EXODUS PATHOLOGY
mid-length work in progress
What is the residue of displacement across generations? This is the anchoring question behind Exodus Pathology, which explores three iterations of forced displacement across three generations of my family’s history, including slavery, exile, and immigration.
The history of my maternal family—black enslaved/displaced individuals brought to Iran from East Africa—is widely denied both within Iran and its diaspora. The systemic erasure of this history began with the alteration of the definition of “slavery” in a Persian thesaurus which eventually led to the eradication of the history of slavery in its entirety and the denial of the existence of black people in Iran. This erasure was part of Iran’s modernization efforts, aimed at claiming a "white" identity. Now, four generations later, I find myself displaced, contending with an immigration system whose brutality reminds me of my family's history, while witnessing from afar that few of my family members are in different stages of dementia. This poses the question of what lies behind such cycle of forgetting. With this new immigrant status, I am revisiting the past to write an alternative future, before everything evaporates.
By exploring notions of border, utopia, and dementia/amnesia, this work creates a relational constellation between colonization and oil, the technology of documentation, slavery, surveillance, gender, visibility and opacity, elliptical identities, and language. In addition to my familial oral histories, the ongoing lines of inquiry shaping this project include Black history archives in both the West and Iran, official USCIS documents, new scholarship on Iranian Blackness, and medieval Islamic cartography.
