Trauma, Diaspora and StorytellingCraving Healing

Fadwa Bouziane

Emily Carr University of Art & Design

Fadwa Bouziane
Thesis Draft
Trauma, Diaspora and Storytelling- Craving Healing
2019
© Fadwa Bouziane

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Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT / POSITION STATEMENT ................................................................... 5
LIST OF IMAGES ......................................................................................................................... 6
TRAUMA .................................................................................................................................... 11
GESTURE ................................................................................................................................. 18
REPETITION ............................................................................................................................. 26
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................ 32

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*
I am not a visitor
I am not a guest
I’m an intruder
*

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Acknowledgement / Position Statement
The land that I live in: I would like to acknowledge that the land on which we gather is the
unceded territories of the Coast Salish people of the Səlil̓wəta (Tsleil-Waututh),
Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and x məθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. It is with gratitude that I
am here as an uninvited guest on these traditional territories, where I live, and on which my work
is based.
The land on which I once lived: I was born in the East territories of Canada I would like to
acknowledge these lands my parents took domicile in as long-term visitors. I would like to
acknowledge that the land I was born and raised on is the traditional territories of Abenaki
people, Wabenaki confederacy and of the Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk), a place which has long
served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst nations.1
These acknowledgements are important for my own understanding of my roots which include the
land I was born in, as well as the land my mother (of Berber origin) was born in – Morocco, and
the land of my father – Haiti. Three different soils. Three different ecosystems but yet with
similar stories of colonialization, marginalization and enslavement.
Dear reader: as you move forward, remember, I request these stories be read with care. These are
the kinds of stories we usually don’t think are important, but they are alive, and need to be heard
and thought through with patience and understanding. They breath. We need to ensure they
survive through time because they form a source of knowledge. You might learn something
about yourself or someone you know. These stories are about my family and maybe yours too, a
blend of fictional and real-life experiences. They may trigger difficult memories in readers.
They grapple with violence, abuse, discrimination, sexism, trauma, diaspora and migration,
recounted through several narratives in discontinuous and non-linear ways. They raise questions
about power, and power enacted on the body by others.
As a means of processing such inequity and aggression, and following in the footsteps of my
ancestors, storytelling is the strategy I use to understand my roots or antecedents, as well as the
histories and political realities I have inherited. This also helps me make sense of my
contemporary context, as well as my Haitian and Moroccan ancestry. Each silence, each whisper,
each pause, each bodily gesture is code for the audience to dissect. I break silence on personal
pain and violence. I use storytelling to process traumatic events and gain the ability to create
space to purge the weight that I’m carrying. Storytelling is how I make sense of and understand
inherited and current suffering through my everyday life.
In the following text, I have made a conscious decision to find references that make sense to
me, and which honour my (and my families) experiences. While I can respect scholarly research,
I actively and consciously refused to relate to world views in which the non-Western world is
relegated to a supporting role. ¨ Non-Western contributions to philosophy, psychology, anatomy,
astronomy, medicines and mathematics are not credited by many colonial writers, leading me to
wonder why so many Western historical sources take credit for what has been adapted or
appropriated from other cultures. Moving forward, I prefer to find my own prism through which
to view art and the world around me that reflects what is important to me. As the poet Aimé
Césaire has noted: ¨Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge. ¨2

1

https://www.caut.ca/sites/default/files/caut-guide-to-acknowledging-first-peoples-and-traditional-territory-2017-09.pdf
Césaire aimé. ¨Poetry and Knowledge, ¨ in Lyric and Dramatic Poetry. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith: Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1990
2

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List of Images
https://www.instagram.com/fadwa_bouziane/
I do not intend to put all of my documentation in this thesis. Some of these photographs are a
catalysis for reproducing second wave trauma. It acts as a violent memory that brings back state
of distress. I provided you with my Instagram website given above.

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*
Let me in
Let me in
Let me in
*

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I AM A MAN.

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A young Haitian woman traveled to Port-au-Prince hoping to find a better life. She was intent on
escaping the poverty of her parents who were most often in a situation of scarcity. But once
there, she found the city overwhelming and realized that improving her life would be difficult
after all. She found work as a servant for a rich Catholic family. She was an illiterate woman
forced into servitude in return for a piece of bread. The family was cruel to all the servants. The
young woman ended up getting pregnant by the brother of her mistress. She was forced to run
every day from the market to the house with a basket on her head as a punishment. When the
baby was born, she tried to drown herself and the newborn in the ocean without success4
I was adopted by a sister of my father when I was 2 months old. At the age of 4, we left to
settle in the north-east. Pétionville is where I grew up. Since my earliest childhood, I was beaten
by my adoptive mother a daily basis. This unrelenting physical violence is my earliest memory.
I started school at the age of eight at a Christian school run by priests. The day before my
registration I was forced to memorize a text by heart. But I had never opened a book before that
day. Registration was a failure. I entered the school the following year. Inside these walls,
students were mistreated and violated on a regular basis. I spent four years in this institution
witnessing and suffering physical attacks. The director, who was a priest himself, routinely
abused young students. He used his office as a twilight zone, sheltered from witnesses. He
brought one student back there at a time. Nobody talked about what was happening. Yet, each
student came back in tears. One day I walked in and surprised him when he was with a young
boy. It was a Wednesday. I was with one of my childhood friends. We saw the director with this
young boy bent over towards the director’s belt. The director opened his eyes. He saw us. We
were terrified. My friend ran away. The director grabbed my arm and dragged me towards him. I
was afraid. I resisted. He pushed my face down towards his hips. I punched him as hard as I
could and pushed him against the wall. I laughed, probably because I was confused. Then I ran.
The director went to my teacher and claimed that my classmate and I had assaulted him; but he
never tried anything on me ever again.
I was the ¨lucky¨ one.
Over the next few years I suffered several nervous breakdowns, migraines and vomiting. Even
when moving to a new school I brought with me the ghost of the priest.
After three years, I ended up leaving high school. Nothing stayed in my head. That same year
my adoptive mother had health issues. She died after a year. My ¨father¨ had told her to leave me
no good fortune. He sent me away, to Jamaica, but I jumped at the opportunity. I prepared
everything without any help. I spent three miserable months over there–with almost no money in
desperate conditions. I needed a plan B. I made friends with other Haitians in Jamaica. We
talked about heading to French Guiana. We heard that there would be work for everybody. When
I think about my ¨family¨ in Haiti and all this trouble to get rid of me, because of my aunt’s
fortune - it made me feel sick. In French Guiana, they were building a space ship. I filled my bag
of food and some of my clothes.
Ten days at sea. Ten days at sea is so long. It’s like time was stretching and didn’t exist as we
know it. Ten long days. Three days without seeing a fraction of land. This test was important. All
of us Haitians were in the boat clandestinely. We ate cans of food and salty crackers. At the end,
of the trip we were exhausted. I arrived in French Guiana. But again, things were not as easy as I
had hoped.
Eventually, I got lucky and made my way to Canada. I worked in a restaurant–then a factory.
I had no choice. No family, no money, you had to take what is in front of you to survive. Finally,
I went to school and got a job as an electrician in the construction industry. I worked for two
3

Gregg Bordowitz, Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Am a Man) (London: Afterall Books, 2018).
As Christina Sharpe evoke in her book ¨In The Wake: On Blackness And Being¨ she introduce similar case of
infanticide rooted in hopelessness but yet in an American context.
4

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years without immigrations papers. The scariest two years for sure. You think at night the
government will come and pick you out of your bed and send you back where you are from. This
fear of being deported is real. It exists in the bottom of your stomach. It is painful.
Then I fell in love with a Quebecoise. She was beautiful and funny. I was under her charm.
We got married. For a while everything was so good. She gave me two beautiful daughters. But
it didn’t work out. At the end of ten years my wife asked me for a divorce. Years after I met a
man from Morocco on my soccer team. His sister was visiting him at that time. We spent long
days together. But soon she needed to head back to her country.
We kept in touch through letters. This is how I was able to build a new family. We have our ups
and downs. It is hard sometimes and easier at other times.
But now I am more at peace with myself.
¨ La vie est faite ainsi, il faut toujours la prendre avec beaucoup d’optimisme. La colère est
comme un soldat qui marche et qui n’arrive nulle part ¨5

5

My fathers’ expression.

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*
There is a piano in the room
Nobody plays
There was a before
now it belongs to the past
It is silenced
but
Time to time
You can hear
Distorted notes
There is a piano in the room
Beautiful to look at
Not to play
Not anymore
*

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TRAUMA
Performance art6 enacted in a contemporary art context involves using the body in gesture,
movement and dance. It allows me to explore highly charged and difficult issues regarding race,
diaspora, trauma, and loss. Most of the performance artists I learned about at school were white
female performers– Carolee Schneemann, Jana Sterbak Marina Abramovich– whose bodies and
history of white feminism did not include my black/brown experiences. I try to push back against
such institutional exclusion by exploring what it is like to perform as a black body. What does It
mean for a black performer to perform their hypervisibility? My body is the vehicle for reenacting past trauma, while the audience bears witness.7 In creating a bond between myself and
the viewer, it is possible to challenge the viewers’ perspective. The audience member is
compelled to acknowledge the difficult subject matter unfolding in front of them, to decide at
what extent they would invest themselves emotionally or reject their involvement and leave the
space.
Performance8 creates an environment of exchange. I use my body as a tool for resistance.
There is a duality to it. On one hand, based on my gender and race I am viewed as a marginalized
body through the lens of patriarchy, colonialism, and the histories of racism and inequity, with
all the burdens inherent in those designations. At the same time, I am physically strong. In my
practice, I use my body as a site of struggle and transformation. As I push through the physical
challenges of the performance, the struggle faced by marginalized bodies in the aftermath of
colonialism is highlighted. In his essay, ¨Between the world and me. ¨ 9 Ta-Nehisi Coates
addresses the reality of ¨race¨ in current day USA. He writes about exploitation and the labor of
black bodies. He details how your body will never belong to you. People who are considered
elite will use and manipulate your body for their own purposes. The mainstream will attempt to
determine your destiny, habits, and abilities. Like Coates, I recognize the institutionalized
humiliation of black bodies which I attempt to reduce and destroy by using my own body to
challenge the North American gaze. My body disrupts the viewers’ potential complacency, while
simultaneously altering the space in which it is performed.
The ideas for new performances find me–I don’t find them. Some ideas can’t be ignored.
They can come from a sentence in a book, an instrumental piece, a movement of someone in the
street triggering a particular emotion or feeling in me. Then, I need to repeat that experience,
6

Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2010), 119-166 and 167-208.
7
This act of witnessing takes place in a North American context, and within a contemporary art framework.
8
Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision; Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press,2011), 105-145.
9

Ta-Nehisi Coates, ¨ Une Colère; Noire Lettre à mon fils. ¨ (Éditions J’ai Lu 2015)

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over and over, until my mind creates a movement in response to it. Usually the day before my
performance, I take time for myself. I stretch and engage in physical activities and spend time
with my body. It helps me focus on each muscle and flow of my breath. Then I go back home
and sit for an hour in the dark. I need this time to concentrate. I don’t talk. The next morning, I
try to stay in a zone of emotional concentration. I always need 5 to 10 minutes right before the
performance begins to gather my energy. I put my hands over my ears while I inhabit the space
where the performance will take place. If it’s outside, I will go somewhere quiet to visualize
myself in that outdoor space. Silence is my secret. I prepare myself to re-live a traumatic event or
emotion. With regards to the subject, my body is the aftermath of the performance event. I
usually take time to process. I don’t want to talk. I am exhausted and empty and want to go to
sleep. By respecting the needs of my own body, I am respecting the subject.
When I find a space to perform in, I attempt to make it my own, by repeatedly visiting it and
visualizing my body reacting with the wall, the floor, the noise, the coldness of the space. I
acknowledge marks on walls and sources of light. The day before my performance I spend more
time in my chosen space. I investigate, I touch the wall with my hands. I try to tame it by
speaking to it in my mind and by moving through it. I clear the energy of others who have used
the space before. My mother told me it is common in Morocco, when buying a new house, to put
sheep or chicken blood in each corner on the outside of the house to neutralize past energy10.
Spending time experiencing the space is my way of neutralizing it and making it my own.
Through performance, my intention is not to return time and time again to those traumas that I
have already expelled from my core. I know that traumatic events that lead to post-traumatic
stress disorder11can’t be totally resolved. However, once a performance is completed, the
emotions, which informed the practice, are transformed.
I don’t want to perpetuate old wounds. That is why, for the moment, I will not re-enact
performances. In fact, writing about past performances puts my mental state and physical body
into extreme tension. As the writers William Aguiar and Regine Halseth have noted in relation to
aboriginal peoples and historic suffering, trauma is often transmitted intergenerationally and
perpetuated through familial stories and actions. In the stories I tell, it is possible to feel this
reality, trauma as embedded and perpetuated through lived experience. In this way, storytelling12

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Based on my mother’s believe, passed on generation to generation. Each family has its own rituals.
Desmarais Serge, Gerrig J.Richard, Ivanco Tammy, Zimbardo G. Philip : Psychology And Life, second Canadian
Edition (Toronto: Pearson, 2012), 472
¨People experience post-traumatic stress decoder (PTSD), an anxiety disorder that is characterized by the persistent
re-experience of traumatic events through distressing recollections, dreams, hallucinations, or flashbacks. ¨ (472)
12
Colin Counsell, Laurie Wolf, Performance Analysis: An Introductory coursebook (New Fetter Lane, London
2001), 116-123. The Moroccan artist, Hajj Ahmed Ezzarghani, is well known by the citizen of Marrakech. He gives
his ancestors’ learning to the next generation through storytelling. In the link below, Sara Mouhyeddine,
11

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is not meant to be seen as separate from but rather an extension of my practice. Individuals
unable to resolve their trauma repeat it within social and intimate settings. Traumatic events or
actions will be reinforced by these repetitive acts. My intention is to channel and disperse the
trauma through a connection with the audience, to prevent it from becoming ritualistic and
reoccurring. It is a working through that shifts traumas burdens to the audience and in this way, it
become a form of distributive justice.13 whether the audience be those complicit, those who have
benefitted from, or those who recognize the trauma.
For example, for one of my performances, Untitled 13, at AHVA Gallery, I juxtaposed
intimate and harsh gestures in order to make the viewer uncomfortable. I later received feedback
that it was so distressing audience members wanted the piece to end. At first, I could hear
people talking, but as I continued to move through the space, the viewers silenced themselves.
Everybody had their gaze on me as I scratched my neck and torso with my nails. The violence of
the gesture and the repetitive nature of my performance created abrasions on my skin. These
repetitive acts represented personal past traumatic events embodied in my movement. My skin
turned from brown to red and bruises slowly appeared. Under my nails, I could see the skin I had
scratched off my neck.
It took me 13 minutes to get from one wall to the other. Despite a pervasive feeling of
hopelessness permeated the space. For me, my performance recreates the repetitive loop through
which trauma is perpetuated. After leaving the space, I felt exhausted. My whole body was
shaking and sweating. The welts left on my neck were still there the next morning, recalling past
trauma and memories. For this particular piece I did not include any pictures in this document as
they remind me of the pain of the performance and the emotion expelled. Besides, I don’t want
to portray another black female body as victim and suffering for the viewers to consume14.
It took one week for the bruises to disappear and my mind to fully recover. In this way, the
performance continued for me beyond the duration of the piece itself.
As the marks dissolved, they transformed the performance into memory. Memories are a
connection between what you feel and what you've experienced both in the present and in the
past. The goal for the viewer is to understand the repetitive action, step by step until they
combine their own subjective emotions with the performance piece even though they will only
reach a fragmented understanding. I realize it will be impossible for the audience to fully
an important woman storyteller, speaks about her struggles but also demonstrates storytelling as empowering action
linked to her own identity:
https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2015/01/marrakech-tale-150131120247912.html (accessed January
31, 2015)
13
I’m aware for someone who never lived these traumas it hard to understand the occurring change. Buy changing
the performance method and aesthetic I prevent it from being reoccurring. On a personal level it helps me to tame
these traumas.
14
Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision; Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 2011) 95-104.

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understand the complexity of this piece without knowing my personal context. Yet, giving too
much information upfront could close down further discussion. Performing is an attempt to find
my own language to break the insidious circle of family trauma and to be able to disperse the
pain to others through my bodily gestures. It’s a plea for recognition to my audience. I aim to
translate the complexity of traumatic experiences, like marginalization and discrimination,
through the black body. Performance art is one strategy to make trauma visible, particularly
when spoken or written language can’t fully explain what is being conveyed. Movement can
communicate what remains unspeakable through language. My body take over as a mediator. It
serve to put words on the traumatic events.
In Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, And Contemporary Art, Jill Bennett15 asks the question
how can art draw forth complex reactions to tragic events such as abuse, trauma, and violence?
She explains the difference between being affected by an image and being touched. Touch can
make you feel sympathetic towards the performer, but affect, which exists outside of language
and is situated in the body, allows the viewer to react on a deeper, emotional level. It allows for a
radical intervention. It can shock and challenge the viewers but potentially change their
perspectives when they bear witness to an action. I question how memories of events can be
translated into an art piece and generate critical discourse on issues like forced migrations and
child abuse. Bennett grapples with the emotions triggered in the viewer as a response to art,
which at first may not be understood but can lead to deeper reflection over time.16 For me,
performance art functions like storytelling as a precursor of narrations that need recognition and
witnessing for them to exist.

15

Jill Bennett, Empathic Vison; Affect, Trauma, And Contemporary Art. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005)
47-69
16
Ibid 47
Other theorists, such as Freud have suggested that the subject is locked into a memory of the trauma which
manifests as repetitious and compulsive memories, transformed into symbolic behavior and needing to be
recognized by a witness. ¨In other words, affect can be recuperated only in the presence of empathetic witnesses.

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THE UNSPOKEN “THING”

17

The unspoken¨ Thing¨18 haunts me like past memories that have been absorbed since childhood.
When I was young, I was conflicted, loving yet hating the man who was my father. As long as I
can remember, I wasn’t allowed to cry or to laugh too hard. This would show weakness to others
which he would not permit, even in front of him.
My father knew only one way of loving. He had been treated, from the very beginning, like a
stray dog. He was abandoned, physically abused and had witnessed unbearable violence. He
never found a safe place, because he never knew what a safe place was supposed to be. The
unspeakable trauma he lived on a daily basis directly affected the way he raised me. This has
always been the elephant in the room. The “unspoken thing.” For him it was everything he left
behind and everything he brought with him: all the violence and pain, all the hopes, all his
burden and dreams.
Demonic lands haunt him when he falls asleep. I can hear him moaning during the night, talking
to his demons. They won’t leave him alone. They come at night, those demons are intelligent.
They wait till everybody else is asleep. I do not know what they say to my father, but I hear him
muttering back.
He is fighting
He is fighting with them
With his demon
He is fighting
He is fighting with me
I don’t think my father knew that he was perpetuating the violence he once lived: that the kind of
love he was giving me was way too violent and lacked tenderness. Yet, I always knew it was the
only way he could share his love. The thing was too complex. I nourished this unspoken thing
with my own hate and rage. I felt I had to walk on egg shells to prevent some unpredictable
bomb from exploding. It ate away at my safe space. When the unspoken thing wasn’t there, my
father was good company. He played with me, he taught me, he cared for me. We built our own
little world. But it was destroyed each time his demons came back. Then we would rebuild.

17

The “Thing” is the term I apply to an emotion shared by two protagonists, but which they cannot name or fully
understand.

15

*
I’m a guest in my own body
I’m a guest in my own town
I’m a guest in my own city
I’m a guest in my own
country
*

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A sense of security

One day I was walking to work. It was a beautiful morning. I walked this route every day, but it
takes just one misstep to make you rethink your every decision. “Being safe¨ is not a given in
Morocco. I felt safe when I was with my brothers or when I was at home. Outside of that, there
was no safe place for me as a woman. I was wearing a beautiful mini skirt. I loved those
European skirts–so sophisticated. It was a particularly warm day outside, like I said a beautiful
day. A gang of five young men were walking on the other side of the road. They crossed the road
while shouting slurs at me.
As they were coming nearer to me, I got scared but at the same time it was daylight. I tried to
ignore them as if I was busy thinking about something else, pretending that I didn’t understand
what they were saying. We ended up crossing each other’s paths. I was petrified. I gazed at the
concrete. Their behavior became more and more violent. They pushed me. I pushed back. At
least I tried. They called me ¨slut¨, dirty and so on. One of them grabbed me by the hair and
threw me to the ground. They started hitting every part of my body. They hit me with their feet,
their fists. They finally let go. I think someone interrupted the attack. I don’t really know. Next
thing I remember is the hospital and seeing my face the next day reflected in the mirror. It was
ugly, I was ugly. They didn’t leave any part of my sore body unscathed. I loved that kind of
European skirt. It was a beautiful day, a warm day in Morocco.
I felt humiliated
less than human
like a stray dog.
I decided at that point that I had had enough.

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GESTURE 19
In my second performance art piece, Untitled 18, the viewer enters a small room, seeing me
sitting on my knees facing them. In front of my body there is an old metal plate, filled with
lemons, half of them cut into quarters and the other half untouched. The audience sits on the
floor, at the same level as me. With one hand, I take my first piece of lemon, the other hand is on
my thigh. As my right hand reaches my face, I lean my head backwards. My hand reaches the
level of my eyes. I squeeze the cut lemon on my closed eyes. I can feel the liquid dripping on my
closed eyes– it stings. I feel the juice running toward my cheekbones making tracks through my
black shirt, in between my breasts. The fabric soaks up a part of the lemon liquid. I can feel the
liquid traveling my whole body until it reached my thighs and finally the floor. I reach for the
second piece of cut lemon and repetitively make the same gesture. Once again it hurts my eyes
and the liquid snakes down my body making me feel cold. When I can’t feel any more lemons on
the plate, I pull out a knife. I open my eyes, which are burning from the lemons juice. I gaze at
the viewers before looking at the plate in front of my body. I reach for the knife that I had
previously hid from the audience and cut the rest of the whole lemons. When all of them are cut,
I leave the knife on the metal plate. I stand up and exit the space leaving behind the remnants of
my piece. I left the space with blurry eyes and tears snaking on my cheeks. My eyes burned. I
finally found my way out through the audiences. The act of leaving the audience without a
definitive conclusion was intended to encourage the performance to continue, hopeful that my
energy might transfer, that someone from the audience might come to take my place.
Gesture is an intentional movement of the body, meant to convey information. It functions as
a form of language, widely understood and communally shared.20 In my practice, repetitive
gestures and embodied experience become ways of pushing the communicative aspects of
performance. It’s about sharing the burden of the performer, the physical discomfort or trauma
enacted on the body, with an audience. It forces the viewer to notice what is happening through
the performer’s body, functioning as a form of two-way communication that is not easily
avoided or dismissed. By building meaningful gestures, I am reclaiming my self-possession from
society - patriarchy, colonialism, the history of racism and inequity. The viewers, at times
uncomfortable, respond through their bodies to the performance, by shifting their eyes or
averting their gaze.
Strategies that I use, such as storytelling and performance art, are efforts to decolonize the
mentality of western society by enabling the viewer to empathise with the plight of the
performer. The semiotician and theorist Walter D. Migniolo see a liberatory potential in gesture,
19

Sarah Pierce, “Fragment, Mediality, Gag,” Little Theatre of Gestures (Basel: Malmo Konstal/MKG Basel, 2009),
12-16.
20
David F. Armstrong, William C. Stokoe, Sherman E. Wilcox, Gesture and the Nature of Language (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).

18

as a form of embodied action leading to critical reflexivity and thought.21 Calling this the
‘decolonial gesture,’ Mignolo argues that decolonial gesture is “a body movement which carries
a decolonial sentiment or/and a decolonial intention.” Gestures need to be embodied with this
idea of subverting colonialism. That is, the gesture has an intention of decolonialization.
It allows a delinking from colonialism, and implies a process of re-surgence, a move beyond the
repression that colonialism impose. My body is perceived as black, nothing else. I define
decolonial gesture as something that cannot be detached from my black body. Migniolo claim
that not all gestures are made to be decolonial. Walking is not necessarily a decolonial act or
going to the grocery store. Unlike the author, I strongly think that depends in which kind of body
you live and need to move through public space as an individual- Transgender bodies, raced
bodies, disable bodies. When I walk in public space interacting with the mainstream (white
individuals) I know that I’m perceived differently. Walking becomes an act of decolonialization
of the space- It is imposing my presence. When I wear my hair curled instead of straight, it is
perceived as a statement gesture against beauty norm. Taking my place in this world, that was
not constructed for my body, is imposing on the world my presence forcing people that I interact
with to acknowledge my presence. The only way those gesture don’t occur is when I'm in my
room alone. All acts created by my body are an urge of decolonialization- registering myself for
ballet dance, swimming lessons, figure skating, snowboarding, attending second degree courses
are acts of decolonialization for me and my practice. Doing performance art is once again a
strategy to be acknowledged in those shared space occupied with a majority of white bodies.
Connecting this to my performance practice, centered on my body, a female body of colour,
allows me to connect with broader social issues and to imagine a new surrounding that has been
informed by pain and other emotions but is more hopeful in scope. It’s a call for empowerment
through repetitive movement and gesture.
Storytelling is an extension of my performance practice. Stories serve as a context and grounding
for the performance piece. Like performance, storytelling externalizes images from the inside
out, purging them like an exorcism.22
My parents told me stories about exorcizing people possessed by demons. In Morocco, it is
said that ¨Djinn¨ can takes possession of a person and a duel begins inside the body. You need to
purge it with an exorcism, so it will not affect your actions in life. Both storytelling and gesture
become a means of pushing back against the boundaries of patriarchal and colonial restrictions.
Images that embody pain, trauma, migrations, misogyny and discriminations are embodied by
committed gestures. Performance art and gesture are responses to what my body goes through
21

Walter D. Mignolo, “Looking for the Meaning of ‘Decolonial Gesture’,” E-MISERICA 11.1 (2014). Found at”
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/emisferica-111-decolonial-gesture/mignolo (accessed February 1, 2019).
22
Dr. Omar Al-Aachqar Souleiman, Le Monde Des Djinns et Des Démons: La Fois Islamique a la lumière de Coran
et de la Sunna (Samo Press Group, 2007), 9-16.

19

every day facing the gaze of whiteness. Fatou Diome in her essay, ¨Marianne porte plainte”23
engaged a critical discourse on the far-right rhetoric on minorities by calling it hypocritical. As
she writes, Europeans continue to come to Africa to loot African wealth (diamonds, natural
resources), while imposing European culture on brown and black bodies. Additionally, she
considers the systemic racism of this system of inequity. She considers Islamophobia, racism,
and the impact of globalization on mass migration. Diome questions the meaning of being a child
of diaspora operating in a racialized body and with their own intergenerational trauma.
With each performance, I create both a new environment for the viewer and a new method of
communicating. Layer by layer, symbolic meanings are revealed. While the viewer may have a
sense of the symbolism embedded in a gesture, it is only through time and a process of
witnessing that a more specific or directed meaning becomes clear. In each piece, I aim to
control my muscles. Each bodily expression is thought through before I perform. My interest in
asserting the body through endurance is an attempt to push social boundaries which try to
contain my racialized body in stereotypical ways. In fact, societal expectations of the black,
female body have skewed its representation in popular culture, requiring another kind of
performance from me. Naa Oyo A. Kwate and Shatema Threadcraft, both scholars of race and
gender studies, have explained that such imagery has physical connotations for how the black
female body is perceived, from the hyper maternal and overweight servant stereotype (Mammy
character) to the angry and masculine images (Sapphire) of a black woman who emasculates
specifically white men.24 I’m conscious of my hypervisibility while performing which in turn
diminishes the visibility of who I actually am as a three-dimensional person. The gaze of the
viewer will intertwine with their loaded assumptions of what I must be. The witness is situated in
a North American context where lives, in majority, the white male gaze. I aim to redirect their
gaze by using repetitive movements so that it’s not all about race or gender but about the
intensity of the gesture, the process of performance, the sounds and emotions produced.
At that moment, I’m the one in control– in control of the time and the story I’m telling. I
direct the viewer’s gaze over my actions and manipulate what they experience. I perform stories
of my family and translate them into bodily expressions which create tension between my own
physical body and the spectators’ bodies. If viewers are uncomfortable, they can explore where
this discomfort comes from. I impose over the audience my own values such as empathy for
others25 in distress, recognition of suffering, and not turning away from others’ pain.
23

Fatou Diome, Marianne Porte Plainte! (Paris : Café Voltaire, Flammarion, 2017).
Naa Oyo A. Kwate and Shatema Threadcraft, “Perceiving the Black female body: Race and gender in police
constructions of body weight,” Race and Social Problems 7(3) (2015), 213-226.
25
bell hooks, “Eating the other: Desire and resistance,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End
Press, 1992), 21-39.
24

20

In my work and cultural context of contemporary art practice, I am performing in front of the
white gaze, a trope used by race theorists from WEB Du Bois to Toni Morrison to Ta-Nehisi
Coates to signal the ways in which the black body and identity has been trapped, limited or
fetishies through the white imagination.26 The white gaze is described as a biased, and
stereotypical box, made to diminish those black bodies.

In his book ¨Black skin/White masks¨ (1950), Franz Fanon breaks down the power relations
between European and non-Western bodies. He explores the self-hatred inflicted on black bodies
by Western culture. For Fanon, it is the legacy left over from colonializations, that englobes a
belief system and socio-political points of view. It has been imposed through Christianity.
Within institutional structures, we perpetuate these views as the only truth. It’s this cultural
heritage that is imposed as how we should see different communities as the same. I face it every
day, This Western culture is everywhere-school, social-media, through Art and museums.
Making myself visible through performance art is a way to force through my own invisibility.
Franz Fanon questions the difficulty that minorities have in accepting themselves as non-white
people, forced to choose between belonging and one’s ancestry. The resulting shame of one’s
past comes from the gaze of the majority and the prevailing values in Western society. I know
that not all racialized individuals have the same experiences I do. We experience the white gaze
and structural inequality on different levels. Each of our experiences are valid and nuanced.
Therefore, we all need to do our own research to best represent our stories.
By performing, I question norms that have been written onto discriminated bodies. These
norms don’t sufficiently recognize the complexity of social and cultural realities, specifically
ones that deviate from the white majority. How will your body ever belong to you? Each gesture
I make re-enacts stories of traumatic experiences and conjures up specific experiences and
contexts. For example, when situating my work today, my female, black body happens to
confront the viewer during the time of #metoo and Black Lives Matter. The philosopher and
theorist Erin Manning have raised an awareness of the ways in which performers’ bodies and
movements evoke an emotional impact on the viewer and can connect to broader social and
political concerns.27 The ‘minor gesture’ might pass almost unperceived, but it has the ability to
transform social relations by its affect on the viewers. These movements create an aura
surrounding the piece, stemming from the energy provoked by the gestures when they are
viewed in the performance space. Manning argues that aura, in this particular context, is the
26

Toni Morrison’s observation on black experience in an interview with the journalist Charlie Rose: “Our lives have
no meaning, no depth without the white gaze. And I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the
white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.” (January 19, 1998; found at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Kgq3F8wbYA).
27
Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

21

kinetic phenomenon created by movements in space that provoke affect. It’s a form of energy
wave created by the dancer gestures. It creates a palpable environment where the viewer and
performer interact on many levels. Performers’ bodies are the building blocks of a new method
of communication based on movements. Time takes on a new meaning that breaks with our
linear way of understanding. The mirroring gestures of everyday movements produced by the
performers evoke similar movements that have been at some point performed by the viewers in
their everyday life, creating an emotional response in the spectator.
First Nations artist Dana Claxton28 works within a colonial context that has always shaped a
fake identity of indigenous people. She unpacks the meaning of superiority within the Canadian
nation-state and the power dynamics exercised over First Nations communities. Claxton
highlights the functionality of gaze, or how the gaze of the colonizer creates biased ideas and
stereotypes which are destructive to Indigenous culture. Those biases, which are intended to do
harm, are translated into history and shape the way we interact with each other. It’s a strategy
those in power use to value and classify bodies in relation to the perceived superiority of
Eurocentric thought. Her work and intervention in contemporary art practice is inspirational and
important to me as a performer. More specifically, it functions to make visible indigenous
communities inside the art world, to decolonialize the art gallery and its inherent biases and
assumptions.
My practice, like Claxton’s, considers how psychological distress stemming from the desire to
attain society’s norms (while being constantly rejected by the mainstream) fractures identity. I
use the theory of Frantz Fanon29 to raise the issue of mimicking the colonizers, norms and
behaviors, yet never being fully accepted by them. My performance practice expresses in several
forms the idea of our own enslavement to the concept of ¨whiteness¨ and the disenfranchisement
this causes. Through Quebecois culture, I am reminded that I will never be ¨French¨ enough.
Through anglophone culture, I am reminded that I will never be “English” enough. It’s a
reminder that blackness come first. When viewers see and react to my performance art piece,
they acknowledge first this black body with its loaded history and signification. For some, they
will look no further than this superficial symbolism. For others, they will try to decode the
symbolism embedded into the props and gestures that I use, leading to a broader conversation
regarding how marginalized bodies are objectified and manipulated.

28

Dana Claxton, Fringing the Cube (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2018).

29

Like indicated earlier in the text.

22

*
I’m a ghost
I woke up every morning wondering how my voice would be unheard
I woke up every morning wondering how my body would be unseen
I’m a ghost
*

23

The travel

Living in a third world country, Europe and America appear as the most beautiful places, where
you can finally live free. You hope for a big house and land. You will travel the world to get
there. You think that when you move, you will be provided with an easy life. I watched
American movies and dreamt of my new life. White teeth sparkling on TV. Whiteness driving
luxurious car.
I chose Canada, I visited several times. One of my brothers was already there. I met a man
and applied for immigration. Each time I visited Canada projected illusions of equality, freedom,
wealth.
I was accepted for immigration because of my education and skills. They said I could work in
my field, but that is not how it played out.
I bought my plane ticket. I was so excited. When I arrived, I tried to validate my diploma, but
was told it told that it was not valid, and I needed to go back to school. Start over, study for a
bachelor’s degree once again. I was humiliated, but I gave it a shot. Then applying for work.
Facing rejection. They see your name or hear your voice with its strong accent. They judge.30
They speak to you very slowly, like you don’t understand. But they are foolish to think that I am
stupid. After several months of job searching, you give up and you work factory jobs. Even if
you are educated. Meanwhile, you have trouble paying for food. You lose hope.
The process is an illness. First come the symptoms, ¨un malaise; ¨ next comes the diagnosis.
You try to swallow the bitter pills. You put your hopes and dreams on your children. You wish
for them what you don’t. This is the monster under your bed that wakes you. It haunts your
children too. It morphs into the racist on the street. I thought, because my child was born in
Canada, she would be spared. But then you realize the name of your child is not white enough,
not ¨Quebecois Pure Laine¨. You are supposed to pull yourself up by your boot straps. But don’t
expect that the playing field is level.
I’m not here to make you feel comfortable. I need you to understand what it feels like to always
be a stranger, even in your own country. It’s hard to learn another language, it’s hard to leave
your home to travel to a strange land. Adapting is hard. It’s even harder when the welcome is
insincere. They accuse us of being lazy, of being unable to adapt. But the reality is that
minorities have a harder time. If we are stuck in the past, we stagnate. To make up for their own
insecurities, they push us around, and put us in ghettos. Like animals. Like monsters. They are
afraid. I am afraid.

30

Fatou Diome, Marianne Porte Plainte! (Paris : Café Voltaire, Flammarion, 2017)..

24

*
I’m dancing in the dark
In my haunted house
I’m dancing in the dark
In my haunted house
Alone in the dark
*

25

REPETITION
Within my practice I use repetition to recall trauma. Repetitive gestures (verbal languages,
movements, sounds, writing) transform the trauma embedded in my own body into narrative.
These gestures are meant to provoke personal reactions from the audience who witness my
storytelling. The movements I repeat create a ritualistic atmosphere, while drawing attention to a
particular gesture that symbolizes generational trauma. Those experiencing trauma are often
caught in a cycle of their own remembering, unable to escape hurtful memories. Repetition can
help coping31 trauma, on a personal level, so I am no longer prisoner of this state of mind to a
certain extent. The pain I inflict on myself is tangible for the viewer, I hope directing an audience
through witnessing pain and trauma will produce empathetic responses, and that empathy leads
to shifts in attitude and behaviour. Some may flinch or wince in response to what I’m doing. In
spoken or written words, repetition mirrors grief in process. Being able to get through my own
performance connects to the resilience needed to manage the grief. By being receptive to
difficult emotions, we can move closer to healing.
For example, during one of my last performances, Untitled 20, I sprinkled the ground of the
performance space with charcoal powder and flour. Then, I waited for the audience to enter, with
my body in the center of the space. People gathered around me. I waited a few minutes and then
started to move. I positioned my body close to the ground with my arms holding my body an
inch from the ground. Then my arm pushed back till I was in a plank position. My back was
arched forward, and I moved into the space in that position for one step. Then again, I reached
the push-up position, bending my right leg, leaving some space for my face to press into the
floor. I started in the middle of the space, then moved closer to the audience. Finally, the viewers
had to stand with their backs against the wall to get out of my way. My intention was to make
them uncomfortable by forcing them into a constricted space. I repeated this movement until my
body was exhausted. When I could do no more, I stopped in front of one viewer. I stood up,
gazing into the eyes of this spectator. I took his hand and brought him to the middle of the space,
where the remains of my past gestures were imprinted like traces in the mixed charcoal and
flour. I whispered into his ear ¨ standing and watching the others disappear. ¨ I left the space with
the chosen viewer in the center of the room, all eyes turned towards him. He was left with the
decision of whether to share the secret I had given to him with others in the space.
Through long and repetitive performance pieces, I’m transforming and transcending pain. My
body is the vehicle that connects the space, the audience and my pain. It is part of a self-healing
process that positions the audience as witness. While everyday life may not provide witnesses on
31

Desmarais Serge, Gerrig J.Richard, Ivanco Tammy, Zimbardo G. Philip, Psychology And Life (Toronto : Pearson,
2012), 411.
Learning to take control over my one stressor caused by traumas, abled myself to reframe them and contained their
power over my behaviour. Repetition helps me to consume the emotions’ related with the trauma event.

26

demand, performance art does in the form of an audience, forced to observe, acknowledge, and
witness pain. For the anthropologist Veena Das32, this give and take between audience and artist
transforms this pain into something more bearable. It acts as a language that can create a bridge
between the body of a performer and the viewer herself. Pain needs to be seen, recognized and
externalized before it can lead to social change. This is a cultural concept that western cultures33
have a hard time recognising. In Western society we are conditioned to repress our emotions;
they are seen as weakness from an individual. Das thinks it’s an instinctive urge to create a
language that addresses pain. Art can be this language. For her, the absence of a language to
express pain is symptomatic to a society. I force the viewers to witness my and family’s pain and
stories. They have the choice of rejecting this pain and being complicit with gestures of violence
and confusion. I nourish my creativity from past emotional states. That’s why each performance
piece is meant to be performed only once. Performing these gestures in a rhythmic pattern
focuses the audience’s attention on each particular movement. These movements help externalize
the inner psychological state I am exploring. It’s up to the viewers to interpret and unpack the
meaning of what they witness. It’s a dance between what its private and what can be shared in
public.
In her writing on suffering, Das considers the use of a new language, through gestures of
mourning, in an attempt to conceptualize pain34. This pain needs to undergo a translation from
silence to expression in order to be heard. Using my body, I’m breaking down social silence by
initiating a dialogue between performer and viewer. I offload some of my own burden when I
capture the audience’s attention. My gesture creates tension in the space. This combines with the
meaning inherent in the gesture so that it transforms into something else, a shared experience. It
gives me a certain relief and feeling of accomplishment when difficult emotions have been
witnessed and shared. Through performance art, it is possible to externalize and express
psychological states of trauma by making them visible. I am mostly interested in reflecting social
issues routinely ignored by society. I’m attempting to create a space where I can provide a voice
for marginalized peoples and groups not fully recognized by society. I use the stories of my
parents and others to address these themes, and hopefully to produce empathy. But there are
risks. Some viewers may refuse to engage on any level with empathy. Not everyone is interested
in hearing what ¨others¨ have to say. My repetitive actions challenge the viewer. I want them to
feel what it is like to be caught up in this cyclical thinking, social anxiety and isolation, intrusive
thoughts that are brought on by trauma.
32

Veena Das, Life And Words; Violence and The Descent Into The Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007), 39-74.
33
Referred to predominant American and European culture
34
Veena Das, Life And Words; Violence and The Descent Into The Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007)39-74.

27

I choose to reference Sanford Biggers due to his relevant position on violence against black
bodies. He created a video piece named ¨ BAM” (2016). Here, wooden dolls are dipped in wax,
which erases their identities, so they look all the same. The audience can’t recognize any clear
characteristics, only their darker skins. In the video, Biggers brings the dolls to a shooting range,
shooting each sculpture and changing it into a new form. He then casts the remains in bronze.
The new sculptures bear the scars of the gunshots embedded in their forms. Every gunshot
represents police brutality against people of colour. By mirroring the daily trauma of black
people, Biggers attempts to stimulate the viewer. Though all viewers will not have personal
stories of police brutality, they still can make connections with the reality of others and
experience empathy as a result. The viewer is left with sense memories, rather than memories of
actual brutality. The dolls can be read in any context of historical trauma against black bodies. It
doesn’t relate only to police brutality; however, it claims any sort of violence perpetuated from
birth to death in society. Every gun shot is a psychological and physical abuse provoked by
authority– it’s a repetitive story of injustice. Throughout European history, there is a tendency of
erasing black bodies35, as if they don’t exist. The history of black bodies didn’t start with the
chain, there was history before slavery and exploitation. Only this history is not recorded in
European historical annals. Due to this erasure, mainstream has an understanding of the black
body as disposable. History led to this perverse perception of black bodies as dangerous,
criminal, drug addicted and more. It allowed the mainstream to use excessive force over these
marginalized communities. The repetition of the gestures is what makes Biggers piece ¨BAM¨,
so powerful. To support this process in my own work, the material used in all my projects are
selected with the aim of exploiting the tension between comfort and discomfort.
This discomfort, first felt by the performer, then conveyed to the viewer, is what makes the
performance come alive, providing the framework through which the work is understood.

35

Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Nova Scotia:
Fernwood Publishing,2017).

28

Dominant dominé le no (wo)-men land
It must be 6 years since I came to Morocco. We took the train from Agezira (Spain) to Tanger
(tangier), and then to Rabat. As I was sitting there, and I don’t know why, I started to cry. I was
silent as I didn’t want my mom to notice. My heart was racing. I was stressed, scared and happy
all at the same time. I have a love-hate relationship with Morocco. I wanted to be there, but not.
Before I was able to think this through, a gang of young men came to sit near us. They started to
get agitated, speaking and laughing loudly. Later on, these young men started harassing us, like
¨Girls, what are you doing here, it’s late- Oh I see you’re shy, Oh I see we are not good enough
for you, Oh I see you are just bitches… ¨: hamar, hchouma, kahba. To thwart any potential
violence, we decided to leave the wagon and find another space to sit. We were scared. The men
were shouting slurs at us. We found another compartment with a couple. Then I realized why my
heart was racing, why my whole body reacted as it did.
By the time we found a bit of security in the train, my head was spinning. I was thinking
about my mom and her exile overseas. How this trauma of violence against women’s bodies was
so relevant at this particular moment. The heritage of inequality between men and ¨girls¨ even
within an openminded families. Women are always treated as ¨girls¨ even at 20, 40, or 80 years
old -they take up so little space. Never fully independent. Always put back in their place. In this
man’s world, there is no space for a fully three-dimensional woman that deviates from
convention. As an outsider, I experienced this as revolting. It was a source of constant
frustration.
In this Morocco, men maintain their social privilege whereas women are silenced. In this
public space, a woman’s body is fair game for harassment by all men on the street. Woman’s
experiences are viewed through the male lens. Insults become practical jokes, manipulated in
favour of men. If you wear a skirt, it’s a problem. If you have tattoos or short hair, it’s another
problem. Don’t think you’ll be free in 2018. In Morocco we talk about inequality, but we don’t
try to solve it. The government knows about harassment and inequality in public spaces. If you
shut down the voices of half the population you control public discourse in a way that is
favourable to the other half. Men in power use the Quran to justify their repetitive use of
violence upon women’s bodies. However, in the Quran it’s written to treat woman as an equal
half of your own body. Fighting back means being against the Quran. All this power is
superimposed on women’s reality. In the theoretical pyramid of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,
women in the Middle East are dealing with the most basic issues such as personal survival. Yet
in the 1970’s women where half naked on the beach, my aunt told me. Dark makeup around their
eyes. Smoking on the street and dancing were considered normal. These are times that seem so
far removed from the current reality faced by Moroccan women today36.
Women’s body are exposed in so many ways to violent acts. The court system is not an ally if
a sexual assault complaint is even opened by the police. Women are treated as liars, disreputable,
whores. Even registering such a complaint can be viewed as dishonorable to a woman’s family.
Like Eve, we are the embodiment of sin. Physical and psychological violence are kinds of
trauma that woman perpetuate as well. For example, before the harassment in the train even
happened, my body anticipated the harm and contempt that we would face. My muscle clenched,
I was sweating, my heart was racing, and I felt dizzy. For the rest of the month and a half that I
36

Sonia Mabrouk, Le Monde Ne Tourne Pas Rond Ma Petite-Fille (Paris : Edition Café Voltaire, Flammarion.
2017)This essay is based on real discussions between two generations of women- a young journalist in France,
talking on the phone to her grand-mother in Tunisia. They talk every week about what it means to be a woman. They
talk about the hijab, terrorism and sometimes there is a clash of generations. They talk about the impulse of
integration, the language, the French language and how for migrants, language is the key to be accepted in their new
country. It’s a philosophy of thought and not just about being understood or successful verbal exchanges. It’s an ¨art
de vivre ¨. These two women unpack the relation between imperialism and organized religion, they about the
terrorist attacks of the Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo. The grand-mother raises issues of mass media and its incapacity
to represent alternates viewpoints. They talk about the complexity of being Muslim and how it’s more like a spider
web and less like a series of sequential steps.

29

spent in Morocco, I was angry and loud. Like the Egyptian, Mona Eltahawy37 insists ¨Angry
women are free women38.¨

37

Mona Eltahawy, “Why Do They Hate Is; The Real War On Women Is In The Middle East,” Foreign Policy
(May-June 2012): found at, https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/04/23/why-do-they-hate-us/. Accessed on February 17,
2019.Eltahawy is an outspoken activist regarding women’s rights. In her article, she explains that women in Islamic
countries such as Egypt don’t own their bodies but their bodies belong to the regime. Men who attack women come
from all parts of society. This includes rich, educated and privileged classes. Such regimes blame the survivors of
sexual assault making it even more difficult for women to come out against their persecutors in a such society.
38
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIjgrNMPqrk&index=9&list=PL-YV6PCoRhVtX0fjHAOA3aAPbsQaOa512
sister-hood interview with Mona Eltahawy. Feminist author and public speaker. Fuuse, (Published May 31), 2018

30

Last performance
As a performance artist I interpret and experience the world around me through my own physicality. With
my body I am the embodiment of the stories of my great grand-mother, my grand-mother, my mother,
myself, my aunts, my cousins, those girls who’ve been killed this July, and all others.
I produced a performance for my graduate show Introspection/Extrospection MFA thesis
show,2019 Emily Carr University, Untitled 11. I dyed a 15-meter fabric golden yellow, weeks
before my performance. Preparing my fabric was important to me. Submitting my body to
physical labor is a way to emphasize my subject matter and mentally prepare for my future
performance. Taking time with the object brings a ritualistic and symbolic meaning to the fabric.
For example, I slept with the yellow fabric for two weeks. Thus, the fabric became an extension
of my own body. I studied its material and how my skin reacted to its texture. The fabric became
indispensable, like a visceral need to be close to it.
The day of the opening, I installed the fabric outside at the East entrance of Emily Carr
University. I settled on the grassy Knoll. I stood on the book with my bare feet. I put the fabric
over my body. I pull the fabric over my head until it covered my shoulders down to my hips. I
felt the wind move the delicate cloth - it caressed my skin. My arms were bent toward my chest,
my palms facing the sky. Then, with slow gestures, my hands grabbed the golden yellow fabric
as it covered my face. I pulled the fabric multiple times, using slow hands gestures. I pressed my
face into the cloth. Viewers could make out the silhouette of my face through the semitransparent fabric which recalled a ghostly figure struggling to be seen. My hands were sailing
within the fabric. A feeling of drowning and suffocation submerged me. Making it harder to
move, the wind blew the golden yellow material as it billowed around my body. I had trouble
moving freely. There was my body. The fabric. The book. And the wind.
Slowly, I navigated inside this restricted environment. With delicate movements, I held the
fabric, my hands pushing it from inside. Trying to free myself, I grabbed one part of the cloth
then dragged it firmly. After few minutes, I came out of the trap and freed my body from its grip.
I unveiled my face and then dropped the golden yellow fabric on the floor. I took hold of the
book underneath my feet. I leant down to the ground and dug with my hands a hole in the earth. I
dug with both of my hands- desperately. I grabbed the book I was standing on and placed it
inside the hole. I covered the book with the soil and put the grass back in place over it. It looks
like I had never been there. I got up and placed myself over the book which was now under the
ground. My bare feet were stamping the earth with little movements to compress it. I stopped, I
stood without making eye contact and left the space. Subsequently, the viewers approached the
remaining relics inside the circle of dirt.

31

CONCLUSION
Diverse stories inform my practice. These stories break with the conventional notions of
how to research a thesis. I have started with personal and lived experience and moved out from
there. It is my way to play with power relations within academic beliefs. I do this by embracing
non-normative philosophies39 that don’t figure in western critical thoughts. I try to leave space
for different discourses. Western world views are difficult to dismantle without perpetuating the
same paradigms. We know that marginalized groups are already disempowered. According to
Denise Ferreira da Silva, we alienate them even further when we refuse to accept non-western
critiques of our own historical behavior. Ferreira da Silva wants us to think in a way that dilutes
the normalized structure imposed upon minorities.40 Storytelling is a powerful research strategy
for including knowledges, bodies, experiences that have been generally suppressed or excluded.
Stories, that I choose to share, are embodied with symbolism and meaning. By using words in
French or in Arabic, I reserve a space for my own cultural identities within my thesis. It’s a
strategy to break the flow of the English reader. I choose to impose my cultural heritage on the
reader just as Western culture was imposed on me. My practice exposes culturally-charged
concepts concerned with identity, diaspora, displacement, race and immigration. My interaction
with these concepts is based on experiences of my family and community members. In my work,
these concepts emerge as performance art pieces and storytelling. The atmosphere of each work,
the anxieties and desires provoked, are heightened through the proximity of the viewer to the art.
By shifting back and forth between performance art and storytelling I am using different media
to explore the same concepts.
Throughout, my work focuses on the stories and cultural weight that first-generation citizens
have to carry as by-products of the diaspora, forced migration, and trauma. At its core, migration
leaves cultural scars because it turns ethnicity and identity into hierarchical groupings, imposing
a dominant culture assumed to be better than the minority one. First-generation citizens find
themselves with no guideposts in navigating the complexities of such lived experiences, and the
trauma and displacement they have inherited. Using trauma as a catalyst, and my body as a
primary vehicle, I explore a new language manufactured from trauma, gestures and movements
in space.

39

For exemple: Al-Aachqar Souleiman, Fatou Diome, Franz Fanon, Sonia Mabrouk, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Denise Da Silva Ferreira, “In The Raw,” E-Flux 93 (September 2018): found at, https://www.eflux.com/journal/93/215795/in-the-raw/. Accessed on February 17, 2019.
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32

Untitled 29

The carpet under my feet is blue
It’s an old one
how do I know, you’ll ask?
The soles of my feet brush against it
I feel it, parched and dry
burning my skin like cement in summer.
My legs swing back and forth
Back and forth
My feet barely touch the ground
The carpet under my feet is blue
A blue that pulls me in
My vision blurs and blurs
My palms sweat and sweat
I try and try
The carpet under my feet is blue
It’s an old one
My feet feel it parched and dry
I feel my ears go numb
His voice is too loud
So loud
I feel the air splitting my face
my brain is shutting down
I am staring at the carpet under my feet
The carpet is blue
A blue that pulls me in
It’s an old one
my feet feel it parched and dry
The piano before me
My hands are shaking
My palms sweat and sweat
I try and try
The carpet under my feet is blue
It’s an old one
My feet feel it parched and dry
it burns my skin like hot cement.
My legs swing nervously back and forth
My feet barely touch the ground

His thumb between my shoulder blades
Insistent and demanding
I arch my back against the pain
I try and try

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I am here but I’m not
I am here but I’m not
I am but I’m not
I am but I’m not
The carpet under my feet is blue
it’s an old one
My feet feel it parched and dry
It burns my skin like hot cement
My legs swing nervously back and forth
My feet barely touch the ground
I try and try
The carpet under my feet is blue
It’s an old one
How do I know, you’ll ask?
It’s been burning the skin under my feet for years.

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Untitled 18,Emily Carr University. Metal plate, hunting knife, lemons. 2018

35

Untitled 20, Emily Carr University. Charcoal, flour.2018

36

Untitled 20, Emily Carr University. Charcoal, flour.2018

37

Untitled 11, ,Emily Carr University. 15 Golden Yellow Fabric, Book.2019

38

Works Cited :
Al-Aachqar Souleiman Dr. Omar, Le Monde Des Djinns et Des Démons: La Fois Islamique a la lumière de Coran et de la Sunna
(Samo Press Group, 2007)
Armstrong F. David, Stokoe C. William, Wilcox E. Sherman, Gesture and the Nature of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
Bennett, Jill Empathic Vison; Affect, Trauma, And Contemporary Art. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005)
Bordowitz Gregg, Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Am a Man) (London: Afterall Books, 2018).
Claxton Dana, Fringing the Cube (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2018).
Counsell Colin, Wolf Laurie, Performance Analysis: An Introductory coursebook (New Fetter Lane, London 2001).
Das Veena, Life And Words; Violence and The Descent Into The Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
Desmarais Serge, Gerrig J.Richard, Ivanco Tammy, Zimbardo G. Philip : Psychology And Life, second Canadian Edition
(Toronto: Pearson, 2012)
Diome, Fatou Marianne Porte Plainte! (Paris: Café Voltaire, Flammarion, 2017).
Ferreira Da Silva Denise, “In The Raw,” E-Flux 93 (September 2018): found at, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/93/215795/inthe-raw/. Accessed on February 17, 2019.
Fleetwood R Nicole., Troubling Vision; Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2011)
hooks bell, “Eating the other: Desire and resistance,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992),
Mabrouk Sonia, Le Monde Ne Tourne Pas Rond Ma Petite-Fille (Paris : Edition Café Voltaire, Flammarion. 2017)
Manning Erin, The Minor Gesture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
Maynard Robyn, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Nova Scotia: Fernwood
Publishing,2017).
Mignolo D.Walter, “Looking for the Meaning of ‘Decolonial Gesture’,” E-MISERICA 11.1 (2014).
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/emisferica-111-decolonial-gesture/mignolo (accessed February 1, 2019).
Morrison Toni (January 19, 1998; found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Kgq3F8wbYA).
Oyo A Naa. Threadcraft Shatema Wate K and, “Perceiving the Black female body: Race and gender in police constructions of
body weight,” Race and Social Problems.
Pierce Sarah, “Fragment, Mediality, Gag,” Little Theatre of Gestures (Basel: Malmo Konstal /MKG Basel, 2009)
https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2015/01/marrakech-tale-150131120247912.html (accessed January 31, 2015)

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