Coffee cup reading in Turkey – and neighbouring cultures such as Greece and Armenia – is a practice based on guessing what might happen in the present or has occurred in the past.
However, its primary focus lies in foretelling the future by deciphering symbolic figures like fish, foxes, birds, trees, mountaintops and roads that emerge from the intricate patterns formed by coffee grounds in a cup. This intimate practice, traditionally associated with femininity, takes place within the confines of personal spaces, such as one’s home, and unfolds as a captivating live performance of transience. Once the reading concludes, the cup is washed and the symbols vanish, symbolising the ephemeral nature of the experience.
These interpretations typically revolve around individuality and provide insights into lives, predominantly focusing on [almost always presupposed heterosexual] love, [capitalist ideals of] money and [ableist perspectives on] health. Generally, these readings do not delve deeper into establishing connections between the gendered, socio-economic, and cultural contexts that shape these individual realities. While the specific meanings ascribed to symbols can vary depending on the interpreter’s cultural background and imagination, specific patterns commonly emerge. For instance, encountering a fish symbol often signifies good fortune, financial prosperity, or robust health, while a snake may be regarded as a harbinger of negative news.
By deviating from the conventional and normative scripts of interpretations, these divinations possess the power to become performative manifestos. In an ethnographic vignette, cultural anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis explores the medium of the coffee cup, viewing it as a form of telepathic sensory interaction that enables individuals to engage with the presence of someone who is not physically present—an act of “sensing the invisible.”1
Can coffee cup interpretations, although made with a controversial product due to its historical ties to colonialism and slavery,2 be used as a medium not only for individual readings limited to our bodies but also for studies of the environments, organisms, ideas, and dreams with which these bodies are in constant contact? Can coffee readings transform the future from the present moment by creating a telepathic dialogue with desired futures? Challenging isolated individuality with the anarchafeminist reading of transindividuality, I desire to read my fortune to come closer to the journeys I long for. Wishful thinking, utopic dreams. Interpreting is relating.
I stand in my kitchen, taking in my surroundings. On the floor, I notice the photo paper I purchased from Willhaben at a remarkably low price, which has long expired, 15 years ago. My shelves proudly display an assortment of spices, while the detergent sits by the sink, and the hand sanitizer rests on the counter. The time has arrived to explore the caffenol technique, a common practice in analogue film development that aims to replace harmful chemicals. It’s time to combine this technique with the chemigram process into a coffee divination. I prepare Turkish (or Greek, Armenian, or Anatolian) coffee for me while mixing instant coffee, washing soda, and vitamin C for the latent images. This coffee fortune-telling session unfolds right here in the accessibility of my kitchen. I sprinkle a variety of substances onto the photographic paper, carefully dipping it into the caffenol mixture. Finally, I submerge the paper in salt water for a day to stabilize the image.
Visions appear.
I choose one to convey the whispers of the many entities that make up the body that is supposedly human-mine.
In this divination, I sense the olfactory expressions of inside-outs. A good percentage of what makes me me is the good bacteria in my gut and the dead skin floating on my epidermis. My colourful scent is determined by the food-friends, who have co-grown in lands and touched by hands I don’t know and who have come through lifenonlifelife3 so we co-devour each other.
I see three Jellyfish. The future is fluid. Fluid identities, fluid economies, fluid relationalities. Gender, race, class, power and all intersectional structures will be gelatinous-elastic movements through vicissitudes, porous permeations and shifting existences.
Under the black spots, colours emerge like a three-dimensional realm filled with vitality. Even the most hopeless, darkest moments open the door to vibrant journeys. I read these speckles as a world where the inadequacy, discrimination, limitation and stiffness of dichotomies such as animate-inanimate, male-female, living-nonliving, rich-poor, east-west, north-south, hot-cold are discerned and transformed from one form to a thousand forms like a bursting soap bubble. This is a world in which that infinite realm in-between is endlessly interrelated, caressing each other’s hair. Worlds within worlds where the meanings attached to words lose their rigidity as if they have been repeated for millions of years in fast-forward.
There is a cat-tree. It means transcending the individual and the cosmos. The interweaving of infinite forms springing from the formlessness of being. To be is to transmorph and move circularly beyond the visible. To become is to spin the hierarchy of being (male*living = geopolitical economic components female*living/inanimate ≠ appearance politics rules of behaviour > > > > so-called non-living as in rock, water and air) upside down, upside down and upside down. Until you ≈ me-you you-me.
1 See C. Nadia Seremetakis, Sensing the Everyday: Dialogues from Austerity Greece, London, New York 2019, pp. 143–165.
2 See, for example, Jeffery M. Paige, Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America, Cambridge, London 1999.
3 These articulations are inspired by Chiara Bottici’s formulations in her book Anarchafeminism (2022), in which she argues for intersectional, queer and fluid ways of knowing the world beyond Eurocentric and fixed ways of being.
