Brussels Skins in Touch

‘I remember that moment in Fitzroy Square after I had finished topping him and said to him, Fuck me now. The weather oscillated between wet and warm, windy and calm. But my obsession was the weather I was creating inside Bina-B. As I glimpsed the lush spring I had brought to his body on that rainy night, I thought that if I could reinvent weather, I could also reinvent love. The lights drifted on the backs of poets’ silhouettes strolling on the deserted streets of Fitzroy Square in the way BB floated around my heart. I don’t remember if I or Bina-B had said it, but one of us muttered: There’s a certain kind of loneliness to falling in love. O. B.B. I want you to fuck me now. As soon as these words left my lips, he bowed his head. When even the idea of fucking me, which many had taken for granted, made him hesitate, satisfaction invaded me. That was the world I wanted to be part of, a world where reciprocity is the key to pleasure, a world where the certainty we were born into is replaced by one constantly altering according to our changing feelings and ideas, a world where the only certitude is to experience freely as we go along.’¹

This is an excerpt from The Seers, my third novel, which I wrote on my iPhone in front of the Ponds of Ixelles, Brussels. I often reflect on those weeks in the spring of 2020 when I was out on the streets, composing the first draft of the novel about Hannah and her lover Bina-Balozi – also known as Bina-B and BB – who together dismantle the internal constraints imposed by patriarchy, traditions and societal expectations, choosing to live as fluid and free as the air of the streets on which they were conceived.

EARLY IMPRESSIONS
I moved from London to Brussels in 2009 for love. And when I first arrived here, I hated it. The prevailing feeling was one of gloom.
I had a constant impression that I was in a city surrounded by clouds, my mind mirroring its overcast buildings. My walks, which are my way of relieving mental pressure, provided no release. Different city areas appeared replicas of each other, reproducing repetitiveness that compounded my boredom. In contrast to London, adorned with skyscrapers of bright glass that pierced the clouds and seemed dressed like Michael Jackson’s sequined outfit – always ready for a night out, always on the dance floor – Brussels appeared as if it were a city from the era of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, shrouded in the mysteries of the industrial age.

I came to Brussels with a detailed outline for my second novel, Silence is My Mother Tongue, set in a Sudanese refugee camp and revolving around the intimate lives of young refugees who fled the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia. The main characters include siblings Saba and Hagos, along with Jamal, who worked in the Italian-built cinema in Eritrea, before he was displaced to the camp.

At that time, as a writer, Brussels was the opposite of what I thought I needed. I wanted something easy to grasp, something that would immediately resonate with me. Dealing with personal issues, I lacked the energy to uncover the layers of a city and find its mystery. A city had to either captivate me or it didn’t. Anything beyond the superficial was more than I could manage. This is not to say that London lacks depth – it doesn’t. However, unlike Brussels, it also has a wealth of superficiality that appeals to those who prefer to stay on the surface of their city instead of delving deeper to uncover what they truly love about it.

But somehow I’d end up exploring Brussels’ history, with the eagerness of Hannah, who longed to hold Bina-B’s waist and enter him. ‘I wanted to wrap him in my arms, to inveigle him into opening his body to my ravenousness.’²

BRUSSELS’ HISTORY – THE CHAOTIC RISE FOLLOWING THE WAR
Soon after arriving in Brussels and my partner securing a full-time job, I found myself on my own. But instead of seeking solace from now-distant friends in London through social media, I left Facebook and threw away my mobile, further isolating myself. It wasn’t that I wanted to be alone, but the matter was that since I came to Brussels I was lost in a creative sense.

I walked most of the day, often without purpose or direction, as if in quest of Federico García Lorca’s prophesy, who said, ‘I’ve often lost myself to find the burn that keeps everything awake.’³ I would take the bus or train and end up in unfamiliar places, seeking to disappear even in my disappeared status. And when I wasn’t roaming the streets of Brussels, I was immersing myself in the city’s past.

Brussels, I found out, was affected by the Nine Years’ War (1688–97), which pitted France against a coalition of allies including Spain, Sweden and the Holy Roman Empire. In July 1695, King William III, the leader of the coalition, launched a siege on Namur, a French stronghold. In retaliation, the French forces bombarded Brussels, resulting in significant devastation to the city. Since then, Brussels has experienced a tumultuous rebuilding process, resulting in disjointed urban development, where various architectural styles have flourished throughout the city. This disordered space, with its disjointed, non-linear developmental path, became my entry point into the heart of Brussels, or rather, it became Brussels’s entry point into my heart.

But you understand the spirit here. When I speak of Brussels, I refer to reciprocity. It’s a case of an equal shift in my perspective and Brussels’s too, which enabled the city and me to carve out a space in each other’s lives. What drew me to Brussels, in the absence of people around me during those early days, was rooted in my imagination’s yearning for a sense of pervasive freedom, a quality I sensed emanating from the gritty streets of Brussels.

Looking back, the characters in my then novel in progress, Silence is My Mother Tongue, churned in the heady breeze of Brussels that I inhaled during my late-night strolls. Jamal, the mild character my imagination conceived while in London, grew bolder and more assertive in his desires in Brussels. It felt as though the more I flâneured through the city, the more Jamal’s passion was nourished by the scents of darkness wafting from potholes and broken cobblestones, like wounds on Brussels’ tired, weathered skin.

Jamal’s infatuation with Saba initially challenged me. And when he followed her to the open field that the refugees used as a toilet, hoping for a chance to be under her so that his famished soul is fertilised with her water, I intended to rid the story of him as a character. But Saba, who yearned to be worshipped in the way Jamal craved her, refused to say a word to me. The characters stood firm in solidarity: there was to be no Silence is My Mother Tongue without eroticism and obsession at its heart.

I set the book aside and fled to the streets, seeking shelter away from Saba’s and Jamal’s desires. Yet it seemed that Brussels was on the side of my characters, only revealing to me the freedom of its space and how it allowed humanity’s diverse desires concerning life, love and sex to unfold without constraint. The city itself became a conspirator, whispering that I could not escape. Brussels offered my imagination a vision: its fluidity and freedom could be embraced. But I was more preoccupied with myself than with my characters’ needs.

THE POETICS OF RELATIONS
In the depths of my winter, I sought solitude in the islands of nature within Brussels. I would go to the ponds of Ixelles and sit under the trees, reflecting on a life that seemed to blow me from one place to another as if I were a leaf. As if I craved something with roots, I sought sanctuary in the trees. Hermann Hesse’s words from his collection of fragments, Wandering: Notes and Sketches, came to me one day while leaning against a trunk: ‘Listen to the trees … If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life.’⁴

It was as if the trees were storytellers for nature and for the people who had left their unspoken thoughts scattered around them. Gradually, my loneliness receded in their company. I returned to this spot every day, sometimes after dark. One day, it was my turn to talk to the trees. I recited poetry to them – so much that, over time, I created a pond of poetic words next to the ponds of Ixelles, from which Hannah would emerge with The Seers, years later.

My soul connected with these parts of the city. A facet of my identity has emerged in ways I never thought possible. This showed me that we do not belong to countries and places through one element, such as a language; rather, the idea of belonging is fluid and shifts over time.

This brings to mind the Martinican writer, poet, philosopher and literary critic Édouard Glissant, who, in Poetics of Relation, dismisses the idea of identity as something fixed, isolated or grounded in a single origin, which he describes as ‘root identity.’ Instead, he advocates for the concept of ‘relational identity,’ formed through connections and exchanges with others.⁵ Though ‘others’ are defined as people, I’d argue that its meaning is flexible enough to include nature, animals and unseen residues in the air.

Glissant’s central idea of a poetics of relation, which emphasises a perspective that values connection, mutual influence and coexistence over domination or isolation, resonated with this period in my life. His viewpoint stresses the significance of the interaction of various thoughts and ideas. It encourages individuals to push their limits and look beyond the obvious, envisioning both the self and the city through adaptable identities and realities that can be continuously reshaped.

Glissant reveals a wealth of powerful possibilities to me. His use of the example of errant poets such as Arthur Rimbaud, to show their continual wanderings were at the heart of his ‘poetics of relation,’ validated my quest to find a home among poets and artists. ‘An arrant, passionate desire to go against a root … For the troubadour and for Rimbaud errantry is a vocation only told via detour.’⁶

In Brussels, decades after becoming a refugee from the Eritrean–Ethiopian conflict at the age of two, I grasped the beauty of drifting, of not having a fixed root but allowing my body to be light so as to float in the sky of the city. To recognise that my uprootedness, my repeated exiles between cultures, countries and languages, represented a form of freedom – freedom from the constraints of belonging to rigidity and purity – was essential to my wellbeing and a significant boost to my creativity.

However, while grasping the fluidity of self and its connection to others, including with places, as defined by Glissant, was essential, it alone was not enough to cultivate the human-centric relationship with the city that I needed during those years – which would challenge my imagination to overcome its inhibitions. To achieve this, I engaged with Brussels in a different way to understand its intricate details and intimate essence that animated it, viewing it through ‘the eyes of the skin,’ to quote the title of a book by the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa.⁷

THE EYES OF THE SKIN: THE IMPORTANCE OF FEELING
I associate my transformation before and after I fell in love with Brussels with the shift in my focus from ‘seeing’ the world to letting ‘feeling’ guide my perception of my surroundings. During this time, Brussels hasn’t changed, but I have. My perspective on Brussels has altered because I changed the way I felt things.

Having studied John Berger’s theories as outlined in The Ways of Seeing, as well as the ideas of the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, who emphasised the importance of ‘feelings’ in art and life, I have come to understand the role I can play in reshaping the way I see things, including cities such as Brussels, in a different light. Realising the power I have as an observer was a crucial element in unlocking the multilayered relationship between Brussels and myself.

In The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, Juhani Pallasmaa writes that ‘the dominance of the eye and suppression of the other senses tends to push us into detachment, isolation, and exteriority. The art of the eye has certainly produced imposing and thought-provoking structures, but it has not facilitated human rootedness in the world.’⁸

The power of the instincts, the sensory, the ‘other’ forms of eyes in our bodies were central to the work of critics of ‘ocularcentrism.’ Oxford Reference defines ocularcentrism as a ‘perceptual and epistemological bias ranking vision over other senses in Western cultures.’ An example would be a preference for the written word rather than the spoken word. I deepened my relationship with Brussels when I realised that reciprocity was essential to uncover its warmth hidden behind its grey façade. The more I allowed Brussels to see me at my most vulnerable, creative, sombre and elated moments, the more I shared of myself and revealed different aspects of my personality, and the more it responded in kind.

PLAYFUL DANCE WITH BRUSSELS
‘Architecture has also been regarded solely as a domain of vision, but scholars on environmental soundscapes have suggested that the first spaces of early humans were selected for acoustic purposes – to dramatise the voice of the shaman – not to be appreciated by vision. Other significant discoveries reveal that early humans built structures for their dead much earlier than they built any shelters for themselves. This implies that the first concern in building was in the mental, metaphysical and imaginative realm, not in the profane utility of shelter,’ writes Pallasmaa in ‘The Hegemony of Vision.’⁹

Pallasmaa contends that the reason for these intensified encounters of the body’s and architecture’s senses lies in the primacy of what he terms ‘the peripheral and unfocused vision in our lived experience of the world, as well as our experience of interiority in the space we inhabit.’¹⁰ This contrasts with focused vision, which ‘confronts us with the world.’¹¹ According to Pallasmaa, an interplay occurs between our bodies and architecture, often subtly, to illustrate the role of the body as the locus of perception, thought and consciousness, and the significance of the senses in articulating, storing and processing sensory responses. ‘I have learned that our skin is actually capable of distinguishing a number of colours; we do indeed see by our skin,’ he writes in The Eyes of the Skin.¹² However, the journey towards the ultimate realisation of a playful connection with the city may start, first, by empowering the skin.

OPEN PORES, OPEN CITY: SKINS IN TOUCH
We connect with the city when its architecture resonates through our pores. It was by chance that I uncovered a method to bring the city’s skin and mine closer together. ‘The skin is the oldest and most sensitive of our organs, our first medium of communication, and our most efficient protector. … Even the transparent cornea of the eye is overlain by a layer of modified skin. … Touch is the parent of our eyes, ears, nose and mouth,’ Ashley Montagu argues in his book Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin.¹³

For years, prior to my walks in Brussels, I had been showering and stepping out of the house without thoroughly drying my skin. This enabled the eyes in my skin to be open when they were in touch with the breeze and the varying temperatures that flowed from the city’s depths. My skin was fully intact, in a state of awareness, prepared for a profound conversation with the city, ready to absorb the thoughts and feelings hidden within the city’s depths, in ways the naked eye could not perceive. The city’s tenderness seeped into me with each stroll through its streets, alleys, parks and hills. This amounted to a dialectic, a moment of rebirth that was beginning to reshape my reality. Playfulness, teasing and seduction were central to a burgeoning relationship between the city and me, awakening my imagination and its tendency towards a free spirit.

‘The elements of architecture are not visual units or gestalt; they are encounters, confrontations that interact with memory.’¹⁴ Here, Pallasmaa highlights that our architectural experiences cannot be reduced to images and visuals. Instead, they involve the interplay between our memories and the buildings themselves. There is a call for interaction between the buildings and all other elements that comprise the skin of the city and the pores of our bodies. Imagining a soul at the hearts of both the skin of the city and ours is to reimagine a much more vivid, alive, thriving, fluid exchange of thoughts and feelings between the so-called ‘objects,’ buildings, and ourselves, the ‘persons.’

By elevating the city and all it encompasses to the same order that governs human relations, in terms of the ability to feel, and the desire to speak, we embark on the path to a transcendental experience that Robert Condia and Michael Luczak speak of in On Mood and Aesthetic Experience in Architecture: ‘In architecture, embodiment allows us to have an aesthetic experience when encountering an atmosphere where the physiological result is mood.’¹⁵ The eyes of the skin hold enough sensitivity and wisdom to grasp complexities when connecting with the city’s skin. By empowering our peripheral vision, we start to see the margins, transcending those confined to ‘focused vision,’ and notice those the centre neglected. People like myself, people who have been overlooked by the dominant class, by those conditioned to see linearly, and by those raised to understand a singular language.

Groups such as immigrants, women, LGBTQ+ individuals, Black people, Asians, Arabs and those collectively referred to as ‘the others’ have become the centre of my creative obsession. In other words, Brussels embraced a wide range of people, ethnicities, religions, sexualities, styles and languages, just as its streets effortlessly accommodated different architectural styles, from modernism to art nouveau and brutalism, all born during the post-war period.

Now, I was ready to embody the city’s versatility in my imagination and create an unjudgemental space, free from taboos and a sanctuary for all kinds of characters. Psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel writes in Creativity and Perversion that perversion is not a disorder discrete to a minority but instead proposes that ‘there is a perverse core latent within each one of us that is capable of being activated under certain circumstances.’¹⁶

Over time, Brussels, with all its facets shaped by its unique history, fostered the ideal environment for my imagination to absorb perversion and present it as a tool for my characters, until the point suggested by Chasseguet-Smirgel is reached – a point where perversion becomes an essential vehicle for advancing the boundaries of human possibilities: ‘Historical upheavals open up the possibility not only of a new political vision but a new sexual potentiality as well.’¹⁷

When I think of sexual potentialities, I think of the characters of my two novels written in Brussels: Jamal and Saba in Silence is My Mother Tongue and Hannah and Bina-Balozi in The Seers. I remember the thrill of returning to write Silence is My Mother Tongue, having rewritten my imagination to be as tolerant as Brussels and having mastered the art of surrendering to my characters, following them wherever they led me – even to the place beneath Saba’s bottom that Jamal cherished, and from which he narrated this scene:

‘I still recall that summer evening inside Cinema Silenzioso when a naked Saba crouched on my face. My eyes travelled across the long back of this woman I had loved since the first night in the camp. Above her arched neck, the stars glimmered around the moon.

Saba rearranged herself, spreading her map of love over me.

This is our time, she said. This is my time.

I wanted to speak but I was breathless.

Saba caressed my face as I inhaled the scent of her, the scent of her history, the battles she had won and lost, her rage, her frustrated dreams, the violence on her thighs, the rivers of desire inside her womb.

She let go.

She filled my mouth from her rivers, so warm that as it slid inside me through my throat, I felt riches invading me, gushing towards my soul.’¹⁸

A NEW POETIC RELATIONSHIP WITH THE CITY
Through the eyes of the engaged skin, I could reimagine the same street in various iterations. This gave rise to a new poetic relationship with the city, which exists both in reality and as a reflection of my imagination. I was to see Brussels not as a static entity but as something that continuously changes shape due to the influence of my observations and feelings in shaping and reshaping the city when viewed through a particular lens. That is, as we perceive the city from our unique perspectives, shaped by our different moods, we play a crucial role in its ongoing transformation in our minds.

Berger referred to this in his book The Ways of Seeing when he wrote, ‘We never look just at one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.’¹⁹ Berger suggests that what we see is fluid – that a city, much like the interpretation of a work of art, evolves with the viewing experience. My understanding of the city altered when ‘seeing’ was stripped away from its bias with ranking vision over other senses. The truth was far more complicated than I had understood. I now believe that as a citizen of Brussels I have the power to mould my own perception of the city. This implies that my feelings and views at any given moment can transform the realities and interpretations of my surroundings. We do not merely see cities, we feel them.

Hence, reimagining a city is not exclusively the responsibility of architects or city planners. It also depends on our internal feelings. As citizens, and if we embrace fluidity, we have the ability to give a city multiple rebirths by continually reinventing the way we perceive and experience it. Hannah’s strength is rooted in the city, and like Saba, Jamal and Bina-Balozi, it is inseparable from it. Just as the city can care, inspire, infuriate and repel, so can Hannah, who was conceived on the streets of Brussels after years of wandering its byways day and night while I was lost and in search of an identity as fluid as its air.

*

When I opened myself up to Brussels and began to see it beyond its concrete, cobblestones and tree-starved streets, it came to life in my mind. The city started to inspire and provoke me every time I was out and about, walking in Ixelles, the Centre, Schaerbeek or Forest.
A city that first allows you to see yourself, and then see your reflection in its buildings and trees, becomes an extension of your emotions, no matter how irrational that may seem. Such a city is the ideal place to write fluidly.

The walls of Brussels’ buildings that I encounter on my walks, even now, months after the publication of The Seers, still project Hannah and her lovers, who exist on the extreme margins of society and love and fuck in unconventional ways. I keep seeing Hannah and her lover, Bina-Balozi, everywhere. They adorn murals proudly displayed on the grey façades of Brussels, with BB turning his back to Hannah. As she enters him, it is as if a lantern is affixed to the tip of her strap-on, illuminating the poetic relation concealed in the depths of his sea.

1. Sulaiman Addonia, The Seers, London: Prototype Publishing, 2024, pp.61–62.
2. Ibid., p.24.
3. Federico García Lorca, ‘Blind Panorama of New York’ (trans. Pablo Medina and Mark Statman), American Poetry Review, vol.36, no.06, available at https://aprweb.org/poems/blind-panorama-of-new-york-translated-by-pablo-medina-and-mark-statman (last accessed 8 February 2025).
4. Hermann Hesse, Wandering: Notes and Sketches (trans. James Wright), New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, p.58.
5. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation Senses (trans.
   Betsy Wing), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, p.11.
6. Ibid., p. 15.
7. Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, Chichester: John Wiley, 2005.
8. Ibid., p.19
9. Juhanni Pallasmaa, ‘The Hegemony of Vision. The Multi-Sensory Reality – Integrating the Existential Experience, 
   Tangible Territory Journal, vol.1, no.3, 2021, available at
   https://tangibleterritory.art/journal/issue-3-content/the-multi-sensory-reality-integrating-the-existential-experience (last accessed on 8 February 2025).
10. Juhani Pallasmaa, op. cit., p.10.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, New York: Columbia University Press, 1971, p.3.
14. Juhani Pallasmaa, op. cit., p.63.
15. Robert Condia and Michael Luczak, ‘On Mood and Aesthetic Experience in Architecture’, ANFA 214 Conference: Presenter Abstracts, San Diego: Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, 2014, available at https://www.brikbase.org/sites/default/files/ANFA2014_ExtendedAbstracts_10_0.pdf (last accessed on 8 February 2025).
16. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, London: Free Association Books, 1984, p.1.
17. Ibid.
18. Sulaiman Addonia, Silence is My Mother Tongue, London: The Indigo Press, 1998, pp.179–180.
19. John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972, p.7.