Critique and Imagination

Movement, Visitation, Healing – Textual Tracings of Encounters

The Arabic word ziyāra denotes "a visit": a movement towards a sacred place, a pilgrimage. At the same time, ziyāra also always means visiting a person associated with that place, which may be thousands of kilometres away or only a few steps up the hill behind one's house. Ziyāra is a movement into another space, as well as a brief pause to share in another life. This crossing over, this act of visiting, is also a search for healing. Crossing over is the practice that binds the everyday to an ambivalent imaginary from which it draws nourishment. This nourishing imaginary is called baraka in Arabic and in many neighbouring languages.

This blog is a space for reflecting on the question of tiqqun – the Hebrew word signifying healing or repair of the world – as it takes place in everyday life. Through stories of encounters, I seek those imaginaries that give human life the structures of meaning in which it unfolds, and through which it takes root in the material world, always stretched between the here and now and an elsewhere – a tension that can dissolve, if only for a moment, through movement and encounter.

It is not always possible to pinpoint exactly what is so remarkable about the lives of those people whose graves become destinations of ziyāra. What is certain, however, is that their lives themselves embody a form of crossing over. They are associated with a rupture that has shifted a boundary of thought, perception, or action, thereby creating a new space that has continued to exist in the world ever since. This space, it seems, becomes accessible through the physical places and landscapes where these people once lived. The nourishing imaginary, baraka, which promises healing, has settled into such places and remains there.

Ziyāra also crosses a boundary of language. When history – in the form of stories – is on the verge of disappearing, it is the act of movement, and the experience that movement brings, through which a new language emerges. Often, nothing remains of a deceased person except a name that remains inscribed in the landscape. Through the movement of ziyāra, the name becomes the source of something new, something that continually weaves it back into life. Beginning with a name, what Vincent Crapanzano calls an "imaginary horizon" is continuously brought into being – a beyond that provides experience with a frame within which formations of meaning can appear again.

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The practice of ziyāra, though traditionally directed at graves of past saints, might equally be a journey to the living whose relationships with the imaginary world become visible in the language of an encounter. The idea of pilgrimage thus transforms into crossings and engagements flaring up within the utterly ordinary.

The archive growing here brings together reflections on such visits to places and people that render tangible a nourishing imaginary. I understand the practice of ziyāra as a participation in the other, a mimetic becoming-part-of that is rooted in religious journeying but has, for me, become a prism through which to describe my own thinking and practice which are often entirely unspiritual. I visit people and places (mazār, a place of visitation that is, at the same time, a person), collecting stories drawn from experiences of crossing and healing. In a gesture inspired by Walter Benjamin's practice of literary montage, I bring them into constellations in which fragments of experience can illuminate one another. This form of ziyāra is a way of understanding the transcultural entanglement through which people, places, and person-places (mazārs) become sources of imagination for one another. At mazārs, imaginaries such as order, salvation, revolution, and healing are translated back into materiality.

J. D. Salinger, who spent most of his life alone in a cabin on the east coast of the United States, writes that the inner journey, not the bodily travel, is what truly matters. He touches on an important point: the journey's very core is imagination, and physical movement remains experimentally empty unless it follows certain paths that connect the material world to thought and feeling – like the "Songlines" that traverse Australia. Over the past fifteen years, while constantly on the move, I have gathered notes of travel encounters, initially inspired by Bruce Chatwin's obsession with human restlessness. Unlike Chatwin, however, I believe I recognise the emancipatory potential of this restlessness. For me, movement is not so much the foundation of an archaic nomadic society sustained by hunting or pastoralism, and therefore blessed with perfect health. Rather, it seems to be something that resists the totalising control towards which our world – already deeply divided by borders and class distinctions – is heading. In this sense, ziyāra is encounter and connection beyond the administred world. It is rooted in a process that Hannah Arendt hints at in her reflection on an "enlarged mentality" in which "one trains one's imagination to go visiting". The epistemic potential of movement lies in shared reflection, in the crossing over into another world, and in the shifting of the boundaries between reality and imagination that such encounters bring about.

Bruce Chatwin called his travel accounts "stories," quietly acknowledging that much of them was invented. If I call the texts that follow stories, I do so for a different reason: the imaginary is, from the very beginning, part of these constellations that connect places, people, and the act of visiting. The healing force of baraka arises within the utterly ordinary – in the imaginative interweaving of ideas and everyday life that people bring into the world through the way they live. Ziyāra is the method of crossing over that renders visible experiences of baraka in the everyday.

Glimpses

The artist Hanan Ramadan (Alexandria) speaks about the process of healing in her work

The photographer Jacob Aue Sobol speaks about how his present life is nourished by the years he spent with a Greenlandic hunter and fisherman

I began a long-term research project in Saydnaya (Syria), seeking to understand healing practices in a community that used to be protected by the Assad regime

The atelier of Muhammad Abla (Cairo) where we spoke about art therapy and his artistic journey between Egypt and Europe

A particular type of tourism has a firm grip on the Egyptian desert oasis Siwa: people from all over the world come in search of authenticity and healing

Muhammad Taman, artist and activist in Cairo, speaks about the 2011 revolution and the miraculous healing of his eye

About

My name is Felix Benjamin. I am an anthropologist moving between West Asia, Berlin, South Europe and North Africa. Please contact me for any thoughts or suggestions.