The Text

“He lifts her from the floor and turns around. He laughs. She laughs too. He keeps spinning. Faster. She swoons and loses consciousness. She breaks apart, bit by bit. The head snaps first and quickly falls.” In her long poem The Text, Nora Amin uses a surrealistic form of poetic writing to deconstruct gender roles, sexual trauma and patriarchal authority, while composing a humane story of creation. This book is the result of a collaboration between Amin, the visual artist Katharina Marszewski, and the graphic design studio Eps51. Marszewski responded to The Text by creating cryptic drawings that reveal the movements central to Amin’s choreographic poetry. Bilingual script and artwork interpenetrate in Eps51’s unique design, which allows readers to determine the reading direction of the book, depending on their preferred language (Arabic/English). The Text is accompanied by an afterword by Christian Junge, scholar of Arabic literature.