All this will feel impossible soon

by Sophia Al-Maria

*Silence. A vast shot of desert. Then, the traces - Al-Atlal. The ruins of an abandoned abode.

This is one of the oldest themes in Arabic poetry.
The qasida begins not with a proclamation, but with absence.
The lover comes to the site of a former encampment—
the tents are gone, the beloved has vanished.
All that remains are markings in the sand, and the ashes of a fire.

The poet speaks to these traces as though they were alive.
But the poet cannot return.
Love has taken them.
And they have taken us to that tender point of ruin.

This is grace.

In Arabic, the word for grace is ḥin—
the sound a mother camel makes when her calf is taken from her.
It is not metaphor. It is loss, vocalised.

Who takes the calf?
What is man?

Who is this creature, arriving on a four-wheel dirt bike through the remains of a camp?
What is this place, where the desert kisses the sea?

Beige sand bakes into brown rock.
Coral reefs, long dead, slip deeper into turquoise water.
Ripples flicker like static on a cathode ray screen.

But this is not a lost century.
This is the 21st.
Liquid crystal is the preferred mode of vision.
High definition. Epic skies.

A lone airplane appears in the distance.
It evokes The Raft of the Medusa—
a single sail, a final signal.

Théodore Géricault painted that raft.
He placed a Black man at its center.
A gesture toward abolition,
before dying from a fall off a horse.
He loved Arabians—
the curve of their necks, the flare of their nostrils.
He painted them as though he longed to become one.

But what does all this mean?

Flash forward two hundred years—
to a city in the desert his Orientalist contemporaries could never have imagined.

Brown hands measure gold in metal bowls.
The nuggets are sifted like rice.
The furnace breathes.

Gold dances like insects in heat,
molten and evasive.

It is poured into molds shaped like iPhones.
Cooled—orange, then dulled.
Cracked, like desert clay.

This is annealing.
Then pickling.
Acid cleans the last impurities.
Pressed, marked, returned.

Is this all minting is?

A stamp. A scar. A wasm—
an Arabic brand once used on goats and camels.
And on people.
Ownership made visible.

Below the surface, artificial islands bloom.
Sand is leached from tankers.
Great fans spray it over concrete dolosse.
New land.
Invisible anchors.

This is how cities are born.
This is how cities float.

The camera finds a stable.
A horse named Asawir.
Born 12 January 2009.
Daughter of Maraj and Nourgeis.
Color: Bay. Owner: Sheikha Maryam bint Sultan bin Ahmed al-Qasimi.
PO Box 1, Sharjah.

Maraj appears again and again.
He must have been a great daddy.

And now we roll backward—through names, through time—
until the voice is unstitched and playing in reverse.

Asawir al-Bada’a.
What does it mean?

Asawir—bracelets.
Al-Bada’a—the beginning.
Or perhaps invention.
Bracelets of the origin. Ornament of innovation.

But there is no Arabic on the nameplate.
Only Latin letters.
The image is impossible.
Or too possible.
Too many meanings refracting at once.

Now the workers of AutoMech.
One man sits alone, finishing his karak from a perfect aluminum pot—
the kind from children’s books.

“I’m a little teapot, short and stout.”

In the office, a Sikh man in a turquoise turban makes a call.
A calendar reads: Reliable Steel Traders. 2000.
The date is unclear.

Steel. Fans. Machines.
A second Sikh man, in purple, negotiates on his phone.
Behind him, the factory floor glows.

Then, the boss man emerges—
a velvet coat, perfectly matching his turban.
He waddles to his Jaguar.
Inside: Arabic pop plays.

Now the high-rise.

A woman prepares a drink in the kitchen.
The Burj Khalifa gleams in the distance.
Marble floors echo with footsteps.

On the wall: Arabian horses, framed and frozen.
Symbols of wealth.
Of lineage.
Of what can be owned.

What makes people pull the ladder up behind them?

Why do we run circles in paddocks,
bred for a purpose we do not remember?
Why has the world stopped listening to poets?

In the West, reality TV shames its subjects.
Disrobes them.
Strands them.

Here, in the Gulf, the most-watched show is Sha‘ar al-Milyun—
The Million’s Poet—
a competition where poetry is performed like prophecy.

And now…

A horse in a hijab.
No explanation. Only the image.

Then flames—
Olympic, symbolic, empty.

And an oil rig at night—
lit up like a spaceship.
Floating in the darkness.

It is impressive.
Satisfying lozenge of coloured light in a void.

And now we are back.
The palace.
At dusk.
It is Maghrib—I can hear the call to prayer.
the time when the jinn emerge.

The fountain is being cleaned.

A minivan arrives.
A Toyota saloon follows behind.

They pass through the gates.

This palace is unlikely to be a palace.
More likely, simply a villa.

A small herd of white horses trot across an impossibly green paddock.
Poplar trees sway.
I’ve never seen poplars in the Gulf.
But those certainly look like them.

How much water does it take
for mist to appear at dawn?

Two horses press their heads together.
Nose to nose.
Alert.
Intelligent.

They are watching.
So are we.

[VOICEOVER—black screen. Then, a slow bloom of orange fire from the right.]

Fire appears from the right side of the screen.

Not sudden, but inevitable.
A long tongue of flame, unfurling like a banner.
It resembles the flares spit off by offshore rigs in the Gulf—
perpetual exhausts of the underworld.

The first time my father saw an oil flare,
he said:
That is the Hell.

And in a funny way—he was right.

Because oil did not just power engines.
It opened a portal.

To this place.
This time.
These circumstances.
Where the sky glows at night not with stars, but with waste light.
Where fire is no longer sacred, only strategic.

It is not a fresh hell.

It is a rotten one.
Thick with the smell of extraction, of surplus, of bargain.

But out of the rot—
from fossils, from sediment, from the slow grind of death—

diamonds emerge.

Not born,
but compressed.
Carbon ordered by pressure.
Time, grief, and geology,
held together
in something clear enough to be sold.

[VOICEOVER—drone shot rising. Flickering lights in the distance.]

A drone pulls out, slowly, from some kind of partyplex island.

It’s a pool party.

Blue, green, and red lights pulse in time with bass we cannot hear.
The pool shimmers artificially.
It is made to resemble fun.

Then—cut.

Desert.

Flat. Silent.
A single palm tree stands in the median of a road.

Below it, workers move in the early morning light.
Presumably: the gardeners.

They plant doomed petunias in a narrow strip of soil beside the asphalt.
Pink, white, purple.
Decorative. Delicate.

A gesture toward life in a place designed for transit.

Above them, the sprinkler system hisses to life.
There are no children running through it.

Just a rhythm of water on pavement.
Water—pressurised, expensive, misplaced.

Grass stretches along the roadside.
Imported. Resistant to heat, but not indifferent.
It still needs to be fed.
Like the petunias.
Like the promise.

All of it—
Needy,
fragile,
out of place.

None of it belongs to this land.
This bitter earth.

[VOICEOVER—exhibition hall. A handler and a horse in motion]

The handler shows the gait of the horse at a conformation.
He wears a blazer. Sneakers.
He runs beside the horse with precision,
timing his body to the rhythm of the animal.

In his hand: a small stick.
A show whip.
Lightweight. Tipped with a soft plastic streamer.
It doesn’t strike.
It evokes.

The streamer flickers in the air—
drawing the horse’s attention,
lifting its head,
pricking its ears,
animating the animal with invisible commands.

The horse becomes alert. Proud.
It performs the idea of itself.

But there is no handler in the next scene.

Only horses.

Horses.

Horses.

Running slowly—
as though unhooked from time.
Perhaps shot with a Phantom camera.
Every movement suspended.

A mane lifts like smoke.
A tail ripples like silk threads dropped underwater.

The music shifts.

Strings of an orchestral piece are drawn out—
so slow they sound impossible for any human to play.
All this will feel impossible soon.
Someday.

These feel like Géricault’s sketches of the Roman carnival races.
Many horses in motion.
Hot tar pitched onto their hindquarters—
running to escape pain.

His horses were not symbols of triumph.
They were creatures of burden, beauty, and revolt.
Alive, flinching, luminous with muscle.

Géricault’s equestrian studies pulled away
from the polite portraiture of his century.
From the Orientalist gaze of Delacroix and Ingres.

He did not travel to Algeria.
Or Egypt.
Or Morocco.
He did not arrive bearing easels like flags.
He refused the expedition.

Instead, he painted from what was already around him:
bodies from the Salpêtrière Hospital,
the dead gathered with permission from no one.

He replaced odalisques with corpses.
Not to shock, but to speak. No lies. No French girls in Arab drag and flashing kohled eyes.

Géricualt brought the horror home so the truth could roost.

One survivor from The Raft of the Medusa—
quoted in admiralty court—
said he only turned to cannibalism
when he began to see the flesh of the dead
not as waste,
but as forbidden nutriment.

This is the alchemy Géricault understood.

Not turning paint into paradise,
but grief into anatomy.
Despair into composition.
Politics into form.

If he had travelled—
(which he didn’t)—
I like to think he’d move more like Bourdain
than a celebrity chef,
sniffing around for proprietary recipes
of Ramallah’s best hot sauce.

But he stayed.
And in staying,
he saw more.

Sophia A-Maria is a Qatari-American artist, author and filmmaker. She has exhibited in museums around the world including the Tate, Serpentine Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery in London; the New Museum and the Whitney Museum in New York; Palais de Tokyo in Paris; Yuz Museum, Shanghai; and biennales in Venice, Bangkok, Busan, Geneva, Gwangju, and Miami. Published writings include The Girl Who Fell To Earth: A Memoir (2012) and Sad Sack: Collected Writing (2019). She wrote the voiceover for the documentary Sisters With Transistors (2020) and adapted Anaïs Nin's short story collection Little Bird into a TV series aired on Sky Atlantic.