In episode six, artist and writer Sadia Pineda Hameed reads an extract from 'To Make Philippines' and considers the things we can't talk about that stay as unspoken histories.
Recommended reading:
Augusto Boal - Theatre of the Oppressed
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All episodes & full transcripts: listeningwith.substack.com
Sadia Pineda Hameed 0:06
One morning, light from the window wakes us together. The hazel tree outside acts as a net curtain, letting just enough sun in from between its branches and offshoots. The slits of light permeate so gently, so knowingly, billow about the two of us, and I can feel an almost impossible breeze. My mother says "you should paint it, it would be nice, and if any art critic asks you what it is, you say 'this is the story of my life'". Small branches from big branches lost in each other. And here, I remember a dream in which she says this to me. I wonder if this is that very dream right now. Am I in the past or the present, reliving or living for the first time? I'm lost between two times but regardless, remembrance is in abundance. We both remember the dream. We both wonder if we are in that very dream right now. Our collective memories, hers and mine, overflow. Remembrance is in abundance. And though we are lost between two times we keep treading together. We tread this in-between state together in circles that always progress. We tread together in circles, always progressing. Treading together in circles we progress. This morning we circle around that tree that brought us into telepathic communion. My mother tells me she has just dreamt of the hazel tree in one of several dreams that night. Another dream involved waiting to have her cards read by the manghuhula. A third about looking for a young girl who was eating spiky leaves from the garden. The last was a trance dream, which I woke her from when I heard her muffled voice asking for help. She says after remembering these, it was like one montage. I say montage in my film class, but I would explain it as the sewing of fabrics together. Then we look out the window, focusing on the tree, and she says "you should paint it". This morning we circle around the tree. We are never lost if we know we will return to the beginning. We are never lost if we tread in circles together, progressing. That morning feels like a part sewn into a whole. I match this loose thread up with a thread from the past, a dream from two years ago. My mother and I look down at a triangular bed of flowers in her garden. She tells me to look up but it is dusk so she lights it up with a torch. She tells me to look, is getting impatient, insists. But the lilies are so overexposed, so unnaturally illuminated for this time of night that I avoid looking. I look eventually when she tells me that this is the story of my life. These two threads of morning and dusk almost make up a full day. It is a slow-releasing story I've had to sew together myself, and I'm still searching for more loose ends. There'll be one called Night, another called Noon and a third named Dawn. I intuitively know this. And I now come to know that this is the only way to communicate a secret held for too long, to scatter the beginnings, middles and ends so that the secret can only be discovered gradually. These things need time, the comfort of time, to be understood. And yet these things also insist that I should already understand. There is an insistence on knowing, that I should have already known my mother would offer her camisa to me when she reminded me of the pillbox hat that night. I think I knew already. This knowing is a kind of ancestral intuition. I weave together fibres to form a whole. Then only after do I remember that I knew already. I visit places with a compulsion for reconnection, then come to remember that I have been already. It is so simple. The knowing is always there in the soon to be remembered. It can only be accessed through intuitive journeying, treading across associations, of dreams, of fabrics, of language, of visions, until you circle back and realise that this is where I started. Still I look. I look for the start in the material. I find a book called 'Philippines'. A few weeks earlier was when I took the name Pineda. I didn't realise then, but perhaps I already knew that I was enacting the start. It starts with the semiotic praxis of taking names, holding them sacred, enshrinement. I adorn myself with a new name. I adorn my arms with a new book to hold and I grasp both just as tightly as the other in adornation.
Sadia Pineda Hameed 4:52
Philippines, a book adorned with names of its own that signed to me in their individual ways. Hélène Cixous who dreams of her mother and writes on it. Laurent Milesi, who first caused me to write on signs itself - signature, event, context. Marcel Proust, who was a secret book for my twin Almond. Peter Evetson, Godiva, Freud, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But before reading about these names, all I know is the books. I grasp for ‘Philippines’ only to find out that it is not about the Philippines at all. It is only a sign. It signals me towards the names within, to enact the start. But I cannot begin to write on this book, only circle around it in its own words. Sometimes they think this is because I've already written it. Or maybe I'm too entranced by its knowledge of me that I can only speak through it and not of it. When I read it, I am not reading but communicating. The book, its pages, so sheer, so permeable. I've never come across a book that expresses my experiences of it back to me. Every one of us has a secret book. It is a cherished book, for it is goodness itself to us, the absolute friend. It promises and lives up to what their promise is. We forget it but it never forgets us. It knows everything about us but it does not know it knows.
Marie-Anne McQuay 6:24
That was an excerpt of 'To Make Philippines' by artist and writer Sadia Pineda Hameed. In this episode she considers the things you can't talk about that stay as unspoken histories.
Sadia Pineda Hameed 6:49
My name is Sadia. I'm a Filipino-Pakistani artist currently based in Cardiff, Wales, and I work in a lot of different mediums like installation, sculpture, film, but most of my work comes from a place of writing, so it always begins with writing. Me and this other artist Beau W Beakhouse, we started a journal, an arts journal, to kind of be a space for our more experimental writing, and that was a way that led us into the visual arts. And from there, we were able to gain a coherency and fluency in how the art world worked, but also develop our own practices and our joint practice as well. It's called Lumin journal, it's part of Lumin, which is a press and radio show and curatorial collective that we have.
Sadia Pineda Hameed 7:42
I'm really interested in the idea of the unspoken, because it figures so much especially from my perspective, as a second generation immigrant, feeling all these resonances of what I feel like is the effects of colonisation, but intergenerationally through my parents. And the unspoken is quite a big thing, I think, in a lot of immigrant households where your parents have gone through something that, if it's ever mentioned, they get very tense. Basically, what they experienced when they migrated in the '70s to the UK, and I'm assuming the racism they experienced, but also the effects on their own countries and the idea of losing, and moving, and rupturing of the land that they travel away from. In a lot of ways, just their inability to be able to express it to you, for a variety reasons. Maybe it's because the English language as their second language doesn't have the right vocabulary to express those types of things. Or it could be a form of protection where they don't want to talk about those things, because they would hope that you wouldn't have to go through that.
Sadia Pineda Hameed 8:53
What goes unspoken passes down and sits there and festers, I guess, and it becomes a tension that really doesn't need to be there as a… familial trauma, I think of it as. I'm interested in what goes unspoken because I think in those spaces of absences and silence, that is where we talk about those things.
Sadia Pineda Hameed 9:17
Being in a westernised culture, growing up wanting to be everything but the culture that you came from, losing the ability to sense those resonances. For me, I started to understand a bit more when I think it was when my parents were ready to talk about some of the traumatic experiences of being in the UK in the '70s. "Oh, now you're 18 I think you're ready to hear it." From there, it wasn't necessarily that they were able to express it to me and tell me "this is what happened". It was more that for me, I felt like I was being visited by my parents in dreams, and they would talk to me there. Not necessarily verbally but through symbolic actions and kind of signals, which I go into in that film 'The Song of my Life', which showed at the Bluecoat.
Sadia Pineda Hameed 10:07
My dad feels quite tense about it still. I think he's interested, but I think he's still in this framework that these things need to still be kept secret. It's something to be protected still. My mum, on the other hand, I think she's kind of a born storyteller. Her dream when she was a kid was to be a radio play performer. She's appreciated the fact that I'm retelling her multiple retellings. I think she's always been really interested in the slow release of information over time.
Parents and grandparents just tell the same story over and over again, and you just kind of have to smile and nod. But actually something is being released in those retellings. There's a new piece of information each time, when they sense that you're a bit more ready to receive it, you slowly get a few more details. This memory that when it was first told to you was really happy actually had a kind of darker thing going on underneath. They sense that you're old enough to understand the concept of trauma, which is not a nice thing for anyone to verbalise between a parent and child. These insistences is of appearing in dreams, of times when my mum speaks to me as if she remembers the conversations we did have in those dreams. I think there is an understanding inherently that we have to keep speaking it. Not necessarily vocally, but we do have to keep speaking these things out because more and more gets unlocked through that way.
We want to regain our latent language that might have been taken out of us over the generations of violence and colonisation and loss, and yet regain is quite aspirational. I think that's what I secretly kind of hope for. We go over the same ground and I'm really interested in reiterating and repeating, but actually sometimes the new solutions are just that - they're new. Everything that we work around when we're trying to deal with our trauma is so set in the past, and reinvestigating the root of these things, but sometimes it's just a break from that, because to look back is, in a sense, another very western mode of remembering.
Sadia Pineda Hameed 12:20
When I think of regaining or learning new modes of non-western interpersonal communication, midway last year I made this body of work which is a collaborative duo with Beau W Beakhouse. We developed these wooden sculptural boards based on the Filipino game Sungka, which is a type of mancala, which is a game. I think it's found all over the world, no one knows where it really came from. But it's this board game that's kind of shaped like a boat. They've got lots of counters or seeds, and you take them from each pot, and you start dispersing them hoping to have the most at the end. And I think it's really interesting that people in the Philippines would play this game that has a lot of colonial resonances with it, of the movement of plants and resources, and the stealing of plants. Have it disassociated with that and just play, and are able to just quietly communicate with someone else over this colonial history without feeling traumatised by it. I think that's a really interesting thing, of not dwelling on it but still having this awareness that it is literally in the tactility and in the movement, and it is the centre of the conversation between the two of you. We took that board and we made two other configurations. One is a shorter version where we ask people to just pass it back and forth to get used to this non-verbal, tactile language of moving. The second one was a remake of the game, so we want people to just play, really, because with a strategy game, you start trying to read the other person's mind. You're trying to pre-empt their moves, you're thinking a couple of steps ahead and you start thinking or communicating in a completely different way. And then the last board, we made a star-shaped one where it doesn't follow any of the rules of the real game, and we asked people to speak through it. For example, we had two friends play it and one of them decided to start taking multiple goes instead of waiting for the other person to go. The other one started taking pieces off the board and actually handing it from hand-to-hand to the other person rather than through the board. And they found that they were actually trying to communicate things of wanting to be closer to the other person. They were kind of mutual friends that always felt a connection with each other, but they never had a chance to connect. So the person handing over said afterwards that they were trying to communicate the feeling to be closer and wanting to break down these barriers of how they're supposed to talk to each other. And the other person was actually trying to even out all the pieces on the board and trying to put the ones in her hand back onto the board. She's a very polite person and she was actually trying to communicate that she wants to be on a very even ground with this other person and wants to form their friendship on this much more neutral ground. So it was really beautiful because by coincidence both of them were South Asian and also found that something about this playing felt so much more... it felt so much more real to speak to the other person through your hands and gestures. You couldn't communicate this idea of 'I have an abundance that I want to gift you' in words, can you? It would be a bit socially unacceptable to say something like that to a person.
Sadia Pineda Hameed 15:43
Later in the book, I talk about a dream I have of my mum and my dad at these waterfalls, and then I find out later that they actually had their honeymoon at the same waterfall. Very specific things about my memory of it was true, and I don't know how I would have known that. And there are other instances where the future calls back to the past. There are instances - I don't know, maybe you've felt it too - where you experienced something, and you thought “that definitely triggered an event that's happened in the past”, but you're not really sure how those two things communicated. I'm really interested in that space. I think that's where the collective dream happens, in these strange temporal loops, I guess. The way we tap into the ability to collectively dream and to communicate between the past and present can only be in the constant retelling of a story or a tradition that slightly changes each time it happens. Something might get more released or maybe something is more withheld, but in that reiterance, and insistence, and constant treading back 'til the beginning, I picture it as a kind of circle where if you go around enough times you might slightly start veering off and it opens up a completely new route to a new future or past.
Marie-Anne McQuay 17:18
You've been listening with the Bluecoat, produced by George Maund, Marie-Anne McQuay and Sam Mercer, with sounds by nil00. Thank you to Garfield Western Foundation for supporting this series, and our core funders Arts Council England, Liverpool City Council and Culture Liverpool. Our public programmes rely on grants and donations, and you can support us at thebluecoat.org.uk/donate
