Lamya Sadiq
MayDay Rooms
ALWAYS ALREADY SPOKEN FOR: REFLECTIONS ON HAUNTING
Panel: Voice
In the winter of 1978, artist Syed Raisul Haq was brutally murdered in Cologne at the age of 23. The investigation ceased after a year with no perpetrator or explanation. His family lived on with the horror and regret of letting their youngest go to a place where his life held a very different meaning. Raisul was my mother’s youngest Chaccha, we call him Siraj.
What little I know about Siraj comes from the sketches he left behind and a few inherited stories – and yet – the specter of his life and specifically his terrible end lies latent within me. I am certain his ghost has haunted me before, however it was only in December of last year that I began to pin this feeling down, the feeling of being wounded. Haunting is never accidental; in Bangladesh, when ghosts appear to us we summon the courage to pay attention.
As we bear witness to the genocide of Palestinian people, for those of us connected to a history marked by displacement and dispossession, a specific, unnameable and historic wound is broken open. That I am being visited by Siraj now is no accident.
In this paper, I will attempt to illustrate some of the characteristics and contours of ancestral wounds, using the experience and material of being ‘haunted’ as a means through which to make real the intergenerational and shared dimensions of trauma and loss. With Siraj’s portrait as a starting point, an “aide-memoire” (Taylor, 2024) for both uncontainable grief and deep connection, I will traverse the slippery terrain of communicating a feeling both intangible and ubiquitous.
I ask, in always occupying a state of being in-between, how can ghosts – of people, land, culture & future – help orient our relation to the tangle of dread and hope so conspicuous in this moment? With illustration understood as a “process”, the language - visual, verbal & psychic - I use to “surround” the haunting is a small act of sense-making under senseless conditions (Taylor, 2024). By drawing attention to the part of us that is powerfully activated through the suffering of others, I offer a means through which to discipline the psyche in hope and resilience rather than defeat.
Lamya Sadiq works across social histories, sonic and visual worlds and psychoanalytic theory to locate tools for other-world making. Her enquiries attempt to highlight the ambivalences of the present, searching for ruptures, portals and hauntings that tells us these other worlds always exist and are possible. Lamya is from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Lamya is currently training to become a psychoanalyst. She works at MayDay Rooms Archive and is a wellbeing worker for women and young people. She is also a member of Red Therapy, an abolitionist collective attempting to think beyond existing psychiatric and psychotherapeutic systems and practices.