In Conversation with Menna Agha

Abstract

Menna Agha is the newly appointed Assistant Professor of Design and Spatial Justice at Carleton University. She is a third-generation displaced Fadicha Nubian, a legacy that infuses her research interests in race, gender, space, and territory. Among her publications are the articles: “Nubia Still Exists: On the Utility of the Nostalgic Space” in Humanities (2019); “The Non-Work of the Unimportant: The shadow economy of Nubian women in displacement villages,” in A Journal for Body and Gender (2019), and “Liminal Publics, Marginal Resistance,” in IDEA Journal (2017).

What is your definition of “desert”?

Opening Figure: A photograph of Menna Agha’s late father, Aly Agha, standing over their ancestral land, pointing towards an imagined future of 6 million palm trees. Photo by Menna Agha.

A definition of deserts had been imposed on me growing up in Egypt, where geography books state that 87 percent of the country consists of deserts while only 13 percent of the Egyptian landscape, which is the narrow Nile Valley, is where the vast majority of the population resides. Deserts had a specific designation, something that swung between a geographic nuisance and a national opportunity. Growing up in the ‘90s, Egyptian media was blasting a specific song that went like this “We want it to be green, the land in the desert, green green.” There was an implicit separation between land and desert, as if “desert” is a characteristic of land deterioration. Additionally, the hegemonic new wave of “Green everything” has added to this conceptualization. In architectural contexts, many resisted the hegemonic “Green Architecture” wave that reached us within sustainability literature with “Yellow Architecture” to acknowledge that our sandy landscapes deserve care and not forced greening that is not in any way sustainable.

What does the desert mean for you, and can you share the trajectory of your work in relation to the desert?

From a Nubian epistemic position, however, deserts don’t really exist; it is not a word that has an equivalent in Nubian languages, contemporary or old. Even though our land was identified as deserts in colonial maps, we never really had a parallel to that identification. That is because the “desert” designation was a device of colonial control that categorized land on the basis of extractability. This designation deemed lands that resisted colonial extraction, or land that rendered itself unattainable to colonial powers, empty, uninhabitable, and barren.

So my work focuses on how the Nubian deserts are colonially invented, and ontologically inapplicable. And on how the Nubian desert doesn’t really exist to us, but is rather a mechanism to dispossess and depeople my ancestral land.

Why do you think it is important to look at the desert? Why now? What’s urgent?

I think we absolutely need to look at deserts as sites of decolonial thinking, asking about their modes of invention, and looking into their designation’s impact on the systematic retaliation against such landscapes that resisted extraction. Especially now as work by Indigenous scholars is pointing out how landscapes such as the jungle, the north, and many more were treated as deserts and legislated accordingly.

Thinking about these landscapes now is urgent because the colonial logic is still active in the extraction industries and the desecration of these landscapes becomes easily invisibilized. It’s also urgent because these landscapes are sites of learning spatialities otherwise, they are sites in which thinking against property, against borders, and against the dominance of the nation state is possible. And we sure need that.

And above all, it’s urgent because land is sacred!

What about education/pedagogy? How does the desert affect your work as a scholar, educator, theorist, or practitioner? How can we learn from (and with) the desert to rethink the architectural discipline, its purpose and tools of investigation? How do you conduct research about deserts?

Here it becomes a bit tricky, as most architecture schools are situated outside these sites of resistance. And engaging the desert can sometimes start at acknowledging its designation through a definition. Syllabi sometimes can’t escape definitions. The task becomes an exercise of learning with and within these landscapes from a campus that is not. And the pressing question would be, how to think about ‘deserts’ without producing them as subjects.

I personally situate myself on Nubian epistemic grounds, and I start at the point of no deserts. Our land has diverse sands and stones. Our sun is strong. And our river is generous. But for the gold digging industry to function, it had to be a desert. For global industrialization, our atmosphere becomes hotter and less habitable. And for the modernization of Egypt, they had to build a dam that disrupted existing ecologies. With tracing these colonial acts of desert making, I try to make sense of layers upon layers of Nubian displacement.

Can the design discipline engage the context of the desert in noncolonial terms? What do you think is a necessary mode of reparations to the people displaced by the colonization of the desert? Both in material and cultural terms

The design realm is way overdue in its engagement with these bodies. As we execute, in our practice, environmental policies that were woven around institutional definition of arid landscapes. And we also act as cultural workers, contributing to the definition making and perpetuation over these landscapes.

Our intellectual labor in rewriting histories of arid landscapes, remembering the people indigenous to these landscapes and their rights to it, but also remember the ancestral labor that went into their relationship. We also need to remember that depeopling landscapes stems from a certain political and economic interest. With that depeopling a certain landscape tends to come with a severe project of epistemicide.

On the policy side, we need to have a critical outlook on terms of art that contribute to the demonization of arid landscapes. We need critical engagement with concepts like desertification, which at its core fails to pinpoint the legitimate culprits of climate change and the devastation that’s inflicted on these landscapes.

How can we learn from the desert biome to reimagine the relationship between humans and nonhumans?

From Nubian epistemic grounds, I tend to return to the importance of invoking politics of personhood and peoplehood of our environments. We don’t have empty deserts because our landscapes are never empty. They are home to the snakes and the scorpions. They are a resting place for birds flying south and north. They are also full of Djinn and many creatures that have their own worlds. Our Nubian knowledge recognized the multiplicity of being within our lands and manifested this recognition in stories that became akin to policies governing our relationship with the land. Land has a life, but coloniality brings brute violence as Stuart Hall posits.

Is there a particular author/text/source you recommend to your students and colleagues in an imaginary bibliography about deserts?

I am enriched and informed by a lineage and a kin of thinkers who share questions and questionings around ‘deserts,’ like the incredible cohort in the book titled Deserts Are Not Empty, edited by Samia Henni. As well as the collection titled The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land, and the Politics of Environment. I would also encourage the reader to engage with Ola Hassanain and Egbert Martina’s text Architectures of the (Un)Inhabitable.

A text that critically engages with concepts of desertification is Diana K. Davis’s The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge.