Artist and memory activist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Jr. created a drag persona to address issues of Islamophobia and homophobia in the world. Drag is a performance
of gender that parody gender norms could shatter the illusion that there are only two genders – man and woman – and lead to a proliferation of genders; or rather to a recognition of, and ability to speak about, the already existing great diversity of genders, sexualities, bodies and pleasures (Evans and Williams, 2013).
In an interview, Zulfikar, also known as Zulfi, discussed his drag persona “Faluda Islam”: “She is a zombie, she was resurrected through Wi-Fi technology and the way she died was in the future queer revolution,” Zulfi explained. “She’s sort of an oracle… she’s able to give an insight into [the] past, present and future” (Burke, 2018). Faluda disrupts the binaries of organic-machine, male-female, even life-death with each performance as a queer Muslim icon.
Zulfikar Jr. is named after his late ancestor Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who was a prominent politician and leader of the People’s Party in Pakistan. In a way that subverts heteronormative expectations of Zulfi, he bravely entered the international art world with pieces that address his cultural background and extended the limits of the name in creating a drag persona. Zulfi recalled his father, Murtaza Bhutto’s assasination, when discussing this persona, and the themes he wishes to explore: “I talk about injustice, who gets the right to live or die, who is the decider of that,” says Zulfi. “War comes up, aspects of martyrdom come up, Islamophobia comes up.” (Burke, 2018) In my understanding, he is addressing the existential weight of being born a male in a Shi’a family and the expectations of martyrdom of such a gender identity. This responsibility was heightened during the Iran-Iraq war that started in the late 1980s when mostly Shi’a men as well as children in Iran fought their enemy combatants in Iraq.
Zulfi explained his ideas in an interview with Reconstructed Mag in May, 2020:
Why are we forced to make our children and families martyrs? What are the forces against us that make us go into these spaces that end in death? The drag character Faluda Islam questions this. The character is my attempt to look at revolution through a high femme lens (Bhutto, 2020).
Digitisation allows for “humans to mobilise memories that cut across the individual and the collective, the institutional and the corporate, the local and the global in ways that disrupt conventional binaries of the public and private, of the body and other” (Reading, 2016). Faluda exists digitally and in performances, disrupting the idea that a “man” protects “his women.” Faluda’s martyrdom and reincarnation as a Zombie may have been for all queer individuals, rather than for prolonging a heterosexual mode of reprdocution. Faluda as a Zombie, in Zulfi’s intention, also remembers the anti-imperialist slave rebellions in Haiti, where Zombies were an esoteric instrument to defeat the white settler-enslavers.
As a multidisciplinary artist, Zulfi’s other conventional artworks likewise explore the Shi’a Muslim’s conundrum of remembering assaults in Islamic history through lamenting the past, while other events celebrate masculinity as strength. As an artist, Zulfi highlights the inherent queerness of such an identity, despite the state’s priority to limit the identity as straight and one-dimensional. In critiquing the national imagery of a strong man, Zulfi said in an interview, in the context of his textile artwork series “Mussalman Muscleman”: “What for me is masculinity? It's softness” (Bhutto, 2017). In his works of a fictitious queer rebellion, he uses imageries of “brown and black body by creating glamorous queered future guerrilla fighters who do not fit neatly into categories of gender, race, faith, threat or desirable subject.” The works sought “to challenge the shifting borders between terrorist and freedom fighter as seen and named by the Anglo-Saxon world” (Bhutto, 2019). Memory, gender and technology are the themes explored by Bhutto’s works and the tools which allow him to express his ideas to a largely heteronormative public.
In “Future Faithful: Islamic Experiments in Space Exploration and Posthumanism” in 2021 at the Bass & Reiner gallery in San Francisco, U.S., Zulfi's artworks incorporate imagery of the calf as a reference to the second chapter in the Holy Quran, “The Heifer.”
“mustaq-bel 2,” 2019. By Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
Zulfi’s artworks reference traditional architecture and mythology. The calf has appeared prior as a sacrificial motif in Abrahamic traditions. This metaphoric practice has been substituted by the sheep or lamb in some ritual instances out of respect for others who found the sacrifice of the cow offensive, such as in India and Pakistan. In Sher Shah, Pakistan, a Shi’a saint’s shrine has been used by pious locals both as a shrine for fulfilling human prayers and a cow sanctuary, which demonstrates the power of cultural syncretism in the subcontinent (Khalid, 2016). The popular press and general population in South Asia interpret spaces like shrines (dargah) as examples of tolerance, since both Hindus and Muslims participate in worship and place requests to the saint of the shrine. They burn incense (loban) and consequently experience therapeutic convulsions against evil spirits that possess them (haziri) (Bellamy, 2011). Sometimes they are places of refuge and sources of cures to illnesses and evil spirits, while other times they are Gedächtnisraum (memory spaces). The usages of these spaces have been altered by modernity, as witnessed by the declining numbers of cows at the Sher Shah shrine.
The textile works by Zulfi were “created to honor real and imagined queer guerrilla fighters from Shiite Muslim traditions of martyr and saint veneration” (Bass & Reiner, 2021). More than just remembering a scar from a millennium-old feud, Muharram rituals as well as Zulfi’s artworks both symbolize a rejection of illegitimate state authority, which many Shi‘as also regard as a key feature of their faith (Freitag, 1989). In Zulfi’s praxis, he is directly addressing wealth inequality of the present.
The evolution of Muharram rituals in South Asia from a religious ritual to an “urban ritual” can be observed from the level of urban negotiation among the multi religious participants (Nejad, 2015). The processions are not limited to one sect or codified in one practice and often have multiple meanings. Different communities establish their own tazia, (also spelled as ta‘ziyah and ta‘ziyeh) which symbolically represents martyrs’ tombs, and carry it to the area that symbolizes the battlefield of Karbala. Zulfi’s work of “Mercy 258 رحیم ۲۵۸” paid tribute to such a practice; his symbolic Karbala was the art gallery of his exhibition.
Mercy 258 رحیم ۲۵۸. by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Screen print on muslin, chiffon and raw silk, inkjet print on silk, various trimming and plastic sequins. 2020, 148 x 28 in
In conclusion, this essay has explored the drag persona Faluda Islam, along with other works by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to demonstrate the potency of memory in his artwork. As an activist addressing Islamophobia and homophobia, Zulfi uses both embodied performances, audiovisual recordings, as well as hand sewn textiles in his ongoing works. Memory both informs the work and energizes the viewers who share part of the knowledge systems and geographies as Zulfikar’s upbringing. The drag zombie Faluda Islam interrogated on the idea that gender is a learned memory that is hard to alter or evolve; rather, the gender practices may or may not survive a future apocalypse. Memory is both the medium and the message.
Works Cited
Bass & Reiner. 2021. Future Faithful — Bass & Reiner. [online] Available at: <https://bassandreiner.com/zulfi> [Accessed 21 December 2021].
Bellamy, C., 2011. The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place. University of California Press. 33.
Bhutto, Z., 2020. Live Interview with Reconstructed Mag.
—----------., 2019. [online] Praxis Center. Available at: <https://kzoo.edu/praxis/artists/zulfikar-ali-bhutto/> [Accessed 21 December 2021].
—----------. 2017. [online] The Tumeric Project. Available at: <youtube.com/watch?v=bc8VtrHA8QE> [Accessed 21 December 2021].
Burke, S., 2018. Meet Faluda Islam, the Muslim Drag Queen From the Future. [online] Vice.com. Available at: <https://www.vice.com/en/article/7xjbgb/muslim-drag-queen-faluda-islam-zulfikar-ali-bhutto-queerly-beloved> [Accessed 21 December 2021].
Evans, M. and Williams, C., 2013. Gender. Routledge.
Freitag, S., 1989. Collective Action and Community. Berkeley: University of California Press. 251.
Khalid, H., 2016. The changing fate of a Muslim shrine where cows are sacred. [online] The Caravan. Available at: <https://caravanmagazine.in/lede/thinning-the-herd> [Accessed 21 December 2021].
Nejad, R. M. 2015. "Urban Margins, A Refuge For Muharram Processions In Bombay: Towards An Idea Of Cultural Resilience". Südasien-Chronik 5. 341.
Reading, A. 2016. Gender and Memory in the Globital Age. Palgrave MacMillan.
