Runway x Firstdraft: What if I die tomorrow?

The eleventh Runway Journal x All Conference Conversation comes from Firstdraft, based on the unceded sovereign land and waters of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.

This text is a creative response to The Only Thing Left is to Leave (Firstdraft, 11 March 2022), developed by writer Ju Bavyka as part of their recent participation in the Firstdraft Writers Program.

In mid-March, the war with Ukraine had already been going on for several weeks (in actual fact years — since Crimea in 2014). I could see people trying to find explanations. People would say horror, shame, pain, then hope, pray … then fight — some with each other. Some would get silent, some leave. Some things were getting ugly, uglier later. Eyes both dry and wet from looking at the screen and at the images of holes left in buildings, multiplying day by day. I was part of a we who shared endless numbers of links, across continents and in multiple languages, with names, numbers, locations for desperate people trying to leave and survive where they went. We marched. We sent money. Those on the ground were doing all the welcoming work: speaking to people, finding places to stay. 

To paraphrase the prompt of a project presented at Firstdraft in February and March 2022: Where do you go when all is uprooted, what do you do? [1] The night I went to the performance event at Firstdraft I didn’t feel like going out. I needed a place where I could be, ideally with someone who wasn’t me, or my phone. 

Lately there has been so much effort to create safe spaces. But let’s think about the mechanisms of safe spaces in a country with safe borders in a world that isn’t safe? My partner brings in a term that I hope will save me from the crisis I am in while writing this text: contamination [2].

I am okay-angry. Cultural institutions are not spaces of contamination anymore. To avoid contamination, war, injustice and discrimination can be made into someone’s private, individual experience. This translocation is a great trick; audiences do not have to respond to such experiences directly. Most of these experiences can be turned into identity markers and safely experienced through a mode of gentle engagement. Safely, at a good distance, or don’t engage at all if you don’t feel like a targeted audience. Just go to another level.

It became necessary to understand how normalizing diversity and turning certain individualized modes of difference into social capital asks for new forms of resistance. [3]

We need to work hard at going beyond representation towards a common ground of shared experiences, so that we can understand for ourselves the complexity of the world we live in. 

*

I arrived just before the start of the performances. Two gazebos were set up in the courtyard, offering shelter for a sound system and visitors in the event of rain. A rather small, pocket-like space jammed between the tall wall of a neighbouring building and the protective net of a basketball court. That night it felt particularly like a transit space. We are used to gathering outdoors now, if we can, and I was glad the event didn’t take place in the white-cube space of a gallery. A few chairs here and there, but most people were standing around, quietly conversing. It reminded me that I generally feel much better in smaller, casual spaces. That night I looked up from this loosely defined container of space into the grey mush of the sky until it got dark, like a void, trying to feel present and connected, projecting hope into my multiple places somewhere out there. Feeling what I needed to feel. 

Each of these interdisciplinary artists interrogates what paths are trodden and social formations woven, what common practices are formulated and networks of sustenance formed, when we move. [4]

There is nothing objective I can or want to say about that night, but I will record some of what stayed with me, what allowed me to write this text. The project team briefly introduce themselves, telling us that it took three years to put this project together, before passing to community elder Uncle Brendan Kerin and collaborators from Arab Theatre Studio, Maissa Alameddine and Alissar Chidiac. They give space to purpose, not the other way around. Morgan Hogg walks through the parting crowd, gets up on a small stage and opens the night with a slow dance, synchronised with the video projection behind. I follow the subtitles and try to memorise words I don’t know. I imagine myself moving between a series of rooms as Hajer reads her piece and silently witness the dilemmas of her protagonist’s life. Nicole Barakat’s voice and body, in the light of a projection, has an almost paralysing effect on me, until I start to feel like a tube giving space to her voice to pass though. I close my eyes during Hussein Kahil’s vocal performance and feel tears coming. I feel like a thin tree and sense every little bump on the ground with my feet through the soles of my shoes, as I try to grip onto it to stay upright. I feel it so physically in that moment that I lose my balance and have to suddenly open my eyes. Don’t I need to belong to a culture to feel it? Maybe it’s more about believing, even for a moment.

That night I stayed for both rounds of performances. I have four beers and multiple cigarettes — way too much. A friend who was there visiting for the Biennale weekend said, ‘If there is no tomorrow, we need these kinds of events’.

*

Previously, in February, a thought slipped in. What if I die tomorrow? 

It slipped into the stillness of my living room on a Friday night. Nemoi vopros — a silent, unspoken question. It appeared like a sad pantomime holding up one of Rauschenberg’s white paintings and slowly vanished into a large gaping void in the middle of the room. I went for a beer and a pub meal that night and met some friends. They were leaving the country after seven years, disillusioned and tired. We sat in the darkness of an outdoor beer garden, barely able to see each other’s faces and talking with increasing volume as the music got louder. University lecturers, they had found themselves in an ‘are you with us or against us’ environment — the kind of relationship where no dialogue is possible and no critical thinking is welcome. They felt they were being slowly pushed out; their otherness had stopped being nice and appealing. Stability was preferred to questioning the canon. Students needed to be job-ready, not protest-ready, and both were not thinkable anymore. I felt sad that night, fundamentally sad and lost, as if I was being left behind, but I would never blame them. We hadn’t spent enough time together lately: all of us trying to maintain our existences, catching up on our own things. I will catch you later.

When I came home that night the void was still there. It might have just been a combination of circumstances. I was turning forty in a few weeks. It was two weekends before Sydney’s Mardi Gras, with a celebratory nervousness in the air, and in the middle of the Religious Discrimination Bill debate. I wrote a note: What if I die tomorrow? Queer and poor. What colour in the rainbow flag would represent it? Yellow? In different cultures, yellow can represent sadness or health. It’s also my nephew Bailey’s favourite colour. 

I remember someone saying queers are difficult commodities to navigate. The flag doesn’t give an answer or justify indecisiveness, being as ambivalent [5] as the political agenda it has become part of. 

Just hang in there … they say.

*

I belong to one of the last generations born during the Soviet communist project, but I have neither nostalgia for it nor aversion. I was seven when it officially dissolved, but its aura stayed for a while. Within a few years, there was less mutual aid and more homeless animals and people. Growing up in the mid nineties was like experiencing your country being in puberty: often arriving unannounced and drunk, unreliable, generally confused and late to buy bread; it was forming its habits. Choices seemed to be either go wild as if there is no tomorrow or take care of the people around you. ‘Zatyagivat’ means both getting addicted or being sucked into a hole. The holes and voids formed in those days stayed for a while: in families, in stomachs, in clothes, in lungs, on the streets. None of them of a paranormal nature. Young, not fully aware of my own sexuality but trying to conceptualise what had happened with the big ideological system and its rituals, I experienced what I believe to be my first queering moment — a thought visitation: did we all just dream it? What if things are not always how we are told they are? And if so, look out for signs of other possible realities. Put them together out of the available pieces and search for parts that do not fit or are missing. That was a long time before I became familiar with José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of queer dreaming and queerness as an ideality and before I had any language available to me to describe my own queerness that was approaching [6].

What did it do to me? It didn’t make me into who I am, but it conditioned my life. It potentially contributed to me being a slightly paranoid, suspicious and slow thinker who navigates their path between entities, formations and groups, conscious of group concepts and logics. All these experiences are subjective, and they might be similar to those experienced by others who were around or even far away but in a similar set up, which doesn’t mean they were the same.

*

But what if I don’t die tomorrow? In the past two years I have been asked twice by medical practitioners if I had suicidal thoughts. Two times that I remember. I replied ‘No’. I just profoundly never thought that I would live this long. I realise I have not prepared myself. It is not as if death wasn’t there before; my grandmother and her sister both had cancer at a young age, as did my older brother. I never expected to live for so long and it overwhelmed me. I didn’t make long-lasting plans. I studied art, not thinking about whether it would pay for a mortgage in the future or make me job-ready. 

I also don’t know that many old queers, at least none from home. I think that the young queers in my home country won’t get to see any older queers either. We moved our bodies out of dangerous territories and rightfully so because we wanted to be a part of a larger party. Queer dreaming. 

The more you dream of the house, the more the house will dream of you. The more you call out to it, the more it’ll call out to you. The more you long for it, the more it’ll long for you. The more you desire it, the more it’ll desire you. It will push open its door, push it wide open for you … and your dreams will melt into each other. [7]

I wish I had written it …

At the end of 2021, I did a short residency with Firstdraft where I asked people to share their dreams with me. I received dreams about peeling large amounts of potatoes, sliding cakes, unexpected pregnancy, milkshakes, ear wax, teeth falling out. A dear friend shared their dream about putting up a tent in a forest with their father, who had recently passed away. All December, I dreamed about needing to move and finding a new home. One night I dreamt I moved into a flat that had its walls and floor completely painted with that thick, glossy, oily paint that reminded me of the paint that the walls and floors in some institutions at home were painted with — painted over and over again to the point that you could believe it’s the paint on the walls that holds the entire structure together, not the bricks or the steel bars and beams within it. It’s the visual effect that holds it. 

Right before the end of the millennium I moved to Germany and quickly found myself part of the Russian-speaking ‘Post Ost’ (Post East) diaspora. Perceived and approached from the outside as a homogeneous formation, internally we — young emigrants in our twenties — were working through the residues of the imperialist side of the Soviet project, insisting on our differences. [8] 

Often, to belong, it wasn’t possible to be Russian-speaking and not from Russia but from a peripheral country like Kazakhstan. Or, to be Russian-speaking from Kazakhstan and to be queer or to have a Russian-speaking Jewish girlfriend. Or, to be Russian-speaking, but to bring non-Russian-speaking friends along. Or, to bring Russian-speaking friends not from Russia but have to remind everyone that they are not Russian. Certain groups were suspected of being less educated and civilised, and no one wanted to be on the bad side when being perceived and judged as others by society. 

I had my first experiences with the ritual of exposure that you perform as a migrant when you enter any sphere of social life, answering questions ranging from where are you from to did you have a washing machine at home and ride a horse? People would say about someone like me that they ‘try to sit on two chairs’. I am trying to sit on more than two and sometimes even that is not enough. 

*

My dad was ‘Russian’. Nationality — based on ethnicity — was written in a separate line in our passports and we had to make a choice between our mother’s or our father’s nationality, separate and additional to citizenship or country of birth. If only his skin wouldn’t get like a kalamata olive in summer and pose that silent question — or sometimes a well-articulated one. Even within my German mother’s family, a displaced minority themselves. Dad knew about his Tatar ancestor, but not enough. But that was okay. It was better to be this way (meaning Russian) than to be somebody you didn’t know anything about. His dad was Russian and he belonged to his dad. Only to find out later that his dad’s dad was Roma. 

When the time came, my brother chose my father’s Russian nationality. Eight years later, in 1998, I chose my mother’s German nationality. Both still citizens of Kazakhstan. By that time I knew we were going to migrate. My brother stayed behind with his family. Later Germany would not accept his papers because he was Russian. His blood wasn’t German enough, while mine was — a paradox I would never be able to get over. The line in his passport crossed out his option to cross the border. I remember going with my mother to check the papers again, when my brother was already sick — a last chance to get him over for treatment. The answer was No. I remember my mother crying outside of the office and her body shaking. After 2013, Germany changed their immigration laws again. Hospitality and aged-care industries needed more labour.    

In a way, I don’t belong to a culture that I am not in conflict with. As much as I would like to believe in my uniqueness, I know I am not alone and yet, I don’t belong. I tick certain boxes (and I tick more and more of them over time) and that makes up my institutional identity, not my subjectivity. My subjectivity is conditioned from living in cracks and my inability to settle in. It’s a partisan subjectivity. 

There are homes and there are homes.

I never believed that you can belong a priori, automatically, authentically. For that matter I never felt like an artist, a writer, maybe even a lesbian. Lack of commitment? I don’t know. Living life sometimes feels like watching a dream slowly unfold. If belonging is not self-evident, can you learn to let yourself in?

When the war with Ukraine broke out, I lost the sense of my body in this dimension. I felt my body going through multiple dimensions, times and locations. These days, we (the generation I belong to) are like cosmonauts set adrift from their orbits and dangling on a thin thread of some remnants of an umbilical cord.

What happens after the 24th of February is a nightmare. The more I try to look away, the more it is in front of me. What we see and learn in these days is that imperialism only sees its own suffering. 

But then I went to this event at Firstdraft.

This writing was inspired by The Only Thing Left is to Leave, an international commissioning project supported by the Keir Foundation, co-developed by Firstdraft, Beirut Art Center, and Arab Theatre Studio. The performances written about took place on 11 March 2022.

The project posed the following questions:

When all is uprooted, does one stay to fight… or take flight? What of those who have always lived on the move, away from enclosures, family and field, census and consensus, monoculture and monolingualism, law and lord? What does it mean to live on the run? 

Thanks to Firstdraft for their support throughout my residency, to Astrid Lorange for being an encouraging and generous mentor and to my reader and partner Melissa Ratliff for being a sputnica.