Contribution short abstract

This presentation proposes considering the Midddle Eastern city as a more-than-human index. Drawing on literary experiments emerging from the region, I attempt at charting a more-than-human story telling of urban political ecologies intertwined with ongoing colonial violence.

Contribution long abstract

This presentation proposes considering the Midddle Eastern city as a more-than-human index. This proposition stems of from the question what does a city hold in terms of spatial, temporal, material, social, human and more-than human and affective resource to come to terms with a world that seems to on the cusp of betraying it (and us)? One of the luring ideas that often emerge as an answer is the idea of “the city as an archive” from which narration and storytelling, or futurity becomes possible. This is a proposition where the materialities of the city-- the built, the fabricated, the found, the carried and the circulated—hold a restorative or redemptive quality, a clue to a story. If the city is an archive for how we script ourselves in it, then how can we read it as it slips away? I suggest that one way to reckon with these questions, is to consider an idiom without which the archive cannot not exist: an index. I arrive to the city-as-index through a wayward urban trek, first the ground, then an explosion, and finally severed bodies. The three idioms emerge from three literary experiments by the Egyptian poet and writer Iman Mersal (2018), the Iraqi poet and writer Sinan Antoun (2013?), and the Egyptian writer Haytham El Werdany (2023). Not only do these works flirt with the archival lure, but through this playing with space, they foreground the question of the thingness of storytelling, the material, the more-than-human composition of the space.