Collectibles of Grief
The first time my dadi, my paternal grandmother, told me about djinns, I must have been a child of around six. I listened enraptured, tales of djinns who lived amongst us. Allah made them of fire, clear, pure, free of any intention— like us, humans, who He made of earth.
I have come to see my paternal grandmother to be a woman who embodied queerness by having a very personal relationship with faith, and was thoroughly unconventional in her approach towards life. The djinn is a mythical being in Islam, and often misrepresented in the media as being purely evil. My grandmother’s conviction in the djinn’s existence and her spiritual entanglement with it, represented a reflective and also inherited queerness for me.
“Collectibles of grief” is imagined as a visual extension of my creative non-fiction piece titled “A fever, a djinn, and the collectibles of grief”, published as part of the anthology ‘On the Brink of Belief’. The photo essay uses creative reimagination depicting the coexistence of djinns and humans, and dispels the more commonly believed ideas about djinns in public cognizance— which is a demonisation of the entity, and therefore by extension in my belief, a demonisation of queerness.
Through this series of photographs, I attempt to develop a narrative that borrows from Islam, but opens up various possibilities to interrupt the binaries of gender, sexuality, and faith tradition that is usually associated with the religion. I reinterpret the mythological figure of the djinn, who was an important part of my formative years with my grandmother, and how later in life I negotiate with her loss, through this alternative queer re-reading.
This series stems from my own experience with faith and queerness, memory, and belonging, and furthers my interpretation of the existence of queerness within Islam, and provides for an alternative visual archive that counters the hegemonic exclusionary readings (of Islamic myth) in mainstream media.
Dadi told me that a beloved djinn lived with her. He lurked by the swamp next to our house, a fleshy pond filled with water hyacinths. The union of humans and djinns is forbidden, reviled. But for dadi, he guarded her against the evils and horrors that her lonesome existence foretold.
Young dadi meeting the djinn for the first time. A friend and companion.
Dadi in youth, moments of solitude and intimacy with the djinn.
Dadi’s djinn was her companion, her loyal betrothed from another realm— she trusted him with her life, and her death. The loss of her family, some of her children both within and outside the womb, her resentment at the injustices of society meted out to a woman who had nobody to lawfully defend her– the djinn stood witness to all.
The djinn’s lingering, protective presence around dadi at namaz.
Farewell of childhood, togetherness at dadi’s marriage. The djinn’s promise of a lifelong companionship.
When becoming my own person from my childhood being, I was learning to bear testimony to her grief, just as he did. When she dies, dadi said, the djinn would then tether himself to me and bind me to this house.
Solitary at death, only the djinn’s grief remains.
The loneliness that dadi carried in her bones had seeped into the house and its very skin. Like it seeped into me, it seeped into the djinn, his presence now sinking into my bones like river sand over the ruins of boats.
The djinn and the grandchild, grasping for collectibles of grief.
Reaching across the chasm of dadi’s memory and loss, the djinn and the child.
An incomprehensible sorrow rose in me, a longing that knows no way of fulfilling itself, an ache that perhaps will never go away, until death takes us both— me and the djinn.
A negotiation with grief–her two beloveds with dadi.
Creative Direction and Styling: Sara Haque
Model: Gloriana
Photographer: Kelsang Bhutia
