to where you ended, George, trying to focus on thinking about how what I make might be useful, and I think that’s look like a few things at the moment, given the particular space that we find ourselves in right now. I’m trying to find opportunities to, as you said, George, like funnel money to people in Gaza who need it. So, thinking about what kinds of tools I have as an artist that could be useful for that. Offering workshops with the group Workshops for Gaza. I’m organizing a few performance evenings here in DC that are intended to raise money and send money in an art sale, and one of the things that’s useful to me in a moment like this, I think a lot of artists, especially as this began, this escalation in October, had a moment of crisis of thinking about how artistic skills could be of use to growing movement of resistance in the United States. There’s a lot of answers to that question.

One thing that in this moment I’m thinking about is one of my former mentors, Michael Rohd, has an idea of civic practice and performance, which really just is about thinking of artistic process in service of community or of collective struggle. So, rather than thinking, “Well, how can I make a piece of art that is going to help whatever local chapter of the movement I want to be connected with?” It’s breaking down our skills as artists and saying, “I don’t think a piece of performance is necessarily going to be useful, but what I do know how to do as a performance artist is rehearse. I know how to connect people. I know how to schedule things.” So, trying to break down the component parts of our practices and see where those parts actually can be useful and fit.

So, sometimes, that’s a helpful thing, which also allows us to let go of this individualistic artist model that is really prevalent within, I think a lot of times, Western arts institutions and arts ecosystems and to think about artistic products not always being useful in a particular moment or by themselves not being enough, and I think that can often feel like a scary thing, but at the same time, it can feel like a generative thing too, to wonder how we can actually insist upon their usefulness by letting go of certain expectations we might have about what art-making means.

So, that’s something that I’m trying to continue to hold and think with, and along with that, I’ve been thinking a lot about despair. And in a variety of ways, I think, number one, it’s just an affective position that has been inescapable in this moment, and I think there’s a kind of line that people often have that that sort of despair is counterrevolutionary. We can allow ourselves to fall into despair, and I understand where that comes from, and also, I’m not sure about it. I have found for myself the feeling of despair to be very clarifying and to be a space that it’s important to honor and sit in and actually do the same kind of thing and wonder like, “How can this be useful?” So, in my own performance work in thinking about what I’m working on right now, I think that’s a space I’m really curious about and in trying to write a new solo performance towards that question in some ways.

It’s ending up being a similar process to EVE, actually. I keep finding myself doing this actually in my projects, is like taking canonical texts and doing something different with them. I don’t know why exactly. I’m sure I could try and figure it out, but that’s for a different podcast. So, I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Book of Job, which is very meaningful to me and has been a real container in terms of language and ideas for some of the things that I’ve been feeling and thinking about, and back to where I started in describing performance as a real site of relationality, like one of the things I’ve felt over the last ten months is that I don’t relate to anybody really in the same way or at all.

So, there’s this kind of deep alienation from a social fabric that I’m thinking about and wondering how or if performance then exists within that feeling, and Job has been a useful vehicle to start trying to think about how to address that question. So, those are some things I’m working on.

What I do know how to do as a performance artist is rehearse. I know how to connect people. I know how to schedule things.

Marina: Wow. I really appreciate everything that you both just said, but also, Fargo, I felt like you hit on a few things that artists have been thinking about. I mean, that Nabra and I have specifically been talking about together is like, “What do artists do now?” And I really appreciated some of the things you said around acknowledging the despair that is happening here and figuring out, like we can’t ignore it. That’s not an option, and it’s not a good option, and it’s not how we exist in community together without acknowledging our own feelings, but also that sometimes it’s not about the artistic piece. It’s about really figuring out how artists can contribute in other ways, and George, yeah, I see the agreement. I also love just the support that you do have for each other, even like we can see in this podcast call, which is amazing. George, I don’t know if you wanted to add something to that?

George: I mean, no. It’s just sometimes we need someone to do the “unsexy work” or whatever, or the invisible, like less visible, like less “heroic,” like there are no heroes. So, someone was just saying, like it was a tweet. I forgot who said it. Someone tweeted months ago like, “We don’t have heroes in this movement. We have collectives and heroism is the individual.” So, seeking that in right now, it’s just… Yeah, I mean, that’s a thing. Sometimes, the best thing to do is like, “Okay, I am going to put aside my fucking ego and my feeling. I’m going to work through my feelings,” not just shut them out, including despair, which I’m interested in thinking more with you, Fargo, on, and just be like, “Yeah, okay. This is just what needs to be done, and I’m just going to prioritize what needs to be done and just that.” You know what I mean?

I mean, I work at Mizna. So, there’s no avoiding that question of just like, “Yeah, someone needs to just get some of this less interesting shit done because that’s what we need to do to move on, do the work we do,” but yeah, it’s just interesting thinking about… I’ve been thinking a lot about this sort of artistic production can be seen in such a weirdly elevated light. I’m trying to think about how can we can… Yeah, I love what Fargo was saying earlier about deconstructing. It’s like, no, actually, maybe my use right now is being like, “I am an editor. Therefore, I can… “

I’m thinking about, yeah, sure, a Gazan poet who’s our fellow in Mizna, who’s been creating these incredible group chats where he just sends massive, massive amounts of people like, “Hey,” like that he’s connected with, “here is a personal statement from someone in Gaza applying to insert scholarship and insert country or whatever or applying for this kind of thing,” and it’s a network of people who are poets, artists, academics, academia adjacent, et cetera. People who are like, “Okay, I’m going to actually use my skills and just go into this Google Doc and help this person get this scholarship,” and just things like that.

Sometimes, that’s way more useful than, I don’t know, someone’s self-portrait as mother under Gazan rubble poems that we get around just like this. It’s like, “What?” Like, “What?” What? Yeah, I don’t know. Fargo will not be the one to say this, but I really have returned a lot to that essay he wrote that was published in Protean, like, in I think December, notes on craft and dismantling this apparatus of imperial capital seacraft, and how can we actually get to a mode of uncrafted, like making and being with each other is something I’ve been thinking about, and on a process level, replacing craft with political theory, and radical insurgent political theory more specifically, as our guide to like, “What are we doing?”

And sometimes that just, I don’t know, takes the mode of like, “I am not going to be artmaking and I’m going to be doing these menial tasks because that is much more useful right now,” and guess what? Some of us might be making better art on the other end of it because we were able to stop and be like, “Hi, I’m going to actually be a human first, or I’m going to actually be a member of a community first,” and I don’t give a shit about these, like what that stupid book that just got announced on the after Gaza, like someone, again, non-Palestinian writing about… It’s just illiteracy.

It is just utter stupidity why people think books like this need to exist and go and create, and quite frankly, no one except Palestinian civil society is qualified to talk about the future of Palestinians. Period. So, I’m just like… Anyways, but all of which is to say, yeah, sometimes, especially in academia, really looking at y’all academics, sometimes know, humble yourselves, get off your fucking high horse. Get into the Google Docs. Get into the less sexy work. That is the most useful thing an academic can do. I think Solmaz Sharif had this quote in a Mizna interview,  actually of all places of like with Tarik Dobbs, where she’s like, “I know when to get out of the way, being in academia,” and sometimes that is the most useful thing people in academia can do is just get the fuck out of the way.

Marina: Yeah.

George: Sorry for the soapbox.

Marina: No, no, it’s a great soapbox. I mean, I think it’s actually a great way to end our time together in this episode because I feel… First of all, we’ll link the notes on craft for anyone who’s listening, but also looking at the transcript, so people can find it, and I’m glad that you mentioned Yehia because if people follow Yehia’s Instagram, there are frequently calls to action in small ways of if you are able to help with this, if you have time, like that’s what working community is. So, I feel like there have been many actual philosophical moments that have been in the past several minutes of this episode with you two, but I feel like one of the biggest overarching was that to work in a collective means to put yourself aside, to get out of the way and to see what is needed to work in this current moment, and it’s also about taking care of yourself too and acknowledging your own feelings, but to work with the group.

So, thank you both so much for your time. I know that you’re incredibly busy and we just really are so grateful for you both being here, and we’re looking forward to getting to engage with your work in different ways soon.

Fargo: Thank you so much.

George: Yes, thanks to you both.

Nabra: Thank you.

Marina: This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of Kunafa and Shay and other HowlRound podcasts by searching “HowlRound” wherever you find podcasts. If you loved this podcast, please post a rating and write a review on your platform of choice. This helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode, along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content, on the howlround.com website. Have an idea for an exciting podcast, essay, or TV event the theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and contribute your ideas to the Commons.

Nabra: Yalla, Bye.

Marina: Yalla, Bye.