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NOISE & NATION

Lime Rickey International’s MALAYEEN

By Leyya Mona Tawil

Noise & Nation is an accumulation of transmissions in literary, performance, sound, and visual form that attend to diaspora, temporality and the post-border body. Lime Rickey International’s Malayeen is a performance score, accounted here as a dream.


Sabr.
She is still, in a triangle surrounded by gold.
Kings fill time with their shadows and sounds.

BEHOLD! I put my words into your mouth.

THE HYMN
The vibrations enter your organs before they enter your eyes
She prepares by scrolling ripples through her bones.

Her hands meet behind her.
Her heart bends before her.
Her exhales define the sanctuary, the geography.
A hymn for the weeping prophet pours onto the ground.

                                                    Jeremiah We weep

                                                    Jeremiah We wrath

                                                    Jeremiah We burn

                                                    City and world

                                                    City and world
                                                             
It falls to the ground, like faith. It is called nation. 
Porous and deceptive as skin.                                          

I make murderers look like saints and saints look like thieves.1
 

THE BATTLECRY                
Roll call for togetherness.

                                                    Where are the millions?

                                                    Where are the millions!

                                                    Where are your voices

                                                    Where are your forces

                                                    اين الملايين؟

                                                    اين الملايين!

                                                    اين اصواتكم

                                                    أين قواتكم



She traces the ghosts, she drops to her knees. 
She trembles out.
Her spine strikes the beats, shrieks, sheiks.
The land like sky like ocean/ infinite and rippling. 
We duck underneath her arms for cover.
Pray for more distance from here

Noise or silence, choose your weapon.
He tumbles into her legs, this horse.
It’s best if her feet stop touching the ground.
The winds speak.


THE LULLABY
She sat on a cement bench in the courtyard surrounded by vines and dogs, the winds spoke to her with sweetness she could taste: we got through, we got through.




This territory
This vaporous tone
The voices approach from behind.
Take your hands, make staffs
Take your legs, strike them enfolding in time.
Your hair harkens dreams and ancients and lovers, lovers of love
Your hair erases the past

The ice shirt melts.
There is a star whose light is the fence of what we call world.
                                                 There’s got to be a better view.

There are melodies we don’t know. 
But we believe them anyway.
She is king.                                                       
Kindness fades.
Voices rise.
We shake with purpose.
The waves begin again.


CODA – BEIRUT
The sea explodes, the smoke is red and her lips bleed.
I ask the saints.  What would you have us do?

                                               
                                                    CITY AND WORLD
                                                    CITY AND WORLD
                                                     CITY AND WORLDS 


She is underneath the slipstream of the sea.
The waters weep with stillness.
Which way is home? We ask for Darwish.
The absence of waves shocks her spine.

We hold together and watch from afar, all times are simultaneous in these songs.

When there is no one else
To hear. Tell me in a voice the sea
Would have, if it had not a better one: as it lifts,
         Hundreds of miles away, its fumbling, deep-structured roar
               Like the profound, unstoppable craving
            Of nations for their wish. 2


Leyya Mona Tawil (Lime Rickey International) is an artist working with dance, sound, and performance practices. Tawil is engaged in the world as a Syrian Palestinian American. She has a 24-year record of performance scores that have been presented throughout the United States, Europe, and the Arab world. Tawil was named the ISSUE Project Room Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow for 2020 for her project “Nomadic Signals.” She was also a 2018 Saari Fellow (Finland). Her work, Lime Rickey International’s Future Faith, commissioned by Abrons Arts Center and the KONE  Foundation, was nominated for a 2019 Bessie Award in Music. She is the director of Arab.AMP, a platform for experimental work and ideas from the SWANA  diaspora.

Endnotes
1. Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, Frank Stanford
2. Strength of Fields, James Dickey

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