Sascha A. Akhtar Surreal-Absurd Sampler

“The surreal and the absurd are the twin axes along which the expanse of my work may well be plotted. I would say my introduction to Salvador Dali at a young age had a profound effect on my ideas of the imagination and what forms it could and indeed must produce. Since it was my ‘cool aunt’, the effect was perhaps doubly formative. I stared at the Persistence of Memory as I grew from a toddler to a young child, mystified but also completely calmed. This reality seemed one I was comfortable with. I can’t say if drinking at the waters of this image of Dali’s is what later led me to seek moments, events, configurations ‘as beautiful as the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on the dissecting table,’ or if when I was led to reading that sentence I was reminded of those hands and in particular the one holding the egg form with the crack in it from which grows tendrilling flora.

Either way, I was taken over, this would lead me to a deep reverence for the Russian OBERIU, the Turkish Ikenci Yani: I often rebel against namings. Why is it ‘surreal,’? Does that not imply that ‘reality,’ as per is not weird, mystical, inexplicable, illogical, irrational. Can it not be said that for the one mind this is how they perceive reality. Heightened. In fact, my mind sees patterns. Questions such as this are important. They speak of how we as a human race call out each other for seeing things differently. Dali was utterly mad many said. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault urges us to understand Unreason, ‘not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled’.  

The shaman enters a different state of being, to see a reality that not everyone sees. What is a ‘hallucination’? How many people actually know they are psychic. How many people understand what being neurodiverse actually means? For some reason that cannot be easily explained or explained at all for that matter, our brains vary. It seems to be the talent of the mind not wired as most to notice the absurdity of life. To experience this acutely. The things we notice are our reality. Life is absurdity. Things do not make ‘sense’ most often. No, things do not line up.

As I mature into this space with my art, I become a hardened nodule. An established artifact within this Unreality, that for the Sufis is in fact reality, where the Unreality is the space of what cannot be accepted within the scope of the dominant paradigm. If to be surreal, to present the absurd is to subvert the dominant paradigm, then I subvert with glee and await the collision; the melting of walls and clocks, so that I can stop pretending time and space have any meaning at all…” Sascha A. Akhtar

Notes on poems:

Russian Songs originally published in Poems for Pussy Riot, an anthology, 2012.

Visual work with translations of Russian Songs published in Poland distributed at a women's march on May Day.

Poems ‘Tribunal’ & ‘Beignet’ (extract) are from The Grimoire of Grimalkin, Salt publishing, 2007. 

Bio:

Sascha A. Akhtar has crafted six metaphysical poetry collections, a short story collection Of Necessity And Wanting embracing social realism and a volume comprising a biography and first time translations of Hijab Imtiazs' little known manuscript Adab-E-Zareen upcoming in January 2023 with Oxford University Press. Akhtar is a Poetry School tutor and lecturer at the University of Greenwich. She performs internationally, some highlights include the Emirates Festival of Literature 2022 and Rotterdam Poetry Festival 2012.  Latest writings appear in the Prototype Annual 4, Cut-Purse (Tangerine Press, 2022), Of Myths and Mothers anthology 2022 and Lucy Writers Platform. Akhtar has poetry forthcoming with both Intergraphia and Haverthorn Press. Many (but not all) of her latest poetic works embrace many forms, including the moving image eschewing the 'book' or the 'page'. These works are often found in anthologies. The latest Disease anthology, Carnaval Press 2022.