I.

In the margins of Shia geographies, ritual is often modulated by proximity to power, risk, and memory. Māṭam, rhythmic chest-beating performed during Muharram, tends to surge with speed, volume, and physical force in Shia-majority zones like Karbala, Qom, and areas of southern Lebanon. But in peripheral or diasporic communities, such as those in Pakistan’s Sunni-majority regions or in Indonesia, māṭam often becomes slower, shaped by local constraints and the need for cautious survival in hostile environments. The tempo of mourning is not just a cultural register, but a geographic one; rhythm marks distance from safety. 

Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry sees the protagonist’s quiet unraveling met with dismissal by an Afghan refugee who, invoking deeper trauma, repositions his own survival as the legitimate benchmark for suffering. This exchange does not directly map onto caste, but echoes what Akhil Kang calls upper-caste victimhood: the act of weaponizing one’s suffering to foreclose or delegitimize others’ expressions of pain. In both cases, grief is stratified: some forms are allowed to be loud, fast, and public (like māṭam in Karbala), while others are contained, policed, or rendered excessive. Caste, here, becomes less about origin and more about access to public mourning, about who is allowed to linger in loss and who is asked to move on.

In the budding stages of my gender-mutation as a Syed-Shia Zaidi, I found myself drawn to the expanded aesthetic and temporal imaginaries offered by rave scholars like McKenzie Wark and Juliana Huxtable. The conceptual interplay between caste, time, tradition, and the body made intuitive sense. Māṭam for me is no longer just a religious rite but a temporal logic that mirrors how I live and move.

In the context of my life, work, and history, it makes sense to cognize māṭam as a kind of sanctioned schizophrenia: a public display of grief for someone never met, a body long dead but made urgently present through sound and pain. It sutures past and present into a single rhythm, collapsing historical time into the immediate now. In this sense, it enacts what Deleuze and Guattari call “schizo-temporality”, the refusal of linear time, the refusal to let the past stay in the past. The mourned are always returning. The ritual is a wound that won’t close; a beat that insists and manifests into a cultural practice surviving generational accusations of heresy. 

The recursive temporality of māṭam, then, finds echoes in the sonic ruptures and visual residues of contemporary trans art in Pakistan. This essay, and the work it contains, are situated in that schizoid rhythm: where mourning is method, illegibility is survival, and art becomes afterlife.

This schizophrenic temporality also aligns closely with Black paraontological thought: Frank Wilderson III writes about Blackness occupying a position not simply of exclusion from the category of the human, but of foundational antagonism to it. Blackness is not marginal to ontology, it is the rupture that reveals its limits. Similarly, Pakistani transness, especially as embodied by moorat performers and khwaja-sira rituals, inhabits a space of ontological impossibility. Paraontology, put simply, names the condition of being that which both exists within and disrupts dominant frameworks of existence. 

This is not about comparing Blackness and transness, nor collapsing them. Rather, Zenaan-Khana (a trans-led, multi-disciplinary art collective) and its work echoes paraontology in the way it renders Pakistani transness as a figure not of lack, but of structural impossibility. It is not a minoritized identity seeking inclusion, but a structural non-being indigenous to this land, struggling to remain.   

II. 

Zenaan-Khana’s visual and sonic practice inhabits this paraontological terrain. Our Boiler Room set in 2025 marked a shift, a curated refusal that belonged to a new generation. Rather than reproducing inherited forms of ritual, we set out to disrupt the dominant aesthetics of elite cultural production in Pakistan: event spaces owned by white-collar elites, anti-paindoo (a colloquial Punjabi and Urdu term, often used in urban Pakistan to describe someone from a rural or rustic background. Depending on context, it can carry a pejorative sense of “backward” or “unsophisticated.”). In their politics, ironically in charge of curating multiculturalisms. We channeled the dissonance of Gen-Z moorats: pulsing beats, industrial noise, synthetic rupture. It was less about recognizable grief and more about building a sonic texture of disidentification. Our set cracked open Lahore’s elite space-time by refusing smooth transitions or legible representation. We merged mujra rhythms with underground Black soundscapes, shifting BPMs to mimic breathlessness and collapse. At one moment, a Somali trans artist reinterpreted Islamic devotional terms over a distorted, syncopated beat; in another, I rapped my song Bakwas, a critique of the male gaze on trans bodies, layered over a chopped-and-flipped sample of Rihanna’s Rude Boy. 

These fragments weren’t meant to cohere. They glitched, tangled, and surged. What emerged was a sonic narrative unraveled by longing, surveillance, ecstasy, and rupture. What we performed was not representation; it was sanctioned schizophrenia staged at the edge of collapse. 

To truly understand this tactic, one must return to what scholars like Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe describe as the afterlives of structural violence. Hartman’s “afterlife of slavery” is not just about historical trauma, it is about ongoing conditions that frame Black life as always already dead. Sharpe’s wake work names how Black existence navigates grief that never ends. Pakistani trans life is also wake work. We are asked to live without lineage, perform without legitimacy or care, and survive without history.

Our practice extends beyond sound. The visual work showcased here, developed with Misha Japanwala as the project maidaan-e-jang mein murjha gulaab (wilted roses on a battlefield), is not supplementary to this essay: it is its embodied continuation. This piece emerges from the same conditions of sanctioned schizophrenia: scattered timelines, ontological foreclosure, ritual excess, and aesthetic refusal. But this was not an abstract exercise. A (name redacted), an iconic Lahori trans-femme  and longtime collaborator, co-ideated the shoot with me, as well as other designers, friends, and a retired mujra artist deeply connected to many of the muses in our campaign. Together, we sat with the muses, listening to stories of exile, longing, and survival, and asked: what does a fugitive image look like? We staged shots that lingered in the affects of dislocation. This image is not a token of trans life; it is its fragment, its echo, its unfinished utterance.

Saidiya Hartman’s idea of “the afterlife of slavery,” posits death not as an event but as a condition. Similarly Zenaan-Khana’s work asks: what does it mean to be a body whose ritualized mourning, whose māṭam, is itself a form of failed ontological recognition? What does it mean to grieve a self that was never legible? What kind of time is this? 

III.

The moorat figure, an Urdu term reclaimed in recent years through movements like the Sindh Moorat March (SMM), carries with it a layered history of religious excess, colonial residue, and social abandonment. Once used ambiguously, even derogatorily, moorat is now being politicized as a counter to Western gender terminology, refusing the flattening translations of “transgender” or “nonbinary.”  The moorat performs what might be called a schizophrenic temporality— not in the pathological sense, but in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms: a breaking down of dominant flows of time and coherence. But unlike D&G’s celebration of deterritorialization, here schizophrenia is not freedom. It is a way of enduring dislocation. It is survival in fragmentation.

The images in maidaan-e-jang mein murjha gulaab do not seek to explain, they glitch. They fold history into flesh, grief into gesture, rupture into residue. The trans body here does not aim for legibility or inclusion; it mourns its own exclusion from the ontological field. Its visibility is always ephemeral/unstable. Its presence is always partially posthumous. ​​

Take, for instance, N (name redacted): a trans woman who runs a house for trans sex workers in Narowal. After surviving a brutal act of violence where her ex-boyfriend shot her leg for leaving him, N now moves through the world with a prosthetic. She is not a symbol of victimhood, but of refusal, of organizing beyond state visibility, of care that persists even when the body is denatured. How does one represent this? Not with clarity, but with tension. Our visual work strives to hold this contradiction: the simultaneous presence of mutilation and resilience. It asks how to archive fugitive ethics, how to remain faithful to their opacity without rendering them legible for the comfort of the viewer.

Paraontological realities echo through our work, staging Pakistani transness not as a minoritized identity, but as a structure/fabulation/imagination of non-being, a body whose relation to the visual field is one of misrecognition. In that sense, the visual art accompanying this essay does not close an argument, it opens a wound. It performs what theory can only gesture toward: the feeling of life after the possibility of life.

This is how we mark time: holding the ephemeral to extend its impact in this moment of subcontinental psychosis. This is how we remain.

This is our proposition: not clarity, but sensation. Not theory for the page, but affect rendered legible through performance and image. Between misrecognition and survival, we find a form. Between ontology and paraontology, we mark presence, not as claim, but as trace. What remains is not always evidence. Sometimes, it’s a psychotic pulse that doesn’t stop. That is where we build a politics.

maidaan-e-jang mein murjha gulaab also builds on the legacy of the Moorat March, one of the most disruptive and generative trans political formations in recent years. A movement that directly birthed the incentive that I needed to advocate for a space like Zenaan-Khana in Lahore. SMM is not just protest. It is legacy work. It continues a lineage of trans, queer, Shi’a-oriented and feminist organizing in Pakistan, grounded not in global human rights discourse but in indigenous ethics and moorat epistemologies. It marks a return to gender plurality as cultural inheritance, reviving cosmologies of embodiment that the colonial and postcolonial state sought to erase. Crucially, it is not just symbolic. It is materially disruptive. SMM builds grassroots power in Sindh, cultivates new kinships across class and caste, and challenges the state’s monopoly on gender recognition. It is precisely within this political genealogy that Zenaan-Khana’s current visual collaboration with Misha Japanwala emerges. The images (including the one offered here) do not illustrate the march; they carry its aftershocks. They hold the schizoid time of moorat rebellion: ishq-filled, subversive in their expression of trans-psychosis, glitching in fragmentation. They don’t document, but distort. And in doing so, they uphold a politics of wake, of misrecognition, of remaining.

There is no pride in cultural organizing during genocide. But there is grief. There is glitch. There is residue. And sometimes, that’s enough to break something open.∎