Sad Sack
By Lydia Beardmore
In her 1986 essay ‘A Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ science fiction’s feminist anarchist matriarch Ursula Le Guin extends the argument that humankind’s first cultural device was not the sword or murder weapon but more likely a recipient, a vessel, a bag, something to put our oats in (as put forward by feminist anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher). Le Guin goes on to use this theory as a framework for her own storytelling style, void of the traditional gallant hero troupe, “My carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble, an imperturbably functioning chronometer telling the time on another world, and a mouse’s skull.’ The theory offering a feminist angle on how to view history - through a collected assemblage of colourful sources and a more radical way to imagine the future.
In this collection of poems, essays, marginalia and juvenilia, multi disciplinary artist Sophia Al Maria takes Le Guin’s essay and applies it to her own carrier bag or ‘sad sack’. Presenting itself on lime green pages and containing a non linear structure made up of the gathered influences Le Guin references with a modern, political and pop cultural angle. Her bag including screen shots of Disney princesses, pictures of carrier objects (USBs, mummy’s coffins, laughing gas cylinders) and odes to fallen pop stars. If Le Guin’s carrier bag is hand woven from papyrus, Al Maria’s has been updated for the plastic generation of bio anarchists with a large thirst for nostalgia, as she writes in her introduction, “Like all plastic on the planet - this will probably outlive me. Please don’t choke on it.”
The Qatari/American artist is known for reframing the colonial western narrative to something more globally considered - “Some people (especially French people) think that to cover one’s face is to disappear. But in the desert this makes me hyper-visible.” Her career also breaks conventional moulds as it straddles many mediums. From the post apocalyptic video installation Beast Type Song, taking inspiration from Ethel Adnan’s poem ‘The Arab Apocalypse’ shown at the Tate Britain in 2019 to adapting Anais Nin’s ‘Little Birds’ for the small screen. She is perhaps most known (along with musician Fatima Al Qadiri) for coining the term ‘Gulf Futurism’ - the notion that some of the fantasies of science fiction in the west may already exist in the Gulf states. This notion, along with the generous sharing of influences inform the collection of ‘micro mega narratives’ within Sad Sack. There is a fan fiction (odes to Samuel Delany, Kurt Cobain and Britney), diary-esque tone to the book. Yet, a political current always runs underneath the fragmented style. The best example of these fragmented mini mega narratives are within the three pieces written during a writers residency at Whitechapel Gallery in 2018, ‘We Swing out over the earth’, ‘We shed the same tears’ and ‘We ride and die with you’. The three pieces sweep through the biggest of themes, Catholicism, gender, extinction, the patriarchy, the future, etc yet are all accented with the micro nuggets that build these narratives in the first place. The texts include titbits about the pop star Sade defecating in a bucket while living in a Tottenham squat before her first top of the pops performance, musings on the importance of the Rolling Stones playing their jaunty misogamist anthem ‘Under my Thumb’ while a black fan is crushed to death in the crowd, calling the way Saddam Hussain’s guards mourned him ‘Baghdad Syndrome’ as a kind of reverse Stockholm Syndrome, asking if revolution is just the rich and powerful’s name for apocalypse. In an interview for Art in America she says of the pieces, “It offered space to move away from the models of working I knew from literature and film, which, by their very nature, need to follow a route. At Whitechapel, I could work on texts that were like tiny little pieces of information that might add up to an attempt at grasping some larger truth. It’s the carrier bag instead of the spear as narrative model.”
The weaving of pop culture with critical thought away from the euro centric, patriarchal or neocolonial that often dominates nostalgia makes for subtley wild reading. While the format itself, somewhat zine like, brings relevance to these mediums in a way that feels so much in the spirit of the artist’s portfolio and scrappy digital style. As with any writing collection from a polymath artist the variety of work brings a level of interest in itself from former articles for the great Bidoun magazine, a tribute to afrofuturist writer Samuel Delany on memory in New York, a blog post on Hassim Blassim’s short stories, a conversation with Abdullah Al-Mutairi on growing up between cultures.
So much of the book references Al Maria’s experiences - both lived and cultural through the Gulf, Cairo, London and the USA. ’Gulf Car Crash + Dear Tayeb’ examines family relationships in the petrol soaked Gulf, while ‘Cry of the Chicken Nugget’ details the woes of the ‘Arabic mother tongue’ accented by children’s paraphernalia. While the politics, as with everything, are always there, the book is still deeply personal.
More than anything else the book encourages one to explore the bags within bags within this bag, each text frames another narrative, asks another question or shows us another side of the artist, a younger self or another future. We see the world from the Gulf and from London and from an art residency and from a blog post. However visible a fascination with what is left over, this is the story told the way Ursula Le Guin said, full of gathered objects, telling the story from all perspectives, collected for us in its very own carrier bag.
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Lydia Beardmore is a writer, visual artist and facilitator based in London/Berlin.
Her work has been featured in Time Out Istanbul, Little White Lies and Resonance FM.
In 2016 she founded Pudding Shop Press, a multi-arts platform showcasing travel based narratives from women and non binary people and has an MA in Anthropology of Travel, Tourism and Pilgrimage from SOAS, University of London. She currently hosts a monthly radio show, UNDONE on 1020.live.