A Practice of Listening with: Omid’s Home-making as Temporal Site of Reconciliation

City, University of London

We listen to Omid imaginatively; we write with an experimental approach of utilizing field notes, exploring social media hashtags of Omid in Farsi, and writing while listening to the collective chorus of Siberian Cranes (Grus leucogeranus), one of the most endangered bird species in the world, [1] designated as “Critically Endangered” under the IUCN Red List category (BirdLife International 2023). Omid, meaning “hope” in Farsi, is the only one leg of the western population of Siberian Cranes who winter in Iran after making an approximately 5000 kilometers journey, passing through Naurzum wetlands in Kazakhstan, and the Volga river delta in Russia (Ławicki and Tizrooyan 2018). Omid has returned to Iran every October-November and stayed until February-March for three-four months for the past sixteen years, except a year in between during which he perhaps found it difficult to visit Iran again after losing his mate, Arezoo, meaning “wish” in Farsi (Alakija 2023). Siberian cranes tend to be monogamous. I imagine Arezoo and Omid’s unison calling somewhere in Russia in 2007 when they bonded and afterwards flew to Iran together. Locals called them Omid and Arezoo: hope and wish. One year later, Omid loses Arezoo, most probably because of illegal poaching. Omid doesn’t return to Iran. Did you want to disappear too? Where did you stay? Why did you return? 

The local trappers act as Omid’s guardians through the cultural practices of ab-bandans—i.e. “an ancient method of water management and irrigation, surrounded by the Alborz mountains in the south and the Caspian sea in the north” (Armanfar, 2023), a biodiverse habitat shaped through sustainable agriculture, namely rice plantations (ibid.). “Ab-bandans, [classified as human-made wetlands], share histories with natural wetlands and distinguishing the two can be challenging. In contrast with natural wetlands, ab-bandans point to a socio-cultural way of land and water management [part of which involves hosting and caring for migratory birds]” (ibid.). Omid has been the only “guest” to ab-bandans since 2009. 

This region that is part of the ancient kingdom of Hyrcania and medieval region of Tabaristan [2] (Sherwin-White & Kuhrt 1993, 81; Barthold 2015), set high values on hospitality although today Iran is described as the “black hole” of migratory birds in Western Asia (MEE 2021). Making home for nonhumans and humans at ab-bandans is not a priority for governments (Anonymous 2012 in ibid.). (Armanfar 2023). 

Imagining to make home for Omid feels aligned with my own process of making home. A moving sense of belonging which is in flux across in-between zones of nations, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, timelines, identities, and flyings. I am working with sounds and words inspired by your flying from around Uvat in western Siberia to Fereydunkenar wetlands in Iran; flying not as a mechanic understanding of how flight takes place, but rather as an ecological archiving of memories, places and timelines. That is how I interpret the word “Omid,” assigned to you, the ironic metaphor of a hopeful extinction? The locals called you Omid, the hope. But how is extinction hopeful? Does their approach call for a hopeful account of care? Or is that the wish for you not to leave? Is that the longing we feel for you to stay? To mate again? To not die? Or do we learn from you the memories you hold? And we pass it on with hope? Is the hope also the hope to spend time listening to you and with you, to imagine your flight and to create space for your presence in a daily life of an artist and researcher through your absence? Is that the hope to learn your survival strategy of navigating the “contact zones” [3] of presences and absences, uncertainties and conflicts; un-navigated and un-thought? What boundaries do you blur? 

Desire is involved with the not yet and, at times, the not any-more. In many desire-based texts (Anzaldúa, 1987; Cheng, 2001; Didion, 2005; Williams, 1992) there is a ghostly, remnant quality to desire, its existence not contained to the body but still derived of the body. Desire is about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future. It is integral to our humanness (Tuck 2009, 417). 

I express my grief and bliss of learning about you, my love and desire, through the hatchway of imaginative practice and collective archiving: we draw and meet you (Fig. 2), we record and remember you, we listen and learn you (Fig. 1), we play and want you (Fig. 3). This is how we encounter you through your absence. An absence that is not silent. Is such cultural construct of collective imaginary able to resist reproducing ways of thinking that legitimize claiming, extracting, and owning Lands, cultures, and meanings you shape-with and co-create? In my practice of learning to write with nonhumans, I have tried different methods that aim to situate my practice as a researcher and artist within a relational context, one that also serves as a learning process about whom I write with. These methods include disruption of using pronouns (Armanfar 2020), non-linear and visual writing (pantea et al. 2022), as well as trying methodologies that enable writing with (Archibald et al. 2019: Robinson 2020). Such context stays open and curious to reflect on how our subjectivities converse and extends writing to other realms of creative survival and imaginative practice. 

But how could you write, work, and be with someone you have never met? In my listening to you, and writing about you, I position myself within an “inter-relational web of connections that embraces the multiplicity of perspectives beyond the researcher that is the human. Accordingly, the researcher can better engage with whom/what is involved in the research process since the artist is a part of the art process” (Armanfar 2023). My writing with you is partly to challenge the language that illusively seeks to know you objectively. It is a feminist task: to think about you with affection and care, is to write about you, is to listen to you, is to be with you, is to make space for your presence in my daily life of an artist and researcher, is to attempt at writing with you. I acknowledge the ripples of your flight in my temporality. It is not me, it is not you, it is the relational space of us. Such a viewpoint contributes to decolonizing epistemes for sharing culture between humans and nonhumans (Robinson 2020; Lestel & Taylor 2013 in ibid.), I ask. I write to ask.

Is this how we encounter you through your absence? An absence that is not silent. In my daily work of the community-based project, Khamoosh, [4] we dedicate time to listen to you as a group in our collective listening sessions. Is it grief? Is it celebration? Is it research? Is it art? Is it meditation? Is it empathy? Is it love? Is it life?

Life and death do not take place in isolation from others; they are thoroughly relational affairs for fleshy, mortal creatures. And so it is, in the worlds of birds—woven into relationships with a diverse array of other species, including humans. These are relationships of co-evolution and ecological dependency. But they are also about more than “biology” in any narrow sense. It is inside these multispecies entanglements that learning and development take place, that social practices and cultures are formed. In short, these relationships produce the possibility of both life and any given way of life. And so these relationships matter. This is true at the best of times, but in times like these when so many species are slipping out of the world, these entanglements take on a new significance (Dooren 2014, 4).

Omid’s wintering home happens to be where I spent the best times of my childhood, a place that is changing rapidly, and from my speculative imagination a place of “Solastalgia,” i.e. a sense of feeling homesickness at home at the time of rapid changes and repercussive absences (Albrecht 2019, 27-63). Ab-bandans are culturally and ecologically endangered landscapes due to the dying out of more than 90% of them since the Ramsar Convention was formed in 1970, as well as the slow yet accelerating chemical violence (Danehkar 2022 in Armanfar 2023). This is also the home in which Omid might have lost his partner, Arezoo, due to illegal poaching. They flew to Iran together from Russia in 2007 and the following year Arezoo disappeared. Her mystery was not solved, searched for, or published anywhere. Did he feel similar to the humans who are forced or choose to leave their home(s) because of the trauma of whom they have lost? Did Arezoo feel the same as hu(wo)mans who have lost their lives only because of the place they are born, sing, walk, and fly? It sounds familiar. Is that why many call you Omid? Your presence has proven to be a resistant social and political metaphor for a society deprived of feeling hopeful and in control of their future. Reflections in social media link Omid’s arrival to Iran as a symbol of hope in a time when there is no hope for Iranians. What kind of hope do we long for when we think of you? Yet we are sure you will be soon gone. You are the last Omid of your kind. Yet we associate the sense of hope with who flies within the “dull edge of extinction” (Dooren 2014, 12). Is that our projection of hope for the nostalgic remanence of the past? Or is it the future we look into? Do we have the same sense of hope? The same sense of home?

A call and response? A sonic choreography? A metaphoric gesture of listening? We are in an ab-bandan listening to Omid and Roya, meaning “dream” in Farsi. In January 2023, Roya was bought and transported to Iran from Cracid & Crane Breeding and Conservation Center in Belgium by the Iranian Department of Environment in the hope of joining Omid in his journey back to Siberia. Roya has stayed with Omid for 34 days, “day and night,” while “feeding perfectly in their habitat, flying and singing together and evidently migrating together” (Qarehgozlou 2023). This situation has been described as “excellent” (ibid.). However, a few days after Omid intends to leave Iran together with Roya, she lands and stays on another ab-bandan close to where they departed in Northern Iran; locals stated Roya was not able to travel with Omid. The reactions to this event reflects hope (Omid) left Iran while dream (Roya) is left behind, as many Farsi comments in social media express this metaphoric interpretation (Anonymous 2023). There is no published or official account of Roya’s current status. At the time of writing these lines, Omid has already departed. He might be now flying along the west coast of the Caspian sea over Dagestan and Azerbaijan (Ławicki and Tizrooyan 2018) before arriving in Russia in about a month. 

Omid, are you mapping our skies? 

Your in-between sense of home across conflicted presences, habitat losses, and spectral histories teach us about home-making as a temporal site of reconciliation. Does such home-making contribute to environmental conservation when understood in the context of social injustice(s)? How can we utilize this along with other scientific methods notably utilized to save you, such as evaluating the impacts of agricultural feeding (Hou 2020), bioclimatic modeling (Ansari 2022), and wetlands’ restoration practices?

Perhaps there is a call for us, at least as ethnomusicologists, to open our ears for listening with Omid(s), and to bring this practice of listening into our research and artistic creation. 

References

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