Field Essays #5: Q – Meanderings in worlds of mourning

In the 5th issue, Field Essays brings together Uzbek artist and filmmaker Saodat Ismailova with decolonial scholar Rolando Vázquez. While Ismailova came of age in the post-Sovjet era of Central Asia, Vázquez carries within him the ancestral geographies of the Latin American continent — or Abya Yala as indigenous peoples call her. The book sets out on a journey to find out what these differing cultures can learn from each other in terms of mourning and healing the triple colonial wound of timelessness, earthlessness and worldlessness (Vázquez: 2018). Can a book be a gesture of offering rather than a space of enunciation? Can it be a space of listening that can reconfigure inherited Western modes of thinking and working and create a space of 'coming to voice' for silenced histories and life lines?

The name given to this book and journey is Q. Meanderings in worlds of mourning. 'Q' stands for the Uzbek word qyrq, number 40, which connects to many parts of Uzbek culture: 40 (+1) spirits, 40 hottest and coldest days, but also 40 girls, an ancestral matriarchal epos, and a 40 day silence retreat at transition moments in life (death, birth, marriage).

128 pages, 17 x 23.5 cm, softcover, Onomatopee (Eindhoven).