Notes on the Barzakh

Barzakh is a biannual multi-genre journal with an internationalist stance. Emerging out of the English department at the University at Albany, SUNY   From their "About Barzakh" webpage:

“Barzakh”

: a word / concept that names the connecting link, the “between” of something, such as different spheres of existence. As a temporal concept it can be, and historically was, considered an interval of time — say, the time between death and Resurrection in the Qu’ran, similar to the Bardo Thödol of the Tibetans, or the travel between life and death as the Egyptians imagined it. The Arabic word has the literal meaning of “barrier,” “veil,” “curtain.” Thus traditionally seen as a separator, it is however also and more interestingly thinkable as a “between” that links, and in that sense can be translated as “isthmus.” 

For the great Arab mystic & poet Ibn Arabi, Barzakh is a kind of purgatory—the temporary and yet historical place which constitutes this, our world where we live and love and labor, aware that what we need most to find our way through is what the poet John Keats called “negative capability,” i.e., the ability “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The idea of the Barzakh is thus not to map a territory but to travel along boundaries, criss crossing always-to-be-redefined regions, in the process creating rhizomatic assemblages, de- and re-territorializing language-intensities as shifting fields of forces.

As Stefania Pandolfo writes in the introductory chapter of Impasse of the Angels: “The purpose … is not to map a territory, but to travel on the boundary of what Maghribî writers of decolonization have called a différence intraitable: a hiatus which destabilizes the assignment of places and parts, which displaces the categories of classical and colonial reason and opens a heterological space of intercultural dialogue — an atopical intermediate region that might be called a Barzakh. There, in that interstitial mode of identity between languages and cultures, between genders and categorizations, a certain listening becomes possible.”



Pandolfo begins her book with a quote from Ibn 'Arabi:  "A barzakh is something that separates two things while never going to one side, as for example the line that separates shadow from sunlight. .. There is nothing in existence but barzakhs since a barzakh is the arrangement of one thing between two things ... and existence has no edges." (This is from The Meccan Revelations, and is cited by Wm Chittick in The Sufi Path of Knowledge, p. 14.



Editors Urayoán Noel and Pierre Joris are interviewed at the Poetry Foundation here
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