I, Jamal (Arabic for ‘beauty’), have never seen myself as exceptionally beautiful. Yet Allah created me “in the best form”(Quran 95:4). But Aphrodite’s and the three Graces’ modern, vulgar and racist demands – colourism, texturism, featurism – have crushed my undervalued body. Fortunately, fashion and art nowadays showcase an abundance of so-called atypical bodies: good intentions miss their mark when the norm obscures injustice. Ugliness opens the doors to the zones of truth, wherein ‘perfection’ paralyses. 

In harmony with Bellezza e Bruttezza, I endorse the idea that ugliness is not the opposite of beauty, but rather its critical operator: ugliness reveals hetero-cis, patriarchal, orientalist, capitalist and aphroditic standards that create categories based on beauty. Any deviation from the canon becomes flesh to be ridiculed. Which is precisely what the term bruttezza also says about defilement, coarseness and ignominy.  

In other words, there is an ethesthetic of the visible and I’m a fervent advocate of downright ugliness – the art of turning the formless into form, the inferior into art, the reverse stigma into an artistic pirouette. What the Eurocentric eye once labelled ugly is now a catalyst for multiple beauties. A stigma that is reversed becomes care: ugliness restores, unites and destigmatizes a world that has been disfigured by the ‘civilizing missions’ that strove to prescribe a unique, white, neutral, virginal, pseudo-universal – and hence desirable – Beauty.  

I believe in a ‘poetic militancy’, because when I recite my poems, I stir up a storm. Ugliness, the excess of reality, detaches the retina and forces beauty to restore itself. The beauty of ugliness lies in its critique of the ethesthetic and biopolitical norm. It allows the flesh, the stain, the disgrace, the distortion and the excrescence to rise to the surface. In the queer, discriminated spaces, the characteristically ugly unsettles the smooth beauty: ‘deviation’ (queerness) and supposed deformity become our existential syntax and the archive of our survival. 

The Sofa Sessions will be a horizontal moment in which we equip our shared line of reasoning  with the necessary tools. Halaqat creates a thriving geography that connects the shores, heals our fractures, and allows stories to better circulate. It’s a marvellous initiative that connects artistic scenes from Europe and the Arab world through care, stories and transmission. I am delighted, therefore, to accept the invitation to pave the way for our caprices and to encourage the public to continue the conversation about the ethesthetic deviations that have become the ethics of deviation. Poetry, community care, non-selective empathy and militant joy are my acts of resistance against the capitalist standardization of our diverse beauties. Let’s turn this sofa into a queer space for reinvention, where the Self is enraptured, weaves a tapestry of knowledge, and elevates our ugliness into Beauty. 

 Jamal Ouazzani