I Bid the Poetry of Pain Farewell, 2024

gliceé, tengucho paper, 30 x 40”

A piece exploring the friendship and words between two sons of diaspora. Dedicated to Edward Said after his passing and written by a close friend, Mahmoud Darwish’s poem Antithesis speaks of the heartbreak of diaspora, the daily minutiae of numbness in the face of immense loss, of the existence of one’s home solely in memory. Condensed and overlapped, Darwish’s poem is in a single frame, leaving it unintelligible—for how could such a concept be contained and still itself? As the ghostlike tengucho breathes in and out, overlaid is the final goodbye in the language that it would have been spoken between them, a hope for peace at last, from a friend to a friend, a final exhale.