Mabuba Sultana Rasul

My mother stopped communing with nature as she did when she was girl of blue blood and dust back in the 50s in Afghanistan. She stopped terracing stones and burying her shit in the yard as she did in the unforgiving heat of dinosaurs and petroleum trunks of Abiquiu. She’s instead, became nature itself. She’s root, soil, Bahian oxygen. She’s bandaged together with spit balls and the rubber cement – the only thing left from every burned bridge and scorched earth. She’s molten – the Tropic of Capricorn. She’s at once never here nor there, yet she’s everywhere. All. Of. The. Time. Her perfectly constructed worlds imploded in on one another and all that remained was the predictable patterns of her breath and promise of falcon wings to carry her across the divide. First was bone, fractured under the weight of pride. Then came the rain. She coughs a parade of pink petals, a single locust, and that one thought that’s been gnawing away at her since her first born. She came from the very dirt by which she scraped from underneath her nicotine stained fingernails lifetime after lifetime and there she will return. — My mother is a refugee from Afghanistan who currently lives with asylum status in Brazil. This series is a documentary of my mother over the many years of her seeking a sense of place after the displacement of war in Afghanistan and then the War on Terror in America. Diasporic communities have been forced to tear down their cultural walls in order to adapt. This act is itself an act of anarchy. Anarchy is a practice – a way of life. Often it is subversive, not an overt rebellion. It can be as much psychological as it is physical. My mother embodies the epitome of psychological anarchy. She’s spent a lifetime liberating herself from the social constructs that imprison her mind and spirit.

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