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antiAtlas Journal #2 - 2017
WRITING AS ARCHITECTURE:
PERFORMING REALITY UNTIL REALITY
COMPLIES
Raafat Majzoub
Raafat Majzoub holds a BA in Architecture from the American University of Beirut and a SM
in Art, Culture and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work is
a negotiation between various disciplines that claim agency over social practice. As an
architect, writer and artist, Majzoub describes his work as “performing reality until
reality complies”. Through a series of novels, Majzoub creates a spine for an alternative
Arab world where his work occurs: The Perfumed Garden. His work has been exhibited,
published and performed internationally. He is the co-founder of Beirut-based The Outpost
magazine and director of The Khan: The Arab Association for Prototyping Cultural Practices.
His thesis A Lover’s Discourse: Fictions (MIT, 2017) hypothesizes a relationship between
the dweller and the land that is similar to that of the lover and the loved one, and
assumes the act of loving as a model of citizenry.
This article is a condensed prelude to Majzoub’s thesis A Lover’s Discourse: Fictions
written at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017, and scheduled to be published
by The Khan in 2018. For antiAtlas, Majzoub exhibits two key concepts in his work, Active
Fiction and Dormant Fiction, incorporating excerpts of his novel The Perfumed Garden: An
Autobiography of Another Arab World (in grey) as well as visuals and project documentation.
Keywords: Active Fiction, Dormant Fiction, Publication, Performance, Arab Politics
Definitions:
- Abaya: a robe-like dress, worn by some women in parts of the Muslim world including in
North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula
- Hadja does not exist in the text, but rather Hajja: a title given to an older woman or a
woman who has performed pilgrimage (or Hajj) to Mecca
- Majlis: a place of sitting, usually used in the context of a "council"
The Beach House, image from the movie, Roy Dib, co-author Raafat Majzoub, 2016
To quote this paper: Majzoub Raafat, "Writing as architecture: performing reality until reality
complies", published on December 18, 2017, antiAtlas Journal #2, 2017, Online. URL : www.antiatlas-
journal.net/02-writing-as-architecture-performing-reality-until-reality-complies, accessed on septembre
18, 2018
"To my grandmother, every man is a universe within a universe where every other man and thing lives. […] In
her universe, everything required a bold leap of faith. Reality was not factually shared or communicated."
- The Perfumed Garden.
I. Introducing Active and
Dormant Fictions
1 All our memories come from the same place. That was what the imam (Majzoub 2014, final
paragraph) was talking about. That was what Omar did not understand. Everyone on the roof
waited for Omar to forget that he needed to remember. They didn’t wait like Arabs usually
wait – flaccid. Everyone went about their own lives. Nothing stopped. There was too much
life in this parking lot on ‘Meedan el Opera’ (Seif 2014) for anything to stop.
2 All our memories come from the same place. This text is the fabric of two texts, woven into
each other in a conversational pattern. These two texts, one composed from extracts of a
novel (The Perfumed Garden) and the other written as an explicatory text for the purpose of
this piece, are conversing with each other, sometimes delicately, sometimes discrepantly.
They can be read both together and separately.
This fabric is an instant in understanding agency within a grander terrain: it reflects my
quest, the quest of an Arab artist, and more generally an Arab producer, to participate in
the making of his world at a social, economic and political level. At the core of this is a
question of agency, the agency to manifest things that may not fit in acknowledged
realities, supposed oddities, into the public: things that, by merely existing, could morph
that public.
To create fictions that are designed to flood into realities with a
potency that will adjust these realities.
In this context, ‘making’ becomes an act of ‘publication,’ the production of something
1
which becomes public and therefore dilutes the existing public. To create fictions that are
designed to flood into realities with a potency that will adjust these realities. To
rearrange borders. To re-narrate stories. To tell new stories. And to create new places in
which stories incompatible with existing stories can flourish.
For now, this further complicates my relationship with research. The inclusion of the
recent and distant past requires an admission of memories belonging to some of the very
realities from which I claim my fictions are designed to reclaim territory. So do I approach
such memories with hostility or could we think of this as a democratic duel, where
realities are accepted as fictions, empowered fictions, able to dock themselves–maybe not so
wholeheartedly–in a harbor away from obligations of logic, reign and jurisdiction? Could
they, then, meet their potential successors?
As this piece weaves a novel, an explicatory text and visual evidence together, it is
enacting its proposal that reality is merely manifested fiction, in this context called
Active Fiction, activated and manifested through its adoption by a power structure. Dormant
Fiction is a system of logic that may or may not transform into an Active Fiction; such a
transformation would depend on a network of power adopting it. Reality is a state of
existing in an arena of enacted fiction. Reality is not the opposite of fiction. It is not
non-fiction.
Perhaps it is possible to envision a form of discourse about constructive fiction through a
discussion about memories and futures negotiating the same place in a cycle of Active and
Dormant fictions. This could allow for a consideration of another “same place” that presents
an inhabitable, non-violent multitude of modalities that would allow for thriving growth
outside of democracy.
Video below: Raafat Majzoub, E7, 2014
3 Two women were helping each other adjust their glittering headscarves at the door of the
staircase leading down to the Meedan. One of them shouted, “Zucchini, Condoms, Mahmoud
2
Darwish … Anyone need anything from the outside world?” They had told everyone they met
together that they both forgot how they met each other. That, of course, was a lie. They
met at the Horeyya, a café called Freedom in downtown Cairo when Amira was hunting tourists
to fuck. Amira thought Egyptian cock was too pale. Admittedly, she was a hypocrite. She
only came to the brown Cairene genitalia she dismissed; yet she kept looking for glistening
blond pubic endeavors to ride.
II. The Khan: The Arab
Association for Prototyping
Cultural Practices
5 Throughout the process of writing The Perfumed Garden, it became clear that this “other”
constructed world would need a governing force, an entity of organization. For that reason,
The Khan was born. Mentioned more than a hundred times in the novel, The Khan, registered
as an NGO in Lebanon by the official name The Khan: The Arab Association for Prototyping
Cultural Practices, is the materialization of The Perfumed Garden’s fiction being activated.
It is a venue for policy research and urban-scale projects rooted in the act of writing as
architecture.
As we delve into The Khan, we can explore the poetry of methodology,
encompassing all its projects and itself as a currency, whose
repetition, overlap, weave and networking raise its value and activate
its fiction.
The institution of The Khan as a registered entity also allows this performance to enter
and explore the realm of the transactional and the economy of fiction, and therefore place a
spotlight on currency both literally and conceptually. As we delve into The Khan, we can
explore the poetry of methodology, encompassing all its projects and itself as a currency,
whose repetition, overlap, weave and networking raise its value and activate its fiction.
Reading Maurice Blanchot’s Forgetful Memory through the lens of Active and Dormant fiction
reinforces the value of this poetic. “Poetry makes remembrance of what men, peoples and
gods do not yet have by way of their own memory” (Blanchot 1969) ou (Blanchot 1993, 314).
6 “Take me to Hamra,” Horeyya said, “The Hajja needs to make a wish.”
I am interested in the poetry of the economy of fiction. And following up on Blanchot’s
positioning of poetry, the economy I’m interested in is made of a weave of active artefacts
on its own that are continuously regenerated and retold, rather than a remembered ruin of
another system. What is generated in this case would not be a monetary networking or
3
interpretation of fiction, but rather the production of a currency outside capitalism .
4 Amira and Horeyya are two characters in a fiction trying to transcend itself. The Perfumed
Garden: An Autobiography of Another Arab World is not a novel that wants to be printed and
read, but rather published (made public). By performing an “autobiography,” it is enacting
a supposed log of things that had happened according to “another” version of a place that
is the Arab World. It identifies its borders as different from the original’s, and claims
territory, claims public. In The Perfumed Garden, geopolitical borders that have been
assigned by the Active Fictions of European colonial and mandate powers which controlled
4
the Arab World until as recently as the mid-twentieth century do not apply. They are
actively challenged with every stride of the narrative. The Perfumed Garden’s duel is with
5 6
fictions such as The Future of Palestine memorandum, the Sykes-Picot agreement and other
proposals that claimed territory through linking themselves to power. The Perfumed Garden
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