Artists have it easy
*NOTE: Why am I posting my journal entries? See my inaugural post: Beyond journalism
(*artwork by Incé Husain. “The Simorgh had a secret. She was a firebird! Her feathers had magic powers. They could grant wishes, make dreams come true…She had seen worlds created, worlds destroyed. And it had made her wise.” ~ excerpt from The Phoenix of Persia)
Yesterday I was on fire.
I’m lucky that I morph to music, to dance. It fills and elevates all my senses like possession, like exorcism. It hijacks, erases, rewrites, redefines, feeding all the emptiness that comes with vague pain. I am completely fused with its raw current. If I listen and fall backwards into open air, I would levitate, neck thrown back like a haunting. It is a hallucinatory celebration. I once danced so hard that I scarred myself, body swinging and ring finger shredding itself on the mouth of a faucet, and I cackled as I bled because I felt like I had wings.
For the last three days, a mission: I will break my heart on my own terms with the music of my dreams. I will break my heart in Arabic and I will break my heart in Persian and I will break my heart in Turkish and I will break my heart in Urdu and I will break my heart in French, and by the time I break it in English, there will be nothing left of me. It is essential that I stuff this ritual, somehow, in the cracks between research and journalism.
Back in September 2023, before the world order became a gory exhibitionist and when everyone was still friends with each other, someone at coffee break asked: “what’s the most romantic language?”
Someone said Arabic. Someone said Persian.
I said nothing. I smiled to myself and thought: and suppose you took your Arabic and you took your Persian and you let them fuse and age in a breath of Turkish and they rose to become the sinews of something entirely new? What monster would that be? Could you bear it?
Can I?
Urdu is genetically a poet and obviously a thief. It is a young language with an old soul. It is a meeting of civilizations, a player of worlds. It is inherently indecisive and playful, its mixtures breeding a sly humor. It toys with the constraints of one root language with the paths of another, for poetry, for song, for mischief. It is capable of anything. It promises: whatever you feel, I will bridge it with something else to set you free without altering the essence of your feeling, without transforming it, without telling a single lie. You’ll feel like you have wings, flying across the planets.
My mind was born from this fire. My eyes are sealed in it. My heart remembers it when my tongue forgets. This language will not let my mind die of anything, certainly not of heartbreak. It will allow a documentation that misses nothing. It will mourn and ignite celebration.
The music is a self-study, and I see clearly the strategy of my mother tongue. I see clearly how it gnaws at its roots, takes what it wants, and then mocks itself.
The Arabic music I break my heart with is intense, elemental, hurls a supreme emotional clarity, hits the bloodstream with conviction, economy. It knows exactly what it is and pulls me unflinchingly into itself. It says: this is what you are now, understand? No questions. But it is not a complete identity death because it is ridden with what brought me here. And this is why it accomplishes heartbreak beautifully. It enhances what I already was, puts my emptiness to narrative glory. It is salvation. And I know these songs so well now that I hear the first few notes and I immediately ascend to the quiet, grief-stricken, panicked tears that I came to them with, that I implanted, that they have come to hold so truly that the songs cannot be anything but a container. This is what it means to morph to music. It is the slow, deliberate crafting of an inescapable, compartmentalizing bond. It is attentive, urgent, gentle. It is exactly how I would hope to love. And so to dance is a celebration of love. And this is what reminds me: if you have felt safety, if you have felt exhilaration, nothing can take it from you, nothing, because you can always find it in abstraction, and this - to dance, to sing - is what it looks like to find it. This preservation through abstraction runs deep in my psyche. It has existed for as long as I can remember. It comes to me in dreams. I dreamt, the day after, of a total wasteland - no trees, no earth, just masses of suffocating dust. And I woke up sick and dazed like my head had been bashed in, poetry blaring in my mind's eye: the birds will return, undoubtedly the birds will return. And now I am the bird, flying, singing.
When I break my heart in Persian, it is with grace and a bit of vanity. Persian music is a little bit in love with itself. It says: look what you’ve done to me, you psychopath, killed me in my sleep, killed me while I was still (day)dreaming, but also, look at how well I’m taking this, look at how pretty I am, my songs and I. It is such self-glorifying, dignified, wounded, tranquil depression. It says: come now, control yourself. You’re really going to spend more time crying than writing about crying? You’re missing the artistry! Come, let me show you how it’s done. The songs are so gentle, so sad, so yearning, so vainly self-deprecating, so obsessed with their pure-heartedness, so contemplative and self-sacrificial in their confessions. They refuse to be pitied; they retain their composure, lighting the path to escapism and prophesied dreams. This is how I learned to daydream without fear. They teach me continuity: tomorrow, the sun will rise, what will you do with its rays? Don’t be wasteful. Dance, and think of the passage of time and honour how you love, no matter the cost. It is this pained lightness that makes me so confessional. Last summer, X said to me: “He’s the one person I will never get over. No one will understand me like he does. I don’t know what to do.” And I said “You should confess.” She recoiled: “NO!” She was scared of rejection and hurt. And I smiled and shrugged and thought: if it’s true what you say, that he understands you, that you’ve decided what you feel is true, then he has a right to the full truth and it should be only him who’s allowed to hurt you on its basis. I, personally, would be honoured to suffer the consequences of a soul-deep confession. Subhanallah. And I take my own advice. I confess, cry, contemplate, self-glorify, repeat. I retain my dignity and speak in artistry. I play with the sun in my hair and think of adventure, gazing out at a sea near me.
I am new to Turkish heartbreak. I didn’t do it last time. But this time I couldn’t stay away. It came to me because I scolded myself and then asked myself some questions: heartbreak is about self-purification, self-discovery. These are good things; you should be grateful. Didn’t you write: you know the raw truth of a person from the way their heart breaks? Tell me, then, who are you, what are you, that this hurts so badly? What are the premises that allowed this kind of harm? What exactly have you lost? Be specific; don’t leave out a single detail and state the facts clearly. My first answer began with my name. Incé, my Turkish name, with the accent on the “e” that was meant to be on the “c” - traditionally, Inci - that the hospital where I was born messed up in spelling on my birth certificate. My name means “pearl”. In the words of Ancestry.ca: The name Inci, derived from the Turkish word for pearl, has a fascinating history that dates back centuries. In Turkish culture, pearls symbolize purity, beauty, and perfection. This name holds deep significance, as pearls are considered invaluable treasures coveted by many civilizations throughout history. Yes, I strive for purity, beauty, and perfection. Yes, I am an invaluable treasure. Yes, the world is my oyster. And I thought of how little I know of Turkish music. But it is easy to get to know, its pulse is immediate. It is orchestral, melodramatic, sultry. It is so heartbroken it wants to break the world. It fiercely tries to deny reality, convince me that melodrama is not melodrama, but the truth. It says: listen to me! I will not survive! Tomorrow the world is going to end! This is not a metaphor! And I love the way it elevates the meaning of passion to this, the way it snaps every thread of sense. It is too deliciously delusional for me to embody, but it gives me permission to be delusional, and I need this. It gives me permission to write: I am a swan, I am a swan that was shot, my swansong is bloody, half-finished, the world should end, I demand it, I’m allowed everything, anything goes, if I dance with my eyes closed and snap my neck falling down the stairs, so be it; if I scream so loud that this house made half of glass shatters around me in a burning halo, so be it; my delirium will be witnessed until it is accepted, the delirium of this dancing girl in this empty house with the ears fried from music.
And Urdu music? What will it be, what does it teach, the songs of the language that steals from the rest? There is a reason I go to Urdu last, climb up the steps of the others to the walkway of my mother tongue. I want to see its full body, identify its emergent phenomena. I listen, finally, to the lyrics of the language that I actually speak, that gives me intuitive, incomplete windows to all the others. The answer is: Urdu eats my very heart. I don’t need rituals of fusing with its songs. They already know me. It is to look into the mirror with my red eyes and watch them get redder, the way they would be destined to even if I did not accelerate their evolution with song. The Urdu heartbreak is everything I ever wanted, everything I always was. It is suicidal, matter-of-fact, soft, flirtatious, taunting, angry, distressed, fierce, witty, surrendering. It is indecisive like satire, laughing while it sobs, poking fun at itself in secretive ways. It speaks to the one it loves with distance, with intimacy, with inside jokes, with a dynamic that is undefined or evolving with the song, that sneakily leaves some path open - not necessarily reunion, not necessarily a forever breakage, but something, a factual “let’s see what happens” that promises nothing and asks for nothing. It does not synchronize me to a singular elemental emotion like Arabic music; it does not desirably distance me with philosophical vanity or melodrama like Persian or Turkish music. It makes me wade into life with as much self-omniscience as possible to face my current reality. And this standoff with reality is always somehow humorous. It says implicitly: There is always a path by definition that life is uncertain. Living through time is the same as existentially letting things unfold. This exceeds your feelings and your state. Try to taste this brink and to laugh at what brought you here. This dynamism gives the songs sincerity and incompletion. They truly, madly, deeply embrace the unknown while mourning and seeking dialogue with what is known. They have plot. They find their own soul and come up for air with a comprehensive shrug. They harmonize everything into a standstill, exhaust all rumination, and laugh. They say: This is the state of things: I am lost and also not lost. I truly don’t know what to do, and it’s a little bit funny, because I did do this to myself, and I would do it all again, and in fact, I actually did do it all again, running in circles with such grace. Would you believe my luck? Surely the time to laugh at my foolishness is now, arms raised in surrender? And this is my final ascension: I will always live in narratives like these and the end is always the same - that I rise, I win. And it’s not because I outsmart my heartbreak or commit to living in an abstraction where I can reclaim everything I lost, though I do this too. It is because I am laughing.
I remember vividly, when all that could be said and done was said and done from my end, cocooning myself on the couch and sobbing against Y’s knee, thinking: if I concentrate I can make myself go unconscious from tears and this, too, I will glorify, to bleed from loss and from the diasporic crack in my forehead. Today, I want nothing, no one, ever. Tomorrow? Maybe I will be reincarnated.
“Look,” said Y, caressing my hair, half frustrated, half frantic. “I know this is hard. But maybe you should stop putting yourself in these kinds of situations!”
I’m laughing at my empty hands, at how paradoxical I am, that I made all these silly decisions that led me here, that I regret none of them and burn for all of them, that my eye for detail is so high-functioning in its love of life and fear of death that I have to love this, too. I must document it, perfectly, on principle. And I must prove my theory to myself and to the world: that artists have it easy. We feel life too much to die, even metaphorically, and it is the way we resurrect and celebrate our self-sickened bodies through writing, dance, art - bodies we choose eagerly, with eyes wide open, with dreams of beauty - that is the proof, that makes people say: You live so deeply, so largely, so fearlessly, so truly, I wish I was you, you make heartbreak seem desirable, you make everything that happens to you seem so insightful and therefore vibrant. Teach me: how do you find such glee without it being shallow, hedonistic derailment? How commanding you are. How free.♦
A random sample of four songs (Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu) I listened to (and you should listen to) ~
أنا لحالي (Ana lahale/ I am on my own) - Elyanna
خداحافظ (Khodahafez / Goodbye) - Erfan Tahmasbi
اے عشق جونون (Aye Ishq e Junoon/ Love is madness) - Farhan Saeed