Density
By Rania Al-Ataba
I chose a photograph of you because while photographers seem to know their subjects’ places, you seem to know your own. The lens is at the gate to your threshold, your head turned aside toward your water buffalo with a certain knowing resting in both of you. Holding the reign under its neck, it seems as though you are taming it and your endurance of the lens. Perhaps it was not only one shot, but several trials at capturing this density.
What drew me to you is your parallelism with the earth, although you stand diagonal to it, fixing down an equally steadfast buffalo. All of you rigid, all thickly built, all referring to one another. Even from inside your eyes there comes a fixating gaze at the buffalo, perhaps a commandment, perhaps the buffalo is the less patient one. With your right leg facing a northeast angle, I understood you are rooted in your place, rooted in your way of life, save for the marshlands that deceived you with their desiccation. That is how, with a resting on your left leg that is retreating southward, you turn westward, as though evading a memory of a different reality. Perhaps evading the irrelevance of an eye that sees you, that wants to pause your dry presence.
Knowing one’s place, by denotation, is knowing one’s status in a society or an organization and not having an urge to change it. But knowing one’s place with time becomes clearest when you are in your element, which even if one tried, one cannot change. It seems both your elements is water. Yet, you are dryly free from an obligation to a worldly life purpose, besides sustaining life. And this is what you are looking away from, are you not? who you are to the words your observer uses; the photographer, the machine and how they cannot recall the water. How many times have your eyes scanned the landscape and carried it to your landscape of memory before you were asked to take shape in our own?
*This text was developed during Confabulations, a generative writing group which took place at the lesser Amman library in April 2025, facilitated by Sima Qunsol. It was written in response to a photograph from Mohannad Al-Sudany’s Barren South, exhibited at Jacaranda Images as part of the Image Festival Amman. Through its subjects, the collection explores effects of the suburban marshland drought in Southern Iraq, specifically in Basra, Dhi Qar and Maysan.
*Photo Credit: By Rania Al-Ataba of Mohannad Al-Sudany’s Barren South, exhibited at Jacaranda Images as part of the Image Festival Amman.