What are the merits of bad practice in an archive? I am thinking of Roland Barthes’ description of a “bad concert hall”, containing dead spots where the sound fails to circulate. A failure of circulation – what is there to gain or lose from inhabiting a “dead spot” for a moment, just a moment, before one expands an archival endeavour into research, something public facing, something consumable, an archival holding I transpose text over, fit into Instagram carousels, frame with research, context, years, culture, sound, aesthetic? What is that private moment (Jasmine raised a good question by asking if this private moment even exists) between you and an object you love or want to love? Before the work of added value, before the work of aesthetic, before the work of drawing someone into your love for something, someone, what is the value/texture/landscape of the moment where you are just saying something simple: love this!



What if one arrives into the archive with a screaming wound and wants to reach for a newspaper, an object, a jar, a folder that might offer a balm? I feel like this is bad practice, because you are supposed to shed your presuppositions, and arrive curious, welcoming, try on the garb of the widest possibility, arrive with skepticism and the tools of a researcher/artist healthy and self-aware, glib in the literature of archive-is-incomplete, fluent in a perspective critical and knowing, flashing with the wisdom of lighthouse knowing that the light can be jeopardy, that this is not a signal-post, that is not the future, that this is not recuperation, that this is not everything, that this is just, just one thing, and everything is everything of course, and this is not—
 
But sometimes you arrive in the archive with a map. I have to stop myself from meditating on the cartographic/catastrophic hermeneutics of the map, because what if we have what we have, feel what we feel? A big, undiluted, simple, raging desire to find something. I am almost certain that this is bad practice. But let’s say for a day we are bad practitioners: we come with heartbreak, and love, and grief, and betray theory’s caution for desire. What if I say, just for today, I am, in fact, searching for something. I am thinking of something, and I hope it is here. I am thinking of someone and I hope they are here. I am hopeful, hope-extender more than practitioner, I am looker, looking for balm, I am looking for covers I can pull to make something bearable.

I think of Faiz, and the tall task of folding in hope and grief in the same verse, but he does it again and again. I wake up from a dream, in which I am standing in front of a crowd reciting Fehmida Riaz’s poem written for the youth of the Arab Spring, which she wrote in wake of Faiz’s poem “tum apni karni kar guzro” (do what must be done!) (grief also at the unending pain of taking away the power of a verse with translation).

Faiz writes, 

jo honā hai so honā hai
gar hañsnā hai to hañsnā hai

gar ronā hai to ronā hai
tum apnī karnī kar guzro

jo hogā dekhā jā.egā

[What must come to pass will come to pass.
If laughter is called for, then laugh.

If tears must fall, then let them fall.
Do what is yours to do, carry it through.

Whatever comes after, we shall face it when it comes.]


And Fehmida Riaz writes,

kuchh log tumheñ samjhā.eñge
vo tum ko ḳhauf dilā.eñge

jo hai vo bhī kho saktā hai
is raah meñ rahzan haiñ itne

kuchh aur yahāñ ho saktā hai
kuchh aur to aksar hotā hai

par tum jis lamhe meñ zinda ho
ye lamha tum se zinda hai

ye vaqt nahīñ phir aa.egā
tum apnī karnī kar guzro

jo hogā dekhā jā.egā

[There will be those who counsel caution,
who place fear gently in your hands.

They will say:

Even what you possess can be taken.
This path is full of bandits.
Something else might happen.

But something else often happens.

The moment you inhabit now—
it lives because you are living it.

This hour will not return.

So do the work that is yours.
Cross the threshold. Take the step.

Whatever follows,
let it come.
We will see then.]

I come awake with this dream from another world, and step into this archive. I come awake dreaming of Faiz’s Instesaab, literally a poem titled “Acknowledgments”, which is a colossal naming of things: zard patton ka ban jo mera des hay, dard ki anjuman to mera des hay [A forest of yellowing leaves is my homeland; an assembly of sorrow is my homeland.] A naming of things, a list, a grief-list that holds close, refuses to let go of the moonlight, life sounds, purity folded into scenes of deprivation.

I arrive with this grief-list; with Faiz’s sensibility of holding one’s grief and beauty together, as ingredients of one another, as flowing from the same water source. And so I arrive in this archive actively looking for this sensibility; of course, I am drawn to the 2021 festival screening of Dagh Dagh Ujala (2020, dir. Anam Abbas), a documentary film which borrows its title from Faiz’s poem “Subh-e-Azadi” (The Morning of Freedom). Subh-e-Azadi says: ye dagh dagh ujala, ye shab gazeeda sahr….[this stained light, this night-heavy morning…]. Dagh Dagh Ujala would literally translate to Stain Stain Light, and I think of screen, stains, dawns,  a visual language for holding a world of hope and grief together. I hold the binder open in the festival archive that contains this brief reference to the world of Faiz and of poetry steeped in the world of revolution from the subcontinent through this route of devastation and hope, and the refusal of writing/viewing/loving in separate registers, the border does not work here. I ask it to balm me.

As I watch Dagh Dagh Ujala, a documentary that follows organizers of the 2020 Aurat March (Women’s March) in urban centres of Pakistan, I hear the electricity of the soundtrack. I see the work of crafting a visual language that is attentive to both the revolutionary spirit of our people trying to save their homes, their lives, their bodies – and one that must, almost as a compulsion, pay homage to the “stained dawn” that our revolutions and movements are mired in. Faiz writes Dagh Dagh Ujala as something to contend with the eve of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, but the sentiment is extended to our political and personal experiences within the container of the nation-state. In Subh-e-Azadi, Faiz writes in the register of a contained disappointment, one that is careful in not giving into its own futility, one that is straining for the dawn as much as the stain. And the documentary charges this sentiment with visuality: with a palpable attention to moments of hope, solidarity, sisterhood, brotherhood, a blue and pink flag, the rise of a wave, a crest of hope ascending and descending, the electric rush of asking, fashioning, composing a dream, the craft of dreaming up a life where you can cycle on the streets, where your life might expand, when hunting men might forego their hunger, where hungers can be revised, where life can be safe, where hands don’t rain— 

My balm from the archive, my private moment, my bad practice, before the archive turns readable: the electric spark of your hope is part of your language; the grief and the devastation and the hopelessness is part of the whole; you are the whole circle, the turning point, and also the turn – the screen is the stain, lighting and waning, away from our cities, the originary point of our grief - to arrive finally, finally, at the spectrum of hope that embraces devastation, it will take you in and not separate dark from light, and so the question the film asks is not how you will hope—but—



How will you greet these mutilations of hope? Will there be a home in this world for an incomplete life? Will there be a home in this world for impossible circumstances — not an impulse towards resolving the antithesis, but asking for a container, to be held in this waning state, of moving back and forth, between this and that, between there and that, between there and this–

Incidentally, the film references Faiz’s Dagh Dagh Ujala in the title, and then also goes on to feature Fehmida Riaz’s poem, when one of the Aurat March (Women’s March) organizers recites the verses to the crowd before her.



I think about bringing these verses together—

Á la Barthes: Ask the archival object: how do YOU feel actually? What is a monologue of the wound when I am not writing over it? Is what I feel for/around/through this brief reference to Faiz in the binder actually communicable? Can I build a dialogue out of it with anyone, anything around me?


Because this is a “bad concert hall” of a question, there is only silence. In that silence, there is an encounter: the dead spot which no container can hold as circulable sound, which no one responds to, which cannot be communicated, which is the experience of you as you, which is just us; a failure to communicate from the archive, and sometimes all there is to do is to look and feel for this –

Ye dagh dagh ujala, ye shab gazeeda sahr,
Wo intizar tha jis ka, ye wo sahr tou naheen.