Elizabeth Rooklidge on Yasmine Kasem
Jihad of Bitter Petals, 2019, unraveled cotton piping, cotton thread, natural dye of arugula, yellow clover, grapefruit blossoms, and celery. Installation at the University of California, San Diego.
[Image description: An installation view of a darkened gallery with spotlights illuminating six pieces of torn, golden-colored fabric hanging from the ceiling by rope.]
One of the thornier challenges in arts writing is that of biography. What kind of biographical investigation is appropriate? Does too much biography stunt interpretive possibilities? How much is too much? While I could not help but think about these questions when I first spoke with Yasmine Kasem about her practice, they quickly dissolved. Because for all the arguments against over-reliance on biography, Kasem’s stories about her own life, and how it informs her art, richly texture my understanding of her work. Her profoundly personal stories about her experience as a Queer, Muslim, Egyptian-American woman reveal an artist thinking through knotty questions about identity with nuance and generosity. Although her textiles, sculptures, and installations successfully operate independent from any specific narrative, they stem from her own experiences of fragmentation and transformation.
The idea of the fragment provides the material and conceptual foundation for many of Kasem’s stories and, in turn, much of her work. Used as a verb, “to fragment” is to break something into pieces; as a noun, it names a part broken off from a whole. Such breaks often recur in Kasem’s stories, beginning in her childhood. The daughter of a Sunni Muslim, Egyptian father and a European-American mother who converted to Islam, Kasem was born in the United States and grew up in Kokomo, Indiana. Hers was one of few Muslim families in town. She played diplomat, presenting the face of the non-threatening Arab Muslim to a community of majority white Christians. At the same time, Kasem engaged in traditional practices of her religion with daily prayers and celebrations of Muslim holidays. She learned about Egyptian culture, from her father in particular, and visited Egypt as part of an ongoing attempt to repair what she experienced as a kind of disconnection with her family there. She often speaks of the conflict she felt in trying to inhabit both the role of what she had come to understand as an "acceptable American" in a semi-rural midwestern town and her identity as a Muslim Egyptian.
As she grew older, going to college in Indianapolis and graduate school in San Diego, she gradually came to recognize her own Queerness, which would become another source of fragmentation in her life. Muslim culture largely takes a hard-line stance against Queer identities and relationships. As Kasem processed a new understanding of her self, she knew that, in coming out as Queer, she would lose her Muslim community as she knew it. She also knew that the Queer community would question her desire to continue to practice her faith. Why, she anticipated her peers asking, would she want to engage a tradition that rejected her? These opposing religious and cultural stances demanded a kind of self-fragmentation. Living out her Queerness would force Kasem to examine her identity as a Muslim and how she practiced her religion, dismantling the ideological and cultural structure of Islam’s conventions. It would also drive her to make space in Queerness for the faith that sustains her.
Detail from Jihad of Bitter Petals, 2019, unraveled cotton piping, cotton thread, natural dye of arugula, yellow clover, grapefruit blossoms, and celery.
[Image description: A piece of golden-colored fabric hanging from the ceiling by five white ropes. The fabric looks soft. It has holes in it and its edges are frayed. It is spotlit in front of a black wall.]
While Kasem began exploring the fragment in her artistic practice in 2014, it powerfully culminated in 2019’s Jihad of Bitter Petals. Designed to be installed in a darkened gallery, the work features pieces of textile suspended by ropes from the ceiling at varied heights. Marked by holes and frayed edges, the fabric appears ragged, but its soft texture and pale color lend the work a ghostly presence. Each piece of fabric is individually lit, giving it an incandescent glow. When I visited the exhibition, viewers intuitively hushed their voices as they wove their way through the installation. Kasem’s work created an environment of potent, contemplative silence.
Jihad of Bitter Petals originated in a biographical moment: Kasem’s experience of grieving a close friend after his death in 2017. This friend had been able to reconcile his Muslim faith and his Queer identity, and so offered Kasem a model for integrating this part of herself, providing her with what felt like a spiritual home. His was the first Muslim funeral that Kasem attended. She was troubled by the funeral’s swiftness, silence, and separation of mourners by gender— it fell far short of the catharsis she sought. Wanting to know more about what she had seen, she began researching Islamic mourning traditions. She soon came across a historical ritual that seemed more fitting for her sharp, bottomless grief: wailing, which had been practiced during Islam’s development in the seventh century and done only by women. Gathering in groups, they cried, sang, screamed, tore their clothes, scratched their cheeks, and pulled their hair. The textiles in Jihad of Bitter Petals work like remnants from these acts, the fragments left over after the voices have quieted and the exhausted mourners fallen into rest. The work also references the Muslim tradition of wrapping the deceased in a clean, white shroud that is bound with rope in three knots. Kasem’s materials are worn and fragile; they have been through obvious trauma. Seemingly on the verge of falling apart, they somehow hold together. In Jihad of Bitter Petals, Kasem manifests her grief, both for her friend and the loss experienced as she accepted her Queerness.
To craft the textile pieces, Kasem carefully teases apart thick cotton piping, creating short, thin strands. She then presses these in sheets, where they bind together, and further cards the material with a wire brush in a technique akin to felting. Kasem has likened this process to prayer. Indeed, Muslim prayer is a physical act, which strings together specific ritual movements and repeats phrases over and over, the same every time. Fragments of actions and words connect to create something greater than the sum of their parts. The repetitive gesture of picking apart the cotton piping and putting it back together in a new form is similarly meditative and transformative.
The cloth’s golden color comes from a dye that Kasem mixes herself. The formula was inspired by her research on the history of Muslim attitudes toward Queerness throughout the religion’s history. While it is generally assumed that Muslim culture has always rejected Queer identity, Kasem has found that the truth is more complicated. Her reading surfaced discussions about lesbianism among ninth century doctors and philosophers, in which these thinkers not only acknowledged lesbianism but theorized its “causes.” One physician proposed that if a nursing mother consumed a particular combination of foods— arugula, bitter orange blossom, yellow clover, and celery— some essence would be transferred through the mother’s milk, rendering the baby a lesbian. In an effort to queer her materials, Kasem mixes these same ingredients to create the dye she calls “Lesbian Potion,” an initially facetious name that stuck. When dyed with Lesbian Potion, the textile fragments become visually radiant, as if lit from within.
Jihad of Bitter Petals, 2019, unraveled cotton piping, cotton thread, natural dye of arugula, yellow clover, grapefruit blossoms, and celery. Installation at the University of California, San Diego.
[Image description: An installation view of a darkened gallery with spotlights illuminating a section of torn, golden-colored fabric hanging from the ceiling by rope.]
Many viewers will note the term “jihad” in the work’s title. Despite its contemporary connotations, the word’s translation from Arabic is “struggle,” and in Islam it means “surrender” or “submission.” It deftly suggests Kasem’s own struggle with what has felt like a fragmented identity as a Queer, Muslim, Egyptian-American woman. With Jihad of Bitter Petals, Kasem materializes these fragments and transforms them into an incandescent whole. This suggests an act of surrender, not to outside forces but to her own authentic reality. Kasem can, she finds, be many things at once: in pieces and intact, grieving and celebratory.
A fragment is factual. It is the thing left after breakage. It carries an inherent sense of loss, as it cannot return to the whole it once belonged to. Loss can feel paralyzing, as if it brings our stories, our biographies as we know them, to a halt. Yet the fragment is what we have, and so the question becomes, instead: What do we do with it? In Jihad of Bitter Petals, the fragment is not to be discarded, but rather to be valued as a thing in itself. Used as material to construct something new, it simultaneously holds the significance of its previous life while taking on expanded meaning. Thus transformed, the fragment becomes part of our biographies, a site of agency and integration.
Elizabeth Rooklidge is an independent curator and Editor of HereIn.