COVID-19 Journal Entry #6: Aisyah Aaqil Sumito

Aisyah Aaqil Sumito is a printmaker, writer and conceptual artist based on Whadjuk Noongar boodja. Considering elements of endurance, pain and pilgrimage, Sumito recounts personal narratives regarding intercultural influences, neurodiversity, disability and queerness. Since entering the local arts industry in late 2016, Sumito has participated in a number of multidisciplinary creative projects at various spaces across Boorloo. A brief selection of examples include Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Paper Mountain, The Blue Room Theatre, Fremantle Arts Centre and the Art Gallery of Western Australia. They are currently a co-director at Cool Change Contemporary.

COVID-19 Journal Entry #6: Aisyah Aaqil Sumito

I message two group chats (my housemates, my friends) asking thoughts on rent striking, contacting landlords to persuasively request reductions or waivers. We all have differing opinions about it. I feel my words becoming weapons and adrenaline pumping through to my temples. I often manifest this nervous system response in the face of speaking my mind. I feel like a spitting poisonous slime monster. Reprehensible and too angry. I remind myself that on New Year's Eve a friend told me that as a dog I’d be a Dobermann. Docile and staunch. The agreement at the table is unanimous. Mmmmm…

the next day I say to a lover, “I didn’t realise I was docile. I thought I was angry and thorny.” and they say, ''that's white supremacy, baby.” 

Mindlessly, I allowed various systems to raise me thinking I had no humanity. K-12, tertiary education, institutionalised contemporary arts...all symptoms of wider structures of oppression. You know the ones. I embodied a burdensome anger (or so I believed). And I guess that is internalised too, the fear of becoming every person or system I’ve ever been abused by.

I slowly squat over the deathbed of business-as-usual, pissing, praying gently for its decay to grant the soil fertility.

. . .

Photo credit: Aisyah Aaqil Sumito.

A friend dropped off freshly picked mandarins at my place this afternoon, with a hand written note describing how they would usually eat them. In return, I handed them five snake bean seeds from a handful that a lover had gifted me this morning over breakfast. My housemate and i split it open in the kitchen and squeal at the smallness. We each have a tiny segment. It’s really sour...but the flavour finishes so nicely i say, yeah almost like candy...my housemate says. Yeah kinda like a warhead, I conclude.

Photo credit: Aisyah Aaqil Sumito.

. . .

A collaborator, G,  posits a question in a shared document, “What have we been doing all this time, why would we keep doing it? I need to rethink everything. Suddenly released from the hamster wheel of business-as-usual productivity we are lost. What is creativity for?”

Oh yeah, that burning question. I have been thinking about this a lot actually. Interestingly, I feel like this is why I had the desire to initiate these virtual thought spaces. I have been feeling very jaded by the desire to live stream what G calls the hamster wheel of business-as-usual productivity on social media. I mean in the sense of building community and strong communal relationships. Because, things are not business-as-usual. And really, what is social media if not just a marketing tool for independents and organisations alike. I talked to a friend about this the other day over the phone, desiring to diverge from a reliance on Instagram and Facebook because these platforms are made to suppress the circulation of divergent narratives and anti-colonial knowledge bases...quite literally. Lost count how many times I’ve been censored just for posting a photo of..uh..myself. Is this a time to finally abandon the social commodification of creative practice?

In saying that the internet has been a long-time salve for so many Disabled folx and people of disparate marginalised communities. It bothers me that it took a global pandemic (costing many lives, mostly BIPOC, poor and chronically ill folx subjected to the cruelty of white supremacist medicalised hierarchies) for people to realise that isolation sucks and that any form of communal assembly should be accessible to everyone - of course assembly is important and the internet won't save us. but what about cultural assembly unable to be accessed by Deaf people? power-chair and wheelchair users? neurodivergent people? home-bound isolated people? where else to go other than the internet for the access of community and art? Those compoundingly affected by ableism, racism, class violence and misogyny? we need to 'lean into mourning'  (the forgotten art of assembly, nicholas berger, 2020) the sudden widespread loss of physically realised contemporary arts space. However, we also need to listen to Disabled people. there are probably more options than social media on the internet than we realise. We ought to bloody consider and understand what it means to be shut out now that we all are. Hope is not enough. Pay the rent. Pay for consultation. Learn your history.

. . .

Social media is a policed archive in it’s own right, predisposed to the maintenance of the social conditions under which it exists. [Social media and archival institutions are] both harbingers of censorship, alike in their faux ‘community concern’. In the end, I never donated to the archives. There is some power in a digital social sphere existing as an archive, but it’s limited and suffocating too. I’m still trying to figure out how to transcend these limits.

‘Donations to the Archives’. Photo credit: Aisyah Aaqil Sumito.

‘Donations to the Archives’. Photo credit: Aisyah Aaqil Sumito.

. . .

I don't have the energy to type so I'm going to try and dictate it. This is a new way of doing things. I just tap the microphone button on my smartphone with my nose. I'm on the phone with A, both of us are really anxious and don't feel like talking. There's tension in my chest and my throat and I don't really know what to do with it. I've tried playing Erie Canal on my trumpet. I've tried dancing to Fleetwood Mac really intensely around my living room specifically replaying the chain over and over again. 

My housemate, M, tells me a story about a friend from school who named an ex lover ‘chain boy’ after the song the chain. And I say I want to be called ‘chain boy’. Will someone call me the chain boy? As I sang and danced around the living room I repeatedly schnk my metal slinky up and down and I said to M I'm doing this because I'm very distressed and I laughed nervously.

Last night I dreamt that I had nits and it was awful. I woke up prepared to shave off all of my hair. The night before I dreamt that I was stuck in isolation with a past life and that I woke up and was surrounded by my friends in my home and they reassured me that I was ok. A lover was there also. I’ve been craving their touch heaps lately. but then I actually woke up and I was alone.

. . .

The tightness in my chest and throat comes and goes. 

Vision blurs, and

I hobble between bathroom and bed.

A thick smog of deprivation weighs

I want to smack my head into the mirror on my allocated bathroom cupboard.

Bleed from somewhere other than my womb,

Break from somewhere other than my psyche.

I lean against her gently, instead,  

grasping large swathes of a purple bath towel.

And merely hope.

. . .

But what if you did have that virus?

The coagulation of phlegm sticks to the walls of my throat

Swallow or spit

I clear my throat, rolling from the back of my tongue, to the front

And spit.

I bleed a fifth day,

Stay inside a twenty-eighth.

I suppose not much is new,

But I do miss my friends.