editorial By R. Benedito Ferrão and Deborah Julia Al-Najjar
I think it’s one of those déjà vu things
Or a dream that's trying to tell me something
Or will I ever stop thinking about it
I don't know, I doubt it
“Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” by P.M. Dawn (1991)
The past stays with us, this we know. But what we can be less certain of is how the future possesses us even before we arrive at it.
Before 1991, India had only one television channel. That changed with the dramatic overhauling of the country’s economy in the last decade of the twentieth century. With the economic liberalization of 1991, cable television expanded English-language viewing choices on Indian television, much of it of American provenance. This included coverage of 1991’s Operation Desert Storm, the Gulf War becoming the first to be televised around the clock.
As Goans in exile from Kuwait watched the televised war unfold, the expulsion of Iraqi forces from the small Gulf country by the US-led coalition was also paving the way for the future (dis)possession of Iraq in the century that was to come.
But at the same time as the Gulf War was being broadcast to India, so were – for the first time – American music videos, hip-hop adding to the zeitgeist. Of the P.M. Dawn song “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” Mikael Wood says in memoriam of its creator, Prince Be, that his vision “was full of the past in 1991.” This, not least, because of the song’s sampling of “True,” a New Wave classic from the 1980s by Spandau Ballet.
As markers of time, the song and its sample reverberate between the two twentieth century wars Iraq found itself in – the one in Kuwait and the earlier one with Iran (1980-1988). However, “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” also pre-emptively incorporates trends that would become hip-hop mainstays over the next three decades. And, so, it signals the subsequent century in which Iraq would find itself in yet another war.
Between them, the titles of the two interspersed songs, a decade apart yet evocative of the future, seem to enquire: If set adrift, how true is memory’s bliss? And what then of a future already imagined and set into motion before its time?
In dreaming up this special issue to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Gulf War, we wanted to bring together writers and artists who – like ourselves – are the children of Goa, Iraq, and Kuwait. We invited them to “set adrift on memory” and imagine anew.
Marlon Menezes begins his essay with a reference to the familiar sound of wailing in Arabic and that poignant image reverberates throughout various pieces in this issue. But that wailing is not only for what was lost. It is also the sound of justice, where memory is witness, a record for the future.
Thirty years later, contributors to this issue feel and think through the historical moment of the Gulf War in their creative outpouring. Dispossession is something beyond words. It echoes in sound, memory, and visual representations.
What do art and art creators teach us about global history and the material realities of war and trauma? This issue’s contributors address these matters in prose poetry, visual art, film, graphics, and personal essays.
Ghosts symbolize another thread of loss which runs within various works here. Speaking to ghosts is both about loss and, paradoxically, regaining past connections.
Such is the case in Dena Al-Adeeb’s cinematic triptych which renders three Iraqi wars as non-linear and non-verbal hauntings, the im/possible realities of decades of turmoil and displacement. Similarly, the fragments of war are also visually represented in Wafer Shayota’s paintings that are both graphic and ghostly. The two art pieces are an account and an accounting of historical wrongs. Hussein Adil’s comic book also haunts; it gives us an archetype of the Iraqi soldier, a story that has us come undone.
Jessica Faleiro’s prose poem is a testimony of the intergenerational inheritance of grief and loss. Sara Leana Ahmad also employs this theme, as well as the genre of the prose poem, to chronicle the fragmentary experience of a child witnessing war via a television and far away from their home/land. How does subjectivity become fragmented as a result of occupation? Dispossession is intergenerational, spoken and unspoken, a meta-geographical trauma, beyond place and time. Our writers convey the ways that grief is interstitial, palpable, and elusive.
Disenfranchisement and the structural violence occasioned by formal education are crucial themes in 1991: Dispossessions. Pieces by various contributors to this issue highlight the abuses that occur in educational institutions that tend towards supporting normative, especially nationalist, histories.
Shahd Alshammari allows us into the intimate space of her Palestinian grandmother’s experiences as a teacher in Kuwait. In tandem, Alia Yunis speaks to the Palestinian experience in exile, too. Yunis reminds readers of the power of photographic memories as she recounts her mother’s travels between Kuwait and Baghdad in the mid-twentieth century. That happier moment is countered by the post-Gulf War mistreatment of Palestinians by the Kuwait government.
Noor Alhuda Aljawad navigates the racist realities of Orange County, California and the school she attended there as an Iraqi child. Her personal essay offers an incident of patriotic distortion in the classroom. Born in 1991 – the year of the war – she relies on Iraqi relatives as well as radical literature to fill in the holes of history so as to remake the narrative.
Dina Lobo’s film Marcela, named for her father’s hometown in Goa, takes us on a dance from Kuwait to Goa as she documents her relationship to the education system in the former. Her experiences with wasta cause her dancer’s heart to break.
Together, these works commemorate a past that continues to have a hold on these contributors whose words and visuals seek to repossess history. They retell the past from the margins and recreate legacies, setting them adrift into new futures.
Deborah Julia Al-Najjar is a writing and career coach at DesireCompass Coaching. She completed her PhD at University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 2017 from the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity. She is co-editor with Nadje Al-Ali of We are Iraqis (2013). She has previous publications in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Banipal. She was born in Detroit and currently resides in Michigan.
R. Benedito Ferrão was born in Kuwait and has lived and worked in Asia, Europe, N. America, and Oceania. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at The College of William and Mary. Curator of the 2017-18 exhibition Goa, Portugal, Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar, he edited a book of the same title (2017). This is his second special issue for The João Roque Literary Journal, the first being a 2018 Goan diaspora issue co-edited with Jessica Faleiro. Ferrão’s writing, in various genres, appears in Research in African Literatures, The Good Men Project, Mizna, and Scroll.
Banner image of Kuwait is by Hamed Alayoub and downloaded from unsplash.com