“Accented” at Maraya Arts Centre, Sharjah

A group exhibition curated by Murtaza Vali

Review published on Ibraaz, July 30, 2015

Excerpt

'What is the connection of our accent to our citizenship?' the artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan asked an audience proficient in toggling between Arabic and English at Art Dubai's annual Global Art Forum in March 2015. He may have been hinting at the linguistic-political conditions of the Forum's host city, Dubai, where a throng of working-class cadences swarm outside the bounds of Emirati citizenship. But more pointedly, Abu Hamdan was referring to a twenty-first century form of shibboleth – forensic examinations of audio recordings whereby European border control agencies screen asylum seekers' backgrounds by analysing not their stories, but their accents.

One's accent, of course, may correlate equally to one's roots or one's present home, to one's friends or one's former colonizers; the connection between this cultural marker and citizenship is tenuous, if not altogether arbitrary. To convert an accent from an evolving social habit into hard bureaucratic evidence, Abu Hamdan argued, requires a 'violent synchronization' of all the regions one has inhabited and the interlocutors one has engaged. An accent is too relational, too unstable, too hybridized to authenticate any origin story. Nonetheless, the United Kingdom has justified denying asylum to migrants for oral deviations from their written claims as trifling as pronouncing the Arabic word for 'tomato' like a Syrian and not a Palestinian.

For show curator Murtaza Vali, the accent symbolizes a defiant holdout against global forces of standardization. In his catalogue essay, 'Searching for the Voice of Difference', Vali writes:

While the processes of globalization promise homogenization, transparency and translation across cultures, the accent—localized in and expressed through the body—represents the residue or remainder that challenges these claims. … It is what exceeds language, resists assimilation and remains opaque.

Vali's appeal to opacity resonates with the late Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant's defence of créolité, in essays like 'Transparency and Opacity' and 'The Right to Opacity', as a collectively shaped and locally evolving tongue contesting the imposition of French. In Vali's exhibition, the accent, following postcolonial theories that assert linguistic hybridity as subversive of European imperialism, stands as an embodied glitch within a global neoliberal system whose lingua franca is 'business English' promulgated by corporate media.