How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts

M was exasperated by her friend's frivolous attitude toward the tragedy of losing a role. She was not trained to read the potential in R's wild imagination. Was it a commitment to realism, trained by the ideological morality of activism, that made her unresposive to the fantasy genre and vigilante characters? R's instinct was to court the unfamiliar, whereas M's training was to engage with criticality. Both these attributes could have interfaced in interesting and colourful ways, with sparks and currents, if and only if the social conditions of the time had been conducive to the arrival of a vigilante.

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, curator and author based in Mumbai and Berlin. She has been the executive director of Majlis Culture, a centre for rights discourse and art initiatives in Mumbai, 1998-2016; and artistic director of Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne, 2018-2021. Her areas of interest are documentary practices, urban cultures, migration movements, transient identities, and lived-in hybridity.

This publication proposes a set of aural exercises that show readers how to disappear, reappear, join a group, or leave a group. Its annex is a lexicon of some of the sounds that dwell in or are banished from the middle-class household. 

Text: Haytham El-Wardany
Editors: Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis
Translated from Arabic by Jennifer Peterson (Preliminary Exercises) and Robin Moger (Sounds of the Middle Classes)

Navina Sundaram is sitting in the editing room in Hamburg. She has managed to reduce the complexity of the Kemal Altun case to the required 2 minutes and 40 seconds for the political magazine; a journalistic feat considering the legal terminology and the international political situation, which must be presented in simple terms. She places her interview with the judge at the back. The audience therefore first gets an impression of perhaps the best-known deportation prisoner of the republic on trial here. The phone rings. I imagine she is displeased about the disturbance. It’s the day of the broadcast; the report still needs to be approved. It rings again. She answers. Peter Boultwood is on the phone and says, “Did you hear? Kemal jumped out of the window in the courtroom. He’s dead.” 

Merle Kröger lives in Berlin where she works as a novelist, screenwriter and dramaturg. She was a member of the Berlin film collective dog film (1992–1999) and founded pong  lm in 2001. Kröger is the co-author of Philip Scheffner’s internationally awarded films Revision (2012), Havarie (2016) and Europe (2022). Kröger has published five novels to date, including Grenzfall (2012), Havarie/ Collision (2015) and Die Experten/ The Experts (2021). Her novels have received numerous awards, including Best Crime Novel of the Year, the Radio Bremen Prize for Crime Fiction and the German Crime Fiction Prize.

Translated by Rubaica Jaliwala 

For so it happens that when the poets speak, objects appear closer to their own shadows. The poet's mouth fills up with horses and marble, and his verses start to shine like rivers. These rivers then turn back to flow through the very palace he is depicting. The poet's own words begin to weigh down on him, as though he were holding up a palace with his palms. Then he travels, and the palace is obliterated. Countries and nations change, and naught remains but what the poets had seen. Of what the poets had seen, naught remains but its image in anthologies. And when the libraries have been flooded or burned to the ground, nothing but the commentaries on those anthologies are left, and all that one finds in these commentaries is that which was appropriated and wrought a thousand times over. 

Hussein Nassereddine is a multidisciplinary artist. His work in installation, writing, video and performance originates from a practice around language that builds fragile monuments - some verbal, some sonic, some tactile - rooted in collective histories and resources of poetry, ruins, construction and image-making.

Translated from Arabic by Ben Koerber.

Russian writer and philosopher Oxana Timofeeva was born and grew up in various parts of the USSR. The book explores the difficulty of reducing one’s sense of homeland to one’s country alone, the philosophical interconnectedness of movement and rootedness, our plant and animal souls, and how we need to reimagine our desired, fictional if need be, homelands. The book interweaves vignettes from Timofeeva’s childhood across different parts of the USSR with a philosophical discussion of ideas on homeland in the thought of Brecht, Deleuze and Guattari, and other main figures of literature and philosophy. 

Oxana Timofeeva is Sc.D., professor at “Stasis” Center for Philosophy at the European University at St. Petersburg, leading researcher at Tyumen State University, member of the artistic collective “Chto Delat” (“What is to be done”), deputy editor of the journal “Stasis”, and the author of books History of Animals (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018; Maastricht: Jan van Eyck, 2012), Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2009), Solar Politics(forthcoming, Polity, 2022).

Commissioned and published by Kayfa ta (2020) 
Translation from Russian by Maria Afanasyeva 
Design template by Julie Peeters 
Cover illustration by Jumana Emil Abboud

This publication coincides with Curtis Cuffie's New York City, an exhibition presenting Curtis Cuffie's work as captured in photographs by Katy Abel, Tom Warren, and Cuffie himself. Unlike the exhibition, this book exclusively features Cuffie's photographs. It is the eighth entry in a series of compact volumes featuring visual contributions,  correspondence,  responses, and conversations accompanying the Grazer Kunstverein exhibition program.

Curtis Cuffie (1955-2002) was an artist based in New York City's East Village. Originally from Hartsville, South Carolina, he moved to Brooklyn at the age of fifteen and eventually settled in Manhattan, first near Bryant Park and later around the Bowery where he lived unhoused for long stretches of his life. Cuffie was integral to a dynamic circle of artists and intellectuals, marking his place within New York's Black avant-garde. 

A chronology of poems selected & translated by Robin Moger.

I had intended my poetry to be a kind of salvation for me in my confrontation with the onslaught of a perpetually antagonistic world. When this confrontation failed, I tried convincing myself that surrendering to the world—being a scrap of paper floating downriver—was the only salvation available to me. But this proved impossible, too.

Wadih Saadeh

In a 2014 AlMayadeen TV interview with the Lebanese poet-host Zahi Wehbe, Wadih Saadeh called his work ‘an autobiography of other people’s lives.’ At this point in the conversation he had already explained that people are essentially alike, so the deeper you plunge into yourself the more you find out about others. Speaking casually, the then sixty-six-year-old—very arguably the greatest living Arabic poet—did not seem to realise how startling is the idea. Donald M. Murray’s ‘All Writing is Autobiography’ is one thing, but to say that poetry is a way to be someone else, and so let someone else be you—that feels like a coup de foudre. A poem, Saadeh told Wahbe, is ‘a momentary, illusory cure’ from the horrors of the world, wounds actually dressed by working, having a family, emigrating. He called the third person, which in Arabic translates to ‘the absent one,’ ‘a shadow self, the self that cannot be present.’ Summoning that inner absence, switching on the reader’s presence, is what the Lebanese master manages, every time. 

Youssef Rakha, 
from his Afterword, ‘The Australian’

241. Laura Buccieri: Songbook for a Boy Inside
240. K. Lorraine Graham: from Feed
239. Marta López-Luaces: Reminiscences of Echoes
238. Montana Ray: Mirroring
237. Yumi Dineen Shiroma: A Novel Depicting “The” “Asian” “American” “Experience”
236. Anaïs Duplan: 9 Poems/The Lovers
235. Serena J. Fox: Night Landing
234. Orchid Tierney: Blue Doors
233. Aditi Machado: This Touch
232. Iman Mersal: الصوت في غير مكانه (The Displaced Voice); translated by Lisa White
231. Abdellah Taïa: 99 Names
230. Javier Zamora: Revising into the Right? Form…Hopefully?
229. Aracelis Girmay: MOTHER MOTHER YOU ARE WHO I LOVE
228. Christina Barreiro, Lindsey Hoover, Fatima Lundy, Rupert McCranor, Kayla Park, Chrissy Ramkarran, Asiya Wadud, Rachael Guynn Wilson: Out-Of-Office
227. Baseera Khan: Be Careful What You Wish
226. Maryam Monalisa Gharavi: Alphabet of an Unknown City
225. Göksu Kunak: I thought this would