Manar Moursi Website
"An Attempt at Exhausting Mother’s Hospital Room"; "Future Womb"
Our Bodies Breathe Underwater, eds. Nour Kamel and Mariam Boctor, Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo, Egypt, 2021
"An Attempt at Exhausting Mother’s Hospital Room" is my own Perec-style log of bedside days and nights. Over a handful of pages I try to register everything that keeps slipping past the big medical narrative: the shade of orange creeping into a urine bag, the rhythm of suction tubes, the way baby-lotion vapour hangs in stale air, the exact sequence for turning a body without bruising it. I let these fragments repeat, drift and collide; monitors speak, letters and shampoos gain voices, grief hides inside inventory lists. The aim is the same one Georges Perec had in An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris: to see whether the smallest, most easily ignored details can carry the weight of a whole place—in my case, the room where my mother’s life was slowly fading.
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