making marjaa: a conversation between mayssa jallad and ely dagher. this is an addendum to a scenes sounds action paper—making marjaa: a conversation between mayssa jallad and ely dagher—and is an integral part of the paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2026.2630595.
this piece did not arrive in the journal as a closed script. it generated an extended conversation between the authors and the editorial collective about opacity, audience and performance. usually that exchange remains offstage. in this instance, part of it re-entered the text in the form of an addendum that references, paraphrases, and responds to our original editorial steer. this short note accompanies the piece in order to foreground that the editorial conversation, too, is part of its performance.
in our initial response to the first version of the script, we described it as ‘unsettling in the best sense’ and highlighted its ‘intentional opacity and strategic elaboration without over-explaining.’ we understood opacity, following édouard glissant’s work on relation, not as a refusal of contact but as its condition, a way of insisting that singularities need not be rendered fully knowable in order to be in relation (glissant 1997). recent work on refusal and decolonial qualitative inquiry similarly treats withholding, non-translation, and non-disclosure as methodologically and ethically generative stances rather than deficits to be fixed (simpson 2014; tuck and yang 2014). our steer was written in that spirit. rather than asking the authors to smooth out the script or clarify every reference, we invited them to reflect explicitly on what it means to render a private catch-up as a public text, and to own the formal and ethical stakes of inviting readers into that scene.
the final addendum reads and refracts that steer in ways that surface both resonance and friction. it situates our comments alongside other encounters in which audiences have demanded more context or translation, and presents the authors’ response as a provocation that protects the spontaneity of their exchange. at the same time, because the steer is referred to but not quoted, editors become characters in the narrative without our words being directly present. that move is formally interesting, but it also has consequences: it shapes how readers imagine the editorial role and the kinds of demands they think have been made. as feminist and relational approaches to publishing remind us, editorial and peer-review practices are not neutral; they are situated forms of labour that organise authority, care and accountability in specific ways (craig 2011).
this accompaniment is not a rebuttal to the authors’ text. it is a small record of an encounter, and an acknowledgement that editing is itself a performative practice with its own audiences and responsibilities. the piece invites readers to sit with the discomfort of overhearing a conversation marked by violence, memory and collaboration. this note simply adds that the discomfort extends into the margins of production as well. rather than resolve the tensions that arose in the process, we mark them here as part of the multilayered reading and writing for which we, too, are accountable.
