In Keeping House: Radicalizing the Mundane as Potential for Reconciliation

I had never seen my grandmother’s home as anything other than well-kept. She took pride in the way her house was always ready for her progeny. She said that the house is a reflection of the soul, and the keeping of the house is the care you show yourself. A few years ago, when I visited her and my grandfather—who was ill with dementia and found solace in his wife, his sole caretaker—I took notice of their house. By any standards, it was clean, but things were left around in a bit of a disarray and for a moment, I was painfully aware of how much my grandmother was grieving. 

The first time I stumbled upon Farheen HaQ’s work, I was researching practices that touched upon questions of identity, family, and our reconciliation to the land and Indigenous peoples. I was seeking topics that had then been occupying my ruminations, especially as someone who didn’t see their narrative—that of an uninvited immigrant Muslim settler—reflected in the conversations surrounding these issues. HaQ’s series of digital images, Retreat (2015), became an offering and a reflection for myself: A Brown Muslim woman praying on Indigenous land, amid urban scapes, being watched as she performs Salat and Sujud, a moment where her head and the earth meet in acknowlegement and gratitude. 

Years later, we meet for the first time online and it is both serendipitous and fateful. Farheen HaQ is a South Asian Muslim Canadian artist who explores a multidisciplinary practice that often employs video, installation, and performance informed by interiority, relationality, family work, embodiment, ritual, and spiritual practice. In our conversations, we talk about the politics of housekeeping, how it becomes a presentation of the inner and outer care we show our spaces, words reminiscent of my grandmother’s, and the grief-ridden space she was in. 

HaQ talks to me about Salat, the act of prayer as a form of housekeeping: “When we do Sujud, I tell my kids, we’re grounding here on this territory,” she says. “This is a land acknowledgement. We are made of clay and of the earth, and we acknowledge this territory and the ancestors who prayed, who had their own practice of connection to the creator.”¹

HaQ’s body of work is a testament to these exchanges of prayer, an embodiment of housekeeping for the internal and the external parts of us, tinted with rituals and a spiritual practice. Houses become metaphors for our spaces and our bodies, the entities that hold our beings and our selves. In these forms of ritualistic care, she recreates methods of reconciling with herself, with her family, and the place she occupies. 

Drinking from my Mother’s Saucer (2015) solidifies HaQ’s housekeeping of the self. It contextualizes new examinations towards the care of the world that houses her. The two-minute video captures that action of pouring chai in a bone china teacup. As the sound of a buffalo stampede slowly rises in the background, the cup shakes, thereby spilling some drops into its saucer. HaQ comments that, “The buffalo was a great provider: giving up its entire body for food, clothing and shelter to the people of the Plains. This teacup becomes a stand-in for the personal body and the collective body.”² The contrast between the pouring of the chai, a ritual taught by her displaced immigrant mother, into the bone china, a product of the displaced buffalo and the colonized land—the original mother—creates an extended gesture of homemaking, from ritual to ritual, from pouring to holding. The labour, grief, and care of the mothers that raise us become reminiscent of the labour, grief, and care of the land that carries us. 

As we listen to the buffalo, we fail to see the cup as anything other than its container, which poses some questions to HaQ’s audiences: How do mothers exist in our bodies? How do we stand to repay the debts of the unseen mothers? How does our housekeeping become practices of acknowledgements of them and their rites—the way they have failed us and the way they have defined us? As the cup overflows in giving and in tears, HaQ reconciles her relationship with her mother and the buffalo, how she spills over for them in both abundance and grief. 

This advocacy towards reconciling the grief of the self and the housekeeping of the body is echoed in Silsila (2018). The work features a chain consisting of HaQ’s mother, HaQ herself, and HaQ’s daughter, providing for one another and continuing the ever-growing cycle. In honouring the passage of knowledge, HaQ also pays tribute to the inheritance of both the trauma of our ancestors and the rituals that burden us. 

The inheritance of knowledge and forgiveness is then extended once more in The Ground Above Us (2019). In collaboration with Charles Campbell and Yuxwelupton Qwal’qaxala (Bradley Dick), HaQ endeavours to search for forgiveness when posing a simple yet weighty question: What does it mean for us as racialized artists to be working on this ground?” Amid community gatherings, soft conversations, and food sharing across the span of a year, the work becomes an investigation of the extent to which we can ask for forgiveness with offerings of gratitude as uninvited settlers. HaQ explains that much of reconciliation and forgiveness is about praying on and for the land. She poses this question to her audience: “How does the land become prayer grounds?” The piece then invites participants to “pause, to take in the sea, the rocks, and to go through this process of just being in relationship to the rocks and the shoreline and the water and then to share in dyads and pairs and ask each other the question.” 

This is an ongoing push and pull with HaQ. The way she ruffles the home in order to tidy it up, spills the tea to clean the saucer, pokes a question to discover the closest thing to a gentle revelation. She chooses to share with us her shortcomings and celebrations of the politics of care, the way it translates generations of rooted grief into languages we can decipher and ultimately understand. Her latest ongoing work, Wash and Fold: Revelatory Housekeeping in an Age of Pandemic and Racial Justice (2020), feels like a culmination to our conversations. How do we situate housekeeping in a time when we are trapped in our houses? The current iteration of this video captures HaQ and her daughter moving through a series of actions of cleaning and tidying. Overlaid is her voice stitched from conversations where we only listen to her, once citing George Floyd and the ripples of his death, another citing her grief in apology for leaving her home, and finally, expressing her need for the keeping of the house that transforms in gratitude. This, in the end, is how we situate housekeeping in a pandemic—by realizing that the mundanity and accessibility of care is often our saving grace, and will eventually become our method of reconciling with ourselves and the land we are settlers on. 

Each time we discuss a work, while thinking of my grandmother, I point to the trauma, the grief, the ache that is bleeding from HaQ’s work, and each time, HaQ responds with Rūmī’s verse, “The cure for pain is in the pain.” She then uncovers the forgiveness, the humility and, most of all, the gratitude in the bleeding, the way it responds to the questions she sets out for herself—how she watches the dust settle in her home and, every single time, chooses to get up to take care of it some more. 

For more on Farheen HaQ’s work, see: http://www.farheenhaq.com 

Yasmeen Nematt Alla (she/her) is an Egyptian artist and art worker living in Tkaronto, Ontario. Her practice approaches alienated narratives from an interpreter’s perspective. As someone who lives between cultures, she deciphers language barriers attached to alienation and otherness. She wonders how the translation of language, experiences, and visuals intertwine with care, grief, and community building. 

1. Conversation with the artist, June 11, 2021.
2. Conversation with the artist, May, 5, 2021.

This article is published in issue 38.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue