Fragrance of Flowers
2012
It is an anti war libretto in response to the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, as well as femicide in Mexico. The heightened reality of a lush garden setting employs the motif of Paradise (pairidaeeza) to tell the story of ‘wilderness’ disciplined in the interest of neo-liberal economics.
(For Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi)
A garden.
A beautiful teenage girl tends the garden. She is mute.
Soldiers are separately engaged as groups in various manoeuvres, exercises and occupations, as well as mind-numbing leisure activities, around the garden. They form duets and trios. The soldiers are as much a part of the garden as the flowers, the vegetables, the herbs, the shrubs, the trees, the wildlife.
The Chorus – a carrion chorus – looks down upon the garden from its vantage point. The girl goes peacefully about her work unaware of either presence.
The Choruscomprises politicians, CEOs, drug barons, financiers, etc – A mob of global power brokers, the criminal, self-interested and corrupt. The seductive first line of each choral part contrasts with the threat of its following lines.
The Groupscomprise soldiers/combatants of every denomination, including guerrillas, terrorists, militia and child soldiers.
Chorus
YOU'RE THE FRAGRANCE OF FLOWERS
intoxication of iPhones, cruise controls, TV sets.
You’re the bad apple stinking of truth.
Red-lipped and pink-trimmed.
Group 1 (drunk/stoned)
Too drunk to fuck.
The bottle will do.
Send it up.
YOU'RE THE CHILD IN MY ARMS
to be taught how to feed. Suck it down.
You’re the filth wiped away
from your cunt, mouth and arse.
Group 2 (child soldiers, playing)
Take the swill.
Your fragile body
cannot sustain itself.
YOU'RE THE LABOUR OF LOVE
Of blood, sweat, spit, cum.
Gritted limbs a cross.
You’re the still of possibility.
Bound by your palms.
Group 3 (sitting around amusing
themselves with nothing much)
I’ll sand your bones white.
Remake each piece of you.
YOU'RE THE LAND OF OUR FATHERS
A combat of desire.
You’re the outlying area,
frontier temptation, vacant lot.
Group 4 (maintaining equipment/
dismantling bomb/working)
I’ll build a clean future
of cardboard and steel.
I’ll cover you.
YOU'RE THE PATIENT IN NEED OF MY CARE
Sprawling, slept-in.
You’re the disease of echoes.
Here’s a treat. Cut the cord.
Group 5 (on sentry duty)
When you are better
I’ll leave you alone.
Find yourself.
YOU'RE THE SPRING IN MY STEP
A cowboy boot kick to the floor.
You’re the faulty assembly.
A cheap market brand. Correct.
Group 6 (on patrol)
Matters should be seen
in their proper respect.
Taken in hand.
YOU'RE THE PENNIES FROM HEAVEN
A white blouse’s buttons …
All Groups
POP!
The girl drops to the ground. Rain falls.
You’re the twin plant of capital.
I’ll seed you in dust.
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NOTES:
The garden may remind you of a Judeo-Christian Eden and an Islamic Garden of Eternity or Paradise (from pairidaeeza– trans: surrounding wall*).
“They wove birds with splendidly coloured wings on to silken trees and rivers and blossom-covered branches. And they would throw their carpets to the ground, creating a garden in the desert.”**
Arabic carpets belong to a domestic tradition that mixes craft and concept and gives primacy to illusion.
Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi (whose name means fragrance of flowers), a 14 year-old Iraqi girl, was gang-raped, shot and then set on fire in a premeditated attack by a group of American soldiers.
The girl represents not just victims of the Iraq war – she could be a woman from the border town of Juárez, Mexico, or a Congolese or Afghani woman, or a woman from 1940s Berlin.
She also symbolises the land of her people. She may be a foreign (virgin) land to be colonised, an ‘artificially sustained territory’; a wilderness to be tamed in the interest of neo-liberal economics.
You may also think of remembrance and fields of poppies, alongside the industrial drug complex.
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*Fundamental principles of the Islamic walled garden:
1/ Keep out the encroaching desert, enabling the area within to be organised and tended more easily.
2/ The enclosed area concentrates the eye and mind.
3/ The wall marks ownership.