Excerpted: Subterrane

In which Zeynab weighs the risk of epistemological violence

Zeynab calls herself an artist. Teetering at the edge of a precipice, calculating the series of daring maneuvers that will reorganize the terrain around her. Up. Down. Over. Under. And who could imagine all the things she would do for the sake of her craft.

She’s hungry. Why else would she sit in a lobby, waiting for an executive assistant to call her into a pitch meeting at the New Stockholm Film Commission. She wants the grant. No, she needs it. Working with a budget, for once, would allow her to finish her project, or, at the very least, silence the static in her head. If only she could stay present long enough to deliver her pitch, which she practiced in the shower, in the mirror, to a drunk stranger at a bar.

Her pitch is solid, if only for the fact that it hinges on her charisma. Otherwise, her methodology is obscure. Her process is vague. Her body is the vehicle. She did, after all, finesse her way into this meeting by way of an audio documentary that spread, first underground in her circles, and then overground in the mainstream circuit, until it reached the institutional shores of the Film Commission. No application forms. No automatic email responses. No waiting around while elastic processing times and rolling deadlines stretch her resources past the point of hope.

For a well-funded government agency, their lobby needs a refresh. From the outside, the brutalist architecture communicates blunt authority. The interior design doubles down on the severity and asks, “What did you expect on a public-sector budget?” She does, however, appreciate the color palette, its soothing blandness. Every surface is draped in varying shades of gray, burgundy touches, speckled with the bit of sunlight that peaks through undersized windows. Even the fluorescents subdue everything to a matte texture. The only sources of variance are the posters of past projects, displayed on the walls in chronological order, in increasingly colorful design, visual proof of the institution’s editorial progression.

In this decor, she feels the distance between herself and the bustling street below. She visualizes herself as a dot scurrying on the ground 15 floors down, thoughts drowned out by the commotion of other bottom feeders. Here, she has to strain to detect the hum of the central heating, the rumble of a self-satisfied machine.

She’s principled. While she waits, she speculates on what it would mean to sell her project. Because it is indeed a sale. To an institution like this, what is a story but a commodity? By its logic, people, pain, and places are mere inputs. Every spreadsheet in this building translates these inputs to games of shadow and light that generate cultural capital meant to reify the state’s legitimacy. Somewhere, a few floors down, digital and material archives swell the coffers and influence the colony’s imagination of itself.

Just by entering this lobby, she has opened the possibility of accessing these coffers and depositing an offering. She resents approaching these illegitimate gatekeepers, positioning herself as a native informant to be vetted by a set of government officials who will have the final say in constructing her or other people’s story. And yet, she sits there, rehearsing points, tying together her narrative arc, sanding down the edges of nuance, whittling down flesh and blood people into protagonists, into a three-act structure.

For a moment, she allows herself to eavesdrop on the murmur that leaks through the adjacent wall. Somebody’s in there, chatting in a relaxed tone, as if to a long-time friend. The content of their speech is indecipherable. At one point, Zeynab thinks she hears the words, “impact production” and “target audience,” but she can’t be sure. She imagines the team of producers, how they must nod approvingly, hanging onto this person’s every word.

When the person exits the room, Zeynab realizes that it’s another documentary filmmaker whose work she knows. That their appearance does not match their voice. That there’s a look of hunger on their face that asks, “Have I fucked this up? Will I starve on a diet of my own mediocrity?” She knows this face well because it is also her own.

She’s glad she went with a crisp white dress shirt, straight-legged trousers, and a solid silk hijab. It’s boring as hell, a business-casual rig, but it will make her legible. As for her human anatomy, she was raised to understand that if anyone judges her based on anything intrinsic about her, it is evidence of their own alienation, that they can go fuck themselves.

She is egoless. When she first walked up to reception, the polite-yet-distant executive assistant never squinted and didn’t ask if she was lost. Although she did not reciprocate her excessively friendly greeting, she offered her an espresso. Zeynab accepted a cup, even if something told her that one isn’t supposed to take the espresso. Then the exec assistant mercifully proceeded to ignore her.

Upon entering the meeting room, she sees that the selection committee is composed of two producers, a lead and an associate. The lead producer, a white man, looms over her and makes insufficient eye contact when he shakes her hand. Mostly harmless. Creased smile. Pink face like smoked ham. Big hands. He seems at a loss for what to do with them. One moment he’s fiddling with a pen, clicking the tip in and out, in and out, the next, he smooths a graying patch of hair at his temples. More like the passive recipient of structural advantages than a confident potentate.

The associate producer is his perfect counterpart. Hungry. Razor sharp. Speaks in clipped sentences, like she expects everyone to have read the memo already. They’re unfortunate, these optics and division of labour, that of a power-imbalanced married couple. One can imagine her straightening his tie, wiping a crumb from the side of his mouth, topping him from the bottom. And there’s a glint in her eye. Behind her facade of professionalism lurks a nugget of contempt. She would be the first to betray him in a coup.

Zeynab has a powerful handshake. She knows well enough to engage the muscles in a way that conveys her trustworthiness. The trick is to focus on transmitting clear intentions. Deploy them in one or two spirited pumps. Easy now. Produce a smile when offered a pleasantry. Don’t overdo it. Although it grosses her out, her mouth waters at the prospect of validation.

The New Stockholm Film Commission’s mandate is to Bolster, Produce, and Distribute Innovative and Imaginative Audiovisual Works that Reflect the Diverse Realities and Perspectives within the Nation and the Rest of the World.

That’s how the lead producer recites the institutional mandate, by capitalizing the first letter of each word, like it’s a spell that conjures credibility, as if everyone hasn’t read the website.

As he speaks, the associate producer seems checked out. Like she’s heard this spiel for the nth time and it’s just white noise to her. She snaps back to attention when she catches Zeynab’s eyes on her. She returns the look with a phony grin, no eye muscles engaged. Judging by the way the lead producer pauses and defers to her every time he concludes a sentence, it’s clear she has the final say in this place.

Zeynab is calculated. When the time comes to describe the project, she inhales deeply and launches into the constellation of incidents that make her documentary not only urgent, but compelling. While speaking, she suppresses her vocal fry and censors the rising inflections at the end of her sentences, like a news anchor. She notices the parts of her rehearsed speech that pique interest, the portions that fall flat.

Early into Zeynab’s preamble about New Stockholm’s de facto expropriatory urban policy, the associate producer peers at the clock behind her, indicating that she’s heard it all before, that her ass should move it along. The producer’s attention flits back to her as soon as she mentions her leads. Her entry point into the story includes a handful of activists who break into the sprawling construction site to destroy equipment owned by a defense construction company, redundantly named Defense Construction Incorporated. The very same semi-public corporation that cheerfully proposed to pave over the neighbourhood of Cipher Falls.

Now she has their attention. That’s when she lays it on even thicker, asserts her privileged access to the story, and suggests that, yes sure, some white-guy filmmaker could try to tackle the same subject, just storm in there with his beard-sporting director of photography and crotch-scratching sound recordist, but that what she offers is an intimate angle, a singular point of view that would demonstrate to the public, their constituents, the Diverse aspect of their mandate.

Immediately, after she says it, she can tell that this was apparently a gauche thing to say, that it landed on ears that aren’t used to hearing this discourse, tepid as it is. The lead producer seems at a loss with what to make of it, and has already deferred to the associate producer for a reaction.

Zeynab’s depersonalized. From the opposite corner of the meeting room, she perceives herself, that awkward, slightly pleading posture in the office chair, how she holds her espresso, ankles crossed against each other in that protective way that comes to her when she’s anxious.

The past always seems layered onto the present. She sees herself sitting in the dining room of a familiar low-rise apartment that faces a parking lot. It always looks smaller and more run-down than she remembers.

She’s candid. The child of political asylum seekers, she strategically discloses her personal history, namely, the adjacent social housing project into which she was born and raised, now a dog park. Its cultural importance. Its swift dismantling. The political climate that foretells the potential demise of Cipher Falls.

She evokes her late father, at his usual spot at the dining room table. How spry and energetic he was, though initially he showed no signs of the sickness that would detonate in his body. Her father’s face, that would come to exist as a palimpsest, memories layered over features. For a while, as his illness progressed, her life would become entwined in his caregiving. She would never forget the pulse of his becoming and unbecoming—not that he was diminished but concentrated to his essential self—when he would spend his days in bed, eyes closed, hooked up to a respiratory machine, where his breathing, metered in khrr khrrs, would cadence the end of his life.

And, of course, she recalls her mother. Mainly her absence, but also her traces. How she was the textile that generated the pattern of their lives, from the placement of the couch in the living room, to the color of the walls, a burnished orange that evokes the sunsets of her childhood. She would miss the atmosphere of driving down a stretch of highway. How carefree she seemed when she placed a bare foot on the dashboard, wiggling her toes to the music. Gone too soon, she would leave behind this fragile material archive as well as an ineffable inheritance. The way a word is whispered. A proclivity for hot drinks and unanswerable questions. A combative posture that paved the way for Zeynab’s independence of expression.

The longer she sits in the producers’ office expounding on the intangible, the more she becomes shaken, flayed, contorted in that awkward posture. There is now a coffee stain on her sleeve, and the atmosphere around her has thickened. The lead and associate producers both lean into her.

“Well,” the lead clears his throat, “that’s interesting.”

She holds her breath.

He strokes his chin and looks to his colleague who rubs her temples, as if to massage away the sting of a thought.

And then, to her surprise, the associate asks, “Tell us, Zeynab. When, exactly, would you be ready to start production?”

As they stand up and extend their hands, she stares back at them and finally exhales. She is flabbergasted, but regains her composure and returns their handshakes. And just like that, the whole business of the pitch is over.

“This month,” she declares, without skipping a beat. It’s an overestimation, a timeline she’s not sure how she would even manage to achieve. With her mind still hovering over the memory of her parents, she hears herself reiterate, “I can start this month.”

She’s an artist, and will fill in those details along the way.