MAGNUNA means madwoman in Arabic, 2019 – present
“Many hebephrenics were accepted as ’majdhubs’, even abnormal motor behavior was tolerated as long as there was no extreme catatonic excitement. For example, Safi-D-Din Ibn Zafir (d. AD 1283) in his biography, wrote of a holy woman in Giza, Egypt, who stood for a long period in a field without any protection from the sun or the wind. She was fed from time to time, eating whatever was given to her.”
—Hanafy A. Youssef, Fatman A. Youssef, T.R. Dening, “Evidence for the Existence of Schizophrenia in Medieval Islamic Society,” History of Psychiatry, vii, 1996, p. 59
MAGNUNA is a groundbreaking, multidisciplinary project dedicated to the ambiguous narratives of female madness in Arabo-Islamic literature from the Middle Ages. It assays a feminist, historical discourse analysis of medieval Islamic madness and its contemporary reverberations by examining how the identity of the majzoub (“attracted by God”) was formulated, and the socio-cultural factors involved in the categorization of madness as holiness.
My ongoing interest in movement and madness started out as a reaction to the experience of restriction and control. I understood movement as means of negotiating space, and madness in the European sense, as the internalization of social restriction, the necessary containment of one’s symptoms, in the face of power and authority. By filtering this understanding, through the narratives of female madness in medieval Arabo-Islamic literature, combining hallucination and prophecy, these performances seek to extract the spirituality from the madness, and create universal mystical experiences, meditations.
But there is a long literary tradition in Islam that connects madness with poetry and mysticism: the notion that the mad are otherworldly, with access to some hidden truth. Magnuna is the colloquial Egyptian form of the Arabic word ‘Majnuna’; a word which shares the same root as “Jinn”, demon, and derives from the verb ‘Ja-na-na’, meaning to disappear. ‘Junun’, or madness, is the disappearance of the mind.
“I was concerned about the woman who went mad,
And I started to waste away over her.
By reason she has captivated a man,
As she continued to enchant the jinn.”
—Shihab al-Din al-Hijazi, Kunnas al-jawari fi al-hisan min al-jawari (The Withdrawing Celestial Bodies: On Pretty Young Women)
In these narratives, the essence of madness is stillness, absence and withdrawal, potentially malefic vacant stares and senseless speech. Madness is a vision, an apparition, a sublime encounter.
MAGNUNA moves towards a new understanding, or synthesis, of madness. It unfolds over three stages: an open-ended research, the assembly of a descriptive study of the body language of madness, and a series of performances.
The research consists of a discourse analysis of the conjoining of female madness and holiness in the medieval Arabo-Islamic history of psychiatry. (The earliest maristan or psychiatric hospital in Egypt was founded in 872 AD by Ahmed Ibn Tulun, some 500 years before the first European asylum.) While also considering Islamic narrative prose and poetry allegorizing madness from the same period.
One outcome of that research is a descriptive study of madness and its physical manifestations in medieval Islamic literature, presented in the form of a glossary that lists, illustrates, and archives the poses and gestures once associated with madness: stupor and agitation, physical tics, repetitive speech, imitative acts and mannerisms. Today, such motor disorders are easily and quickly treated with medication, adding a layer to the whimsicality of these gestures, their power for signification as events in oblivion.
The research sorts and classifies every description of such movements from the literary and historical sources, paying close attention to tone and vocabulary, noting variation in familiarity—indications of curiosity or judgment, themes of power and ownership. Its ambition is to locate the material history of Arab (female) madness.
But MAGNUNA is ultimately concerned with the practice of performance, deploying the choreographic vocabulary assembled in the research in the creation of a series of performances with female performers. These are precise metronomic choreographies, potentially recuperating and rewriting these movements in first person narratives, using these literary characters as effigies, and the immersive atmosphere of madness—its tropes of vacuity and repetition— for the crafting and potentiation of singularities; manifestations of extremely controlled and focussed consciousness.
There’s an Arabic word for manifestation: Tajali, it refers to divine self-manifestation, but it can also describe the illumination of the mind. Junun is the disappearance of the mind, and tajali its appearance, or apparition. There are instances where this crossing is blind, and the wise fool, majzoub, is pulled into God’s presence, and yearns for fanaa’, the ultimate dissolution in unity with the Divine. But there is nothing outside of madness. It cannot point to anything outside of itself, it is all there is. MAGNUNA wants to affirm, through movement, that the only way to turn madness into manifestation is through an implosion, the turning inside out of all thought into a fabric of symbols, traversed by bodies throughout history.
Every MAGNUNA is the archetype of infinite, self-contained, spiritual energy.
MAGNUNA 1: Hayouna
Live performance, 14 min 54 sec, 2022
“Hayouna” (ha-yu-na) is the first performance in the project MAGNUNA means madwoman in Arabic. It is based on the character of Hayouna al-Majnuna (Mad Hayouna), a Sufi mystic who lived in Iran in the 10th century. The only recorded mention of Hayouna is in al-Naysaburi’s Wise Madmen, written before 1015-16 AD. Her existence is recorded in five pages (in the oral tradition central to Islamic sacred texts), as a woman who vacillates between ecstatic rapture and suffering. She was seen at Souk Al-Haddadin (the Blacksmith Market) skipping and singing Ya malek la-a’oud (my Lord I do not go back), to the sound of hammering metal.
MAGNUNA’s research is deployed in the creation of geometric patterns, which are abstracted from language, sounds and images. They have two functions: to facilitate the creation of complex, repetitive metronomic choreographies, and serve as universal symbols for the allegory of eternal motion at the heart of the project. The pattern here is based on the sounds and rhythm described in her story.
Hayouna is performed by Noura Seif, and commissioned by the Bergen Academy for Art and Design, for the exhibition Social Acoustics, curated by Brandon Labelle.
