{"id":10,"date":"2015-10-27T01:28:09","date_gmt":"2015-10-27T01:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dmuhleisen\/?p=10"},"modified":"2015-10-28T15:07:05","modified_gmt":"2015-10-28T15:07:05","slug":"nima","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dmuhleisen\/2015\/10\/27\/nima\/","title":{"rendered":"Ni’ma"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ni'ma\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I created this piece of art from dried flowers on a backdrop of two of Alice Notley\u2019s poems in response to The Wedding of Zein. I incorporated two poems from Notley\u2019s book Culture of One titled \u201cAt the Beginning Stop Suffering\u201d and \u201cThe Mercy Moment.\u201d As I was reading about Ni\u2019ma and her refusal to be subjugated under the patriarhcal culture in the novel, I was reminded very much of Notley and the way she also refuses to fall under a category. She builds and rebuilds herself and takes from what is used or old or broken and creates something beautiful. But Notley\u2019s beauty differs from the cultural standards of beauty, and it is this that makes her even more powerful. Even more interestingly, Ni\u2019ma was drawn to the name \u201cMercy\u201d because she believed that one day she must sacrifice herself for something great, and this mindset I believe truly allowed her to view herself as more than the typical ideal of a woman in her culture. She had her own picture of who she was, and she was beautiful to herself because of her values. In \u201cAt the Beginning Stop Suffering,\u201d Notley writes:
\n\u201cI am Mercy; I have no understanding of who I am;
\nthough, with my thousand arms, I have written of my own
\nnature since writing began. I inhabit you and you write about me again.\u201d
\nHere, there is a sense of withdrawal from a the idea of a society\u2019s physical being. Rather than following the institutionalized form of \u201cbody,\u201d Notley creates her own, she creates this higher self that is either her own self or another self to understand everything around her. This reminded me very much of Ni\u2019ma and the type of thinking that could have appealed to her.
\nIn the sequel to this poem, \u201cThe Mercy Moment,\u201d Notley writes:
\n\u201cThe most outstanding characteristic of the mercy moment, the time when she comes, is
\nhow instantly the suffering stops.\u201d
\nI was reminded of suffering because Ni\u2019ma suffers from the mere fact that she is a woman in a society that does not value women so much as men. Women are objectified and viewed from a very physical sense, and this dehumanization in my idea is a form of suffering. And to draw from suffering to create personhood is the most beautiful thing. I created Ni\u2019ma\u2019s face from dried flowers for this reason. To me, dried flowers a different form of beauty, one that is often regarded as \u201csad\u201d or \u201cdead\u201d and not as \u201cworthy\u201d as a blooming flower. To me, these mindsets are very similar to the phrasing used to describe women in the novel: \u201cthe best girl in town\u201d versus a \u201cfirst-hand woman.\u201d And so I took the poems about Mercy and the poems about suffering and these dried flowers and made Ni\u2019ma in the way that I thought could relieve her from the social standards she was born into.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I created this piece of art from dried flowers on a backdrop of two of Alice Notley\u2019s poems in response to The Wedding of Zein. I incorporated two poems from Notley\u2019s book Culture of One titled \u201cAt the Beginning Stop Suffering\u201d and \u201cThe Mercy Moment.\u201d As I was reading about Ni\u2019ma and her refusal to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7877,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dmuhleisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dmuhleisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dmuhleisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dmuhleisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7877"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dmuhleisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dmuhleisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dmuhleisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dmuhleisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dmuhleisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dmuhleisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}