a broken body, born anew

by river budur

Guest contribution by river budur for PERSPECTIVES.


from my crippled house to yours. one body to another. this act of holding, of remembrance- with gratitude and with grief. and finally, a kiss on the forehead of each jagged bone as i lay you unto rest.

انّا لِلّه وانا اليه راجعون

a Faience plate reconstruction, by Michiel Teeuw, 2023. The image shows different ceramic shards of a blue and white faience plate, digitally pieced back together. The edge contains two different floral patterns which succeed each other. In the middle there is a smaller ring with simpler floral ornaments. In the middle of the plate there seems to be a piece of a goblet. The whole image is a bit warped, fragmented and has missing pieces. At parts, the inside of the ceramics is showing, which has a light yellow color.
Blue-white earthenware (faience), excavated by the Rijksdienst voor Oudheidkundig Bodemonderzoek in 1957 at the Borg Bijlma terrain in Faan. The photograph shows a smaller shard which is part of the full plate shown above. This shard looks a bit like a spread wing and contains fragments of the floral patterns mentioned earlier.

am i a delicate porcelain vase?

fragile and beautiful.

painted with flowers and

two wisps of birds

glazed to charming imperfection.

if you touch me, i might break

so you fracture me with your careful gaze

– a shard from “i am an object your eyes behold”, my poem

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the body// fragile, cracked, breaking. broken.

(de+re)constructed. [a formula to measure the shape caused by two parallels intersecting dissimilarly]

the land as body. the house as body. the body as house,

the walls carved. scarred.

the bones, the remains, the corpse of the house, unburied, rebuilt.

the body as witness. the bones always remember.

the house (body) is witness (shahaada, شهادة) to the violence it endured, and housed.

and i wonder-

these porcelain shards. fragments separated from each other, body broken and misshapen, (de+re)formed.

what did they see? what were they witness to?

the eyes of the monster that ate off them? the monstrosity he unleashed? did they bleed with the شهداء?

did the plates cry? did they shatter and bleed like my heart does when i think of this?

did the walls crack and cry? the walls that heard their pain and agony. that witnessed the violence, that has their blood and screams and whispers, and bitter prayers to a god that has deemed them unholy, pain/ted onto them.

that witnessed their despair as they had to confess the names of their lovers for this torture to end, knowing they’re assigning their lovers to the same cruel fate?

the flesh, fresh and bleeding, dark and decaying, bruised and buried behind the porcelain blue. pretty on the eyes, a dainty veneer covering the gruesome, the ugly, the deformity.

that is my body.

fine china broken and shattered

by default and by the hands meant to hold it with care

again and again

this misshapen body. (de+re)formed. rivered in cracks.

deepening canyons.

every now and then one slowly turns gold- kintsugi. a leaf in autumn.



the scars that remain, witness to the violence endured. the cruelty of evidence of the violence and suffering lost to memory. when it isn’t visible on the body. the searching. the need for a record, for the score.

Assemblages, Michiel Teeuw, 2023 | As seen at CRIME SCENES, Bierumer School, spring 2023.
A slightly blurry photograph of a number of wooden crates and glass boxes on a wooden floor. Light flows from the central box, both streaming out at the bottom, and puncturing through in dots and stripes at the top parts. In the glass boxes, unidentifiable objects can be seen.
Photograph of al-Ka'ba al-Musharrafa in Makkah, al-Mamlaka al-ʿArabiyya as-Suʿūdiyya. Unknown source. The image shows a holy architectural structure which has the shape of a black cube with a gold ornamented horizontal line covering all sides, and some smaller shapes running underneath this line. In front of the structure, there are hundreds of people on a white tile floor, primarily dressed in white. Behind it, there are two rows of arched walls, and several other buildings in the background.

the boxes, (de+re)assembled.

the current resting place of the remains. the coffins, the graves.

perhaps then

the archive is a graveyard.

a cemetery (asymmetry)

[انّا لِلّه وانا اليه راجعون]



the holy house, the ka’aba.

the believers assembled around them.

the house of god that no one but the keyholders and those deemed fit by them allowed entry.

them assuming their godness, as authorities of purity and faith. much like de mepsche. and his house. who gets to enter? who gets to leave? who gets to stay and who gets to be free?



a room and a window

with a door that won’t open

a cold bed warmed by your body

folded unto it.

a 2*(4ft + 2ft) patch of sun on

the dead white tiles.

rectangles upon rectangles.

(the body, a wrecked tangle)



did the basement have a window? perhaps at the top, where the sunlight could worm its way through?

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the house as prison vs home. a house isn’t home simply because it has four walls and a roof.

a window- from which you see a glimpse of sky. a sliver of cloud. a shiver of leaves.

two fleeting songbirds at rest.

a home is built with love. for and with. heart and heart and hands.

the room a cage, the room as solace.

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nad_-_opgravingen_-_1984_xi_13_-_269.jpg
1984-XI-I4 | Green triangular tile | Excavated by ROB in Faan | Photograph by Michiel Teeuw. The photograph shows a small triangular tile, which is dark beige on the inside and covered with a light green glaze. On the glaze there are several light beige spots in a varying pattern. The surfaces and colors are textured but calm.
Campaea margaritaria. The photograph shows an emerald-colored moth on a large green leaf, with their wings fully spread, making a shape similar to the triangular tile above. The background is blurry and out of focus. In the front, there are a few grass sprouts.

spinning things gold. this skeleton that has housed violence unthinkable, looks like a small green moth. looks like the house of god that held my heart when i was 8. looks like these gnarled, deformed bones. peeling back, flesh revealing. looks like rectangles upon rectangles upon our beings briefly tangled.

the windows house the marrows of this soul. the sun angles at 6 p.m, the walls gleam gold and shadows, and my twisted form presents itself lovable against it.

the heart breaks. the heart sheds. the heart heals. and a body emerges. anew.

rinse and repeat.

and repeat.

[انّا لِلّه وانا اليه راجعون]

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about the author:

“I am a trans-disciplinary artist, who has been playing with words and colors for as long as I can remember. As someone who wasn’t allowed to go out for the majority of my life, writing and illustrating was my way of creating colour and joy in the isolation.

My works mainly revolve around disabled bodies— celebrating, glorifying, romanticizing what has traditionally been considered grotesque, and attempting to question and reimagine the idea of what a body is. I also dabble in poetry and the occasional photo/video art, performance art, and body documentation, though I feels most at home illustrating self-portraits, abstract interpretations of disabled anatomy, queer love and queer characters.

I use a walker as a mobility aid and my relationship with it as a body part is a recurring motif in my digital illustrations and my poetry. The interplay between my transmasculinity and my disability also informs my practice, and so does living estranged from birth family in a metropolitan city largely inaccessible yet manageable in pockets.”