خلاص/Khalas

Woke to a resounding KHALAS reverberating inside my head. The end-all, all-caps response to life right now. It has a doppler echo and continues to boomerang around the space between my ears. Enough with it! How does one scream in Arabic while typing on a computer? This is no looped-song-opera stuck on repeat forever. This is someone drop-kicking a drum set across the stage, or tearing hundreds of thousands of paper sheets in unison, or millions of street cleaners taking on the same neighborhood.

The problem with sounds in your head is that you can’t unplug the cable. The speakers can’t shatter, because they’re not ruled by the same physics as our body parts. So how to silence the noise inside this make-believe physics? I find myself back in that cinderblock high school, tracing my finger and watching the walls explode behind me. I am dancing with my whole heart in the middle of a concrete hangar that is filled with light. My shoes are off and I am running through silt that belched up from the drowning creek.

Like Water

Anybody else pre-order an ebook a month in advance, just to take care of their future self? Wading through Lev Manovich’s latest book, Cultural Analytics, and thinking on the politics of art history. I was reading a novel by a poet with precise vocabulary, which really messed with my Arabic lessons. What does “غريب” mean on a granular level? I need to know the boundary, so I can smudge it or erase it. My bravery toward writing poetry in Arabic has only extended to the labels I make for my studio materials: غريب/weird fabric (yet to learn the word for fabric).

I dream about visiting eternal springs in the Californian desert. Packing and unpacking dirty laundry, making breakfast for forty with only my 6-cup French press and the slowly crazing cookware from my childhood. Sharing studio space with strangers (أستاذ غريب) and blind to what I am working on.

folklore ("Mad Woman")

Months ago I listened to Jad Abumrad’s “Dolly Parton’s America” podcast series, a wonderful story to ponder while crocheting rug yarn into a circle. A great research project that explores every facet of Dolly’s life and soul and symbolism, her prolific work and how she smashed the glass ceiling; “Miss Americana.”

When I was in undergrad, I purchased all of Taylor Swift’s discography. At the time, she had dropped Red and nobody knew 1989 was on its way. I was months from graduation when she announced her genre change, and soon after her new work blessed us. Arguably, Taylor has furthered a lot of Dolly’s work in the country music industry. Taylor is infamous for bringing country back to teen hearts. She updated the tropes and massaged them into contemporary pop, a cool young adult embodying everything Dolly had also sung about. Everything the industry expected of her and of every other woman.

The first time we really saw Taylor’s potential and range was in 1989. Jaw-dropping imagery and sound updating those damn country song tropes. Was she singing them because she believed them? Because that was all she knew? Of course I watched the Netflix documentary on Taylor Swift that dropped not too long ago. Throughout the documentary, it becomes clear that Taylor is another young woman who has been broken by self-esteem issues brought on by a white male-controlled system (The Industry). Did Dolly ever show this struggle so transparently? Or did she leverage the tropes (her sexuality and voice and childhood?) from the start?

Since 1989, we’ve been given Reputation and Lover, which are fine. They are songs I will still listen to and music videos I will still watch, but folklore is what music history needed. folklore is the album I could hear in the newness of 1989. Taylor is finally in charge and owns all of her own work moving forward, starting with her album Lover. This ownership is heard vibrantly in folklore, an energy and freedom that was last seen when she declared her genre change. Her renewed energy as a result of creating outside of her years “in the system.” A re-emergence of higher self-esteem through the pause our global pandemic brought.

folklore by Taylor Swift, album cover.