1. Memoir(s)

At this moment, the only desert storms I can recall are blowing through my heart. So I find that the more I analyze, understand and narrate them as a writer, and perform them solo or with groups as a social choreographer, the more I gather mastery of the wind and determine its direction.

I have a memory of breathing sulfur in the morning: acrid air composed of the finest desert sand intermingled with oil fumes. My father drives us to school. We travel at great speed through a new shadeless highway within the safety of our family’s hermetically-sealed sedan. It is early morning but the temperature outside is rising swiftly. The sun shines bright through the dusty haze; it will be an impossibly hot day. Yet, when I look around me, we each wear lovely designer sweaters. Our cool climate-controlled environment permits us the fantasy to skip Nature and dream of a different landscape: western, northern—whiter. Thus begins my neocolonial childhood’s disconnect from warm brown bodies and surroundings. It will take a lifetime to decolonize—to heal.

Our private school is no truer: foreign teachers cater to me and my classmates as smiling missionaries of European and American culture. We learn to celebrate their holidays and decorate our classrooms with: snowflakes conjured through exquisitely fine white paper cutouts. My teachers complain about our barbarous environment and yearn for their homes. We accept this shame politely and learn to yearn with them. We read their literature and forget about ours. I speak English at school—the global language of access. We think ourselves sophisticated the more we shed our accents. Our thick accents may charm others, but they expose us. My generation does not wish to be exposed: we don’t want to be ghettoized when we finally arrive.

Back home after school, seated in front of enormous color TVs like innocent pubescent sponges, we are engrossed by popular media that heralds all manner of distant seasonal urban lifestyles. We watch tourists’ fair bodies; we read tourists’ bodies as yet another textbook. We first learn to imitate and ultimately to desire them. Our erotic life is slowly and imperceptibly colonized. The process is incredibly thorough, and fills us with secret contradictions, forcing us to inhabit parallel conflicting realities. We become secretive as we accumulate and negotiate more and more secret desires. We become adept at leading very public secret lives, encoded behind a myriad presentation and representation strategies.

Much of this (much of me) will remain dormant for years, unquestioned. It will not be until I study visual arts in college that I finally begin to understand how dominant cultural messages are crafted and communicated verbally and nonverbally across the globe, that I will begin to gather crucial creative critical thinking tools and perform a certain kind of brutally honest surgery on myself, to endeavor to understand how my false self was fashioned—shedding myself from it. In this respect, my first art works were embarrassingly autobiographical. They embarrassed me and others-like-me through a public catharsis, but this was the only way to go forward with a newfound inviolable sincerity. I perceive a very similar dynamic unfolding among my young Arab art students. Therefore, the arts education that American colleges and universities dare to provide them with over this decade is going to incubate them. It’s up to the artists to remain asleep or to awaken.

2. Gender(s)

There is a neocolonial education of the body. It is triggered, regardless of gender, every time there is an invasion, a war. Wars create quick lessons of the invading culture and the invaded culture. But it is a precipitous affair. It makes us difficult lovers.

North American universities now follow in the wake of our latest war, opening campuses in the Middle East. North American art programs increasingly receive Arab women students into their BFAs and MFAs. But no one has prepared their professors and instructors, to understand the culturally-informed art work that these students are presenting, in the same manner that no one prepared that very same staff to receive several generations of South Korean women students before them.

During the past two decades, a number of US art programs became Victorian-style finishing schools into which Korean middle-class families sent their daughters to make them more marketable back home as creative brides. But I fear that too many of those girls were never truly challenged by these studies. Unless they picked up a white husband, many just came and went. So we should be forewarned; we should do better with our Arab art students. This new wave strikes me as entering this unprepared academic space wanting more from it. These art programs must become acutely aware of their role as catalyst, and offer nascent artists safe creative spaces where to acquire practical and theoretical tools and to explore their young voices. And while more and more of these students are experiencing this, it is not because these art programs understand them, but because they are doing it on their own. Indeed, as an educator, sometimes I feel that I am enjoying the honor, the privilege of witnessing a new stage of feminist art practice in the Middle East as it unfolds within American classrooms.

Into this scenario also enters the Arab male student body, the most poignant version of the neocolonial body. The most recent occurrence of the Arab male body erupting in our collective American consciousness was during the Abu Ghraib tragedy. Buried deep within the abuse of Arab male prisoners was the Puritan repression of the white body and its destructive erotics that inform military torture practices abroad. And while oil may have been the grotesque secret lubricant behind the collective lie that sought weapons of mass destruction, for a moment the spectacle ceased from being one of war to one of a twenty-first century male harem. Indeed, the harem was reborn as the underbelly of the colonizer was revealed, and the neocolonized Arab male body was restaged as the new odalisque. The event was not about the creation of eunuchs, but of odalisques.

I recently heard a gay friend say that Arab male porn was the new rage. Indeed, following porn’s objectification of the body into fetishized parts, this neocolonized male body keeps resurfacing through newspaper headlines of US servicemen posing for “hero” photographs with the body parts of Arab male soldiers. I just spent two years under the weight of this archetypal body while working with two Muslim male graduate art students: the first one, creating a performative film about political torture, his film unfolding as video clip flashbacks during a long police interrogation; the second one, painting metaphors of bloody ritual deaths as punishment for transgressions.

The West is unleashing something in the East, and it must be accountable to the young Arab artists it is increasingly recruiting. These artists are increasingly trained by western visiting professors or migrating to and studying in the West, crafting their first portfolios and projects there, most of which challenge the status quo back home. I’ve had a Muslim Pakistani student viscerally rebel against being married against her consent after graduating from her BFA. She generated installations about her older sister’s wedding, a wedding that shocked her into non-compliance, and inured her to a destiny of obedience. I have had an Arab graduate student perform in ways that challenge patriarchy and would cause her arrest. Those dangers are far greater than the dangers experienced by young US artists who occupy Wall Street. Arab students need to take full control of an American art curriculum that naively seeks to occupy them.

Frantz Fanon taught that the first generation of slaves’ children often has to serve as educators to the first generation of former slave owners’ children. There is no question that this call to own their education is a heavy mantle, an unfair burden on the back of young Arab artists, already caught in-between two worlds within their country of origin: having to prove to traditionalists that they are not sacrilegious, and to progressives that they are not retrograde. Added to this balancing act of pleasing opposing expectations at home is the global curatorial demand abroad for cultural purity in The Other. Young Arab art students have to juggle between not being hermetic to Western audiences and being too westernized for western audiences seeking “authenticity.” Of course, everything has its benefits, even exotification. For example, Western curators of contemporary art allow The Other to engage in content that is not allowed to Western artists, mostly out of the unspoken assumption that primitive cultures continue to engage in the magical, manifested as religious and spiritual content in their art work, generally a taboo in the West, where God is dead and His comeback would be considered nostalgic and sentimental—anti-intellectual.

3. Direction(s)

There is little need for young Arab artists to become translators of contemporary Arab art to the West. Arab art is merely another frontier; we should be conscientious of our involvement. Much the same dynamics played out during the 1980s with artists from Central and South America and the Caribbean. In the US, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York recently inaugurated an Islamic art exhibition, showing work from the seventh to the nineteenth century. In the Arab world, art museums and new collections are slowly being born throughout according to Canada’s Lord Cultural Resources, which has been serving as private consultants in Abu Dhabi, Cairo, Dhahran, Morocco, Qatar and Riyadh. There is talk of well-to-do patrons and international museums alike discovering the social agency of art via the recent uprisings throughout the region.

But how do young Arab artists gain and sustain control over such forces? How does one lead one’s circumstance in the direction desired? As an educator, I believe that young Arab artists of this generation need to demand much more from American art programs while they document this critical moment and themselves with great detail, every step of the way. If American universities want Arab art students, they need to add modern and contemporary art history of Arab art into their curriculums while familiarizing themselves with the political and social processes their art students face back home. Yet, Arab art students should not only rely on foreign and regional art historians, critics and curators to write their unfolding history, but begin to write and rewrite their own histories themselves, right now, at this early moment in their collective art history and individual art practices.

Nevertheless, this call for constant self-documentation is about a courageous and intuitive knowledge of the self. It is based on the understanding of one’s practice as channeling ancestral values and new traditions one may trigger as a contemporary artist. It treats one’s practice as cultural material greater than one’s self. Of course, this only works if the practice, if the artists’ body, has been decolonized. Otherwise, the practice may err in being an angry form of reversed colonialism, a new form of self-exploitation or manipulative orientalism (very commercially successful, no doubt), a hyper-educated tourism complete with efforts that pass for normative whiteness through conceptualism and minimalism as coded media. Art practice exceeds the artist if it is socially engaged. A socially engaged practice is automatically greater than the artist, greater than the sum of its parts. It is documented because of its intrinsic cultural value, regardless of the individual, regardless of personality. As young Arab artists examine the preconscious neocolonial wiring of their desires, personal and professional, they will begin to determine their directions and direct the gaze of audiences.

4. Performance(s)

The restoration of the integrity of the Arab body, a body tragically exploding—a bomb and the victim of a bomb—burnt and scattered throughout the land, intuitively feels like one of the healing mandates of a new urgent pedagogy of the body. But how does one perform dismemberment, and how does one retrieve it back to wholeness? As an instructor of performance art, as a social choreographer, it strikes me as a generational challenge to perform this wounding and wounded body, this embodied sign of brutal times. In early feminist theory, nothing parallels the visual language of beauty as strategy, the welcoming language of the familiar as strategy, as the packaging for horror.

Performance is increasingly the language of the times, not so much out of art world fashion, but resulting from an experience of bankruptcy and passivity. The popularity of performance marks the end of the disconnectedness of the modernist artist and of a post-modern body that does not move but seeks to be moved, as Rebecca Solnit states in her history of walking. The young Arab body seems restless, it reclaims agency.

So what is the young Arab artist’s body going to do? All the stakes are significantly higher for it than for any other body. A multi-cultural moment is happening again. Will it be about commerce? Will the Arab body be cleaned up for consumption? Will it shed the uniform of its elders? Will it wear what cool kids wear in New York, London or Tokyo? Will it realize that every uniform is the product of a specific race, ethnicity, class and culture? There is no Platonic uniform. Will it be uncompromising? Will it become chameleon-like, shrewdly and flexibly negotiating appearance according to context and goal? Will it also subvert the uniform of gender? Will it stand up and walk in the heat instead of riding a cool car? Spring is about blossoms throughout a landscape, but summer is about bodies bearing fruit. An Arab spring has ensued; we await its powerful cultural summer. Despite being overdetermined in the media and receiving high price points at auction, it has not made a full debut yet in the world stage; it has not been fully “discovered” by art the world and, most importantly, by the art market. So it has incredible potential, numerous choices to determine its destiny.

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