issue 34|on grief and imagination

If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you know I lost my grandmother back in September 2022. The grief I have experienced has been like no other, an immense loss not just of a person I love deeply, but of my refuge, the existence rooting me even as I have always been finding myself in movement. Whatever would happen in my life between joy and pain, I always had my grandmother’s home to escape to. Now that home is empty. For the past two years I feel I lost my roots, my language, my ability to connect to the place where I was born. This sensation of living in limbo has not quite left me. It isn’t suffering as much as it has been confusing my connection to the world.

My grandmother wouldn’t have wanted that to happen. When I picked up her old analogue camera and looked through its lens at the world I inhabit, I realized I wasn’t lost—I had simply been distracted. It’s a Samsung Fino 700XL film camera, the one she always carried on her trips. She loved exploring new places—perhaps a trait passed down through generations of migration. For a time, she also filmed with a handy camcorder, and on my next trip to Istanbul, I plan to find and archive the footage she captured.

From nostalgia to artistic expression, many people return to analogue photography these days for a variety of reasons, and young people are discovering its aesthetic possibilities. Analogue shooting asks for a different pace, a poised gesture. It demands patience. You don’t look at the image you are capturing on a screen, and you have no idea how the image will look like before you have the film developed. It is a very humbling process that acts as a reminder of what matters to you. Not what the world is trying to impose on you.

And beyond the artistic aspects, my connection to this particular camera has become spiritual. I am looking at the world I dwell in through the eye of my grandmother. 

In January 2025, I have started to lead a series of online workshops with a group of brilliant multilingual poets, organized by the Poetry Translation Centre. I made a selection of essays and works tackling language, being a multilingual writer and artist, and translation, for us to have conversations. In the last session, one of the poets has opened my mind - and also a wound - by confronting me with the painful reality of constantly having to place myself in opposition to a White gaze. I needed a moment to reflect on their powerful words, which they shared with immense care, intelligence and kindness. Their discourse was a necessary reminder that, as people originally from the Global South living in the Global North, we need to be careful not to be stripped out of our right to imagination by constantly having to justify our presence and existence.

It has been two weeks since the session and I keep thinking about how I was shaken to the core by this urgent reflection, from someone who was powerfully speaking in their own terms, from a place of their own imagination. I was moved. It hurt, of course. But it didn’t cause pain, and that is because there was no violence in the exchange, it was only based on common understanding, care and love.

I had a similar feeling back in September 2024, during the Read My World festival in Amsterdam, where a group of trans, queer and indigenous writers, artists and poets from Brazil, took on the stage and shared discourses with depths of reflection and imagination I hadn’t experienced in a very long time. They were placing their stories in their roots, their truth, and not in opposition with anyone else’s, certainly not the White experience, and while doing so, did offer a powerful critique of the violence of colonialism still prevailing today.

After feeling their power, I cried—just as I did after our session with the multilingual poets two weeks ago. Not out of distress, but out of sadness, realizing how the constant struggle to claim space in a predominantly white society can erode one's own imagination.

I am grieving on many levels, and it creates layers of emotions I am grateful to be able to share with my many friends and beautiful communities. We hold each other, and that is how we can create the spaces we need for imagination. In this process, I am taking my grandmother’s camera with me to places I inhabit in movement and for any period of time, reconnecting with our roots, our languages, our truth. How much longer will we all grieve, I don’t know. What I know is that we all need our imaginations back. 

A FEW THINGS THAT MAKE ME THINK AND FEEL…

• I have been watching and rewatching this video conversation with Dame Tracey Emin, in which she reflects on her career, creative process, and the pains and joys of her life. She also speaks about her childhood and heritage. Her father was a Turkish Cypriot, and his grandfather, originally from Nubia, was enslaved in the Ottoman Empire. “He gained his freedom in Cyprus, and they were known as the Black Turks,” Emin explains. Her father later moved to Margate in 1948, where many Greek Cypriots had also settled. I had no idea about these layers of Emin’s cultural heritage—only that she had roots in Cyprus. Beyond her personal story, I am in awe of her generosity in creating spaces for younger artists and in sharing both her life and art with such vulnerability. At one point in the video she corrects the interviewer who refers to a “sexual assault” Emin experienced when young: “Well, I wasn’t sexually assaulted when I was thirteen, I was raped.” And from there she continues to tell the story of her incredible journey to London and to become the artist she is.
   

• I have listened to the audiobook version of Poor Artists by Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad (aka The White Pube) on Spotify, narrated by Gillian Kearney. Using a novelistic narrative arc, the writers offer a sharp, at times funny at times painful, depiction of the art world and how to make it as an artist in this gigantic industry.
  

• I am reading an urgent book titled Elite Capture. How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)

  by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. “Elite capture happens when the advantaged few steer resources and institutions that could serve the many toward their own narrower interests and aims. The term is used in economics, political science, and related disciplines to describe the way socially advantaged people tend to take control over benefits meant for everyone,” Táíwò writes. It’s a complex book that invites us to reflect on inequality beyond a simplistic binary division of race vs. class, and brings power imbalance back at the centre of the conversation.

ABOUT + SUPPORT

Canan Marasligil (she/they) is a writer, literary translator and artist based in Amsterdam. She established the attention span website and its newsletter to publish their work independently: making the time to reflect, analyse and imagine.

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