Talk The Ghosts Will Not Give Up On Us with Lamya Sadiq

In this talk, Lamya Sadiq will attempt to trace 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.

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 people of the diaspora bear witness to the genocide of Palestinian people, it breaks open a specific, unnameable and historic wound. That I am being visited by Siraj now is no accident.

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? 

This reading group is part of iniva’s Research Network programme Contested Sites. It is supported by funding from Freelands Foundation.

If you would like to view resources from Lamya’s reading group on Insurgent Rituals, please click here.

*Paternal uncle in South Asia

Accessibility

If you have any access requirements, please email us in advance at info@iniva.org and we will do our best to accommodate. 

About the facilitator

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 spectral hauntings that tells us these other worlds always exist/are possible. Lamya is from Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Lamya works at MayDay Rooms Archive and is a wellbeing worker for Hopscotch Women’s Center. She is also a member of Red Therapy, an abolitionist collective attempting to think beyond existing psychiatric and psychotherapeutic systems and practices.

Image: Syed Raisul Haq, courtesy of Syed-Haq Family Archive