Rene Gabri
2023, February 18, 6:32pm, enough time has passed that we could try now to situate what it is we have been running from. It is not long ago, we can still recall it, it started even before, but the story we were told began by a series of visits. (Downtown 1 train, Ayreen and Bego open a conversation on monogamy and polyamory, writing interrupted) 
February 19, 4:10pm, they came village to village, asking for our names, they, who were our parents, when, where they, we were born. Whenever these inquisitors had no time or when our responses did not fit what they were looking for, they made things up, they called us by new names, they spelled things out according to what the papers wanted, what they wanted and had come looking for. They called it modernization, they called it development, they called it identity, they called it document, they called it constitution, they called us subjects, citizens of a state, no longer simply dogs of the sultan. We called it another beginning to the end. But since things had begun and ended for us before, this was yet another occasion to recall, our names as only but an alias, our names as never belonging or synonymous to us, our names as something given, taken, hidden, fabricated, falsified, reconstructed. 
To be called a name, like Gabri, a Scythian tribe, a dialect, a language, a village, a people, followers of the revelations of Zoroaster, a caretaker of the fire and its associated rites, godless, an infidel, unfaithful, untrustworthy, kafir, gavur, an insult, a swear word for a ‘lesser’ creature, homo profanus. Or, Rene Gabri. A less than human stateless person with unreliable origins, documented and identified by opposing states, refuging in art and language as a means of perpetual elusion.