Literature

My grandfather was from Sudan and came to Britain in the 1940s before settling in Assiut, then Cairo, then Assiut again. He kept a home in Khartoum. A place that I would never come to see except from an aerial view in the sky as a child. He would tell me that the national flower was a Desert Rose that made Karikade, a red drink. I began to suffocate under the weight and burden of ascribing metaphors to a place that I did not know after he died. A place I did not know. A place I could not claim as home because of ongoing conflict, violence, and more. So I dreamt and painted tentacular threads that were porous and unmoored. I began to think of the Egyptian cotton fields - how the government ringences them; how there is nothing Egyptian about Egyptian cotton at all, as the bulk of it is made for export, and so little of it is assumed for and by local culture. This painting is a weaving together of dreams--of memories of "a rose" that is not "a rose" but a mutable force of an imagination that has at once been deserted and reclaimed.