"The chemical stench of the toxins left behind by the fire in my home in Altadena made it hard to breathe, but I was determined to find what I had left behind before fleeing: Etel Adnan's book, The Arab Apocalypse. Adnan once said of the sun, "Because the sun is dangerous it can kill you - burn you. But the sun is also life.""
"Don't look up at the sun, we are told. Our irises burned, scraped abraded-like the migrants burning their fingerprints to evade border police. Burning the traces on your fingers to circumvent erasure. Edouard Glissant comes to mind as I think of burning irises seizing the right to be illegible. The paradox is damning. This is a story that mingles in the interstices of decay and fecundity. In the unseen realms of jinn and spirit. In the Anqa; an illusory female bird who induces renewal andresurrection by burning herself in a nest of palm fronds."
"One of the many erasures my body has had to contend with after becoming a refugee in the west is of an embodied connection to sentient and non sentient kin. To be connected with the ecologies I touch and to whom I am touched by. To be attuned to what Gloria Anzaldúa named as spirit and what I think of as jinn. Did the jinn originate from the flames of the sundescending on the planet to live unseen with us humans?"
Hayv Kahraman’s new body of work responds to Los Angeles wildfires and long-standing themes of displacement. The work interweaves personal loss, environmental contamination, and the search for belongings amid forced flight. Imagery invokes burned irises, erased fingerprints, and rituals of illegibility to confront border violence and erasure. References to Etel Adnan, Edouard Glissant, jinn, and the Anqa bird link literary, spiritual, and mythic frameworks of destruction and renewal. The pieces probe depression, dissociation, and severed bodily connections while seeking attunement with sentient and non-sentient kin and ecological resilience.
Read at Juxtapoz
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