Motherly Affects: Coming Together with Iman Mersal’s How to Mend

The Idea of Houses

           I sold my earrings at the gold store to buy a silver ring in the market. I swapped that for old ink and a black notebook.
This was before I forgot my pages on the seat of a train that was supposed to take me home. Whenever I arrived in a city, it seemed my home was in a different one.
           Olga says, without my having told her any of this, “Your home is never really home until you sell it. Then you discover
all the things you could do with the garden and the big rooms—
as if seeing it through the eyes of a broker. You’ve stored your
nightmares in the attic and now you have to pack them in a suitcase or two at best.” Olga goes silent then smiles suddenly,
like a queen among her subjects, there in the kitchen between
her coffee machine and a window with a view of flowers.
           Olga’s husband wasn’t there to witness this regal episode. Maybe this is why he still thinks the house will be a loyal friend when he goes blind—a house whose foundations will hold him steady and whose stairs, out of mercy, will protect him from falls in the dark.
           I’m looking for a key that always gets lost in the bottom of
my handbag, where neither Olga nor her husband can see me
drilling myself in reality so I can give up the idea of houses.
           Every time you go back home with the dirt of the world under your nails, you stuff everything you were able to carry with you into its closets. But you refuse to define home as the future of junk—a place where dead things were once confused with hope. Let home be that place where you never notice the bad lighting, let it be a wall whose cracks keep growing until one day you take them for doors.

– Iman Mersal (emphasis mine)1

I heard this poem before ever reading it.2 I had never encountered Iman Mersal before, and yet a single line of her poem managed to dwell with me from then on.

So I can give up the idea of houses.

I found Mersal at a time of loss and unrootedness: in my later twenties, starting a PhD program so far away from my home, and feeling the mounting pressure of heteronormative familial and societal expectations rushing me to attach myself to someone. Cornered by seemingly arbitrary imperatives, all alone, my desire to feel something, anything otherwise, grew. How might my loneliness turn into abundance, I wondered.

Hearing this poem on my way back to my apartment was the first time Mersal’s storytelling facilitated the disclosure of my own disorientation. This horizon I had been instructed to chase was flawed, and neither happiness nor abundance were necessarily awaiting on the flipside: I can give up the idea of houses.

Sometime after I was roaming the Cairo International Book Fair and stumbled upon a curious looking book. How to Mend: Motherhood and its Ghosts.3 Just below the title, I encountered Iman Mersal’s name for the second time. What was she trying to tell me this time? I was determined to find out.

Iman Mersal, an Egyptian poet and essayist now based in Canada, has long been known for her writing that weaves the personal with the political, attentive to intimacy, estrangement, and the ordinary as sites of critique. In How to Mend: On Motherhood and Its Ghosts, she turns this lens inward, holding together themes of memory, grief, and mothering/hood. The book is her attempt to process loss in its many configurations: the death of her mother in childbirth, the estrangement of exile, and the upheavals of parenting a child struggling with mental health. Mersal gathers an intimate archive of photographs, diary entries, dreams, and fragments of writing to trace the entanglement of loss, memory, and mothering/hood in her life. Rather than offering closure, she dwells in the ambivalences between representation, lived experience, and loss. In my reading, this makes the book more than testimony: it becomes a method, a way of attending to how affects of mothering/hood take shape in fragments, hauntings, and repetitions rather than in linear narrative or resolution.

My speculative reading of Mersal does not emerge from a desire to impose an analytical topography to frame future readings or critiques of her work. In fact, it is not my intention to critique Mersal at all, but rather to engage in “worlding” or world-making as a practice alongside her, beginning with approaching her book as an archive of affect rooted in an embodied experience of knowing rather than solely a personal testimony. What this archive opens through disclosure and speculation are forms of alternative relations: Mersal’s reckoning with herself, her ongoing dialogue with the spectral presence of her mother, the delicate intimacies of caring for her children, and my own encounter with her words. Together, these relations gesture toward a possible Otherwise.

My approach owes much to Deborah Thomas, who sees in archives of affect an opening for “new possibilities for seeing connections previously unexamined and for reordering our ontological taken for granteds” (2019:6). Mersal’s book provides just such an opening. It lends itself to what Thomas calls Witnessing 2.0, a practice of watching, listening, and feeling that is relational and profoundly intersubjective. Reading her, I begin to recognize mothering/hood as an embodied way of knowing that exposes the very binaries that give it shape. Saidiya Hartman’s reflections in Wayward Lives (2019) also resonate. She writes of feeling a connection to her archival interlocutors, seeing in their want and their resistance a blueprint for other arrangements (2021:128). I feel a similar pull toward Mersal’s account. My recurrent dwelling with her words has become an intersubjective exercise in excavating intimate history, an attempt to register the transformative potential of motherly life through close narration (2021:129). Sara Ahmed’s reminder that reading is a form of sociality, an encounter shaped by reader, text, time, and place (2000:15), helps me name what is already happening in my engagement with Mersal. I am not tracking the figure of the stranger in her work, but I am drawn into a mediated process of excavating the affects of mothering/hood from her writing. By drawing on Thomas, Hartman, and Ahmed together, I approach the text in a way that is intimate, embodied, and critical all at once. It is in this mode that I can register the motherly affects in Mersal’s writing, those that spill out from the story and its telling, often exceeding even her own intention (Poletti, 2012).

Taking this recognition of Mersal’s experience as method also means attending to speculation as a practice of repair – for her and for me. Mersal speculates to confront and stay with what haunts her, and in those moments motherly affects animate the intensity of her testimony, sensations brimming in search of an outlet. Dreams, imagination, and speculative thought become “ways to create other kinds of story” (Hartman, 2021:135), the kinds foreclosed by the violent abstractions of our world. I, too, speculate with Mersal: acknowledging the ghosts she names, attending to the specters unnamed yet present, and sketching what might be.

Adjoining the terms mothering and motherhood was an intentional choice. Mothering implies an active practice, while motherhood suggests a fixed state or condition. One is immediate and unfolding, the other a longer journey or commitment. Yet they cannot be fully separated: ideas and actions bleed into one another, just as past, present, and future are always-already entangled. This is why I turn to the Arabic term Umuma, which captures the two realms of ideas (motherhood) and action (mothering), suggesting an entangled relation involving subjective embodiment and historical ideological formation. Therefore, I find that mothering/hood as a hybrid term reflects the complexities of navigating the binaries imposed on mothers in the modern world.

But why an archive of motherly affects? This again takes me back to the title, Motherhood and its Ghosts. The spectral invocation in the title suggests a haunting has transpired or is transpiring. In Ghostly Matters, Avery F. Gordon (1997) describes haunting as the felt presence of what appears to be absent, missing, or even silenced. Ghosts in this symbolic landscape become signs, the recognition of which can lead to “that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life” (1997:8). There is an affective charge embedded in haunting under which likely lies “a structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition” (ibid.). Mersal’s book overflows with ghostly encounters – her mother’s spectral image, her own moments of overwhelm as a mother, the dislocation of exile – revealing how the affective dimensions of mothering/hood are often discounted due to their relationally dispossessive character and distance from idealized mothering/hood. Indeed, lingering with these “unpleasant” motherly affects can open up an emergent space of recognition rooted in a relationality that exceeds the binaries of the modern world.

Affect (1): Dispossessive

While Mersal’s account undoubtedly reflects her intimate and personal struggles with mothering/hood, it is also furnished with entanglements that enable her narrative to travel and resonate in other contexts. How can mothering/hood be relationally dispossessive? Guilt is one affective field through which maternal dispossession can be observed. Mersal writes:

Feeling guilty appears to be a feeling unifying mothers across difference. It lies in the distance between dream and reality. Similar to the way it unfolds during childhood, in love, in one’s career and in friendship, guilt is the byproduct of the distance between idealized mothering/hood in public discourse and its letdowns in personal experience (2017:12).

These cultural frames defining idealized mothering/hood set limits on which experiences are validated and which are derealized. By derealization I am invoking Butler’s discussion of grievability (2004): whose losses do we mourn? While Butler is thinking of the loss of human lives, loss as dispossession can be extended beyond that. In terms of mothering/hood, Mersal refers to the norms of idealized mothering/hood in public discourse; the figure of the ideal mother is circumscribed and produced through the prohibition and foreclosure of the dispossessive dimension of mothering/hood. The violence of derealization rests upon foreclosing recognition. In this way, idealized mothering/hood functions as an optic that is both regulating and regulated (Puar, 2007), a way of disenfranchising other modes of mothering without leaving a mark. Butler (2004) states that dehumanization emerges at the limits of discursive life, of that which is made unthinkable and unnatural. When Mersal shares her unhappy feelings, she writes against the limits that marginalize and problematize her mothering/hood. She writes of the cruelty of idealized mothering/hood in the absence of referentiality. She writes of selfishness, not as empowered mothering/hood, but as a resort the writing mother cannot afford to give up – a resort that is nonetheless very much guilt-ridden. She writes about the difficulties of navigating a loved one’s mental health, and the resentment that might arise from being made to feel like a problem or a failure. She writes of the secrets mothers often think but never utter. Most crucially, she writes of her dreams as portals through which the derealization of wounded and incomplete mothering/hood comes undone.

Affect (2): Disorienting

Mersal writes from a position that Sara Ahmed calls an “affect alien” (2010) – someone who cannot or will not inhabit the cultural frames of idealized mothering/hood. In “Happy Objects,” Ahmed (2010) reminds us that happiness is not free-floating, but bound to particular societal aspirations such as family, marriage, children – objects that circulate as promises of fulfillment. Mersal is implicated in this promise through her marriage and her children, yet she never fully embraces it. Instead, by disclosing the contradictions animating her mothering experience, she demystifies the promise, showing motherhood as a negotiation between self and society rather than a natural path to happiness.

Her alienation is most palpable in her position as both mother and writer, where the gap between what mothering/hood is supposed to deliver and what it actually feels like opens onto disorientation. Rather than conceal this gap, Mersal insists on writing through it. In doing so, she aligns herself with other writers who have mothered before her, like Adrienne Rich and Anna Swirszczynska, finding in their work echoes of her own journey. Mersal recognizes herself in these accounts but also extends them. For her, the difficulty is not merely balancing two roles but enduring a constant tearing apart:

When the writer succeeds at being a mother for a day, she will feel defeated in regard to what she failed to read or write. If she has a day for herself, she will ache from her own selfishness. On another day, when she manages to write with her child on her lap, or play hide and seek while ruminating a poem’s word choice, there is no guarantee she will not feel guilt or failure in that either, nor is there any guarantee her child will not one day read what she wrote without hurt. (2017:31)

This sense of estrangement resonates beyond Mersal’s own account. Reflecting on the challenges of existing without children in societies that idealize mothering/hood, Shereen Abuelnaga (2018) writes: “I am not a mother, therefore I do not exist.” Both she and Mersal grew up in Egypt, where – as in many parts of the modern “Middle East” – motherhood is imagined as a compulsory rite of passage, a blessing, even the fulfillment of faith and purpose. Within this frame, those without children are often met with judgment and pity, cast as either misguided by choice or burdened by the inability to conceive. Mothers who deviate from these prescriptions face similar disavowals. It is precisely these disruptions that animate Mersal’s book, which emerges as an artifact of, by, and for affect aliens. By writing directly into her disorientation, Mersal transforms alienation into a practice of disclosure. In doing so, she unsettles the cultural scripts of happiness and opens a space where mothering/hood can be lived and recognized otherwise.

Affect (3): Speculative

In the second section of the book, titled “How to Find your Mother in her Image? Motherhood and Photography,” Mersal turns to photographic archives of mothers through which she identifies two dominant figures of motherhood: the invisible mother and the instrumental mother. The invisible mother represents the mother who sacrifices anything and everything for her child, so much so that recognizing her presence is not readily registered but has to be purposefully excavated and announced. The instrumental mother represents the symbolic functionalization of mothering/hood by different social actors, one example being the take up of metaphors and representations of militant mothering/hood by different political formations and social movements. Neither the invisible nor the instrumental figuration can account for Mersal’s experience, which disrupts the overt and latent respectability embedded in both figurations.

The invisible mother for Mersal inhabits the mass volume of family and children portraits. In some of these images, especially those of children, the mother is quite literally concealed under a cover to hold the baby up until the shot is taken. In others, the mother is there but appears ethereal or even spectral. Mersal’s observation cannot be read outside of the disorientation she feels towards the first and only photograph she has with her mother from her childhood. Two months after the photograph was taken, Mersal’s mother died as a result of labor complications. Facing her image with her mother, Mersal cannot recognize the adult woman in the photograph or is unable to remember her. Memory, grief, and mothering spill into one another for Mersal, who struggles to form a referentiality to her mother that can shape her own mothering. She asks:

What if your mother had died before you could form a memory of your relationship? What about the absence or the disappearance of the mother as a personal reference that you can adopt or battle with when you become a mother? And what about the experience of motherhood in exile, when you are made absent from your motherland? Does this make your practice of mothering more liberated or more lost? (2017:20).

As Sara Ahmed’s discussion of happiness suggests, memory is one component that facilitates the correspondence between objects and feelings (2010:32). When the retrieval of memory is blocked, when memory itself is absent or unavailable to be called upon, disorientation is likely to transpire. In Mersal’s case, the photograph of her mother did not feel like a souvenir, but perhaps more so an object of affect that seeps into her dreams. In “The Site of Memory” (1987) Toni Morrison sees in images a potentiality to move towards the truth through reconstructing a world that cannot be grasped. Speculating around an image for Morrison represented a way to lift the veil cast over what is beyond recognition. As objects, photographs are amenable to processes of reproducibility and repurposing, which endows them with “active biographies in a constant state of flux” (Edwards, 2012:225). Understanding a photograph thus goes beyond its visual content and involves the social relations through and by which it is constituted. In moving beyond mere visual apprehension, photographs are brought into relations with social practices and experience. In the case of Morrison, an image becomes a gateway to the unwritten and interior life of the enslaved through imagination. As Morrison points out by “image,” she is not referring to “symbol” but to “‘picture’ and the feelings that accompany the picture” (1987:92).

Keeping with Morrison’s rationale, images become interlocutors to be talked to and talked with. Mersal couldn’t just apprehend her photograph with her mother through the sense of the visual, but she had to reconstruct their relationship through speculation. Mersal puts forth a speculative narrative to reconfigure the disorientation the photograph triggers in her. It is only by leaning into the disorientation, the uncomfortable feelings, the contradictions paving the distance between the ideal and the experienced, that Mersal is able to arrive at what Morrison would term her truth. When Mersal dreams her mother into being, she realizes that she does in fact recognize her mother as she relives mundane scenes of her childhood. In those reimagined moments, Mersal attempts to fold her mother back into her life but finds herself unable to speak. Contemplating the nature of grief, Butler (2004) complicates common assumptions of so-called successful mourning. According to Butler (2004), mourning successfully is typically associated with an endpoint at which the restoration of a prior order is possible. By this logic, loss is resolved through substitution as if it is a void that can be refilled. What Butler suggests troubles this trajectory by underscoring the ties we have to others, rather than others per se, as the loss. Through her dreams, Mersal realizes that it is not exactly the figural loss of her mother that haunts her; it is in fact the loss of a primary relationality that constitutes us as social beings – the loss of a form of attachment that orients us. In Mersal’s dreams, the disorientation manifests itself through her unrecognizability to her mother, who only knew her as a child. Mersal’s speculative dreams expand her own understanding of referentiality in the practice of mothering/hood. The inability to reference is experienced by both parties in the dream, unearthing their relationality as the true marker of loss. Butler implies that mourning happens when “one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever,” and is therefore contingent upon “agreeing to undergo a transformation the full result of which one cannot know in advance” (2004:21). Accordingly, Mersal comes to terms with the relational loss by realizing that she has been remade by it in a way that already shapes her mothering/hood and will continue to do. This is not a wound one can substitute. Rather, this is a wound one learns to live with and through.

Affect (4): Abstractive

The anxious disorientation in Mersal’s mothering/hood is as institutional as it is intimate, shaped by the imperatives of the nuclear family and the nation-state. In Mersal’s case, several shades of loss compound these tensions. In addition to the relational loss of her mother, Mersal mothers in exile. Here, loss is more than distance or aspirations for return (Williams, 2016). Loss in this context is also political, remaking Mersal through disaggregation from communal ties and through limited access to the resources they once provided. Alongside this loss is Mersal’s enmeshment in regimes of surveillance, immigration, and racialized gender norms that regulate which mothers are deemed legible. Falling outside the idealized parameters of mothering/hood – parameters written through middle-class whiteness – renders her suspect from the outset.

At the risk of overinterpreting Mersal, I will spend some time thinking through one account from her diary entries. In this particular entry, Mersal recounts preparing to travel from Boston to Canada after spending some days with her spouse and two children, Murad and Yousef. On the trip back, the family splits up, with Mersal and her son Yousef traveling back together. As they are rushing to make their connecting flight, Yousef, who struggles with mental health, stops in his tracks, and demands to be reunited with his father and Murad at once. Mersal tries to explain that they will reunite right after the second flight, but Yousef begins to yell: “I won’t see my dad and my brother ever again, you are kidnapping me, you are a liar you said we will meet them in Canada.” Before Mersal could calm and reassure her child, airport security escorted her to a private office for questioning. Despite presenting her Egyptian passport and her Canadian residence permit, the officer asks Mersal to reveal who she really is. Mersal recounts his accruing suspicion, his resolute dissatisfaction with her answers, as if his mind was already made. Whether she was this child’s mother or not, in the officer’s eyes she was certainly a questionable one whose failure to meet standards warrants more security and surveillance. While Mersal’s anecdote stops there, it raises pressing questions about mothering in an age where securitization and surveillance shape everyday encounters, particularly under the War on Terror.

In The Anti-Social Family (2015), Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh describe the family as both an institution and an ideology by which gendered assumptions are essentialized and made inherent. At their core, these gendered assumptions cannot be divorced from ideological constructions of femininity and masculinity. The feminization of care work for example is the byproduct of such ideological constructions. So is the heterosexist familialization of larger society, making the family and the nation reciprocally connected and mutually reinforcing. Through this normative arrangement, categories such as woman, mother, and citizen all collapse into one another and failure to achieve one category undermines the promise of fully realizing “good subjecthood,” as Mersal’s anecdote illustrates.

Reflecting on her own experience as a mother, Adrienne Rich (1976) explains how motherhood can serve patriarchy by reproducing the ideal/lascivious woman divide. Patriarchy sustains itself by categorizing women’s bodies as either sites of sin and unruliness or sites of sacred life. In this way, those who mother are offered a place in the order, while those who do not become its nemeses. Yet, authorized mothering/hood prioritizes middle-class whiteness, and mothers’ recognition under patriarchy has always been racially restricted. In Black Feminist Thought (2002), Patricia Hill Collins traces how the “cult of true womanhood” required women to embody piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity – virtues reserved for white women. Black women, by contrast, were confined by controlling images, such as the mammy, the matriarch, the welfare queen, and the Jezebel (2002:69-96). These images, which target black women’s sexuality, function as an ideological justification for interlocking systems of oppression, mobilized to insist that the system is intact and that it is Black women who are broken.

Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai (2002) extend this critique into the domain of counterterrorism. They trace how terrorism studies grew out of colonial notions of sexual perversity, treating the psyche as “its privileged site of investigation” (2002:122). Within this frame, “inconsistent mothering” emerges as a pathology said to produce deviant children. The “bad” Black mother and the “backwards” Muslim or “Middle Eastern” mother are both cast as culpable, their children imagined as criminals or terrorists. Mersal’s interrogation at the airport echoes these logics: she is treated as a suspect mother whose failure to embody middle-class whiteness invites securitization.

Despite the fact that Mersal has chosen to participate in the family as a sociopolitical project, she experiences the psychic and the material limitations of the family as a social form. The nuances discussed above are not lost on Mersal whose alienation from these ideals is experienced fully in a dream where she appears before a jury composed of her child’s social worker, physician, therapist, and teacher. Placed in front of the jury is an enormous file with the name “Yousef” plastered across. Mersal wonders if any of these professionals ever bothered to fully read it, knowing their confident expert diagnoses often ironically emerge from an incomplete understanding of her son’s full being. The prosecuting attorney begins to present the case to the jury, noting that the accused cannot swim or bike, plays no instruments, and failed to learn ice skating. Not only that, on the rare occasion that she is present, she shares stories of war from her childhood that traumatize her child and keep him up at night. During her absence, while strangers raise her children, the accused accumulates professional accolades. In closing, he addresses the jury saying:

“She is an absent mother, she did not appreciate the blessing that god bestowed upon her and in her denial of that blessing she has been unjust to her innocent son, who has attempted suicide at the age of 12.” (2017:101)

Mersal wants to rebut and quickly begins to assemble “proof” that she is not what she is accused of being. Ideas swarm her mind, begging to be deployed in her defense. What if she brings up her other son, Murad, who meets the jury's normative prescriptions? What if she mentions that she herself grew up without a mother and has nonetheless survived? Has she? Mersal is not sure. She was about to declare her unwavering love to her children, how much she has given up for them, when inspiration struck. Unapologetically, she professes:

“He [Yousef] is like me, we are twins, we suffer from the same affliction and neither of us can look the other in the eye without remembering their own tragedy.” (2017:102)

At first Mersal was tempted to exonerate herself through the very binary logic that brought the charge against her. She wanted to denounce her perceived failure to mother Yousef by foregrounding her “success” with Murad – an embodiment of ideal mothering/hood. She even almost referenced her experience with her mother, to shift the scrutiny from her psyche to Yousef’s. These tactics all share an investment in truncating alternative relationalities between a mother and her child. They are in pursuit of the normative moral distinctions of worth and social distinctions of value assigned to ideal mothering/hood – distinctions that at once produce the wounds of mothering/hood and preclude its reparative potential by rendering it unutterable. Perhaps it is because the speculative terrain is a frontier or a borderland always in flux that the regulating and regulated optic of ideal mothering/hood unravels in its folds, revealing itself as a disciplinary mechanism and unachievable horizon. And perhaps, it is precisely through recognizing the fallibility of an ideal, and resisting the urge to convert the disorientation the realization induces, that disclosure and speculation are made possible. As Ahmed reminds us, it is the disclosure of “unhappy affects that is affirmative, that gives us an alternative set of imaginings” (2010:50). Only by embracing her disorientation is Mersal able to grasp and give form to the alternative relationality she shares with Yousef, a relationality emerging from the wounds of mothering/hood but not delimited by ideal mothering/hood. One could argue that just like Mersal, Yousef is also an affect alien, and perhaps it is their shared disorientation from the normative and ideal horizons of mother, child, and subject that connects them.

Conclusion

While Mersal does not call for abolishing the family or motherhood as institutions, the exposition of the suffering she and her loved ones experience is, if not an unequivocal indictment of the increasing privatization of care, then at the very least a fierce organic critique. If Witnessing 2.0 endows us with a sense of responsibility/response-ability toward Mersal, then the obligation to call for abolishing the form and communalizing the relation falls on us.

Avery F. Gordon writes, “when you know in a way you did not know before then you have been notified of your involvement” (1997:206). I embrace Gordon’s urgency. I have been notified and moved by the motherly affects inhabiting Mersal’s account. I have felt Mersal feeling the dispossession, the disorientation, the abstraction. My repetitive reckoning with these motherly affects has enabled me to grasp the historical violence built into subjectivity itself.

The binaries of our modern world – civilized/uncivilized, sacred/lascivious, ideal mother/inconsistent mother – are always hard at work seeking to sever us from who and what makes us who we are. These binaries are examples of what Melamed calls “technologies of antirelationality” (2015). What is hopeful about Mersal’s storytelling is that it attests to the way speculation can bring us back into relation in the midst of chaos. This is not speculation of any random sort or order. This is a speculative practice enabled by embracing an embodied experience of knowing. In this sense, Mersal is at once bearing witness and inviting us to witness. The speculative here calls upon what Haraway (2016) refers to as our response-ability to become-with and render each other capable of waywardness, or “an ongoing exploration of what might be… an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been set” (Hartman, 2019:227).

Repair, explains Thomas, “demands an active listening, a mutual recognizing, an acknowledging of complicity at all levels” (2019:212). I am not a mother, and I am not sure if I ever will be, but I know that when I read Mersal’s book, I felt with and through her, which means we are somehow already connected. Undoubtedly Mersal’s narrative describes her experience, but it does not belong to her alone. By laying bare the ethical dilemmas of mothering/hood, Mersal has created an intersubjective field that brings together individuals and collectivities and invites them to witness (2019:216). I witnessed Mersal’s mothering/hood as an embodied experience of knowing and I deeply recognized her uptake of speculation to bring about transformation that surpasses the binaries of our modern world. As I witnessed and related, I was rendered capable of becoming-with Mersal. I leaned into these conditions of “real love” enabled by our relationality, and I used this paper to speculate about the possibility of improvising with already set terms of social existence, to free ourselves from the chokehold of modern binaries. In doing so, I tried to provide an imperfect example of how working through a speculative narrative might potentially extend into a collectivity: “to act reparatively, in concert, as humans” (2019:221).

• 1. Translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-idea-of-houses/
• 2. I first heard the poem on the podcast Maqsouda, which recites and analyzes Arabic poetry. https://open.spotify.com/episode/36bYaAEj8lo6EGWUu6bETU
• 3. Mersal’s How to Mend is part of the publishing initiative Kayfa ta which “uses the popular form of how-to manuals to respond to some of today’s perceived needs; be they the development of skills, tools, thoughts, or sensibilities.” For more see: https://kayfa-ta.com