Design by Randa Hadi ↗
Never! Not with our red streams flowing forever,
not while the wine of our thorn limbs
fed the thirsty roots,
Arab roots alive
tunneling deep, deep, into the land!
هوت الشجرة؟
عفو جداولنا الحمراء
عفو جذورٍ مرتويه
بنبيذٍ سفحته الأشلاء
عفو جذورٍ عربيّه
توغل كصخور الأعماق
وتمدّ بعيداً في الأعماق
عفو جذورٍ مرتويه
بنبيذٍ سفحته الأشلاء
عفو جذورٍ عربيّه
توغل كصخور الأعماق
وتمدّ بعيداً في الأعماق
– Fadwa Tuqan, The Deluge and the Tree
there shall be a people
more fluid than water more fiery than the
coming Hiroshimas
ours.
more fluid than water more fiery than the
coming Hiroshimas
ours.
– Etel Adnan, Jebu
“How can the world be recreated in the wake of the world’s destruction?”
– Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics
From the beginning of times, in ancient Mesopotamia, Africa, Native lands and beyond, prophets envisioned the catastrophic fate of those who ravaged people and earth for power and eternal life. Itinerant pre-Islamic poets composed odes amidst the ruins of defeated encampments and villages; their public poetry performances induced a state of trance, and circulated shared ethical ideals. Now, in the wake of genocides, ecocides and relentless Arab apocalypse, poets rise defiant beyond the deathscapes, elegizing the martyrs, chanting for revolution and disruption, sowing seeds and constellations of discontent – defying death. They alchemize drones, white phosphorous, poison, torture, deviance, tear gas, sirens, waste, gashes, and blood into solidarity gospels after the end of the world. Their funeral cacophonies, erotic performances and “creative disorder,” as Etel Adnan incants in Jebu, flow through underground tunnels, clubs, global intifadas, viral boycotts, freedom flotillas, Sumud caravans, noise demos, sit-ins, dead-ins, splattered red paint, showers of pamphlets and unraveled flags, pot banging, tears, infiltrating and contaminating everything in a demand for justice from Gaza to Khartoum, Cairo and Tehran. Rooted into the soil, refusing injustice forever.
Farah Al Qasimi
Jeanne et Moreau
Farah Al Qasimi
WAILING نحيب
Reimagining the deep lineage of revolutionary singers from the Arab world, artists in DIY, underground, experimental networks have been distorting, looping, glitching, amplifying their voices and improvising freely to protest oppression, corruption, genocide and violence, repurposing rhythms from Punk to Techno. Palestinian singer, oud and qanun artist Kamilya Jubran’s eerie lamentations contain multitudes of histories and memories from the homeland and the world – ecstatic Tarab and Irtijal of love and discontent. Singer and producer Nadah el Shazly mashes up plunderphonics of pollution, disorientation and chaos throughout the African continent. Rap artist Sabine Salamé, influenced by Zajal, narrates complaints of life under siege. Maryam Saleh blows up Egyptian folk and resistance songs into absurd performances of rebellion. El Kontessa captures the chaos, intensity and breakdowns of Cairo in sonic collages evoking Mahraganat, Free Jazz, Hip-Hop or Techno. Tune into these otherworldly polyphonies from the frontlines.
Delirium هذيان
Experimenting with the body as a site of total violence and injury, artists expose the damages of relentless mutilation and assault onto the flesh, psyche, neural and sensory systems. In the eighties, as the Lebanese Civil War raged, Mona Hatoum’s durational performances staged her own nude body under torture, between life and death, covered in offal, blood and excretions, trapped in a glass casing filled with mud, caressing her balaclava and exposed skin with a large knife. Now, dance artists such as Sahar Damoni, Nasa4Nasa, Mette Loulou Von Kohl, Nora Alami and Samaa Wakim explore extreme experiences of brutality, madness, and viscerality on stage, revealing the irreversible marks of rape and war.
WaSTE خرب
How does life overcome ecocide? Immersed into waste, leaks, toxic fumes and remains, artists recycle rubble, toxicity and pollution to expose and defy ecological collapse. Performer and activist Jessika Khazrik traces the history of ammonia, stored in the wheat silos that exploded in the Beirut Port on August 4th 2020, back to Ancient Egypt and Persepolis. Performer and academic Tania El Khoury reveals the dangerous privatization of Lebanese public beaches, dumping of toxic substances into the sea, and speculation on public electricity networks dating back to French occupation. Jumana Manna sculpts food leftovers, concrete bricks, silos and newspapers into sun-burnt memorials of war and abandonment – echoes to Simone Fattal’s forests of ancient mythical heroes and civilizations and limbless bodies.
Dissassemblage التفكيك
The breakdown is a feminist, queer tool of rebellion and experimentation, a cosmic rhythm of life amidst forever violence. A noise dissassemblage from deathscapes, encampments, protests and underground worlds sabotages the systems and structures of cisheteropatriarchal, colonial, capitalist terror to reveal other ways of living and loving, reclaiming earth, water, blood, sky, voice, breath, stars – sumud and Intifada. The poet is at one with the martyr and actionist, rupturing, dismantling, investigating, highjacking, looting, sabotaging, demanding truth and justice. Larissa Sansour’s dystopian archeological tragedies reveal the disaster that has fallen on Palestine – futuristic wastelands through which lyrical freedom fighters excavate memories, songs and traditions. Eruptions from parallel worlds rise as cries for justice and liberation. As the poet Hala Alyan writes in Spoiler: “I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in. I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.”
YOU NEED ME // YOU NEED ME // YOU NEED ME // YOU NEED ME // YOU NEED ME // YOU NEED ME // YOU NEED ME //
Mette Loulou Von Kohl, direction Stephanie Acosta
by Andrea Abi-Karam
rope as vein, location marked by desire
the whale tail shadowed impression w/n each liver
excess filtered by portal flooded sinusoids
our bodies taxed by the toxins we are forced to fill it with
tasked with draining our absorptive surfaces internal
was sonic youth the soundtrack to your disappearance?
feet crack the molten pavement in anticipation
the electricity of critical mass in summer
shared sodium chloride amongst pallbearers
the sky shadowed & ominous / lightning strikes the open casket
political funeral marked by a force that cracks
the symbolism is accentuated, yet still material
we inject our faces w/ asymmetry
coagulate into a cross-linked clot
rattle through the state’s mainframe
as wire mesh, as human dragnet
nausea rises from inside the empire
beneath the glow of nuclear reach, the world shrinks
to throat. It’s one long nerve, the doctor says. There’s a reason
breathing helps, the muscles slackening like a dead marriage.
Mine are simple things. Food poisoning in Paris. Hospital lobbies.
My husband laughing in another room. (The door closed.)
For days, I cradle my breast and worry the cyst like a bead.
There’s nothing to pray away. The tree loves her cutter.
The nightmares have stopped, I tell the doctor. I know why.
They stopped because I baptized them. This is how my mother
and I speak of dying—the thing you turn away by letting in.
I’m tired of April. It’s killed our matriarchs and, in the back yard,
I’ve planted an olive sapling in the wrong soil. There is a droopiness
to the branches that reminds me of my friend, the one who calls
to ask what’s the point, or the patients who come to me, swarmed
with misery and astonishment, their hearts like newborns after
the first needle. What now, they all want to know. What now.
I imagine it like a beach. There is a magnificent sand castle
that has taken years to build. A row of pink seashells for gables,
rooms of pebble and driftwood. This is your life. Then comes the affair,
nagging bloodwork, a freeway pileup. The tide moves in.
The water eats your work like a drove of wild birds. There is debris.
A tatter of sea grass and blood from where you scratched your own arm
trying to fight the current. It might not happen for a long time,
but one day you run your fingers through the sand again, scoop a fistful out,
and pat it into a new floor. You can believe in anything, so why not believe
this will last? The seashell rafter like eyes in the gloaming.
I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in.
I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined,
so make it beautiful.
Spoiler
Hala Alyan
“Poppies in October” released by Ruptured
قفص
Nadine Makarem
تخلي عن نمط حياة مألوف
لنعلق حالنا من حفة الشاشة
كبسات بدل عييط مكتوم
شعشعة عتمة والشمس مطفيّة
مسامير ع طرف الاصابع
طابة قماش بالتم
صاريخ ساكت
وصمت صاخب
واقع اضرب من كوابيس الطفولة
الصبح للقهوة والتأمل
و١١٥ كلم صوب الجنوب
الصبح للصلاة والتخطيط
طمني اصحابك بالبعيدة وبالغربة
انو بعدك موجودة
عم تهتمي ب الجنين
ل اصابيعك نهارو
ولا نبض بلا ارض
ما في بيت بلا نفس
ما في ضحيه بلا مجرم
بلا مستعمر ما في قفص
وعد حياة افضل ب بلاد الحضارة
مرتاحين لولا شرش
السخرية
عم بمزح بالتعليق الكئيب إلي قلتو
إدريك النفس مثل الزيتونة
لازم تنشف ل درجة العطش قبل ما تصقيها
تصفي الماي تحت ذروعها
قبل ما تكبر وتعطي
ولا نبض بلا ارض
ما في بيت بلا نفس
ما في ضحايا بلا مجرم
بلا مستعمر ما في قفص
شعشعة عتمة والشمس مطفيّة
واقع اضرب من كوابيس الطفولة
string
strong song slick save soldier sold song Unsellable Nation
I have watched us fall
ennui mind by ennui mind
comforts weapon commodity
sing no praises Praise no belonging
Diaspora is destiny
Death wish for object permanence
None free til all free
lesson learned necessity
i was
thinking abt
the arabic
how rich it sings
who has taken my friend away
from her home
who led my cousin shepherd
to the flock of metal death machine
away from broom and sunlight to trenches
and hollowed earth waiting
who pulled him away
from daily joy to the ecstasy of struggle & liberation
the rapture of martyrdom
a glare into every eye
long live the footsoldier
in the era of flight
of automated maim
long live the
lady’s gaze
into the insufficient eye of machine
Photos by Myriam Boulos * Photos by Myriam Boulos * Photos by Myriam Boulos * Photos by Myriam Boulos * Photos by Myriam Boulos * Photos by Myriam Boulos *
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Heat, Body, Horror
Dina Abdulhadi
deathfalls in autumn marathons.
I fry eggplant in its skin,
baked again with tomato, breaking down
to a bloody, slimy thing served cold with bread.
City policy: the only guaranteed air conditioning
is a morgue, the humming trailers
keeping bodies unslimed.
Move too much, you’ll
be blamed for your death.
Too much stimulation by day, too much
cortisol with morning. I dream of dark
hot night, a lover I never made love to.
The humid sun wakes me out of strangled fishnet
covering their chest. The light
more disruptive than the heat, that sweaty warmth
I crawl back to in place of another body.
What if wet n wild
started running ads on climate change?
Manufactured the sky’s chemical kaleidoscope
into an eye palette. Turned the ocean to
seltzer, canned this salt soda of last resort
while fascists feed fresh water to machines.
Spewed black death to air. Permafrost bodies
don’t know the plagues they release upon melting.
Our bloods’ fever is barely over
the threshold where fungi thrive, a barrier held
since nature selected mammals over dinosaurs,
when the asteroid made an earth with no sun.
Desiccated land expands death dunes
men cross when they try to flee
the death camps built by men.
The dead don’t lay in the street to be walked
over.
May they haunt us, forever. May we honor
their haunting, letting there be space
for what is to come, to really come
for what is possible to last, to last
if bracing, and be enough.
* RESOURCES * RESOURCES * RESOURCES * RESOURCES * RESOURCES * RESOURCES * RESOURCES * RESOURCES
Organizations
Readings
- Abi-Karam, Andrea, and Kay Gabriel, eds. We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Nightboat Books, 2020.
- Abi-Karam, Andrea, Villainy, Nightboat Books 2021
- Abi-Karam, Andrea, EXTRATRANSMISSION, Kelsey Street Press, 2019
- Adnan, Etel. The Arab Apocalypse. 3rd ed. Sausalito, Post-Apollo Press, 2007.
- Alqaisiya, Walaa. Decolonial Queering in Palestine. Routledge, 2023.
- Bazeed, Mariam, ed., I Want Sky. Mizna (in partnership with AAWW’s The Margins), June 2021
- Boulos, Myriam. What’s Ours. Aperture, 2023.
- Choufi, Nadim and Rifaii, Yasmine eds, I Will Always Be Looking For You - A Queer Anthology on Arab Art. Commissioned by Haven for Artists, 2025
- Conner, Randy P., David Hatfield Sparks, and Mariya Sparks. Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol, and Spirit: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Lore. Cassell, 1998.
- Gopinath, Gayatri, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Duke, 2018
- Jahshan, Elias, ed. This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers. Saqi Books, 2022.
- Jahshan, Elias, This Queer Arab Family: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers. Saqi Books, 2025
Joukhadar, Zeyn. The Map of Salt and Stars. Atria Books, 2018. - Joukhadar, Zeyn. The Thirty Names of Night. Atria Books, 2020.
- Jarrar, Randa. Him, Me, Muhammad Ali: Stories. Sarabande Books, 2016.
- Jarrar, Randa. Love Is an Ex-Country. Catapult, 2021.
- Kaabour, Marwan, ed. The Queer Arab Glossary (bilingual, Arabic/English). Saqi Books, 2024.
- Mejdulene Bernard Shomali. Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022.
- Institut du Monde Arabe. Habibi: Les Révolutions de l’Amour. Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe, 2023.
- Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. (Expanded 10th Anniversary Edition, 2017)
Digital Platforms
* HIYA LIVE PLAYLIST ARCHIVE * HIYA LIVE PLAYLIST ARCHIVE * HIYA LIVE PLAYLIST ARCHIVE * HIYA LIVE PLAYLIST ARCHIVE *
ARTIST INDEX * ARTIST INDEX * ARTIST INDEX * ARTIST INDEX * ARTIST INDEX * ARTIST INDEX * ARTIST INDEX *
Dina Abdulhadi
El Kontessa
Etel Adnan
Farah Al Qasimi
Hala Alyan
Jeanne et Moreau
Jessica Khazrik
Jumana Manna
Kamilya Jubran
Larissa Sansour
Leyya Mona Tawil
Maryam Saleh
Mette Loulou Von Kohl
Myriam Boulos
Nadah Al Shazly
Nadine Makarem
Nora Alami
Sabine Salamé
Sahar Damoni
Samaa Wakim
Shatr Beirut Poetics
Simone Fattal
Sophia Al Maria
Tanya el Khoury and Dictaphone
- Yara Asmar, all that has been seen will have been seen for nothing, Stuttering Music
- Faten Kanaan, Three Arches, Nisf Madeena
- Mayssa Jallad, Kharita, Marjaa: The Battle Of The Hotels [Ruptured & Six Of Swords]
- Fatima Al Qadiri, Gumar (Moon) Intro, Gumar
- Floy Krouchi, COUVRE FEU Arabic (feat. Kamilya Jubran), COUVRE-FEU - Composer le Réel - 2011
- Sandy Chamoun / Anthony Sahyoun / Jad Atoui, Hayawanon Ghader - حيوانٌ غادر, Ghadr - غدر
- Pollution Opera (Elvin Brandhi & Nadah El Shazly), Cairo???, Pollution Opera
- Asma Ghanem, We've Got A Life In Illusion و لنا في الخيال حياة
- B.Abbas & R.Abou-Rahme, After everything is extracted, Only Sounds That Tremble Through Us | فقط أصوات ترتعش في أجسادنا
- Sabine Salamé, مدينة بلا ناس A City Without People, التعايش مع البقاء - Living with survival
- Makimakkuk, Bidaeyat, Only Sounds That Tremble Through Us | فقط أصوات ترتعش في أجسادنا
- Maurice Louca, Rupture - El Kontessa REMIX, Benhayyi Al-Baghbaghan (Salute the Parrot) REMIXED
- Deena Abdelwahed, Pre Island (33EMYBW), Jbal Rrsas Remixes
- dj haram, Handplay, Handplay EP
- Fatima Al Qadiri, Is2aleeha feat Bobo Secret & Chatham, Shaneera
- El Kontessa ,الكونتيسة, Bingo بينجو, Nos Habet Caramel | نص حبة كراميل
- bergsonist, mold, #1D3A18
-
Liliane Chlela, Bison IM112, Anatomy Of A Jerk
- Jlin Embryo, Embryo