Nightlife, Performance, Rituals: Ahmad Swaid on all tomorrow’s parties

In Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, Arthur Jafa’s seminal 2016 film, the artist oscillates between a spectrum of viral clips, archival footage, and cultural fragments, capturing the exaltation and complexities of Black American life. Transmissions of heavyweights from Michael Jordan to Malcolm X to Serena Williams, all interpolate with frequencies of Black struggle, Black triumph, and Black joy.

Meanwhile, pop culture punctuates with everyday recordings from Jafa’s personal life: his daughter’s wedding, his mother dancing. One moment screams out, “Faaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiith!” Rap culture. Boom! Afro-futurism. Boom! A pastoral sermon that interconnects triumph with the foundational racism of the 1960s civil rights movement, the 1992 LA riots, and the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012.

Throughout, the film confronts the white structures that have threatened a marginalised group of people. Since its debut, Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death has become required viewing; a singular channel charged with too much urgency to collapse into metaphor. Jafa’s film, which I had first witnessed several years ago, could not be more timely and true. It is a Guernica for modern times that echoes the shared struggles of all marginalised people around the world, with a singular message vis-a-vis a frequency of 300 GHz of life, pulsating through spaces that reject, erase, and still – somehow – resist.

That image of a scorched Earth often plays on a loop in my mind, because it’s happening in real time. Between the on-going genocide in Gaza, the unchecked colonisation by tech bro overlords and a cultural climate that has veered into McCarthyism, there’s barely time for all of us to catch our breath. We are hypervisible, surveilled, and mined for data by platforms pretending to offer connection while harvesting our alienation.

This was the starting point of this issue, alongside examining the notion of space, which became a building block for this issue, bringing us into the (in)visibility of the night as a time where most crevasses emerge. Space always finds its way – where we find each other and ourselves – particularly in the shadows, whether it’s gamer girls in Iraq, tarab players in Yemen, or Palestinian nightwatchers protecting villages from the malevolence that is Israel’s ethnic cleansing.

In “Between Two Ribs”, for example, performance becomes undone by Kiss Facility. Made up of Salvador Navarrete (aka Sega Bodega) and Mayah Alkhateri, the musical duo speak to deputy editor Sarra Alayyan about the refusal of definitions, and how a heavy dose of nocturnal energy is how we should understand them. Elsewhere, for our main fashion story “A Love Supreme”, dancers channel the Sufi rituals of Ali Pirzadeh’s ancestry, offering a raw study in movement and spiritual release. Along those lines, Dexter Navy returns to his ancestral landscape of Egypt, exploring the body as vehicle and metaphor in “Ceremony”.

Carrying this thread of movement, albeit tinged with gasoline, Kwabena Sekyi Appiah-nti centres the vibrant biker culture that exists across West Africa in “Heavy Metal”. This story struck a chord, bringing me back to when I lived in Sierra Leone, where I often found myself riding on the back of an okada at night.

Last but not least, there is Lebanon. No place threads this issue’s theme – nightlife, ritual, and performance – together quite like it. For this issue, we went there, in three parts: Beirut’s club culture (a sanctuary for so many), the celebratory chaos of weddings with emphasis on the South (naturally…as my team often imitates my favourite saying, “ana min janoob!” and there, weddings take up an entire world of their own) and, of course, Sporting Club (the ultimate in kitsch-meets-communion).

Through the lens of the city’s ardent female photographers – Myriam Boulos, Lara Chahine, and Yasmina Hilal – Lebanon is over the top. It’s the regional grande dame that pillars through its most symbolic icons of past and present: Fairuz, Sabah, Nancy, Haifa. It’s where age is irrelevant, but the tenet of sakhab reigns supreme.

Nightlife, Performance, Rituals centres around the boundless possibilities of what happens in the ‘dark’ and what comes to light the morning after. It’s where we transform into our true selves. From dance floors to sacred spaces, the night is where we are without judgment. It’s when the invisible becomes visible, the shadow becomes shelter, and where we can find each other.

We hope you see yourself in this issue, too.