Factual Dispersion, Poetic Compression: LANGUAGES OF EXILE

Podcast of performance work: two voices each voice addressing and underscoring the other. Together they are producing words reading backwards through a wave of news coverage about the Syrian war, the refugee crisis, and the dangers of the Mediterranean Sea. The reading backwards of these journalistic texts breaks up the habit of our clear factual articulation – a clear factual articulation that, in its fact, becomes ignorable as it satisfies the need for fact. This backwards flow of journalistic facts carried forward from the reversal of the day’s date stamped so firmly and authoritatively on the facts, as if justification itself, is interrupted ever so often by the words of female Syrian poets, whose poems are oddly and noticeably not dated in the books recovered in translation from the British Library. The necessary compression of meaning within each sentence of this poetry is in turn counterpointed against the fact of legal journalistic accuracy and its subsequent dispersal, its general thinning out, particularly in the face of reported death.

Syrian poets:

Mona Fayad
Hala Mohamed
Maram al-Masri
Saniyya Saleh
Aisha Arnaout
Ghada Al-Samman
Salwa Al-Neimi

(Source: https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/11/02/languages-of-exile/)

• https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/11/02/...
• http://www.crisap.org/event/salome-voege...
• http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/1024...