“Atomi Daamaki Wali Mohabbat (The Atomically Explosive Love)” is a lecture performance that speaks to questions of nationalism, community, and self through speculative fiction. The narrative chronicles the history of nuclear power in Pakistan through state and familial archives. It intersects specific events, starting with the successful nuclear tests performed in the 1990s. The research dissects a military monument erected by the state, Chaghi Monument Hill, as a motif, location, and historical moment that is consistently reconstituted within religious-state logic, and in digital space. The green screen is used to represent Islamic orientalism, Pakistani nationalism, and a projection space for the populist imagination.

The interface allows both of the images of the monument, the moment of the blast, and associations of nation to reflect its looming, haunting presence in the present. Such a haunting is an implication of the digital diasporic experience as well as suppression of histories/narratives that do not fall under the patriarchal state structure. Using flora as a metaphor for embedded violence, the animation negotiates forms of hegemonic, historical retellings through a character narration of a fictional, populist, contemporary Urdu male poet. The reading by a female speaker (myself) allows for a queering and alternative historicizing of South Asia in an age of global nationalist uprisings.

[Script excerpt:]

Let us wait with our flags to the moment we can climb the peak of the pre-destined crumbling monument!

Let our bodies cascade over the pseudo earthly surface!

Let us purified men set the tone for the rest of the nation!

As we await the moment of both creation and destruction.

I lay out an offering to the coming Chaghi.

I offer my words to the monument;

a description of the people of Chaghi and by the people of Chaghi.

To face the coming of my Beauty-Full Chaghi Monument Hill!