Revolutions

Revolutions sifts through the grains of Muslim daughterhood to find four metaphorical circles inextricably overlapping: shame, pleasure, waiting, and surveillance. In an extended conversation with Mona Hartoum’s + and -, Revolutions asks how young Arab women - who live in homes and communities where actions are surveilled and categorized as 3aib or not 3aib, shameful or acceptable - make and unmake their identities.

Revolutions works between poetic traditions. It places its response to Hatoum’s artwork in a Palestinian and Iraqi lineage, drawing on other artists such as Mahmoud Darwish and Naseer Shamma. At the same time, Revolutions looks to feminist Canadian poets like Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, Nicole Brossard, and Syd Zolf in the way it manipulates sources, erases text, and invokes many simultaneously possible readings. Revolutions invites us to read across its poems, finding echoes along the way, turning and re-turning around the circles.