Through this work I investigate processes of trauma healing and gender affirmation at the core of the psycho-spiritual release experienced by women participants of possession ceremonies known as ZAR-Bori in Northern Sudan. ZAR (a.k.a Zahar or Saar) is the name of an ancient possession cult and family of spirits historically active in Central/North and East Africa and parts of the Arab peninsula. Practice involves the ceremonial placation of possessing spirits through performance in conjunction with other ceremonial acts. Through a body of collages, clay-works and paintings, engrained in Zar concepts of interiority and perfection, I will engage in a transcendental and Afro-futurist exploration and unveiling of concepts and symbols outlining gender performance as referenced in the works of anthropological researcher Janice Body. To further highlight the functionality of ZAR as a borderspace and site for communal healing, I will interpret and evaluate possession as a parallel process to trauma integration as detailed in Judith Herman’s Dialectic of Trauma. Herman divides trauma integration into 3 distinct processes: Hyperarousal (Trigger) Intrusion (Flashback/Mental image) and Constriction (paralysis/physical response).

Drawing upon interdisciplinary praxis that engages Art and Culture, Visual Art, Anthropology theory and Socio-Cultural and Psycho-spiritual philosophy, my primary research, exploring abstract multidisciplinary artworks, serves to distort and subvert the intention of the ideals which inspired them and convey the feelings of horror and desolation experienced by women implicated in varying interpersonal and communal dramedies, fueling the demand for possession ceremony (fertility, FGM related issues, issues relating to beauty and gender performance and all those problems generally stemming from implication in the nuclear family). When referring to “Ideals” in this context, I am referring to those images and symbols both relevant to my own life and upbringing in Northern Sudan including domesticated items symbolising enclosure such as jars, thickly skinned fruits such as oranges and canned and encased foods.

The significance of these objects and images lies in their proximity to concepts grounding ideals of womanhood such as purity and cleanliness. The middle point between the personification of these ideals and the need for ZAR lies in their inherent un-inhabitability and subsequent failure at the social and interpersonal level. Thus, ZAR operates for these women in particular, as a remedy to a variety of domestic, interpersonal and communal hardships and shortcomings emerging from their status as both married and having children. In this research I am looking to both present and distort these natural, cultural and metaphysical symbols of feminine perfection by creatively drawing out artistic frameworks for transgression inspired by ZAR ceremony and the narratives situating it in the cultural context of North Sudan.If ZAR is a space where otherness is permitted and inhabited, where standards for femininity are both confronted and discarded in performance, then we can aptly label ZAR as a functional Borderspace. Not only do I hope to uncover the visual narrative informing the Borderspace and how it facilitates healing, I will also explore if the framework of Borderspace used to heal the possessed can be replicated in artistic practice to subvert images and symbols informing gender and identity in post-colonial North Sudan.