The Small Circles project is how I first encountered Saad Choeb’s work: we were paired together, writer and artist. I’d been tasked to write an interactive dystopian short story within the universe of The Bloods, a future setting of the UK as country divided between a religious-fascist regime and its opposition. My story, The Voice of Whiteness, is about a person who needs to use their half-forgotten mother language to resist propaganda beamed directly into their mind; the tension is that the protagonist is also chaperoning a Language Seer, whose lack of any English renders her immune to the propaganda. In the worst-case scenario, the narrator falls into Voice Madness and compromises the Language Seer’s safety.
I thought of it as a reflection of one of the core frictions of a migrant’s life: that of languages and where they sit within our identities. This is a deep anxiety, and one that is often laying under the surface amongst Arab communities. Think pieces on the demise of Arabic as a world language; reinvented ways to engage children in this language; arguments over language purity against colonising French and English; laments over Arabs without Arabic: these are common discourses that our communities cycle through. The feeling we sometimes have, of Arabic being ‘feeble’ against English or French on the world stage, is really a reflection of our despairing anger. Modern, recent, current Arab history reads like a series of tragedies. (NB: There is hope too, there is always hope, but we were situating ourselves in dystopia at that time)
All this preamble to say that it was not my words but Saad’s art that realised this short story together. The black backdrops; the pastels; the chalk-board effect – these draw our eyes to the protagonist’s haunting despair. In one artwork, the character in blue and his ward, the Language Seer, are divided by a red line. A spirit like a screaming ghoul seems to emerge from the narrator, threatening to overwhelm him, commanding the attention of the viewer.
The most arresting piece – reserved for the worst scenario – depicts the protagonist clutching their forehead, the soft curves of their hands turning into claws tearing at their head. The eyes and mouth are curled inwards with despair. When our eyes drift to take in details from other corners of the piece a yellow arrow, like a migraine, forces our attention back on the forehead.
In its brutal defeat, it is not just despair depicted, but the despair of the colonised mind. An understanding of the concept of the colonised mind is something I was still developing; I was charging towards it in this short story, but it was Saad’s art that saw the real heart of the piece and evoked it.
This collaboration was all the more poignant because Saad was, at that time, in Lebanon. We were working in late 2021, and the Beirut Port explosion in August that year had shaken Beirut, Lebanon, and indeed the Arab world to the core. We were still in the wake of that explosion when we collaborated together. Electricity and internet were intermittent, local currency was worthless; life for Beirut’s residents was bleak. When we launched Small Circles in January 2022 with a live Zoom reading, Riana Richani, another Lebanon-based artist, remarked that it was grimly easy to evoke dystopia in her art because Lebanon was already a dystopia. Saad, who should have joined me in our portion of the reading and Q&A, missed most of the event – his absence caused by Beirut’s spotty internet.
It’s been nearly three years since I encountered Saad through this collaboration. He’s made an impact in the UK with his art – as with his exhibition in Hackney’s Space Studios in 2022, following his receipt of the Don Bachardy Fellowship.
I come back to The Voice of Whiteness at least once a year since it has been published. But it’s not for my text that I return: it’s for Saad’s art. And it is especially that final artwork which for me touches on a frightening, abysmal despair that claws at our hearts, that exists within every Arab of our generation who has witnessed wars, brutality, corruption, theft and coups define our region and felt useless in the face of it – even when actively working against it. More succinctly than my own words, this drawing captures the terror of the colonised mind. I am sucked into it because I wish to reject it. I see a reflection of my own worst qualities and I wish to change it.
That, in itself, is the real quality of dystopian art – it is not there for us to wallow in our darkness, but to experience it frighteningly, and then reject it.
– Ali Al-Jamri