Say What?

It's Published!

2012-01-24T22:10:00.000-08:00

It's a bit of a whirlwind as Love, Inshallah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women was published today. My story makes up only a small 4% of the the 25 stories within the pages - but goodness, are those stories amazing as a collection. I just finished reading the book this week and I'm in awe. The book was featured in the New York Times today and the book is #213 of all books at Amazon!

Also today - I was profiled.

Why were you drawn to this project?

As a South Asian girl in America, I was inundated with images of white people beauty and white people love stories on the big screen. At home, I was raised in a strict Bangladeshi Muslim household where the message was no dating, and when I got married it would be arranged to a Bangladeshi Muslim man. At school, while my friends went to school dances with dates, I was the perpetual wallflower who was never asked out. My perspectives on lust and love were in turn shaped by racialized concepts of beauty and orthodox familial pressures. I didn’t see examples of passionate love stories with Muslim, brown-skinned women nor did I think it was even possible. The best example I had was Jasmine from the movie Aladdin, and that princess was hardly an example to live up to.

It wasn’t until I was well into my twenties that I fell in love (multiple times) and found faith in my own way. I was drawn to sharing my story in Love Inshallah because I wanted girls to realize that Muslim women are strong, beautiful, and passionate. That Muslim women can love, lust, wreak beautiful havoc and struggle to find their deen all in the same breath. I hope that this book can be that beacon of inspiration and dreams for some other girl out there.

You can read the rest of the interview at the book's website right here! And be sure to pick up the Love, Inshallah at a book store near you today!

Hijabi's on Ella's Voice

2012-01-18T10:26:00.000-08:00

Dan Ancona talking with Lowes manager.

Much love to Oakland's Ella Baker Center for Human Rights for letting me share with them my #HijabiFlashMob experience on their blog Ellla's Voice:

A #HijabiFlashMob – at least that’s what we were calling it even though there was no actual dancing involved. In its literal interpretation, it’s a sudden mob of women in hijabs.

A “hijab” is the head covering worn by some Muslim women as a sign of faith, humility, devotion, and sometimes even a political statement. The premise behind having a flash mob of women in hijab being that the hijab in the “West” has turned into such an icon of fear and righteousness for islamophobes in this nation that the mere presence of many women in hijab standing all together would scare the bejeezies out of them.

Read the rest of my post at Ella's Voice through this link!

When I Needed You Most

2012-01-01T23:36:00.000-08:00

I want to start this year off right. This isn't a fundraising pitch. This isn't an effort to get you to sign my petition or register to vote. This is simply the first of many love letters I hope to write this year (one of my 2012 New Year's resolutions) - this is a letter to let you know that I love you, I appreciate you, and I'm grateful for you. I'm going big, broad, sending this to everyone that touched my 2011 life - apologies for the impersonal nature.

2011 was not an easy year for me and my family (you can read about my year here). June 2nd changed our lives drastically when my mother was suddenly taken away from us. I struggled with the grief and chose to wear it on my social media sleeve, tweeting and facebooking throughout. I don't know why I chose to be so public with grieving- maybe because I found comfort in hearing stories from other people who had experienced the same set of circumstances. Or maybe it's because my mother has always been an inspiration for my writing and activism and so many people had already built a relationship with her through my words about her. It just seemed natural.

There's something amazing about community. It's a built family, created with people who have crossed your path and for some reason they chose to stick around. As a community organizer, I work to build community. But I never in my wildest dreams expected that my community (that's you) would be there to catch me when the ground under me was pulled out and I was free falling - in the way I was caught by my community (you).

So this is my thank you. To every one of you that sent a card, or flowers, or books or food. I cannot tell you how alone it felt and how each one of those cards helped my family feel just a little less alone. To every one that called or tweeted or facebooked or texted. To the people that flew and drove for miles to attend my mother's funeral, especially to that person on twitter that I never even met who came. To every one that made sure that I was fed, that I left the house, that I was sleeping. To every one that helped me travel between Oakland and Los Angeles visit my family. To every one that sent me and my sisters job openings. To every one that humored me with uncomfortable questions about signs from beyond and seeing loved ones in dreams. To every single one of you that sent us a contribution - I can't tell you how scared I was about the family finances, how many bills were in the red the day Mom died - you literally helped keep the electricity on and a roof over my family's head at a time where we didn't know how we would economically survive. To every one that gave me a shoulder to cry on, an extra long hug or a squeeze of my hand - it just helped so much to know that I wasn't there experiencing this alone. Thank you for taking care of me and more importantly, thank you for helping me take care of my family.

Lastly, thank you for reminding me to have faith in my community. That our work as leaders, storytellers and advocates are tied directly to our personal lives - politics is personal and the personal is political - they are intertwined and rightly so. We must remember that the reason why we advocate is for humanity - these are real lives, real beings that we are fighting for on the daily. We are the 99%. My mother was Teamster who worked in the airport parking lot just so that she could have health insurance for her family. She was an immigrant Muslim from Bangladesh who came to the US for a better life yet always felt like a second class citizen. My mother will be a constant inspiration for how I write and advocate and I hope to continue to live her legacy well.

I appreciate you, friends and strangers alike. And somewhere Mom is looking down also appreciating you too, and grateful that I have a community with you.

Love,
Me

P.S.
Do me favor - if you genuinely felt loved from this - pay it forward. Write someone an e-mail to tell the you appreciate them too.

2011/2012

2011-12-31T19:45:00.000-08:00

2011 Year in Review:

My mother died.

I can't really remember what happened before June 2nd, or what happened after June 2nd. Sure, I was invited to the White House and shook hands with the President. I instigated two hijabi flashmobs, one in a room of right wing reporters where our back up was Lt. Dan Choi, and another again at Lowe's in San Francisco. I worked on editing an essay which will be published in an anthology with other dope Muslim women next month. I helped to empower 17 amazing South Asian American youth to be radical leaders. I worked on repealing affirmative action, promoting civil rights, replacing the death penalty, and assessing South Asian American community issues. I hosted a webinar to assist people to be educating in moving their money out of big banks. I PR-ed pies, and cookies, and a play hearting Hamas, and a play empowering Janaki, and a gypsy Sikh hip hop album, and a dreadlocked Sri Lankan rasta, and an animal haired singer songwriter. I was tear gassed at Occupy Oakland while taking back the streets, the ports. I prayed Eid in East Oakland behind a student of Elijah Mohammad. I collaborated with Muslim, queer and fabulous activists to put together an amazing Islamophobia Zine out next year. I interviewed amazing people and wrote about a bunch of issues on Sepia Mutiny and Taqwacore Webzine. Inspired by political poster culture in Oakland, I started collecting political art of the South Asian American, leading my new Tumblr site Mutinous Mind State. I saw Harold and Kumar inside the White House and had DJ Rekha over at my art party. I danced with second line ghosts in the 9th Ward of New Orleans, and ate cheese curds in the Mall of America in Minneapolis.

I wrote poems. I painted. I painted a whole lot. I did not write as much as I wanted to, as much as I needed to. But I did paint.

I sorted saris. I counted prayer beads. I shredded more envelopes of unopened bills than I ever want to see again. I drove to the thrift store countless number of times getting rid of her clothes. I sifted through stamps upon stamps. I flipped through pictures upon pictures. Boxed up jewelery. Wrote thank you cards. Vased flowers, and threw out flowers. Ironed my sisters clothes. Held my sisters as they cried. I cried. Boy, have I cried in 2011. I didn't think it was possible to cry so much. I prayed. I prayed so hard it scared me. And I sat. I stared out aimless and just sat.

Stunningly enough, this year I survived.

2012 Resolutions:

1. Write
2. Love
3. Occupy My Life
4. Write Love Letters
5. Look people in the eyes.
6. Believe/ Faith/Pray

#OccupyLowes with a #HijabiFlashMob

2011-12-20T13:22:00.000-08:00

A #HijabiFlashMob - at least that's what we were calling it even though there was no actual dancing involved. In it's literal interpretation, it's a sudden mob of women in hijabs. The idea started this summer in response to street harassment that a group of hijabi women experienced by right-wing bloggers in Minneapolis. So in response, two days later we gathered Muslimas and allies, handed out scarves, wore them as hijabs and stood ground where the right-wing bloggers were meeting. The idea being that the hijab is such an icon of fear for the right that the mere presence of many women in hijab all together would scare the bejeezies out of them.

For this weekend's #HiajbiFlashMob, we held our action at the Lowe's in San Francisco, to support Lowe's boycott and send a message to corporate that we were upset that over the pulling of ads from the reality show "All-American Muslims." Though many companies had pulled out their ads from the show, Lowe's was the only one who admitted to pulling out because - "We based our decision to pull the advertising on this research after hearing the concerns we received through emails, calls, through social media and in news reports." The right wing fringe Christian group that Lowe's was responding to? Why that was a Florida based group that didn't like All-American Muslims because it portrayed Muslims as normal people and not as terrorists. It went against their beliefs of what the facts on Muslim Americans were. So we boycott.

It was a rapidly planned action - it was decided Thursday night at a local South Asians for Justice meeting and was planned for Saturday morning. We gathered Muslims and allies alike, sending - women dressed in hijab and men in kurtas and the allies dressed like the average American shopper. The plan was, instead of dancing, we would send in the allies first. They would fill up their shopping carts and kick it near the registers. Ten minutes later, a mob in "Muslim garb "would show up. We'd have a spokesperson speak loudly about the ills of Lowe's and the mob would split up, to hand out flyers to the customers. Our "plants" would react shocked, engaging the manager and other customers in conversations. It was more guerilla theatre than anything else.

We gathered a block away from Lowe's Saturday morning. There were about 20 of us and about half of us were "brown". We hung out for about an hour, getting on message and waiting for people. At 11:50 we sent in our group of shoppers. It was then that I had a moment...

Up until that moment we were a multi-culti group of civil disobedient activists on the sidewalk. But when the allies left, all that was left on the sidewalk was the group of South Asian, Muslim clothes wearing "mob". My heart started to beat faster. I felt the cars that were driving by were glaring at us. Our allies provided a sense of safety and when they left, I was left with a feeling of vulnerability. In my head I knew that they didn't abandon us, they were doing part one of the action. But I still was shaken up by how it felt like a target was on our backs as soon as they left.

The "Muslim Mob" followed in 10 minutes later, our allies disguised as shoppers waiting by the registers. The action went off without a hitch - almost too easily. We handed out our fliers. Conversations with normal customers were had. The manager on camera said that Lowe's wasn't racist and that they hire people of all race (which is my favorite worst argument for being not racist). Cops were not called. It was in some ways too easy to occupy the space in Loewe's. It made me think we could have pushed a lot more and done a wilder action. It made me also think if it was this simple to OccupyLowes then maybe, we should Occupying other places too.

It is clear to me now more than ever how important it is to have allies support Muslim and racial justice action oriented spaces. They don't just provide a legitimacy to the campaign, the solidarity felt is important for everyone's minds and hearts too. As Muslim/South Asian Americans, we are often other-ized by the mainstream press and community and in identity driven organizing we often seek solidarity in identity based empowerment. But it's important to reach out and build with our allies to, because they'll have our backs when we most need them to.

It is also clear to me now more than ever that we need to act. Whether it's on a frivolous issue like a reality television show or whether something more serious like the stabbing of a Sikh man at the Fresno airport, it is clear that islamophobic and xenophobic hate speeches are having an effect on the average American's behavior. This needs to stop. . And if it means occupying space with a fun hashtag or if it means consciously buying your goods from a locally sourced store, so be it. Be vigilant, build community around love and act with solidarity.

Your Hair is Haram

2011-12-15T01:00:00.000-08:00

I think I may have misinterpreted the whole Muslim thing – I didn’t realize that I had to be baptized by being thrown into a lake and have my girlish long locks hacked into a bob chop fashioned by a police chief to prove my Muslim-ness. 59 guys and 5 girls have been sent to a ten day morality camp in Bandeh Aceh, Indonesia – their crime, they went to a punk show. They shaved their heads and threw them into a lake…for a bath. This is their start to morality brainwashing.

Indonesian sharia police are “morally rehabilitating” more than 60 young punk rock fans in Aceh province on Sumatra island, saying the youths are tarnishing the province’s image.Hundreds of Indonesian punk fans came from around the country to attend the concert, organised to raise money for orphans. Police stormed the venue and arrested fans sporting mohawks, tattoos, tight jeans and chains, who were on Tuesday taken to a nearby town to undergo a 10-day “moral rehabilitation” camp run by police. [link]

My baptism wasn’t by lake water but by fire, avoiding the glares of the Christian fundamentalists with their barking dogs on the street corner protesting outside my American mosque, or getting pulled out by TSA in airport security lines. My Islamic baptism happens when I watch my back for hate-crimes when walking down the street defiantly brown in a white America or when I get told by drunk bigots at parties to go back to where I came from. My boycott these days is of a hardware supply store for not supporting a reality show. That is the American Muslim punk baptism right there.

In America, being Muslim is an act of defiance. That’s punk. But what does it mean in a Muslim province with partial shahria law? If punk is relative to your environment, and the establishment is staunchly Islamic, does that act of being an anti-establishment punk push you further away from faith?

Read the rest of the post at the Taqwacore Webzine!

Love For All the World to See

2011-12-14T13:39:00.000-08:00

I didn't write it to make a political statement. I didn't make it to educate the masses. I didn't write it to provide a counternarrative to the mainstream.

I wrote it because it was a whirlwind of a romance, a once in a life culmination of everything I had passion for all rolled into the most amazing love. I was on a journey to incorporate it as a value into everything I did, and somehow I had achieved it. And I wrote it for myself because I wanted to remember it for myself. A year later, I was asked to contribute to an anthology which would have a collection of stories that were "the secret love lives of Muslim women." So I decided to share it for the anthology. Published by Soft Skull Press, the book titled "Love, Inshallah" is an anthology of 25 non-fiction narratives about love written by Muslim women. These are the secret stories, the ones that are real, magical, and humanizing. The book hits the shelves on January 24, 2012 - but you can pre-order your copy from Amazon right now. I am proud to be sharing the pages with 24 other women on such a lovingly demystifying project. I am also scared shitless.

Love is a scary thing to write about publically for a political activist and community organizer. Our words are our tools to create change, to advocate on issues and to create a community counter-narrative. Our words are coyly messaged to pull an audience into signing a petition, win sympathy on an issue or to reframe a dialogue. Writing about love - well that's a woman at her most vulnerable. People who play in politics, and especially women who are fighting for a place at the table, are not allowed to be vulnerable, right?

Then you add the intersection of being Muslim. Currently there is a campaign against Lowe's for pulling ad space from supporting the reality show "All-American Muslim." The characters are boring and normal - folding clothes, playing football, getting married. And there are all kinds of Muslims - hijab-ed, tattooed, club owners and coaches. Yet by virtue of the characters sharing their lives, it has turned into a political statement. Being a Muslim in America is a political statement. One doesn't even have to do anything. Just stand there, and you are making a statement.

So yes, I have reasons to be scared shitless. This book has the potential to be catalyzed into being a political statement. Orthodox Muslims will consider it shameful and a poor portrayal of educating the masses to what happens to Muslim women behind the veil. It'll be heralded by academics as a counternarrative collection of marginalized Muslim lives. Islamophobes will say that we are performing "taaqiya" with the stories being told, and the Florida Family Association will be upset that there are no jihadi extremist stories reflected in the pages, thus being deceitful. The sharing of my brief love affair will be considered an act of political defiance.

But in the end it is a love story. And we all deserve to be loved and to give love. May this book be a reminder to all other Muslim girls out there in their confused and hyphenated selves that they too deserve to be loved and to give love, proudly and shamelessly, no matter how gloriously complicatedly messy it may be. May this book be a love letter to them.

Eye Contact Compact

2011-12-08T12:44:00.001-08:00

I hold the hand held broken compact mirror up to my eye, so close that only one eye fits to reflect back. The whites of my eyes looked aged, brown spots and red veins creeping. I turn my head, move my eyes, to see other discolorations on my eye ball I may have missed, the softness outlining brown iris. Soft small wrinkles frame the corners, long black eye lashes shade from above. The bags below my eyes are now permanent, soft, tendered, discolored, just like my Nani's and Ammu's were.

I stare hard at my one eye. Did her eyes look like mine? I remember they were lighter, mocha colored eyes and mine were deeper, espresso-like. But did they look like mine, otherwise? When did the brown spots and creeping veins appear in her eyes? When did the softness outlining her brown iris blur? When did her eyes get lighter? When did the soft lines turn hard? When did she stop seeing herself? I blink hard, hoping that when open, it'll be her eye that stared back. It was just mine, squinting back.

The mirror was unhinged and the gold colored metal on the back was rubbed off till it was silver. It was the compact mirror Mom had carried in her purse for years. I had bought it for her the summer I went to Paris from a streetside vendor when I was 18 yrs old. I was going through an impressionist phase - the front of the mirror compact had a Degas field of blurry flowers. I couldn't afford much at 18 yrs old, but this I could afford. She carried it in her purse ever since that summer. On her breaks at work, she used it to pluck her eye brows or to apply her Avon eyeliner. For fourteen years her eyes looked into this mirror.

I salvaged it on my last trip home. I found it under my parents' bathroom sink, on a pile of cosmetic jewelery that was intended of the thrift store. I had picked it up, remembering vaguely that this had passed through my hands first. I pocketed it immediately, without giving a second thought, keeping it close, the way I kept all her "special things" close.

What did she see when she looked into this mirror? What reflected back at her? There's a certain magic in reflection and a certain power in knowing that this compact is what Mom looked into for fourteen years of her life. Looking at a mirror is vulnerable, stark, revealing. It's making eye contact with yourself when no one else will. She once told me that she stopped seeing herself when she looked in the mirror - she said it was like she was looking at someone else. So what did she then, when she looked in this mirror? Who did she see? Was her essence captured in the reflection? Did she leave a piece of herself behind in this mirror?

When did we stop making eye contact? Can I save it, is it to late? I'm looking for her, I'm looking and seeking. But when I look at the reflection, I just see my sad eye looking back at me. Can she see me? Wherever she is, can she see?

Six.

2011-12-02T13:28:00.001-08:00

Six months.
If I was in a relationship, this is the moment where we'd have "the talk."
If I was pregnant, this is the moment I'd be showing and people would rub my belly.
If I had a job, this is the moment when I'd finally feel like I was getting the groove at work.
If I was in school, this is the moment I'd stop feeling like the new kid.

Six months.
This is supposedly when the grieving period is over.
This is supposedly when people have moved on with their lives.
This is supposedly when the tears are not supposed to brim instantaneously, spontaneously.
This is supposedly when she's supposed to fade away from appearing.
This is supposedly when all life insurance money should have been received.
This is supposedly when the guilt should have receded.

Six months.
I can't remember anything that happened before six months ago.
It's as if my memory slate was wiped clean.
But strangely enough, the past six months have been a blur.
How I got here to this day completely confounds me.
These months have moved like maple syrup and a shutter click.
It moved so slow, but here I am.
Six months.
But it feels like it was just yesterday.

Mom's Cooking

2011-12-01T21:13:00.000-08:00

Ever since she died, I am drawn to the kitchen. I was never one to cook really. I’d have my signature dish of Paula Dean’s couscous salad, or the chicken pakoras (which is just fried chicken that was dipped in chick pea powder instead of flour), but I never really explored beyond that. If I wanted that kind of cooking, the big Bengali dinner, I could just go home for Mom’s home cooked meal.
But I can’t anymore.

I can’t see her. I can’t hear her. And even in my dreams, when she appears it is fleeting and not strong enough to stay remembered. I can’t even write about her. The words choke in my throat before they can make it to fingertips. So the kitchen draws me. I think maybe, if I can make that dish of hers, then somehow it’ll be like she never left.

I went to India with my Mom and Khala when my Nani died. I bought my Mom’s plane ticket. We spent the three weeks after the funeral hanging out in the house, cleaning through her things, watching Bengali soap operas. Mom spent a lot of the time sleeping. My grandparents had a “khagar lohk,” a guy that stayed at the house and cooked all the food. Rahul was only a couple of years younger than me, a guy that came from Asam to Delhi to work in the “embassy” household. My Nani would always scold him, in that way that cantankerous old people do. But he watched diligently and learned how to cook all of my Nani’s dishes. As far as I can remember, Nani was always in the kitchen with Rahul, not really ever trusting him to prepare the dish alone in there. After she died, for those three weeks we were there, Rahul cooked every one of my Nani’s signature dishes. Each meal - breakfast, lunch, tea time and dinner – was an elaborate showcase of the skills he had learned under my Nani’s tutelage. Rahul would take his bike across Delhi searching for the perfect maghur mach, data shag and the most colorful vegetables.

With each bite, my Mom would get so excited. “This is just the way Nani used to make it! I can’t believe it,” she’d exclaim. I know now that it wasn’t just a form of grieving that Rahul was sharing, he was giving my Mom a gift, what little he could, by sharing what Nani had shared with him. Sharing a legacy.

I sit here in my living room, the smell of beef curry pouring out of my kitchen. I’m skeptical that it won’t tastes like Mom’s and I know it won’t. Every ten minutes I go to the kitchen and lift up the pot lid to give it a skeptical look. I find that I spend hours where I should be working but instead I’m scouring the internet for Bengali recipes, hoping to find anything that resembles something that she would have made in her kitchen. Near the end of her life, she was tired and sad. She stopped cooking with joy and relied on the yellow boxes of pre-mixed spices from the Indian store’s shelves. But the Mom that I remember, the one that was vibrant and alive, she loved to cook. And she refused to use “garam masala” and “curry powder” and coriander powder. She rarely toasted her spices, and definitely never ground them. And she put fresh dohnia – coriander leaves – in everything. She’d make shaag which was just another term for “greens”. But her greens always came out right, even though she just sautéed in oil, garlic and onions. Whenever I try to do it, it never tastes the same.

Tears welled up as I chopped the onions, ginger and garlic. Why did I not ever learn how to cook the basic beef thokeri from her? I had watched her countless of times chopping meat in the kitchen – but never learned because I was so insistent on cooking simple and healthy meals. I could make a great salad. Traditional Bengali food was drowned in oil. But, here I was, with two pounds of halal beef defrosting and a recipe off the internet to guide me. It didn’t even sound Bengali – it sounded Indian. It wanted me to grind the spices in a spice grinder. I’d never seen Mom cook with a spice grinder and had no clue where to even look for one.

When Mom was alive, I used to call her for recipes as I was in the kitchen. “I want to make your salmon stew! What should I do?” I’d ask. She’d walk me through the process in a very casual manner. “It’s very simple! You get some onions, fry them in a pot. Throw in some fish, and some turmeric and that’s it!” she’d say. “But how much?” “You know, some. Measure it with your eyes. Andagi khorah,” she’d say to my frustration. Andagi is just another way of saying intuition, but having never cooked this dish, I had no trained intuition for the dish. So now I have a cupboard full of Desi spices and no andagi to go with it.

It has been 2.5 years since Nani died and .5 years since Mom died. And all I could think about as I chopped was how jealous I was that Mom had Rahul to cook for her. Jealous because here I was all by myself in my Oakland apartment trying to piece together some resemblance of what Mom used to cook for me. I wished so desperately that I could call her, to ask her what I was supposed to do next in the recipe because I was certain, so certain that I was doing it wrong.

So I called my Khala instead, who’s personality was more precise than Mom's. She walked me through step by step, ¼ teaspoon of this, ½ teaspoon of that. Yet still, I looked skeptically on as I watched the spices get thrown on the spattering oil.

The beef is done now, having simmered over the writing of this entry. I almost don’t even want to eat it, sadness having engulfed my appetite. It’s almost as if I wanted to cook just to fill the house with aromas that reminded me of Mom and that’s it. But I know I will, poured over the rice made in a bag. And it won’t taste like Mom’s. But maybe, it’ll be close. Maybe she’s watching me and maybe she’ll be guiding me. And maybe, just maybe it will be close. Maybe she’ll be close.

21. Let Time Stand Still

2011-08-25T15:19:00.000-07:00

Pause.
Stop.
Wait.
This can't be my truth, can it?

.......... "Take it back!" I sob into the phone. "Take it back!"

Wandering lost and aimless
In the home I grew up in.
Mind like a seive
Unable to latch onto much of anything.

.......... "Take it back! You didn't mean it! She's fine!"

In this time pass
Time stands still in perpetuity
Denial of time from doing what it does best -
ticking forward.

.......... "She was just sick! The doctors are going to fix her! TAKE IT BACK!" I screamed.

Life spins around me
But I can't seem to catch onto it
Lost in myself.
I pause, not knowing what I started
I start, not remembering why.

........... "Please, take it back. This can't be real. Pleasepleaseplease take it back...."

My truth has changed.
The ulitmate universal paradigm shift.
An explosion so big,
My world's axis tilted,
Just a bit.

........... "Take it back...." I cry into the phone, even after I hear her hang up.

Minutes pass. Hours pass. Days pass.
Months pass. MONTHS.
Time stands still.

Pause.
Stop.
Wait.
Let it be still for only a moment
Before my world exploded.

........... I sob into dial tone, screaming at an empty phone.

20. Come Back

2011-08-24T14:52:00.000-07:00

Portishead snakes through morning mist
Dreams disappear into the sunlit cracks in the blinds
And into the beyond
Before memory grasps.

How then will I know if she was here?

19. Where Are You Now?

2011-08-23T16:27:00.000-07:00

Does that make her a ghost?
Or is she just gone?

18. Can't Box Me

2011-08-22T16:22:00.000-07:00

Just try and see.
Next time you ask,
"What are you working on?"
I'll respond, "Sanity."

"What do you do?"
I'll respond, "Be."

"Where do you work"
I'll respond, "For me."

I cannot be defined
By the confines of such
Normative simplicity.
It's not a choice,
This unconventionality.

So please,
Quit trying to fit me
In your boxed categories.

17. Love Me Dreams

2011-08-21T11:29:00.000-07:00

It was but a mere fling,
A silly summer romance thing
Yet three years later it's suddenly him,
Who persistently enters my dreams.

I ask nightly for my mother to appear,
She's the only one I want to see and hear,
But it's been three months,
And nothing but empty dreams shrouded in tears.

But he. He vividly materializes behind closed eyes,
Comforting and loving like in our old times,
Feeling solid, absolute and genuine,
Dreams disintegrating the distance of real life.

Daily I fall asleep with anticipation,
To only be seduced by false seduction,
I wake in shocked gasps.
Alone, missing both, and lost in confusion.

16. Trust In The Story

2011-08-20T13:45:00.000-07:00

This narrative driven life
Drives me to tears
As mercury retrograde falls constant
And is constantly suppressing
My liver yang qi rising,
Inducing spinning vertigo
But where this story goes
Only Allah knows.

I need a juju remix.
A karmic restart.
A chakra realignment.
A chi redo.

This
Perpetual glitch
In my matrix
Of unexpected risks
Where the road less taken
Is not a choice and
Takes me for a ride
Is exhausting and
With no sight of the storybook ending.

They say the Ultimate storyteller
Only tells tales
That the heroine can handle
But what if she can't?
Did Ammu's death come
Because she could handle her tale no more?

Is this life cycle on recycle,
Cycling a legacy,
A repeat of legendary?
How much more can I handle
Of this fated tale?
What if survival to normal,
Is just a story of survival?
What there's no happy ending,
Just a struggle for perpetual?

15. Un/Break/Able

2011-08-19T01:02:00.000-07:00

Fragile
As if a simple touch
Could disintegrate this hollowed
Shell of bravado
Into lackluster dust.

Everything is scary
When impossible becomes reality
Shaking to the core
a gut-wrenching impervious fear
Into a lifeless mess.

Tears
On the brink of gushing
Ready for the unready
Unable to brace
For the unexpected
Any more.

I question my strength/my bravado
Because a strong woman, a brave woman,
Would never feel this breakable.

Risk averse in life.
Life averse with risk.
So what does that make me
But a scared shell of
Fragile...

14. Words Escape

2011-08-18T00:50:00.000-07:00

acrylic on canvass; Bhalou Thako

painting.

sinking.

painting.

swimming.

painting.

drowning.

finger painting.

strokes.

sweeps.

colors.

acrylics.

canvas.

brush.

painting.

surviving.

13. Haiku: On The Margins

2011-08-17T00:14:00.000-07:00

Laptop azaan sings...
Muslim outcasts pause silent.
Tears well. Iftar time.

12. Haiku: This Year

2011-08-15T23:15:00.000-07:00

If every action
Has opposite reaction
This better be good.

11. Gasp

2011-08-14T18:36:00.000-07:00

That feeling where I get an urge
to pick up the phone to call her
Because it just feels like I should
Call her to talk to her...

It's not that feeling but the
Feeling immediately after
When I remember that she's
Not there to call anymore.

Like a punch to the gut
Every. Time.
Every. Day.

10. Forgotten

2011-08-13T17:42:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I forget the tragedy of 'what is'
Is overshadowed by the tragedy of what was.

Sometimes I forget that she's freer now, happier now,
Is better than the weight of sadness she had been trapped in.

Sometimes I forget that I loved her,
Doesn't have an end date and that I will always love her.

Sometimes I forget.
But it hurts to remember.

9. Haiku: Losing Time

2011-08-12T23:42:00.000-07:00

Where does my time go,
Spending all my time alone?
Muse in vertigo.

8. Fevered Missing

2011-08-11T22:53:00.000-07:00

When I was sick as a toddler,
You'd rub Vicks on my chest,
And run a brush through my hair.

When I was sick as a child,
You'd put ice in a bag wrapped in a towel,
And put it on my forehead till the fever broke.

When I was 18 yrs old with a lump in my breast,
You held my hand through the examination,
And were there when I woke up up groggy from surgery.

And when I was sick as an adult,
I'd call you with my symptoms,
And you'd give over the phone anxious ridden medicine suggestions.

And when you got sick,
Which you never did,
But this time you did.
I wasn't there to take care of you.
And you left.
I never got the chance to try to save you,
To take care of you the way you took care of me.

And now I'm feverish and sick.
And all I want to do is to call you and tell me it will all be okay.
But I can't.
And I don't know how I will ever be well again,
Without you by my side.

7. My Heart Sings

2011-08-10T18:02:00.000-07:00

If music is haraam,
Then why does listening to azaan make my heart sing?
If it isn't halal,
Then why does it sound like a chorus when we say "ameen"?

Suras are sung through recited lips,
Finger tips dancing on Arabic script,
Thosbee beads going click, click, click.

Lines are made lyrical
Creating a treble to make veins tremble,
A bass to make breath breathless,
A shiver to center to let nur enter,
Words so temptress,
It makes soul music jealous.

Or maybe it's just the pages of the Qur'an,
Are music sheets for the soul
Striking like the bangs of a dhol,
True blues in the raw,
Where faith love is law and
Angel wings beat to a tempo
Of musical manifesto.
So...

If music is truly haraam,
Then heart beats would turn to rock,
Veins frozen into ice blocks,
Rhythm of life would stop,

Faith wouldn't resonate.
Soul would be sedate.

In my truth,
Faith
Is sung
With love.

6. Haiku: Retreat

2011-08-06T23:05:00.000-07:00

The fire licks hot
Sparking inspiration tides
Crashing heat on all.

5. Haiku: Impossible Existence

2011-08-05T01:14:00.000-07:00

How is it possible
That all that exists of you
Are my memories?

4. Dua

2011-08-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

Say Ameen -
...and wish for the chance of an angel's synchronized breath.
Say Ameen -
...hoping for nur to fill ruh when the angels come to her death.
Say Ameen -
...may all of my prayers bring her soul peace and rest.
Say Ameen -
... may angels guide her to jannah to fill her with bliss.

Ameen.

3. Haikus: You a Slave to the Pages of My Song Book

2011-08-03T11:28:00.000-07:00

a.
Tattered edged song book
Sits idle in a mother tongue
No longer mine.

b.
Harmoniously
Over harmonium breath
Tagore brought to life.

c.
Lyricized pages
Falls like blue-inked paper rain,
Earth bound no longer.

2. Ameen.

2011-08-02T12:30:00.000-07:00

I miss you,
Ameen.
I love you,
Ameen.
I'm praying for you,
Ameen.
Let the angels provide you comfort,
Ameen.
Oh Allah, have mercy,
Take care of Ammu for me,
Ameen.
Ameen.

Rabbir Hum Hooma Kama Rabba Yani Sahirah,
Ameen.
Ameen.
Ameen.

1. Ramadan Eve

2011-08-01T10:56:00.000-07:00

Lost in tangled tides,
Magnetic field flies,
My needle spins wildly out of control,
Counter/
Clockwise,
No one way to go.
She was my compass
Pointing me due North,
No -
Make that due Northeast
In the direction of the Kaabah
She was my guiding star to Allah.

She, who taught me how to bow to the Almighty,
She, whose love was a million tawafs around my soul,
She, whose actions were my reminders of faith above all else.

Her teachings formed remembrance of "la ilaha illallah" on my lip,
Innately, incessantly, thoughtlessly,
My muscles remembered these words,
Whispered them in a drone,
As we buried her into the ground,
Her face tilted northeast,
Remembering nothing else no more.

And now it is Ramadan Eve,
Or is it?
Because the sighting of the New Moon dictates when the month of fasting begins,
But in my universe the almighty new moon sighter was my mother,
Something having to do with looking at the sky through a cheesecloth,
Something to do with the moon's double halo,
Something that said that the moon was indeed new.
Till now...
So now how...?

I loved her.
I LOVE her.
I loved her before I even knew what love was
I loved her before my heart knew how to beat,
When her blood was my blood and
Her love sparked my life.
She was the first love. Of my life.
And more than anything, till her dying day,
-- I can say that now, she has an actual dying day --
I just wanted her to love herself as much as
I loved her.

The new moon has been sighted,
The holy month has started,
And in the morning Muslims will rise,
They'll pray.
They'll do good deeds.
They'll begin fasting from food and water.

But my Ramadan started two months ago, exactly.
My new moon came with a late night call.
Because the ultimate fast,
The most difficult sacrifice,
Is to live a life without your mother in it.
A fast from your guiding light.

I've never prayed so much and so hard in my life.

How do I find my way now?

Poetry A Day fo Ramadan

2011-07-31T19:53:00.000-07:00

Ramadan is upon us. And this Ramadan I'm challenging myself to write one poem a day. I don't usually share my personal writing on this site - but since I'm partaking in the Ramadan poetry challenge with a few other people, I'm going to do it in this space.

It's been a while since I've written - because every time I begin to want to write, I choke up with tears and fear. So, I'm allowing myself to stumble through this poetry a day exercise, and allowing myself to write poems whether good or bad. Just as long as I write. So please bear with me through the bad poetry - hopefully there will be a few gems that come through.

Join me. Write a poem a day. No rules. Just write. For the month of Ramadan. Share the link in the comments.

Ramadan Kareem.

Desi History Personalized at BASS

2011-07-27T19:03:00.000-07:00

This past weekend 16 Desi youth gathered together for a four day camp in Oakland, CA for a once in a lifetime experience - to attend the Bay Area Solidarity Summer. Created out out of a volunteer collective of like-minded South Asian Bay Area based organizers, the idea was to create a camp for youth that we wish we would have had when we were teens. A place were youth could get educated on progressive South Asian American issues, develop a framework on how to intersect these issues with anti-oppression frameworks, and to learn about the legacy of South Asian activism that brought us to this point in history. Most importantly, we wanted to provide a space where youth could feel safe, supported, and inspired to live life with a purpose. We wanted to spark them, to activate them. And to spread that energy in the world.

The camp is over. And it went off without a hitch, even better than any of the organizers could have ever expected. Not only was the camp rich with knowledge - it was also rich with love and inspiration. It was absolutely unbelievable to see how the camp manifested from an idea into reality.

As an organizer, the most exciting workshop for me included incorporating my Tumblr site, Mutinous MindState, to demonstrate the vibrant history and legacy in our community. The curriculum went like this:

On the first day, at the end of the Personal Storytelling workshop, the youth participants create an image that marked a pivotal moment in their lives, a moment that made them want to be an activist. After they created the image, they had to place the image on the Master Timeline.
Next, the participants were split into two. One group was given 45 images reflecting South Asian American history, largely with a focus on the California. Almost all of the images can be found on the website Mutinous MindState already. The other group was given a stack of short summaries that corresponded with each of the image. The two groups had to find the image that corresponded with the summary, and tape it. After matching the images, they had to stick it up on the Master Timeline.
The organizers walked through the timeline with them, while explaining the history of South Asians in America and the significances of the images.
The participants then had to create an image from their future, something reflecting what They hope to do, and stick it up on the "future" portion of the timeline.
The timeline remained up throughout the camp and each of the participants were invited to add to the timeline if there was an event that was missed.
On the last day of the camp, as a part of the closing session - each participant and organizer was invited to grab an image off the timeline to take home. During the closing circle, each person held up their image and explained why they were taking that image back.

In my wildest dreams, I couldn't have imagined having such a spectacular product come out of this bizarre idea to create this Mutinous Mindstate tumblr. I'm so grateful that this site exists (I know, I know, I created it, but still!) because it made creating this workshop that much easier. I'm a firm believer on the intersection of arts and images with every aspect of activism and as a tool of learning. Can't wait to see how this can expand to be even greater. Can't wait to see how to improve on this for BASS 2012.

Grateful.

If you are an educator and would like to learn more about the curriculum used or to bring the workshop to your youth, please feel free to hit me up at tazzystar [at] gmail.com

Grateful for Community

2011-07-11T00:38:00.000-07:00

I played with the carpet as I sat in the hot upstairs area of the women's section of the mosque. It was Ammu's Choleesha, the prayer marking forty days since mom's death and even though the imam was reading Sura Ya'sin, I couldn't focus on the words. All I kept thinking about was how much I wanted to read out loud the speech that I had spent all night working on to everyone in attendance. There were about 250 people that had come to the mosque to recite prayer on behalf of Ammu and even though Choleesha prayers were more cultural than Islamic ritual, I was scared that some how I wouldn't be given the space to speak.

I was scared because in Islam, I felt like I was always fighting for a voice. It was often my own Ammu that would have to yell at the other Aunties in the mosque to be quiet so that should could listen to the sermon or made sure that women were inclusive in the programs that the community eventually created. But Mom wasn't here anymore. I worried because on the day of Ammu's Kulkani, the special prayer three days after someone dies, we held it at a smaller mosque. They wanted to shove the women into a back corner, away from the actual prayers. I refused. Despite what the Imam said, I insisted that we pray in the section next to the men - that Mom was not just a woman, but she was a mother with daughters. We wanted to pray too. And that woman deserved to be up front too. It was that fight I kept replaying as I played with the threads of the carpet waiting for the imam's speech to be done.

When it seemed like it was close to finishing, I hovered in the lobby of the mosque, and insisted my sisters come with me. After dua was given, the imam's called Abbu to the mic. And he in turn called me to the front of the men's section."My daughter wants to say something," he said. With my sisters in tow, we walked right up front, next to the Imam and the podium.Abbu handed me the mic and sat down at the carpet by our feet.

I opened my typed paper, clenched in my hand. My hand shook as I held it up. "Salamalaikum" I said into the mic, the words echoing hollowly. Murmurs of responses. "I wanted to thank everyone for coming - " I read off the paper and abruptly choked. Tears were already welling up and keeping my words down. I couldn't believe it - I hadn't even started. "This is going to be more difficult than I thought... " I mumbled into the mic. I took a deep breath and tried again.

As I read through my speech, the tears tumbled down my face and I fought through the catching in my throat. I was shaking so much that I couldn't read what I had written - luckily my sister was there and halfway through, she grabbed the paper to hold it as I read. I wasn't nervous, nor was I embarrassed about crying - by this point, everyone in this room had seen me cry endlessly through the funeral process. I have no shame about my tears - I truly believe if people cried and laughed more, the world would be a much better place. In reality, I was just overcome with emotions, and a need to be heard by the people I knew were in the room. I needed them to know how thankful I was, how I wanted them to remember Ammu. This is what I said:

Thank you for coming.

For the past forty days, I’ve been thinking about Ammu’s life. At the age of 23 in 1978 she got married to Abbu, without having even looked at him before the wedding day. Quickly she moved around the world to California to be with her husband, and for opportunities for her unborn children. She left her parents and sisters in Bangladesh for a new American life with her new family in the US.

Many of you have similar stories. Many of you immigrated to this country at a young age for the pursuit of a better future, and left your family behind in Bangladesh. Sometimes, you visit once a year, sometimes even less. Family was divided by oceans and continents, but you did it for an opportunity. And here in your new home, you created a new family, a new community.

When Ammu died on June 2nd in such an abrupt and shocking way, it was this Bengali community that came together to show our family support. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do because after all, I always turned to my mother when I had questions about culture or customs. How were we supposed to prepare the body? What prayers had to be said? What were we supposed to do? But it was the local Bengali community that came together rapidly. They split the Quran so each family read a section; they told us what to say as we read the thosbees; they gave us comfort when we prayed. It’s this new family that came together to make sure the proper things were done – and for that Abbu, my sisters, my aunts, my Nana and myself... and even Ammu, who is probably here watching today – we are eternally grateful.

As many of you know, my Nani passed away 2 1/2 years ago. I went with my Ammu to India to bury my Nani, and it is with extreme sadness that only 2 1/2 years later Ammu is joining Nani. At my Nani’s Choleesha, the imam said,

“When a person dies all of her work will stop except for a few things. The knowledge she has and spread on to other people will continue. Her thoughts, this knowledge - it will live on in the people that have learned from it…”

As many of you know, I’ve been involved in politics for some time. But what you probably don’t know is that it stems from a need to make the world a better place – and this is something that I learned from Islam. And something you also probably don’t know is that Mom’s struggle for belonging and acceptance as a Muslim American was my inspiration for being an activist. When she told me she didn’t feel like a citizen, it motivated me to do something about it, to make the world a better place for my family and for my community. Even though Ammu may not be around anymore, she will continue to be my inspiration to fight for what’s right. She was a loving, generous soul, and she gave more than she could have, should have. She was loving, she was pious, she was smart, she was independent, she was tough, she was brave and she made sacrifices to see her children succeed in life. She was the glue that kept the family together.

For me, her life, her love, her intelligence, her faith, her bravery and her tenacity are the legacy she leaves behind. I ask that you too, please keep Ammu in your prayers. And keep her memory and legacy alive through remembering her life by being loving, brave, pious and tenacious. Have her memory inspire you to keep persevering and to keep faithful. Please learn from this, be inspired by this, and carry it forward. May Allah reward you in the afterlife and give us strength to get through this.

There was silence after I finished. It's not customary to applaud speeches in a mosque, but all the same, I wasn't quite sure how to make an exit. I stood there unsure of what to do. And then I heard the Imam, who was sitting at the podium to my right say out loud, "Ameen." There was a murmur of Ameen's that echoed over the room, myself included. I breathed a sigh of relief, handed the mic to my father who was going to give a few words, and walked to the side of the mosque with my sisters in tow, all of us grief stricken, but some what in peace.

I gave a khutbha in front of the men's section of my mother's choleesha and it ended with "ameen." Allhamdullilah. Mom would be proud, I think.

Close Your Eyes, Ameen.

2011-07-09T18:51:00.001-07:00

It's been forty days since my mother passed.

Can it be? Forty days already? Forty days since I got the late night dreaded phone call where my cousin told me she didn't make it? Forty nights since screaming into the phone for her to take it back? Forty world spins since my world stopped revolving, since living became a task, and the task of living became the biggest burden in this world? Has it been forty days, really?

Nothing is scarier than this feeling. I could be abducted by aliens, I could be attacked by zombies. But it would be nothing compared to how scary it feels to be in this lurch of having abruptly lost my mother.

All my life, writing has been my refuge. But in the past forty days, I haven't been able to pick up a pen. I fear, that this dreaded frightening gut wrench, this feeling of my world being rocked, of being truly scared... is going to be normal if I write it. That writing will somehow make me complacent and this will become reality. That a life without my mother is reality. I don't want this to be normal. This cannot be normal. My mom was my life. She was my glue. She kept this family together. She was the only person I could ever count on. She was the reason why I lived. She was my inspiration. She was my story. She was my first love, my biggest and grandest love. She gave me life. She was my life. She was taken away from me tragically too soon. I wasn't ready.

I didn't tell her I loved her when we said good bye on the phone last time we talked. She always ends each call with "I love you." And I begrudgingly would respond, "Love you too." But I didn't on this last call because she was sick, and not making sense, and I had made her hand off the phone to my sister. The last call I ironically made because I was sad over a friend's death, a call I wanted to make because I was sad and I wanted to be close to her. Little did I know that this friend's death was Allah's foreshadowing.

There are a few images that keep replaying in my mind, every time I close my eyes. I keep replaying the sound of my little sister's voice over the phone from that night - from the moment she called to say that they had taken her to the ER for what they thought was dehydration, to the absolute fear in her voice when she said that it was a code blue. I replay the sound of choking on my own tears as I lay in bed waiting for the morning's flight back to Los Angeles. I replay how I started sobbing when I turned my phone when my plane landed, and I saw all these text messages, tweets and FB posts, and how unashamed the tears fell as I made my way through the airport. I replay sitting outside with my sisters at Maghrib as they told me the story of Mom's last few days of being sick and how she died - I was hyperventilating, hand over mouth, tears dripping - and all I could think about was how brave my sisters were, how proud I was of them - that feeling I keep replaying. I replay the shock my hands felt when I touched my mom's head, and felt the weight of it as I dried her hair in the washroom, her body cold, her hair, her head so real. I replay placing the hijab on her head, tucking her hair in just so, as we wrapped her in white cotton. I replay being in the mosque and sitting vigil next to Mom's body as women came through to view, and right before jummah prayers, I replay tenderly tying covering my mom's face with cotton, my tears falling, hands shaking, unable to see the knot I was tying. I replay when my dad came to the room with the viewing, and he whispered a sura and blew on her face, hand waving the sura closer. I replay standing for my mother's janaza, peering down through the window to her body cloaked in a green cloth coffin in front of the men's section of the mosque, sobbing uncontrollably, unable to remember any of the suras that were supposed to be coming out of my mouth. I replay standing between my sisters, as we watched Mom get carried into the grave and how we kept repeating into a drone, "Laillahinlala" the words running into each other into a single sound. I replay standing next to my mother's childhood best friend, as she stood at the head of the finished grave and recited Sura Ya'sin out of her little hand held Quran, just me and her standing vigil as people left the graveyard - and feeling serenity and peace for the first time in a long while. I replay sitting next to my sisters at the head of Mom's grave right before leaving, and whispering to her that the death angels were going to come after we left and to be sure to answer their questions correctly. I replay how with desperation I clicked through the beads on the thosbees, desperately wishing I was more pious and more Muslim so that I could do my mother's death right. I replay talking to my Nana, telling him that I was so sorry that we couldn't save his daughter. I replay crying as we gave duas. I replay crying as I gave duas, every dua.

And I replay maghrib time. Because as desperately I want to feel her, see her, have her come to my dreams - she can't, she hasn't. And Maghrib time is the closest I've ever felt to having her present. And I miss her so so desperately. I never got to say good-bye. But when the sky is pink, and suras spills surreptitiously and easily from pious lips, and the summer wind blows, I like to think it's her that I feel.

But the biggest thing I keep replaying in my head is the sound of her voice and how she asked in the past year, "Are you still writing? You should."

But how? What am I supposed to take from this? How do I give voice to this? How?

+++++

The charity we chose where people could give funds in my mother's memory was South Asian Network. Based in Artesia, SAN provides services to the South Asian community in Southern California. The following is an excerpt of a letter I wrote the Executive Director a couple of weeks ago.

Mom moved over to the US when she got married to my Dad in 1978. I was born soon after in 1979. She had high hopes of getting a masters degree, but she got pregnant and ended up raising a family instead. She still continued to take classes whenever she could at local community colleges. My Dad is an engineer, but struggled with jobs, going from job to job. We traveled the world as he job hopped, even making it to Saudi Arabia for a couple of years. They performed pilgrimage there.

In 1994 we moved back to California - my dad continued to struggle job hunting. To keep her daughters with healthcare, Mom worked a Teamster job at the airport parking lot as an attendee. She loved the people she worked with and was an active member in the union. When she died it had been 15 years she worked there. My Dad eventually went to work at Home Depot in 2004, he is there now. I have two younger sisters, 25 and 27. They both live at home and are struggling to find a job. The middle one has chronic asthma. The house is payed for, but my mother's life hasn't been the easiest financially in the past few years. She did everything she could to make the lives of her daughters easy and devoted herself to Islam, her garden and knitting.

At first when I was thinking of what organization to choose, I was thinking about any group that served the Muslim women community. But then I remembered how I would bring Mom to SAN events. My parents at first didn't really understand why I did what I did - they saw it as a hobby. So anytime there was a SAN town hall forum I would bring my Mom along, because I wanted her to be involved and understand why I did what I did. I wanted to her to see I was doing this work for people like her, families like ours. She started listening to NPR, reading my The Atlantic magazine and we'd exchange Desi & activism books. And she always enjoyed the SAN townhalls, I think. I don't know if she did it just to humor me or if she genuinely enjoyed it, but SAN was an organization she respected and participated in. And for me, your organization allowed me to share my activism with my Mom in a meaningful way when she was alive. And that to me now, without her here anymore, means the world to me.

My mom in life has always been my inspiration - it was her comment right after 9/11 when she talked about feeling like a second class citizen for being a Muslim American that led me to start SAAVY. As I went through gaining knowledge in this field, I starting seeing public policy disparities and -isms and -phobias in every aspect to how my immediate family lived their lives, as Bangladeshi Muslim blue-collared Americans. And I guess now, Mom will continue to be my inspiration as I try to figure out how to keep fighting for social justice of marginalized brown and Muslim people. I'm going to try to live her legacy.

I just wanted to share this with you, because I wanted SAN to be able to live her legacy too. I'd really like it if you as an organization can continue to be a voice for women like her.

I have been overwhelmed by the love in the activist/Muslim/Bengali/Brown/virtual/Taqwacore community and generous support coming from all corners. I couldn't have gotten through these few weeks if it hadn't been for the outpouring of love from the community; our family wouldn't have been able to survive had community not been there to catch us when we fell. As an activist, it was my mother's voice that provided me the inspiration to do what I do - and it's because of this community that I've been able to do what I do. Mom is love. Community is love. Social justice is love. Be inspiration and be inspired. Fight for what's right. Live legacy. Love life. Live life.

Ameen. Ameen. Ameen.

I Am Haram

2011-05-31T00:44:00.000-07:00

The Gaza Stripper passed away this weekend.

I met her through Taqwacore.

I wrote a poem to her.

We all struggle with our own personal jihads,
She just chose to wear hers inked into skin as her sleeve,
That brave contradiction is to be admired/aspired.

We are all haramis,
struggling searching for taqwa
and seeking to live judiciously.
But she did it with balls out bravado.

This kind of mythology can only be written by the Almighty himself.
The punk with “I Am Haram” emblazoned in Arabic across her chest.
The sometimes hijab wearing pole dancer who danced to The Kominas music.
The pierced Arabic language studies student.
The burka-ed bride at an Ashura themed fake blood soaked lesbian wedding.
The Palestinian meets Israeli meets American meets adoptee meets mother.
Crazy how self-created mythology can fold in on itself.

She was more Jehangir than anyone else in Taqwacore could ever be.
She was taqwa to the core before Taqwacore was even a term.
That’s the sign to a true Taqwacore – someone who doesn’t wait for others to define them.
Fists out, they jump into the pit of life to duke it out for themselves. Self-define.

To jannah you go, our young pious rebel,
Our tragic heroine with the untimely death.
May we all carry the light of your legacy in our lives.

If I’ve learned anything from you it is this -
don’t wait till tomorrow for the next tattoo.
Get it now.
Live life. Now.
Love recklessly. Now.

To read the rest of the post, please visit the Taqwacore Webzine. Photo courtesy of Kim Badawi.

Civic Engagement in Practice on Prezi

2011-05-22T16:11:00.001-07:00

I gave a presentation this past weekend to this year's New Leaders Council fellowship program in San Francisco. Ironically, I had also applied for this fellowship and did not get accepted. I was thus pleasantly surprised when I was invited to give a talk this year's fellowship class. I was asked to share my experiences in civic engagement and some best practices I've learned along the way.

Since I myself hate being talked at, I also hate giving presentations where I'm asked to talk at people. So, I developed a Prezi.com presentation for this weekend's talk. It's my first time using Prezi, and I'm now a HUGE fan of it (except for the minor fact it is slow to use on my Asus). Here it is!

Civic Engagement in Practice on Prezi

The great thing is if I ever get invited to share my experiences again, I can use the same presentation, and just tweak the path, depending on their needs. I will totally be using Prezi for a panel presentation I'm giving at Netroots Nation next month now. Enjoy!

Mutinous Mindstate

2011-03-22T23:24:00.000-07:00

I've been a obsessing. Absolutely obsessing. At first I was obsessing over graffiti. Then I started obsessing over stencils. But most recently, what I can't get out of my head is political poster art. Mainly because in all my years of being a political organizer and having to create flyers and posters for events, it just never really crossed my mind that it was a form of art. But here I am ten years into political organizing, and I wonder, what ever happened to those pieces of art?

And then I started thinking - what about the stickers? The t-shirts? the 3-fold flyers? The album covers? What about all these images of art make it political? And I started thinking, what about Desi diaspora political art? How many desi diaspora political posters can there actually be?

And then I remembered this story. About how in 1970 when my dad first immigrated to Los Angeles, he was part of the new Bangladeshi community. Bangladesh had just started fighting their revolution and was suffering a great drought. And my dad and his community screened a movie at UCLA that had documented the struggles in Bangladesh.They raised money and collected medicine to ship to Bangladesh. And I started thinking...what ever happened to those flyers?

As Desi Americans, we have political posters/flyers/materials out there - but where are they???

Like I said, OBSESSED.

So I did what any internet savvy (saavy!) woman would do in this situation. I started a Tumblr site.

From scouring online political poster galleries, to scouring images on Sepia Mutiny, to googling key parts to South Asian history. I collected images. At first, I just wanted a political poster site. But then I realized I should expand to Desi musician tour poster too. And then there were some poster images from South Asia directly, not diaspora. And what about stickers? Or book covers?

So.

Here I am. Curating a site with images of the Desi Political Diaspora. Primarily it will be created art, and American focused. And something about the image has to be political, whether explicit or implicit. I'm probably going to hit a ceiling soon - but I'm pretty sure I have images to last for the next month.

And of course. When I tweeted about my obsession, it was DJ Rekha, THE DJ REKHA, that sent me my first image - a Pardon My Hindi design of Bhangra vs. Bush event circa 2004. It was then that I decided that I need to collect all these images in a central location. And voila, MutinousMindstate was born. Thank you to DJ Rekha, and thank you to everyone that has given me images so far. Please continue to send more - and more importantly, if you have access to print images, scan them and send them over. Super excited about this - let the image hunt begin.

www.mutinousmindstate.tumblr.com

Top Songs for 2010

2010-12-24T20:51:00.000-08:00

In my ridiculously long drive from Oakland to L.A. this Christmas Eve, I was listening to podcasts of top music countdowns of 2010. But I hadn't heard of most of the songs on the list. How come none of the songs that I listened to were on this list?

Oh that's right. I listen to mostly brown indie artists.

So here it is. The list of my top songs for 2010. If you follow my writing, you'll recognize some of the artists as people I've written about at Sepia Mutiny or the Taqwacore Webzine.

In no particular order, Taz's Top Songs of 2010.

1. The Kominas dropped their long awaited EP this year, Escape to Blackout Beach. My favorite song on the album - High Noon.

2. Das Racist dropped two FREE albums in 2010 - Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man - tho I gotta say Shut Up, Dude has better stand-alone songs and my favorite. I gotta appreciate tho the other album - it has a clearer Das Racist style.

Das Racist - 'Fake Patois' from dallas penn on Vimeo.

3. I heard about Best Coast first through a Rockistani tweet, and since then been addicted. I love the album Crazy for You. It's so L.A.

4. I kept hearing this song everywhere I went - it was only later that discovered it was Bombay by El Guincho. By far my favorite music video this year, if not ever.

EL GUINCHO | Bombay from MGdM | Marc Gómez del Moral on Vimeo.

5. Oh wait. This may be my favorite video of 2010 - and I'm super jealous I didn't make the all star Muslim cast of characters. The Narcicyst song "Hamdulillah".

6. Ok, so I missed Rye Rye at the Fox Theatre because I had to stay to phone bank for the campaign. And then, by the time I got to the show M.I.A. put on a crappy 30 minute show. But still - I like this song, Sunshine w/ both of them.

7. I jumped on the Gogol Bordello bandwagon way too late. Way too late because I can't afford the shows. This song Immigraniada should have been the theme song for #DREAMACT. Maybe it woulda passed in 2010 then.

8. This is the perfect road trip song. Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zero. I don't even remember how I found this song, but it reminded me of my cross country road trip. Love that feeling.

9. I saw this song Gutter the week that Humble the Poet, Mandeep Sethi and Ras Ceylon created it. I love this video and love that this threesome got together.

10. I love love love Girl Talk. I am so sad I didn't know who Girl Talk was until this year. By far my favorite download is this album, amazing to dance too. Watch the break down of the mashup right here.

11. It may be the typical girlie thing to have this song play in my car, but it's 2010. And I did.

12. Sober girls acting like their drunk. Best lyric EVER.

13. BAAGI means REBEL. I heart Humble the Poet and Sikh Knowledge!

14. Dubai. Hijabis gone wild. Nuff said.

15. This was the soundtrack as I traveled around the world.

Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse feat. Julian Casablancas - Little Girl (Music Video) from m. ilker demiral on Vimeo.

16. As a Californian girl, it's almost a mandate that I love this.

17. I don't think this song has an official video, but I do love this song.

18. I hope this isn't cheating - the video came out in 2010, so it counts!

19. Everyone could use a little bit of Paki Country in their lives. With Sunny Ali and the Kid.

20. This song is the bomb and reminds me so much of Lovage. Love it.

So that does it. If you can read between the lines, you'll be able to tell a lot about what was happening in my life in 2010. But it's okay if you can't - the songs are great anyways. And great well past 2010 and into 2011. Happy New Years!

Hollywood-ification

2010-11-15T01:43:00.000-08:00

I'm back from a quick jaunt to Los Angeles where I attended The Taqwacores Motion Picture screening, twice. It was.... interesting.

Click clack went the heels of the tall Persian woman in the bright purple mini-dress. I looked at her shoes. They had the iconic red soles. Louboutins. “I can’t believe she wore those shoes to a punk movie!” I whispered to the girl I was with.

“Those are $700 shoes!” she whispered back. I couldn’t help but think how that contrasted with how broke the bands were living these days. At least the director, Eyad Zahra, had kept it real with his shoes. He was rocking the Converse with his suit.

We were at The Taqwacore premiere and it was clearly a different crowd. It was the type of crowd that as an L.A. girl, I tried to avoid. The Hollywood types. But more – it was the Hollywood Muslim have-lots-of-money types. Totally not gutterpunk types.

It didn’t really bother me until we got to the question and answer portion of the film. It was my third time watching the movie, and this time, it felt different than the first time. The movie to me was no longer a fiction, it had become reality. And in the reality of taqwacore, so much had changed in the “real scene.” Taqwacore folks were rejecting the term “taqwacore”, there was squabbling and what was once a cuddly bunch had seemingly dispersed. Or grown up. I guess. If the storyline were to parallel reality, I’d say we were at the point where the fight in the moshpit had just ended. As the credits rolled on the movie, that was all I could think about, and how none of the real punks bothered (or could afford) to show up to this screening.

As the lights came on after the show, I looked around. I was the only one rocking the colored hair. No mohawks, no punk gear, no buttons. The moderator began by saying people had walked out on the movie. they hadn’t expected it to be so “controversial” and “offensive.”
But as Eyad said later, “It’s a punk movie. If people aren’t walking out of the movie that means that it’s watered down. And then we weren’t being true to the essence of being punk. It’s a good thing.”

To read the rest of this post, please visit the Taqwacore Webzine right here!

Interview w/ Illustrious Omar Fadel

2010-11-15T01:17:00.000-08:00

I had the chance to interview Omar Fadel, composer of the movie The Taqwacores Motion Picture over at the Taqwacore Webzine. Check out an excerpt below:

In a punk book turned to movie, punk music plays a crucial role. In some ways, the music in itself is a different character. You created the score for the movie – how did you go about preparing to work on this movie? Did you read the book first? Or did you get a draft of the movie and just jump right in?
I was involved from day one. Eyad called me up after he finished reading the book and told me about this amazing story of Muslim punks. I read the book and was blown away… Aside from reading the book and watching the film over and over, the majority of my preparation was trying to think of cool sounds that would work with the film. From the very beginning Eyad and I knew that the score couldn’t sound traditional and had to use a non traditional palette of sounds and instruments.

So both The Taqwacores score AND the Taqwacores soundtrack are for sale on iTunes. Why did the production team decide to release them both?

The were several reasons why we decided on two releases rather than on one combined score/soundtrack. One reason was that we felt that some buyers would want one or the other but necessarily both score & soundtrack. And the other reason is that we wanted the listener to be able to listen to the score in it’s entirety without it being broken up by the soundtrack songs. The same idea goes for the soundtrack.

Have you always listened to punk music or was this your first foray?

Yes, I have always listened to punk, but never really played or wrote any. Operation Ivy’s self titled album and The Clash’s London Calling are in my top 20 favorite albums list.

The moshpit scene is one of the most crucial crux point in the movie – how did you choose the song that you did for it?
I believe Eyad had stumbled on the Bad Brains song early in the editing process. I never watched a rough cut of the film without that song. One thing that did change is that Eyad originally wanted the Bad Brains song to continue throughout the whole mosh pit scene. At a screening of the film with Eyad, Justin & Zach (Snap Sound, the did sound design and mixed the film), Josh (the editor) and myself, we decided that we needed to help point out what was happening to Jehangir and the how the emotion of the mosh pit changes after the fight begins with Bilal’s Boulder. So I wrote a piece of music that was mixed in with the Bad Brains song, and when the fight begins, the Bad Brains song gets lower and the score gets louder. It ended up being very effective, in great part to the amazing mix that Snap Sound did.

To read the rest of the interview with Omar, check out the Taqwacore Webzine interview HERE!

Proudly Voted

2010-11-05T17:22:00.000-07:00

Via www.jenniferpae.com the day before Election Day.

As I marked my absentee ballot today, I felt an upswell of pride. I was voting for Jennifer Pae for Oakland City Council and it marked an exciting campaign coming to a completion.

What makes me proud about making this vote wasn’t because I was voting for a friend. It wasn’t because I was the campaign director and she was my candidate. It wasn’t because I wanted to win this campaign.

Ever since Jennifer told me she was thinking of running for Oakland City Council, I knew it would be a tough competition but one well worth it. In the past four months of working on this campaign, it proved to be one of the more difficult campaigns. Even though my mission was to get Jennifer Pae elected into City Council, my personal goal was to make Jennifer the type of candidate I would be proud to vote for.

Over the course of the campaign I’ve seen her change from a community organizer into a leader ready for City Hall. She has her feet firmly planted in her progressive beliefs while able to work with people across the political spectrum. She understands thoroughly the economic struggles we are experiencing and how it relates to public safety being the number one issue for this community. She recognizes the complexities of negotiating public policy issues with local politics and has the knowledge to bring the best strategic plan to the table.

The campaign has prioritized surveying every person we talked to and empathizing with their priority issues for Oakland. We have highlighted people and stories from District 2 throughout our campaign. We didn’t just talk at voters, we listened to voters and shared their stories. This campaign reflects what Jennifer Pae is all about – it is about walking the talk. It’s time that Oakland has a candidate that is willing to step up to the plate and do just that.

Tomorrow, I will drop my ballot off at my polling place before heading to campaign headquarters for a full day of campaigning. I will do it confidently because Jennifer Pae is the type of candidate I would be proud to vote for.

I voted for Jennifer Pae. On Tuesday I’m asking you to vote for Jennifer Pae.

Please also ask your friends with an e-mail, Facebook note, text message or phone call to vote for Jennifer Pae.

Thank you. Together we can do this.
Taz Ahmed
Campaign Director

Pause in Oaklandistan

2010-10-10T21:11:00.000-07:00

I've been so wrapped up with working this campaign, I can't breathe. I'm so stressed about surviving with my expenses and what I'll do for money after Election Day, I can't sleep. And needless to say, with both those intertwined, I can't write. And I'm just not me when I can't write. But Friday, something happened. And I was reminded to write again.

Blue skies, potholed streets in Oaklandistan – I was craving halal hot links as I drove by the halal market. It was Friday, and I was stealing some “me” time away from my job on the campaign trail. In my head though I was still working, thoughts preoccupied, stressed about finances and wondering if we were going to win the race. I paused in thought, seeing men in thupis and women in hijabs walking briskly down the street. They were all heading down the street behind the halal market – to the mosque. I glanced at the clock on the dashboard – it blinked 1:00 pm. Jummah time. I glanced down at my strappy summer dress. Haram. At least, haram enough that I would feel guilty buying hot links at the halal shop during Jummah while people judged my attire.

So I kept driving.

A couple blocks away I pulled over to the side of the road next to Mama Buzz. I’d never been before, and was desperately in need of coffee. As I parked a stunning woman stared down at me from the wall. It looked like her mouth was in mid-ecstasy, mid-enthralled, mid-life shattering. Oakland is full of graffiti, but this one was stunning in a way that made me gaze at the mural from my car for a good minute as I slowly parked.

As I got out of the car, I noticed a guy watching me as he leaned against the windowsill across the street from where I parked. He was wearing green leggings, a black leather kilt and a wild unkempt hairdo to match his beard. He was completely tattooed with branches creeping up his neck out from his collar, eyes lined with tattoo as if with kohl, and legs inked in Arabic scripts.

“Kazem?” I asked hesitant as I walked towards him.

“I knew you’d eventually find me,” he responded firmly, taking a drag on his brown cigarette.

The only time I had met Kazem was at Mike Knight’s bachelor party. Well, it wasn’t as much a bachelor party as much as it was a punk show. It was the night before Knight’s wedding and The Kominas & Sarmust were touring across the country to the wedding and were doing a show at the Stork Club in Oakland, just a block away from Mama Buzz. Kazem had organized the show, created the flyer for the night and was the opening act. It was the first night I met most of the Taqwacore family.

When Kazem took the stage, no one really knew what to expect. It was the first time most everyone in the Taqx crew had heard of Kazem. He took the stage with rigged classical instruments that he had modified with metal work. His band’s name was the Mujahideen Bernstein Affair. He played a set, a mix between classical sounds and a punk rock edge. By the end of the set, all the punk kids were mesmerized, sitting on the floor of the sticky punk venue and hypnotized by the ethereal sounds.

Continue reading the rest of the post by following this link to the Taqwacore Webzine. Pause and read.

JP in Oaktown

2010-09-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

As some of you know, I've moved to Oakland.

I live in a fancy loft that with a view of girls that walk and work the streets at all hours and I live with a pie maker who often has pies for me to taste test. And I've moved for a really good cause. I'm managing the campaign for Jennifer Pae for Oakland City Council in District 2. It's been a crazy three months so far and now we are 22 days until Election Day. Wild ride. I haven't had much time to write - I hit the ground running in August and it's been non-stop till then.

But I did get a chance to do a guest post over at Angry Asian Man last month where I talked about Islamaphobia and my fears of it affecting my work on the campaign.

"Whoa..." we both gasped as we walked into the immense prayer hall. The room was grandiose with tall high cathedral ceilings, an organ in the back, surrounded by dark wood walls, and a delicately decorated dome ceiling royally presided over the podium where the Imam was currently speaking. I was staffing my candidate, Jennifer Pae, who is running for Oakland City Council in District 2. It was the first Saturday of Ramadan, my first week on the job as her Campaign Director, and after a week of fasting for Ramadan, she had decided to join me for a CAIR hosted open house iftar at the local Islamic Cultural Center here in Oakland. From the outside the building looked worn, a dusty relic of a Masonic Temple but the local Shia Muslim community had adopted the space turning rooms into sport rooms, classrooms, and opening it as a space for the Oakland community.

As we found a seat in a pew, Jennifer pointed out her opponent, the incumbent, who was sitting across the room. An older white woman from the more affluent neighborhood in the district, she was sitting stiff listening to the sermon.

I have to admit, it was kind of a relief.

Just that week, South Asian Sacramento Congressional candidate Ami Bera had returned a $250 donation from Basim Elkarra for his association with CAIR (see my post at Sepia Mutiny). He had been pressured by his Republican opponent to do so, and Bera spinelessly folded. As Islamaphobia rapidly sweeps the nation with obvious Election Day motives fueled by the N.Y.C. Park 51 Cultural Center controversy, a small piece of me was scared that somehow Islamaphobia would become a part of this particular race that I was working on. I was fasting for Ramadan; I wore an Allah pendant around my neck; I went to CAIR hosted events. I wondered if my faith would hold back my candidate. Yet there we were, both incumbent and challenger, both non-Muslims and supporting the local Muslim community. It was a relief to know that in this election and that in the community of Oakland, the Muslim community wasn't one to be pushed to the margins, but rather the Muslim community had votes to be courted.

Read the rest of my post HERE! And be sure to visit www.jenniferpae.com! Donate or volunteer today!

Ramadan Away From Home

2010-08-28T21:02:00.000-07:00

My first Ramadan in a long time away from home. I wrote about it on the Taqx Zine. Maybe you should read it too.

Confession. I don’t know in what direction to place the prayer mat. It hit me with extreme sadness this evening as I came to that realization. I had been fasting all day for Ramadan and had just broken my fast with a date by myself in the kitchen and I didn’t know what to do next. Everywhere I’d ever been throughout my whole life, I’d be praying behind someone that would provide direction for me. At home it would be my parents; when traveling abroad my friends would direct me; at mosques you’d follow the lines on the carpet. At one time I even had one of those prayer mats with the compass sewn into it. But here, living on my own in a completely new place, I have no one to show me how to lay my prayer mat. Look outside at the setting sun, I know some of you are thinking. Well, I moved to Oakland and it’s been four days. Where there is nothing but cold weather and cloudy skies. There is no rising or setting sun, at least not yet.

Ramadan can either be the most glorious time, or the most saddening time. It is what you make of it, essentially. There is no one to keep you in check as you fast, no one to tattle tale on you. The test is between your virtuosity and yourself. Allah may be looking down on you and you may gain those extra points during Ramadan, but when it comes down to it in the present moment, it really is about the day to day personal struggle, dare I say, personal jihad...

Read the rest of the post over at the Taqwacore Webzine - where I write about all Islamo-punk things.

Buy Shirt. Then Awaz Karo

2010-08-18T00:09:00.000-07:00

I am giddy with delirious excitement. This year as I embarked on chasing adventures the universe would send my way, I took on a project that is a labor of love. I started designing a line of shirts with BlackLava. I've always been a fan of BlackLava and am a proud owner of their "Desi" check box shirt. When Ryan Suda, the mind behind the enterprise at BlackLava approached me about designing shirts, I nearly fell out of my seat. Literally.

As I traveled around South Asia collecting stories on revolution, activism, and family histories for a project I'm working on, I kept an eye out for things to inspire me. I didn't want to create just any designs - but like all the other designs on the BlackLava site, I wanted to create a progressive message. I returned from my trip brimming with ideas, images, and stories racing through my mind. I started sketching, and thus, the TazzyStar line of clothing out of BlackLava was born. We should be releasing new product once every couple of months.

My first shirt is a title "Awaz Karo" and pictured above. You may recognize it from a poem I wrote earlier this year. Here's the complete story....

Riding in a quintessential yellow Ambassador taxi cab on the streets of Calcutta, the back ends of lorry trucks kept racing by my window. Unlike in the rest of India where signs read "Horn Okay Please" here in Calcutta the back of the trucks were elaborately painted with "Awaz Karo." The word 'Awaz' meaning 'noise', and 'Karo' meaning 'make.' "Make Noise."

I was in Calcutta to collect stories on revolution, from the old timer Naxalite activist with stories on Marxist activism in the 60s, to visiting the my grandfather's college which was the center to his Partition story, to roaming the streets with a present day pavement dweller activist.

I couldn't help but think, these lorries were sending me a message. They were telling me to be the voice of the voiceless, that social injustice exists and rebellion is weaved into the fabric of our history. It was reminding me to "Make Noise."

August 18th is the last day the shirt will be available at the sale price of $15. They run for $20 usually. But if you hang tight, the logo will be printed on tank tops and scarves very soon. So if you are anti-t-shirts like me, there will be fashionable options coming along soon.

At #NN10: Part 2

2010-07-28T17:11:00.001-07:00

I was excited for my first panel of Netroots Nation. Titled "Tweeting the Revolution" with the infamous hip hop Oakland journalist Davey D sitting on the panel. Their conversation went deep, talking about how twitter represented a virtual barber shop, and depending on who you were following, you could really shape the news that came to you. Also, if a respected twitter-er, you can serve as a the hub for news as well as helping to change the narrative on stories. I couldn't help but think of Critical Race Theory and the idea of creating a counter-narrative when Davey D was saying all this. In my mind, tweeting was kind of like creating the alternative narrative.

As someone who has been on twitter for about a year, and someone who really saw the Taqwacore scene come into it's own via the twitter-verse, I didn't really learn anything new. They talked about the need for hashtag, how communities of color were more likely to have text messaging capabilities instead of internet access, and how twittering from phones can provide instantaneous account from rallies or protests. As someone without 'fancy' phone capabilities, I was reminded how twitter can be used as tool for citizen journalism and a way of building community on the ground. I really wanted to get a phone where I could access my twitter just as easily as I could make calls. I really needed to find a Credo Mobile person at this conference.

+++

As I wandered through the halls going from one session to the other, it felt remarkably similar to the Sundance Film Festival. Everyone had these bright orange badges with name and association and special flags if they were a speaker or an organizer. It was all about networking, meeting random people, looking at badges and trying to figure out how you could connect. It felt just like Sundance in that sense. At Sundance, it was also all about the badges, all about what sticker you had and where you worked. Except here, it was organizers trying to meet bloggers that could write about their projects or writers or tech saavy folks trying to impress upon people just how relevant they where. All the same, it made for a comfortable space to strike up conversations with complete strangers.

+++

"I bet that person's South Asian," I whispered to Jay, a South Asian friend of mine who was at conference representing LoudSauce. We were walking through the halls of Rio's convention center to the next panel. I had spotted a desi person, I was sure of it.

"You don't know," he whispered back.

"I know, but I'm almost positive! This is what I've been doing for most of my adult organizing life!" I said. I quickly shut my mouth as the person in question walked by us.

"Oh, yeah, they were totally Desi," Jay responded seriously.

"Is it weird that I'm playing the Desi Spotting game here?" I asked. "I feel weird playing it, but seeing as how I'm here with a South Asian American blog and they are our targeted ethnic community I feel like it's my duty to play this game. They are after all potential readers. Right?"

"Right..." Jay responded sardonically.

+++

"What do you do?" someone asked me. I wasn't quite sure how to answer this one - I had so many hats, but currently and technically at the moment I had no hat at all. So I went with what was on the badge.

"I write on a blog called Sepia Mutiny. It's a South Asian American blog, the largest in the Asian American blogopshere."

"Oh!" he responded, as if he had something important and surprising to say. "There's a study out that says Asians are the most likely to use the internet."

I just nodded my head politely. In my head though, I was thinking, No shit, Sherlock.

+++

I was excited to sit in the audience for the "Fighting the Right Wing with Racial Justice" panel. I had just had bout on Sepia Mutiny with "Chai Baggers" and I was hoping to get insight from people on the battle with how they deal with such issues in the blogosphere. I wanted to learn how to come back at "with us or against us" attacks I often felt as the lone Muslim blogger in a South Asian space.

It was the only panel where I saw Critical Race Theory play a distinct entry into the dialogue, particularly from Tammy Johnson of ColorLines Magazine. She mentioned that the key to fighting the right is through the advancing of narrative stories of our communities to challenge the narratives dictated by the right. That the margins were a place or organize from, it wasn't about moving the margins to the mainstream. The analysis during this session was astute, tackling the nuances of developing a narrative change instead of telling the counter-narrative.

But what lacked in the discussion was - what do you do after that? What do you do after telling stories and narratives about your community, the way we do at Sepia Mutiny, and then you are attacked by the right? What do you do when telling the narrative of your community is not enough to combat bigotry and internalized racism issues? Those were the questions I was looking for answers to.

+++

I was walking down the hall when I saw a recognizable figure. "Manan!" I said loudly, and we gave each other big hugs. "How are you? I was hoping I'd run into you! Congratulations on... well, everything!"

I hadn't seen Manan since SAALT's South Asian Summit I had attended last year. It was there that he had told me his secretive plan, he was going to run for Congress. I had been surprised at the time. Manan and I had gotten our Master in Public Policy degree together at U.C.L.A. Here he was, one year later, secret was clearly out. Manan Trivedi had won his Democratic primary and at the age of 37, he was a viable candidate to take a seat in U.S. Congress. I was so proud of him. He was someone who I respected throughout grad school and I was excited to see him take this important and amazing step.

"Can I get you to do an interview on the flip camera for Sepia Mutiny?" I asked sheepishly. Of course he said yes. But he had to do it that day. He was flying back to D.C. the next morning - he was sitting on a panel that IALI had put together. And sitting next to him on that panel would be Jay Sean. So technically, I am now one degree away from Jay Sean. And I'm still confused as to why Jay Sean spoke at that panel. He can't even vote in America - he's British.

+++

I was sitting with Affad in the when this Desi guy approached our table. There was another Desi girl sitting at our table too. The guy was from Nuclear Mango and was trying to get us to go to a screening of his movie. "We even have a Bollywood star in our movie."

"What? Let me see the flyer again..." I had picked up the flyer earlier and I could have sworn it was a Latina chick on the image. The movie was called "Politics of Love," the story of a romance around the 2008 Elections. Upon closer inspection of the flyer, he was right, Mallika Sherawat was sprawled out naked blanketed in a nothing but an American flag.

Maybe I wasn't as good at the Desi -Spotting Game as I had thought.

+++

I've never really read Daily Kos - the site design always confused me. So I wasn't quite sure what to expect when Markos, the founder of Daily Kos, took the mic at the opening session. But when he said that the tea baggers were the best thing to happen to the 2010 elections, he had the room laughing. If bloggers didn't have tea baggers to write about, there wouldn't really be anything to write about. Said without the tea baggers, the Democrats were pretty boring. I'd have to concur.

+++

From the outside, it looked just like a strip mall. But once I entered it was a hookah boudoir. Red upholstered walls, gold ornate framed paintings, and low cushy benches. Glowing hookahs were the center piece to every table. It was here that the real blog talk happened, the conversations about the risks taken to be a Muslim blogger and being called a jihadist, being slapped with the label taqqiya when you are not fitting into the right's definition of what a Muslim is, and how as a Muslim rebel you are fighting both the orthodox of the religion and the right's perception of the religion. The Racialization of Islam in Blogosphere - now that's a talk Netroots Nation could have used. But instead, we had that talk in a shady hovel under the hanging of hookah smoke. That's where the real talk happened.

+++

As I drove back from the hookah bar back to the hotel, I passed by the hotel I had stayed in last time I was in Vegas. We had been here with Asian Pacific Americans for Progress for the Nevada Caucus. It was the first time I had organized for Obama. The experience was madness. As I drove through the Vegas night lights, I thought of how far we had come from spring 2008 and just how far we still had left to go to hold President Obama accountable. It seemed like my life revolved around election cycles - there was always some campaign to organize around on every election day.

+++

The man standing in front of me in line at Starbucks turned around and smiled at me hesitantly. He was older, distinguished. He looked down at my name tag. I went ahead and introduced myself. I noticed the "Speaker" ribbon on his tag and asked what panel he was speaking on. "Redistricting," he said. We went off discussing the differences in the redisctricting process between California and Nevada, his home state. He talked about how Las Vegas was suffering from the recession. I talked about the unemployment bill that had just been extended that day and how I had been unemployed for the past year. We had arrived at the cash register at that point.

"What are you getting?" he asked me.

"Oh, uh, a coffee grande," I was thrown off. He made motions to pay for my coffee. "Oh, you don't have to buy me coffee. I hardly know you," I mumbled.

"It's fine. It's on me," he replied.

All of a sudden I felt silly that I had been talking about being unemployed for the year. Maybe that was why he was buying me coffee. I should have just kept quiet. Silly me and all my rambling. I gave him my cheesy business card before I left him to his coffee meeting.

I opened up the Netroots Nation program booklet as I walked away. I found him in it. Oh, I thought to myself, the Senate Majority leader for the state of Nevada just bought me my morning coffee. Of course. Of. Course...

+++

Van Jones has this way of speaking that just reels you in. He's dynamic, has personality, and a suave way with words. I had followed his movement through the environmental justice scene from a distance and seen him speak on ocassion.

With Shirley Sherrod fresh in peoples mind that week (it was the week she was fired and re-hired), it was clear what the topic was Jones would have to start speaking on. He opened with how these are the times of "hope" and "heartbreak" and how he had had all his dreams and fears were met in the past two years. He talked about how the media machine on the right was vicious and how as bloggers and voices of citizen media, we had to fight back with our own progressive agenda. He said that we could do it because we had done it in the past - when Macaca-gate happened, it was YouTube and blogs that made sure to let the nation know of what had happened. I agreed. At Sepia Mutiny, Macaca-gate had to have been one of our biggest stories of all time. I would like to think we had some influence in how that election turned out.

Van Jones went on to liken the White House saga to the Lord of the Rings - it's not just one story but an epic. And then he went on to challenge progressive bloggers to outwit Fox News.

When all is said and done, it was one of the best speeches I'd seen at Netroots Nation.

+++

"I can't believe as progressives, the Desi candidates are pandering to the Jewish vote," I was talking to a good friend of mine that had sat on the board of my organization SAAVY back in the days. He was there promoting his new PR company. I continued as he listened on, "I mean, I realize they are a voting block, but I don't think you have to compromise your values and all of a sudden support Netanyahu's plan, just to get votes. It's pandering. It's like AIPAC partnering with USINPAC and the whole Indian-Israeli alliance thing."

Just at that moment, this white older guy in a suit comes up and interrupts our conversation. He motioned to my friend knowingly, and then asks me, "What Indian Israeli thing?"

"Uh..." I hesitated. "You know, how India is coordinating efforts with Israel. The whole Indians following in the path of the Jewish community, as far as affluence and influence..." I drifted. I wasn't sure how much more to say without knowing where this guy was coming from.

"Yay!" he responded. "Hin-Jew Alliance! Let's keep it going!"

I closed my mouth. I kept my mouth tight immediately and looked to my friend. Saying 'yay' to that alliance to a Muslim is grounds for mouth off, that I was close to being on the brink of. It threw me off. Here I was thinking that everything related to a USINPAC/AIPAC agenda would be extremely on the right. I thought that at a progressive conference and progressive space like this one, surely people would not be on the anti-Muslim/pro-Israel/conservative foreign policy alliance. Right? Can you be both a progressive and support AIPAC and USINPAC allying together? Can you be both a progressive and pander to the Jewish vote for the sake of winning your seat?

I wanted to say all this, but didn't. It was here that I realized even though I was in at a "progressive" space, it was still not necessarily a safe space. And that the progressive agenda still had a long ways to go.

+++

I passed by my roomie Prerna Lal in the conference room. She was standing outside the room where lunch was being served. She was with her Dream Gang, a bunch younger mostly Latino activists who were organizers for the Dream Act. On their arms were cut out circle patches labeled "ICE". I found out through the tweet stream later, the Dream Crew posed as ICE agents and questioned all the white folks before they were allowed into the dining room. They were trying to make a point, of course. And via the tweets it seemed the White people were offended, of course. They wanted an apology. They said they had done a lot for the movement already and didn't appreciated being picked on.

No offense, but racism doesn't look at your resume. That was the point of the exercise.

Now take it back, remember that as you blog and tell the narrative of America.

+++

It was no accident that I ended up rooming with Prerna - we had already been following each other on twitter and when we both realized we were the two Desi women that got the scholarship, we asked to room together.

She's a fifth generation Fijian-Indian, she came to the U.S. when she was a teen. She talked to me about how in Fiji, the Indian community remained seperate. They had their own schools and they were even taught Hindi. She became a blogger because she felt like she had no choice and online organizing for her was a way to break out ofher senseless situation. Her story of how she ended up undocumented is amazing (albeit tragic) and a testament to the fact that this is a DESI issue too. This is an excerpt of her self introduction to the scholarship recipients (I did tell her I'd blog about it on Sepia Mutiny, and hopefully I'll get to be able to share the full version of her story on the site).

I arrived here with my father on a tourist visa from the Fiji Islands on November 13, 1999 when I was only 14. He filed for adjustment of status to an F-1 while converting me to an F-2 and putting me in a California high school. Soon thereafter, my U.S. citizen grandmother filed an I-130 with my mother as the beneficiary. I was listed as a derivative beneficiary of this petition.

Things went drastically wrong in January 2003 when USCIS rejected my application for a student visa when I wanted to attend college. In their letter, they specifically cited the I-130 family petition, which they claimed conflicted with the application for the non-immigrant student visa and also noted that I showed no ties to Fiji. My parents were not about to send me home due to the outbreak of government- sanctioned violence against ethnic Fiji-Indians and I had no family members left there who could take care of me. I wasn't put into removal proceedings and several immigration attorneys told my family not to worry since I would eventually gain legal residency based on the I-130 petition.

At only 22, I would graduate with a Masters in International Relations only to find out that all my hard work and waiting in line was for naught: my parents became legal permanent residents of the United States, while I was told to wait another 7-9 years just because I was over 21 and no longer considered an "immediate relative" for the purpose of immigrating.

Undocumented people isn't the story of people sneaking across borders from Mexico, but it goes more complicated and deeper than that. As a Indian in Fiji she left the country for fear of persecution and here she was in the U.S. also unable to have rights. Our immigration system is so archaic with ideas of family and so backlogged, it denies the rights to people trying to play by the system.

Maybe she should have an Anchor Baby. Kidding. KIDDING!

+++

As I bit into the juicy piece of burger, tangy tasty red sauce dripped over my fingers. It had a little bit of a kick and combined with the flavor of the meat so delectably. Quickly, I licked the sauce running down my finger. I couldn't let it go to waste. It was the best burger of my life.

"This is burger heaven...." Affad said, mouth full.

We had escaped The Strip for a meal at Bachi Burger.

Ironically, one of the topics of conversation as we drove into Las Vegas was the consumption of red meat in our diets and how we both were trying to decrease it. That went completely out the window when Affad got a text from Japanese-American organizer friends that he had to check out. The place was started by Ehren Watada, a revolutionary in his own right. As a First Lieutenant of the United States Army, he refused to be deployed to Iraq. His reason for refusing deployment - he believe the war to be illegal and that, under the doctrine of command responsibility, it would make him party to war crimes. He was court martial-ed which ended in mistrial and then he was discharged. And then, he opened up the best burger joint ever.

"We should make a list of restaurants that are started by revolutionaries," I said between bites. I thought about it, I couldn't think of any. "Well, you know, community organizers at least. And we should eat at all of them."

A google map will now be created.

And if I lived in Las Vegas, I would eat Bachi Burger every single day.

+++

"That's a really geeky shirt," I said monotonously to the guy in the elevator. He looked up at me stunned (completely possible he was also slightly tipsy too). His shirt had the symbol for "pi" and then the letters "M" "P" after it.

"You are the most beautiful person for recognizing it!" he exclaimed. "I wore this shirt all day, and no one said anything about it!"

"Well, yo umay have better luck in this casino," I replied. "I'm staying here for a blogger conference. There's going to be a lot of geeks around here." And I stepped out of the elevator.

+++

I bumped into Karlo Marcelo by the slot machines. "Karlo!" I knew him, technically, through an Ex, though really we met when we were both doing Youth Voting stuff. I convinced him that we needed to go to the rooftop lounge of the Rio that night. We started walking and talking, slowly collecting people along the way.

I was excited to see Karlo at this conference and to talk about the new project he was working on: Immigrant Stories from the 5%. The premise is that Asian Americans are often left out of the immigration debate and the site would serve to be a conduit of collecting Asian American stories on immigration. Still in the nascent stages, the site has a lot of potential and is a really needed project.

Somehow by midnight, we ended up with a group of 20 Netroots Nation people taking the elevator to the rooftop lounge. With a stunning 300 degree view of the strip from the top of the Rio, we were surrounded by everything that made Las Vegas gloriously and disgustingly decadent. But surrounded by people from the progressive community, it felt just fine.

+++

"Hey!" I said to a guy leaning up against the railing. Jay and I were wandering through the casino at the Rio. He seemed surprised to see me. "So, you work at Credo Mobile..." I noticed he was wearing a Credo shirt and was standing all alone. I knew I had to make my attack right then.

"Yup. Yes I do."

"So, here's the thing. I have been an AT&T customer forever, and I really can't stand their service any more. I'm going to work a campaign and I really need one of those fancy phones. What can you do for me?"

He started telling me all the benefits of Credo Mobile and why AT&T sucked. He was dishing out bargains left and right. But frankly, he had me at "hello." I was already won over on Credo Mobile, I just didn't have the job incentive to make the switch. But with a new campaign on the horizon, I knew I needed a new phone, and quick.

Then, he then took Jay and I down to the bar and bought us both drinks. A beer for Jay, a Red Bull for me. By that point, the Red Bull was the cherry on the top. A mobile service that buys you drinks? Come on, totally won over. AT&T would never do that.

+++

On my last night in Vegas I found myself alone in my car, driving to the House of Blues at the Mandalay Bay. Alone in my car, I kept my windows rolled down as I drove down the crowded Saturday night trip. Creed was playing on the radio. Las Vegas alone is always depressing, but with Creed on the radio, triply so. Creepily so.

+++

The closing party was at the Hard Rock Cafe. As I walked up the stairs, I felt someone grab my arm and pull me. It was a girl who I had organized with five years ago. She looked leaner, taller. More grown up. I had been following her career from a distance - at one point my inbox was full of e-mails signed by her on behalf of the organization she worked for at the time. "Who are you here with? What have you been up to?" she asked me.

"Well, I'm here with a blog, Sepia Mutiny....but wow, since I last saw you it's been a roller coaster...." I gave her my life story since the 2004 Elections, since I had last seen her. I told her about SAAVY, how it folded, how I went to school and why, where I worked after school, the blogging, the traveling the writing, all told within a five minute synopsis. Always a little bizarre when your life can be summarized like that.

But it was great to see her. Great to see people like her who I haven't seen in years, people from the progressive movement I've worked with in the past. Though it has been eight years since I lived in D.C., it was refreshing to see people that I recognized still in the movement, though in different organizations. It felt a little odd to be coming at the conference not representing an organization, but a blog that I wrote for (unpaid). But at the same time it was the reminder I needed. I needed to be reminded that organizing for progressive causes is only effective if you can communicate the narrative of your cause as well. Story-telling, writing, narratives are needed if community organizing.

+++

And just like that, Netroots Nation was over. Bags were packed, business cards stacked, and slot machine tickets were cashed in. Interestingly enough, I wasn't leaving with a sense of dissapointment which I had expected because of the lack of a Desi/Muslim blogger dialogue at the conference. In fact, I had hope that it could improve next year and that I would like to contribute to making those changes.

But there was just one thing left to do before hitting the road and the long traffic filled highway back to Los Angeles - a trip to Serendipity for the frozen hot chocolate had to be made.

The perfect end to a very interesting four days.

+++

I really wanted to thank everyone that voted to get me the Democracy for America scholarship! Though I wasn't top three, I did have over 200 people vote for me, and for that reason, I felt like this trip was as much yours as it was mine. Thank you for encouraging me to continue to do what I love to do at a time where I was personally lost. Knowing you believed in me gave me reason to believe in myself. You inspired me to organize and write, again.

Getting to #NN10: Part 1

2010-07-27T19:44:00.000-07:00

In the city of Baker, we exited and pulled into the gas station in front of the "Bun Boy Motel" and next to the tall large thermometer. It was Maghrib time, the sky was tinged in gorgeous desert orange and a dusky blue. As I opened the door, I was washed over with a fierce dry wind, hot. Really hot. Like opening an oven door wave of heat. Despite the setting sun on the horizon. I got out of the car and looked up at the thermometer. Way near the top the number blinked in red, 106 degrees. It was already evening, first stars were starting to pop across the skies and it was ridiculously hot already. I couldn't imagine how hot it would be by the time we arrived in Las Vegas.

++

There's this part on the drive from Southern California to Las Vegas where you lose the desert behind you and the lights open up to you. The car cruises over a hill, and you see nothing but darkness in front of you, the car swerves to the left a little and suddenly you see the glow to the city. Bright white light emanates, and you can see the light of the Luxor shooting straight up. No matter how many buildings develop in Vegas, and no matter how much time passes, this moment of seeing Vegas for the first time after driving for 4 hours is classic.

Vegas Baby, Vegas.

++

I was heading to Vegas for Netroots Nation 2010, a progressive political blogger conference - an annual event that had been happening for the past five years. I'd never been before, and probably wouldn't have gone this year either if I had not been encouraged by Affad, blogger at The American Muslim, to apply for the scholarship. I did, and after a few weeks of fierce internet campaigning, I got the scholarship. Sure, sixty other people also got the scholarship... but it covered all the expenses, including room and board - I just needed to drive there from Southern California. And that's just what Affad and I did. I was stoked to attend and had a list of things to accomplish on the trip - the first and foremost was to let this progressive space know that Sepia Mutiny and the larger South Asian American blogosphere existed. The second was to schmooze like hell to find the perfect job after having been unemployed/on writing sabbatical/traveling for the past year -I figured this space would be a perfect pairing of my two professional worlds, social media and community organizing. I even had flashy business cards made. Finally, I was on the hunt to find someone in a Credo Mobile shirt. I had always wanted to make the shift but it never really made sense to make the switch out of ATT unless I found a really good bargain. I was on the hunt for a good bargain.

And of course, I was on the hunt for an amazing adventure and a spectacular story. I didn't know what to expect, but equipped with my flip and digital camera and a purse full of business cards, I was ready for whatever came my way.

++

It was late night by the time my car pulled into Las Vegas. The tall hotels and casinos towered down on us as my little Yaris made it's way down the freeway. Looking at the tall buildings reminded me of driving in Dubai. It had only been three months since I'd been in Dubai, and it made me feel a bit nostalgic. It's no surprise, Dubai is considered the Vegas of the Middle East. People come to Dubai to party and to drop cash, just like in Vegas. The tall buildings of Mandalay Bay could have been plopped straight out of the beaches of JBR and Aeria could have been straight out of the Financial District in downtown Dubai. Both cities were places of contradictions and where reality and fantasy merged in bizarre ways.

The fact that Netroots Nations was at the Rio was no less bizarre. Here we were over 2,000 progressive political internet nerds and we were in the city of glamour, glitz, and all that is superficial. About as contradictory as it got.

++

We got in line to check in at the Rio. It was a Wednesday night and the casino was deserted. The parking structure was empty when we pulled in (though Justin Beiber was blasting through the soundsystem), the hall was empty (as we walked by the larger than life photos of Chippendale dancers) and the casino we had to walk through was empty (despite the bright lights and the clanging of the slot machines.) Walking through the casino felt surreal - I was reminded of how almost ten years ago to the day, I had been in Vegas to celebrate my 21st birthday in the very same hotel. It was like time had stood still in the casino but my memory had clearly faded.

As we stood in line, we tried to figure out who was there for the conference. "I feel like we should know people in line with us," I whispered to Affad. There were people in line with us with skinny jean and the hipster beards as well as people with Birkenstocks. Checking in at the counter was a long gray haired woman with a Democracy Now canvas bag slung over her shoulder.

"Is that Amy Goodman?" Affad asked.

She turned around. Indeed it was, with her trademark swinging gray hair. We were officially at Netroots Nation 2010....

Awaz Karo - Poem

2010-07-19T23:11:00.000-07:00

This was a collaborative piece that I worked on with Jayson Joseph (of Elephant w/ Guns). This piece was specifically created for The Code, an annual Muslim spoken word event in Los Angeles. "Awaz Karo" is a phrase that I saw on the back of trucks in Calcutta while I was on my trip to South Asian in March. The theme for the evening is "Knowledge is Power." I was very nervous performing this - it was my first collaborative piece, and first time playing to music. Enjoy!

Falling at Grand Canyon - Poem

2010-07-18T23:59:00.000-07:00

I performed at The Code on Saturday night, a Muslim spoken word space here in Los Angeles. It's an annual event. Lots of memories associated with this event. This is the fourth one. I wrote this piece while I was on the Taqwacore summer road trip adventure last summer. I'll let you figure out what (or whom) the poem is really about.

Das The Truth w/ Das Racist

2010-07-16T15:46:00.000-07:00

I did an interview over at MideastTunes with Himanshu Suri of Das Racist. I kinda like it. Not just cuz I like to scream out "Das Racist" every chance I get, but cuz I'm addicted to the super fly music, and Heems is a super smart and smarmy dude.

This was my favorite Q&A from the whole thing:

Mideastunes: In your song Hugo Chavez, you talk about playing double dutch with Maya Angelou and “no Dinesh DeSouza” – people that the usual hip hop artist wouldn’t refer to. What would you say to Dinesh DeSouza if you had him in a room?
Himanshu: I’d prolly just smack dude. He doesn’t look intimidating. Please use this opportunity to include a photo of Dinesh D’Souza. Oh man what a goober.

Read the rest of my interview HERE. RIGHT HERE. CLICK THIS HYPERLINK. IT'S EASY RIGHT HERE. I'm proud of this interview. I think it came out well. I'm a little bruised from it, but in the end, awesomeness.

Dear Oscar Grant

2010-07-08T15:52:00.000-07:00

I don't know you.
And you never knew me.
But when I ride the Bart on Oakland transit
The youtube video of you taking your last breath
Is all that I see.

Your executioner was a police officer
He had you on the ground
Face down
Your hands were cuffed behind you.
You complied
He reached behind
Grabbed his gun, over you he stood.
One shot to the back.
Just like that.

And you were gone...

Your skin was a few shades darker than mine
Your age was a few years younger than mine
You lived a life I couldn't even dream
Father by eighteen, life full of struggling.
Victim of the system of a racialized society
Lives so different yet in you I see me.

Today the non-black jury in Los Angeles
Sent down their verdict.
Not your people, not your city.
And the verdict...
Mehserle is guilty of manslaughter, involuntarily.

The same would be given to a person that fell asleep at the wheel
And killed someone accidentally.
The claim, which the jury seems to believe -
The cop mistook his gun for his tazer.

No justice no peace
People across California are congregating on the streets.
Your blood spilled in our community
By a man who was supposed to be a peace police.
You are Ayana Jones,
You are Sean Bell,
You are me.

I'm sick of being referred to as a terrorist just because I'm brown,
When it's clear with situations like these
That the police are the real terrorists on the streets.

Oscar Grant, I will always remember you
Alot of other people do too.
No justice, no peace
Folks are taking to the streets.
Remember Oscar Grant.
Fight for people's liberty.

200th Post at Sepia Mutiny

2010-06-26T16:06:00.000-07:00

I was just about to start writing a post at Sepia Mutiny when I checked a number on the side. The post I was writing was going to be my 200th post on the site. I've technically written 199 posts with a total of 11,803 comments.

Wow.

I was invited to be a monthly guest blogger back in 2006. Back then, guest bloggers had to write three times a week. I was such a fan of Sepia Mutiny that I went at it full on - writing about punks, and piercings, and activism. All the Desi-fied topics that interested me. I was invited back on to write about the 2006 Elections. I left for about a year. Returned to write about the 2008 Elections and haven't left since. In total, that's four year journey, just about. I no longer can maintain the three times a week blog, but try my best to have something up there once a week. I've dabbled into interviews, reviews, and video interviews. I like doing investigative reporting, when possible, whether it's checking out M.I.A.'s new clothing line or interviewing people at the Desi Coming Out Day rally. Kind of feels strange knowing that the blogs I wrote over the years have solicited close to 12,000 comments. That is a large number. Sure a lot of them may have been trolls or bossy commenter telling me how to write, but it does feel somewhat awe-inspiring. And I can honestly say that we've built a real community as well as contributed to the dialogue of what it means to be a South Asian American in a most significant way.

That is all.

I'm Going to Netroots Nation!

2010-06-26T00:01:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone that voted to get me the Netroots Nation scholarship! I did not get top three, but I did make it top six. And that got the attention of enough people that I was selected as a scholar! I want to thank each and every one of you guys for helping me get here - it meant a lot.

I'm very excited about this opportunity. Basically winning means that the conference, room and board will be paid for - I just need to get myself to Vegas. This shouldn't be too costly since I'm pretty sure I can get there on a tank of gas. Plus my friend Affad from This American Muslim, also got a scholarship and we will be road tripping it together to Vegas. At the conference I've put in a request to room with twitter friend Prena Lal of DreamActivist.org. I've never met her before, but people that know me know I have this way of seeking out brown people everywhere I go. She also received a scholarship. The other scholarship recipient I'm excited to catch up with is Karlo Marcelo of the Immigrant Vote from the 5%, the new Asian American immigrant story project. Of course, I'm plenty excited about the panels too - the agenda just got posted this week and I already know all the panels and workshops I want to attend - surprise - they are all the ones around race and voting. And of course, I already checked to make sure there would be a Asian American and Pacific Islander Caucus.

I'm at a point in my life where I'm in sort of a limbo and I really hope that the people that I meet at this conference will ignite something and push me in some direction. I'm not implying that I'm completely directionless - far from. I just realized how niche my interest and skills are and this conference will be a melding of all the types of people that are in the same genre of "niche" as myself. I even got "Tazzy Star" business cards printed up - which is odd since this is the first batch of cards I've ever created where I'm not associated with a company, but were created based on myself.

It does feel strange being a "free agent" - often times conferences in the movement always highlight "who do you work for?" This week there are a couple of conferences where all my peers are at. All of my AAPI community organizer friends are in DC for the Advancing Justice conference, and all my super leftist friends are in Detroit for the United States Social Forum. I frankly wish I could have been at both, but the cost was totally ridiculous plus not working for an organization means I don't have anyone to subsidize me like before. It's weird to feel like that once you are laid off from a job in the movement, how easily people drop you from the organizing space.

I think that's why going to Netroots Nation is particularly special for me. Even though I'm not employed in the movement at the current moment, it does not mean I've stopped being an activist. In fact, I've had more time to write now (a lot on progressive issues) than I did before when I was employed. My unpaid volunteer gig of writing on Sepia Mutiny, etc... is recognized as something real. So that is exciting. As I read the tweets of my friends in Detroit and DC this week, I keep reminding myself that I'll be at Netroots Nation and be able to connect with people in the movement there. Something that I desperately need right now.

I don't blog too much on this site, but since I know that so many of you took a personal investment to get me to this conference I want to pay it forward. I'll hopefully be blogging and tweeting from the conference on this blog, just to keep you involved.

Thank you so much. It means the world. I can't wait.

Get Taz to Netroots Nation - Vote Today

2010-06-04T14:32:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to get to Netroots Nation. I need your vote to get me there.

What is Netroots Nation?

Netroots Nation amplifies progressive voices by providing an online and in-person campus for exchanging ideas and learning how to be more effective in using technology to influence the public debate. Through our annual convention and a series of regional salons held throughout the year, we strengthen our community, inspire action and serve as an incubator for ideas that challenge the status quo and ultimately affect change in the public sphere.

I've heard about this conference for quite some time and people were always telling me to go. But I just didn't really see why I would go. The jobs that I had in the progressive community never incorporated an online side. I always did blogging for myself, as a way to speak my mind on the injustices I was seeing in the world and how I saw my life. Somewhere along the line that turned into telling stories of my journey in developing my political South Asian identity. And that in some serendipitous way is why I choose the work that I do and taken the professional path I have.

To me they go hand in hand - writing about what I see in the world, connecting with people, to working in the progressive movement. After all, it's all about building community and creating a grassroots power from this built community.

I think it's time that I check out Netroots Nation and see what it's all about. Last August after I got laid off from my job, I decided to risk it and take the time to do what i always wanted to do - which is to write. A bunch of adventures, and many stories collected later - I think that I should go to Netroot Nation to see how other people incorporate all both activism and writing. And how they get paid to do it. I hear there aren't many people of color that represent at this conference usually, much less South Asian Americans so I'd really love to be able to go and provide that voice on the margins. Maybe help take this margin voice mainstream!

But I could use your vote. You don't need to be a Democracy for America member - you can just go to the site. And vote for me! If you like my voice, and want to see where I can go the way I want to see where I can go with this - vote for me by following this link:

Thank you in advance and much love! I'm currently in the top ten - but if I get top three, then I'm IN!!! Voting ends June 13th.

Inspiring and Inspiration from #Flotilla

2010-06-04T12:53:00.000-07:00

“Have you been watching the news on this?” I asked my little cousin.

She wasn’t really “little” anymore, two years out of college, she was the same age as my little sister. I was driving the two of us to Los Angeles to partake in the rally in front of the Israeli Consulate against the attack on the Flotilla ships taking humanitarian aid to Gaza. The night before the Israeli Defense Force had jumped on board the lead ship and killed 9 people in an attempt to take over the boat. The other ships were taken peacefully. It was a huge international crisis, and an American crisis too, if you consider that 3 billion dollars a year of taxpayer money was going into Israel.

“I haven’t been watching the news but I was online and read up a little on it,” LC responded. “I stopped watching the news because it got to be too much. It was depressing.”

“You don’t watch the news, at all?” I asked. This cousin had minored in public policy.

“Not really. Because after you watch it, nothing changes. It’s pointless.”

“Well…. Then you do something about it. It’s pointless only if you don’t do anything about it.”

We sat quietly in the car on the drive to the protest, Narcysist blasting lyrics of empowerment through my speakers. I bit my lip as I drove fast into the setting sun, late, of course, for the protest. It had disturbed me what she had said. It was such a defeatist statement that somehow empowered her intentional ignorance. Is that really what the world had come to? Young people who chose not to watch the news, because they were able to live in ignorant bliss because of it?
To her credit, she had chosen to come with me to the protest. She had come over to the house for a Memorial Day BBQ and saw me making protest signs in the backyard. I asked her if she wanted to come along and after thinking about it, she decided to tag along. It was her first protest, ever.

As I drove, I thought about something Mom had told me. I had gone into the living room as soon as my twitter feed had started blowing up with #flotilla. We tried to find an international channel that was covering the attack on the flotilla but came up with nothing. I explained the situation to my mother. She said, “It’s not that I don’t feel bad for the people that got killed, but… they should have known what they were getting into. They knew what was going to happen.”
The six ships that had sailed into the Gaza blockade of course knew that there was a blockade. The blockade on Gaza is one that many people in the international community have denounced. The blockade on Gaza, enforced by both Egypt and Israel, was put in place in 2007 to prevent materials to get into the hands of Hamas leader. Israel cites that I they don’t want to get terrorist attacks and the blockade is there to prevent materials that can be used against Israel to come in. But when you look at the list, there are things like spices, food, medicine, and paper that are prevented from coming through. The six ships that were coming to Gaza were loaded with materials like these. Though Israel says that they would have let humanitarian goods in through their ports, there’s a good chance that “banned items” such as medicine and wheelchairs and school books would not have made it in. It’s outrageous that a blockade of this kind is put in place in Gaza. The people there are provided aid through the Israel government (as claimed by the Israel government), but what is provided is hardly enough to sustain an actual economy. Especially if they don’t allow anything on the extensive list of banned items.

The humanitarian boats were coming to break that blockade. This was the mission’s ninth time coming to Gaza, all the previous missions never having ended in bloodshed. Sometimes they were allowed to dock in Gaza, other times they were diverted peacefully to an Israeli port. The boats came from all across Europe – there were boats from Ireland, Greece (?) and Turkey, all of them caravanning together from Cyprus. On the boat were peace activists, mainly European, approximately 700 in total. There were no guns or violent weapons on any of the ships, just slingshots and sticks. The boats were attacked in international water by commandos that descended on the boat from helicopters.

Mom’s statement surprised me because it wasn’t a matter of they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into – it was a matter of despite knowing the risks associated with being a part of a humanitarian aid mission to Gaza, that they continued on. They didn’t have guns aboard, there were reporters that were covering the actions on the boat live. The humanitarian activists took the risk for the sake of the people of Gaza, not to further a Muslim agenda nor to further Hamas. The reporters on the boat took the risk to be there to tell the story of these people, to be the unbiased news source for when the IDF started releasing skewed data on what was happening. Since the attack, the IDF news desk has been busy releasing information, a lot of the information skewed. Photos that were released had dates linking them to well before the attacks, unbeknownst to the IDF.

This past year I embarked on this wild journey, to write a memoir. For the purpose of story collection, I went to South Asia. I wasn’t just looking for my roots as a person, as a girl looking for love, and as poet – I was looking for my roots as an activist and as a revolutionary. I heard so many stories. There was the story that my grandfather told me of how he went to college in Calcutta, and whenever he crossed the Ganges river, Hindus would throw rocks at him because he was Muslim. It was under the cover of Holi that he escaped his hostel. A Bengali man provided his house for the 14 students to escape to and hide out in. There was the story of an uncle who was a police officer in Bangladesh in 1971. He left the force when the Pakistan army took over, but decided to go into the office seven months later when they called police officer back to the force. It was only when he went back to his office, that he realized it was a ruse. A non-Bengali saved him. There was the Sinhalese activist woman I met in Sri Lanka who dedicated her life to support the Tamil and Muslim people still stuck in the IDP camps. There was the Hindu cabbie that got out of the cab to give me salaams as I got out of the cab in Calcutta. Muslims had helped him escape out of Bangladesh in the 70s when he was a baby.
My point is - that as South Asians, our roots are deeply intertwined with struggle and revolution. We can’t afford not to watch the news, or to let people “get what they deserve” without a fight. We can’t afford not to “do” anything. And despite the many sides to the political arguments we always hear coming out of the Desh, buried underneath it all are stories of humanity, of people helping each other to survive. Caste, race, religion no-bar. Our history as being American is also deeply entwined w/ revolution intertwined with humanity. Who are we as brown people in America if it weren’t Montgomery, Alabama or Rosa Parks. Who are we without Dolores Huerte, Martin Luther King, or Yuri Kochiyama. There have always been unlikely allies of humanity throughout the history of America and South Asia. The situation with the flotillas to me personally was not about Hamas or IDF, it was about peace activists who were doing humanitarian good for the people of Gaza. They were bringing much needed supplies to blockaded people, people of a land who are being used as pawns in an international power game.
We have to take that personal risk to save other people. The power I find in the people that were on the boat is that they went to provide aid despite knowing they were going to put themselves in a risky situation. People have been doing that for me since before I was alive. I think I need to honor that by paying it forward, and supporting the people that put helping other people ahead of themselves.

Maybe, also, the reason I went to the protest that day was also karmic selfishness. Because I want to know that whenever I'm out doing humanitarian good, that if I'm shot at and kidnapped, unable to connect with the outside world - that there are people out there protesting on my behalf. As an activist, I have to stand in solidarity now for when my day comes later.

I recently got into an argument with someone who expressed disdain that I lived so much of my life so publicly. A person who I had shared experiences with on my journey, she was upset with me for sharing stories from our time together. She said, what is the point of showing other people pictures and videos when what was captured was just for your own personal enjoyment? I told her that I was a storyteller, and whether words, pictures, or videos, I was trying to tell a story. I think this experience of hearing my mother and my cousin’s perspectives (and my sisters too who undoubtedly think similarly) was a reminder to me of how much I need to share with my family the family stories I collected on struggle, revolution and purpose. I need to write the stories I collected not just for me, but to remind others how interconnected we all are. If we don’t remember our stories, our histories, then what are we really? Our histories remind us how to act, how to “do”, how to live. And we must live to make history.

Okay. That does it. I am re-reminded why I should get back to it and write.

Videos From Traveling.

2010-05-30T17:30:00.000-07:00

I just returned from this fabulous trip. One that took me on a journey through Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Dubai, and a journey where I collected stories of the past and present. The stories are all hopefully going to be included in a project I'm working on. But since I've been back, I got busy editing the pictures and videos from the trip. So the writing will soon return from the back burner.

For personal privacy reasons, the photos can only be viewed by friend of mine on facebook. But what I can and will share w/ you are the videos I collected from my trip. Here they are below. I hope to share more about my experiences and the stories I collected. But you can't rush me. All in good time.

Drum & Bass in Delhi

2010-05-30T17:20:00.000-07:00

Sheikh Zayed Mosque

2010-05-30T17:19:00.002-07:00

Kandy Dancers in Kandy

2010-05-30T17:19:00.001-07:00

Sea Turtles!!!

2010-05-30T17:19:00.000-07:00

Elephant Hunt

2010-05-30T17:18:00.001-07:00

Journey to World's End

2010-05-30T17:18:00.000-07:00

Desh

2010-05-30T17:17:00.001-07:00

Home in Bangladesh

2010-05-30T17:17:00.000-07:00

Going for a Ride. A Rickhsaw Ride.

2010-05-30T17:16:00.000-07:00

Another Taqwacore Adventure

2010-01-14T23:07:00.000-08:00

Yo. I'm going to Sundance 2010. And blogging the whole time.

I'm tired of the shameless self-promo blogs so read them on your owns.

Sepia Mutiny's On the Road to Sundance, Taqwacore Webzine's Pilgrimage to Sundance and of course, I will be blogging for The Taqwacores Motion Picture at the tumblr blog Taqx at Sundance.

My blogs will also be cross posted w/ MTV Iggy - as well as getting them some exclusive interviews and movie reviews.

Ok. That's all!

Rebel Warrior Poet

2009-11-20T11:25:00.000-08:00

Crossposted from The Taqwacore Webzine...

I was just reading Blue-Eyed Devil while my Genius Itunes played music that I never knew I had. This song just jumped on, the 2008 song Rebel Warriors by Asian Dub Foundation.

My ears perked as the open khobitah had recognizable words. It was in Bangla. I immediately went to the parents to ask them what it said.

“Oh! This is Bidrohi Kobi!” my dad said, as he looked over my shoulder at my laptop. Bidrohi Kobi is defined in English as ‘the rebel warrior poet’. “His name is Kazi Nazrul Islam. This poem is famous. They recite it all the time. He’s singing about being oppressed against the British back when it was colonized. He saying that we need to fight.”

I had been a little surprised. I knew poetry and language was a big part of Bengali culture, but the poet that I heard about repeatedly was the famous Rabindranath Tagore, known for his Nobel Peace Prize that he won for writing his epic poem Gitanjali. But I hadn’t heard of Kazi Nazrul Islam, who was the official national poet of Bangladesh.

“They both are well known,” my dad continued. “Almost all Bengali functions start with a poem by Kazi Nazrul Islam and a song and dance by Rabindranath Tagore.”

This poem that was sampled in the song above is Islam’s most famous one of all – written in 1922 (after he left the British army in 1920) and is called Bidrohi. A punk blogger said with regards to the words, “I can’t get over how Rock & Roll his words are. It’s Like Sabbath meets T Rex meets The Clash.”

An excerpt of the lyrics are below, though you can find the full lyrics here. I believe the song sampled the closing para.

I am the hurricane, I am the whirlwind
I smash everything on my path and leave behind.
I am the dance-insane rhythm
I dance on, with my own beat
I am the heart liberated wit.
I am the different musical modes
I rock, I roll, on move I startleI whistle and swing on sharp notes.

I do whatever this mind wants whenever
I embrace the enemy and fight the death as a warrior.
I am pestilence, the global terror
I am the death of the dictator
I am warm and restless forever.

…

I am a Rebel ‘Vrigu’-
I mark my footprint on the chest of the creator God
I shall cut open the heart of the grief inflicting whimsical lord.
I am the Hero, Rebel – eternal -
Rose above the universe alone
My head is ever Monumental

I just find it phenomanal that rebellious poetry got such recognition in Bangladesh. It’s as if they were punks and activists intertwined into the history of what it means to be us here as muzzpunks in the US. The poets were punk before there was punk. And yeah, yeah, yeah, taqwacore is how we define it and punk is how we define it but I think being a rebel against the colonizer is punk, and Kazi Nazrul Islam was an original Taqwacore.

Though the wiki stated that Islam died in 1976 in Dhaka from a degenerative disease, my parents refuted. “He was poisoned,” my mom said. “By the British.”

That’s not what wiki said,” I told my mom. “It said he died a slow death.”

“He did,” she stated, “because he was poisoned. What is this wiki thing, anyways? What do they know?”

True rebel rocker, fighting the colonizer, poisoned by the oppressor… Keep your Gandhi, we have Nuzral Islam and Tagore to inspire fight in us.

Softcore Punk

2009-10-30T16:12:00.001-07:00

The soft punk
With a sterling heart
Has fierce love.
Hard core is full of melting fire,
Tender sex is brimmed with grit,
And passion is raw.

Icy lust and plush love
Crash together into punk drunk romance
Leaving broken ice pieces
Scattered
Rebelliously melting softly
Into pulling you under.

A heart that is raw-ly grit
A soul that is gritting-ly raw
Is the soft love
Of a hard core.

Redefining Punk, My Way

2009-10-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted from The Taqwacore Webzine...

Real punk is gutter punk, the kind of punk where you go dumpster diving for your next meal, are straight edge until you find a the tail end of a joint on the ground to smoke, and wear the same black jeans and metal studded jean vest with black and white patches of your favorite extinct 1970s crust bands. This is what real punk is supposed to be, right? Live in the streets, fight in the streets and died in the streets. We don’t vote, we believe in anarchy. We don’t give a fuck, we are punk rock.

I always found this contradictory because to me, the people I saw in punk spaces were primarily white. Contradictory because to me, white people epitomized privilege. And how real could ‘gutter’ punk be, if they were white?

When I first started going to punk shows, I thought the music was wild. I was in my teens, it was the late 90s and ska/punk fusion was just about to blow up in Southern California. It was right before OC punk manifested into OC punk, back before Warped Tour became pop and back when Incubus, Hoobustank, Dashboard Confessionals and Blink 182 were opening acts to Homegrown, Goldfinger, The Ataris and Save Ferris. Back when Fat Wreck Chords was the only label I bought from and Travis Barker was still the drummer for The Aquabats.

In this space I found an energy that for the first time reflected me. I was always the ‘weird’ girl in my group of friends, because of religion, race, and creed or whatever. I didn’t fit into a normative box. I was also the hyper kid that got high off of sugar and bounced off the walls with ridiculous ferocity. At punk shows, I’d be skanking in the circle pit, I was the girl on the front railing singing along, and I’d crowd surf my way to get around the pit. I found my people. But at the same time I didn’t find my people. I’d be that one brown girl, never quite fitting in. I never made friends at the punk shows, never found people that really understood all of me. With my circle of (white girl-) friends that I’d go to shows with, they didn’t understand why I fasted for Ramadan, why I wasn’t allowed to go to school dances, why I had to be home by sunset so that I could pray Maghrib. They didn’t get why I wasn’t allowed to date, why I couldn’t wear tank tops or shorts, and why they couldn’t bring their boyfriends to my house for my birthday parties. I didn’t know that what I was feeling was “marginalized” or that my narrative of self was being pushed to the boundaries or that I was experiencing implicit subtextual racism. I didn’t learn those words till after college and I started work as a community organizer professionally. At the time, I just felt lost, and that I was just trying to be myself, but that no one around me was letting me be me.

Over the years, my punk rock-ness has manifested itself intrinsically. I’m straight edge, that’s punk. I like making stuff, doing it on my own, and hate having other people do things for me. I’m DIY, that’s punk. People aren’t listening to my peoples politics and are beating up brown people in hate crimes? They think that all Muslims are responsible for 9/11? And the government doesn’t have my back to protect my rights? Well fuck it. I’m going to organize as many brown youth as I can to register to vote and create a political voice that can’t be ignored. Fuck them, I’m punk. No one believes that a 24 yr old can do start a national organization on her own? Well I did, in 2004 I started a non-profit and ran a national campaign on $9,000. No one believe a pierced Desi girl could do it, but I did. No one’s going to tell stories of what life is like on my margins? Fuck it, I’m punk. I’m going to write it. Being punk means rising up even if people hold you down. The white man can’t hold you down, or in academia speak — white systematic oppression — can’t hold you down.

Punks aren’t about the poverty, exclusively. At least to me, not real punk. It’s about being disempowered and giving voice to the voiceless. It’s about ideas of power and not having any. This is how I defined it for myself – being able to bring a punk energy and attitude everything I did, particularly in empowering a community of people. That became my deen. To be the voice of real punk isn’t about coming straight from the gutters to give legitimacy. Classism and poverty are not the only forms of privilege. The privilege of race and the privilege of freedom of religion are very real privileges that mainstream punk rockers have not had to deal with. But as Taqwacore, it’s something that all of us have had to deal with. Every single one of us.

I write all this because I am disturbed by the notion that to be a legitimate voice in punk space, you had to come out of a trailer and prove your poverty and gutter-ness. That if you have financial privilege of parents, that you cannot be real punk (as was mentioned on this comment thread at Sepia Mutiny). Speaking as the product of a blue collared family, I think that is a stupid notion. I feel that statement is tainted by white supremacy notions, and marginalizes the very real disempowerment experiences of racial oppression and religious freedoms that my community exists in. It’s feeding into the model minority myth. It’s like saying, “Wow, you just got beat up for being Muslim? Well that’s okay, you aren’t that poor. It’s the poor people that should really be speaking out about getting beat up.”

While we are on the topic, anarchy punks really piss me off. Also, ‘I don’t give a shit about society’ punks piss me off. Those two concepts of being punk are rooted in white privilege. The first founding fathers of this nation were white, and the only people that had voting privileges were land owning white men. Even after women got the right to vote in the 1920s, I still didn’t have the right to vote. I had to wait until the Luce-Celler Act of 1946 to give me as an “Indian” person the right to vote. And I bet even then, I couldn’t go vote in a lot of states until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. We (women/brown/Muslim, in my case) had a long struggle to gain that right, and I’ll be damned if anyone tries to take that right away. I made it a life’s goal to work to empower a community, whether, Muslim, South Asian, female, pan-Asian or People of Color. I don’t think that makes me any less punk.

I guess that what it comes down to. Punk is how we define it, Taqwacore is how we define it, and fuck it if people try to contradict it otherwise. I finally found the space that allowed me to be me. I didn’t “find myself” after discovering Taqwacore the book, or bonding with the Taqx people. After all, “life is about creating yourself, not finding yourself,” has been a life mantra of mine. I did find a like-minded community building and struggling around the same issues I was. We are defining what it means to be Taqwacore, together. Whether we have different class backgrounds, races, or religiosity, the empathy of understanding commonality amongst this posse is not lost. This empathy translates into a building of bridges with all sorts of communities including those that are not punk/Muslim/brown. And to me, that is how Taqwacore is redefining what it means to be punk, in a whole new brilliant way.

Fuck it if people try to tell me otherwise.

#BoyintheBalloon

2009-10-15T19:25:00.000-07:00

A six yr old boy flew away in a balloon today.
The balloon was helium filled
Shaped like a shiny saucer
Twenty feet in diameter and six feet high.
He kept flying higher and higher.
A couple feet, then a hundred and then a thousand more.
A panicked father called a local news station
To get the news helicopter to find and follow the balloon.
The balloon had been un-tethered,
Unbeknownst to the father,
An amateur space science enthusiast.
The older eight yr old brother
Said he saw the younger brother climb into the balloon,
Before it flew away.
The father upset because he
And his six year old son named Falcon
Had just got into a fight.
Father had told son,
"You can’t play in the balloon."

At 5,000 feet the balloon soared,
Swept away higher and higher by the winds gusts
Going miles and miles over the Colorado prairies,
Further and further away from home.
The shiny balloon floated high,
swaying between clouds
And soaring through the big blue sky.
The national guard came up with a rescue plan,
All flights in the vicinity were grounded,
The news watched on intently.

All eyes from all across the nation followed
As word got out about the boy in the balloon.
Cable news networks, online live streams, and even CNN
Started watching the big balloon in the sky.
People tweeted with hashtags of #balloonboy.
“How did he get up there, how will he come down?”
Scientists speculated the helium would contain
Keeping the balloon flying for eight hours more.
Meteorologists said rain was forecasted
Creating a cooling weather pattern would decrease the pressure.

And six year old boys across the nation
Looked on with awe
As this six year old little boy named Falcon
Was able to fly away from his family
Like they had wanted to do so often before.
Grownups like me watched wistfully
Thinking about how the silver UFO shaped balloon
Was really Ronald Dahl’s big peach,
Or Mary Poppins’ umbrella,
Or Tinkerbell’s fairy dust,
Or Miss Price’s flying bed,
Or Falcore the Luck Dragon from Never Ending Story.

A couple of hours later,
The balloon dropped altitude rapidly,
Slowly deflating
And spinning in circles
Thousands to hundreds of feet.
The nation watched the live feed
A synchronized national gasp
As the balloon landed with a gentle thud on a barren field.
Sheriffs and fireman and emergency technicians
Ran to the balloon,
Tethering the balloon before it could fly again.
“Don’t be scared, Falcon.
We’re here to help!” they shouted.

But as they pried open the cardboard basket
They realized…
The balloon was empty.
The six year old boy named Falcon had disappeared.
The nation was stunned.
Where could Falcon have gone?
Could he have fallen before the helicopter started watching him?
Maybe he jumped out before the balloon took off?
And six year old boys across the country
Looked on with amazement.
Falcon had been successful in his escape.

Four hours later,
Falcon is found.
He was hiding in a box
In the garage attic.
He had runaway upset,
Ignored when he heard his name called,
And fell asleep.
He was safe.
Alive.
He had never been in the balloon,
Never had the ride of a lifetime.
The boy in the balloon had never been in the balloon.

But for those few hours as he remained hidden in the garage
Falcon was the embodiment of every childhood fantasy
And living out every six year old kid’s dream.
Maybe that’s why the nation watched on with such intent -
Because Falcon represented that despair of being a child,
And that feeling of wanting to float away.
I believe the nation watched with intent
Because they secretly were cheerleading for his success.
He was able to do what we all had wanted to do when we were a child his age.
And even though in the end,
He had never been in the balloon --
For those few hours today
He reminded us all of the peach, the umbrella, the bed, and the flying dog,
And what it was like to be a six year old kid with childhood fantasies, once more.

Christians Sing About Allah Too

2009-10-04T18:49:00.000-07:00

The first time I blogged about The Kominas and The Taqwacores at Sepia Mutiny I made the mistaken comparison that the "Muslim Punk" of The Taqx was akin to the Christian Punk scene. In high school, my best friend was this crazy blond Christian listen to nothing but Christian punk songs. She was my association to the space. But it is a comparison for which Basim from The Kominas has never let me forget and one that I realize now is far from comparable of the two genres. I get it. I get it.

Christian Punk as a genre usually preaches the godliness of God through the music of punk. The Taqwacores, is barely "Muslim Punk" in that sense. It's more a space for people to explore, debate, and discover the spiritual, political, and cultural contexts having a Muslim identity and that often can be mutually exclusive, or ridiculously muddy. Or on the flip side, it's a space to explore what it means to be punk within the context of identifying spiritually, politically or culturally as Muslim or brown or curious. I get it. I get it. And now that I'm looking at Taqx from the inside out, I really see how no definition can succinctly capture what it means to be Taqwacore because it is constantly morphing and changing person to person, band to band. Taqx, unlike Christian punk, is the intersectionality of identity politics at it's finest.

That being said...this month's The Atlantic profiles a Philly based Christian post-punk band called me without You signed onto the Christian rock label Tooth & Nail. Started in 2001, the band has released four albums, and morphed out of a straight-edge discovers Jesus type scene. They sound kind of like Sea Wolf, but campfire hokey like They Might Be Giants. My interest was peaked when I read the following: "...having spiraled along the spiritual trajectory of its mercurial singer, the band now wraps up its live set with what can only be described as a Sufi worship song: 'In everyone we meet/Allah, Allah, Allah!/In everyone we meet.'"

That sounded quite similar to what I saw as a Five Percenter school of thought where they believe that Allah is in everyone. Men are called 'God' and women, well, women are called 'Earth.' But we'll save that for another conversation. I was now officially curious in me without You (and selective capitalization reminds me of the capitalization of 'no god but God'.)

Lyrics to Allah, Allah, Allah.

Turns out that the latest album, It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Allright largely influenced by the sufi teachings of Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. The album can be streamed entirely on their imeem site, and it's kind of interesting to here songs peppered with Islamic phrases when this band has such a large Christian following. Another song on the album, Every Thought a Thought of You melds together Hewbrew phrases and "la illaha il Allah." For the record, the Weiss brothers of the band were raised in a Sufi Islam household (Dad, a Jewish convert and Mom an Episopalian convert) and they doesn't consider themselves a Christian band (says lead singer Adam Weiss, "I just don't think it's true. I don’t think we live up to that calling, so I’d be reluctant to go saying that, and God knows the truth.") I find this to be an uncanny resemblence to bands in the Taqwacore space who shy away from being identified as "Muslim punk" bands.

Can you picture it? A Christian punk show where I would imagine the crowd would be largely evangelical and white (I'm making assumptions, obviously), all singing along to "Allah, Allah, Allah" or "La illaha il Allah." I have fantastical images The Kominas dressed in Taqwacore super hero costumes barging into a Christian punk fest, fists in air, kafiya in hand. I wonder how they would be treated. Will it be like Basim at the straight edge show where he got his arm torn out of the socket because he wasn't white? Or will the band be heralded and brought to the stage? Or will an attempted kidnapped baptism take place and they have to escape by Omar's hybrid car with the tour trailer jostling over the road....? Jesus Christ on a pogo stick chasing them...? Ahem. Sorry for the tangent... What I meant to say was -- is the band me without You serving to build or hinder an interfaith punk/rock alliance? More importantly, how does that translate to shifting the attitudes of their fans to be more accepting of Sufi and Islamic teachings, and by extension, people like us in the Taqx?

Take a look, take a listen. Is this the new wave of [name your religion] meets [punk/core/post-punk/rock/gypsy/country/rap] music? Is everything is everything, anyways?

Almost Famous, Taqx Edition

2009-09-03T00:16:00.000-07:00

I pulled the car over and cried. I cried and cried and cried. Tears streamed down my face behind my big sunglasses as I sat in my car in the striking heat of summer. I was somewhere in the middle of Texas, completely all alone. I looked out my windshield at the Texan scenery wondering how I had ended up there 1,500 miles away from my home in Southern California. Somewhere along the way the lines had become blurred. Somewhere over the course of the past few months who I was in this Taqwacore space had blurred. I was no longer a blogger from the outside looking in. I felt like I was that kid in Almost Famous, the one that was a writer and got totally absorbed into the band subculture. I was in it, as in it as one could possibly get. I was Taqwacore, whether I liked it or not.

The Kominas had left me to finish the national Taqwatour without me. I was all alone somewhere outside of Austin, Texas. I wiped my tears and walked into the Walgreens I was parked in front of. Inside, I bought a map of the nation. I didn’t own a map. First step first - I needed a map. I had just gone on a spiritual pilgrimage of the Taqwacore kind. With love, and punk and punk drunk love. With two weeks till the start of Ramadan, it seemed symbolic in a way. Before last year’s Ramadan, I had read Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores to prepare my Muslim mind state for a month of fasting. Some would say a punk book of kids toeing the line on the border of Islam may not be the best book to prepare oneself into a Muslim mind state, but for me, it was just what I needed to remind me that I belonged. Here I was a year later, taken on the Taqwacore journey of a lifetime, a pilgrimage both unlike and so similar to the one I had performed in Mecca years and years ago – a journey into my internal spiritual self, finding a collective peoples I connected with, and finally feeling I had found a family that I belonged to.

My mind rocked with a circle pit of images; people praying on cardboard boxes behind punk venues; skateboarding in saris; Mohawks and pop rocks; guitar stores and the Grammy Museum; punk colored hair wedding entourage; sleeping on rooftops under stars; Mike Knight in wedded turbaned bliss; late night desert drives; tagging on the trailer; storming the stage for Muhammad was a Punk Rocker; bouncing to Evil Eye; sweaty water drenched singalong skanking to Rumi was a Homo. A moshpit of madness in my memories. It was all I’d have left on my slow drive back home.

I opened the map and charted a course on the I-40. With only one goal in mind of returning to Los Angeles before the start of Ramadan, I turned the engine on my Yaris, aptly named 'Johnny Quest'. It was time for the slow roll back home.

+++

A punk rock circle pit is like tawaf around the Kabbah- looks like a circular chaotic pushing and shoving, but indeed, there is an internal order. Love and spirituality in the perceived chaos. And every now and then some guy copping a feel.

+++

“Thanks for all you’ve done,” Michael Muhammad Knight said from behind the table with a pile of Osama Van Halen books. I looked at him quizzically. “You know, for the boys and the Taqwacores and stuff.”

I scoffed. “I didn’t do anything. I’m just a giddy fangurl that’s totally geeking out right now.” We were at an L.A. book reading for Mike and I had just met a large chunk of the cast and crew to The Taqwacores movie. It was a couple of weeks before his wedding and a couple weeks after I had met Mike for the first time in NYC.

He looked up at me from signing my book. “Really? But you are Taqwacore. You are what this is all about.”

I felt like I had just been christened. But the Muslim punk equivalent.

+++

It was time for Isha prayer at the Vermont Mosque and I was standing outside waiting for Rasika Mathur. She was following me for her role as Fatima in The Taqwacores movie – the character is a Bengali activist punk chick and apparently, I was the best candidate for the job. My job was to download into her mind everything of what it meant to be a Muslim activist punk chick in a matter of six hours. She was going to be on set in Ohio later that week. She had come bouncing up to meet me on the steps in fur lined Uggs and a floppy knit cap, ridiculously enthusiastic.

Inside she did wudu with me and then put on a generic white cotton dupatta labeled in black marker “Property of the Islamic Center of Southern California” across the back. She sat in the back as she watched me pray. We went to a coffee shop afterwards and talked the night away.

It was later that I found out she had had an ‘accident’ with brownies the night before. Thoba, thoba, taking her to the mosque like that. I wondered if the shoulder angels would dock me points for that.

Allahu Alim.

+++

“Knock, knock,” I heard Omar Waqar’s voice crackle through the phone. I had called Basim Usmani, lead singer of The Kominas, to fact check a blog I had been working on about their tour. It was the first day of The Kominas national summer tour and the phone was getting handed around to everyone in the car. I felt like the village bicycle. I hadn’t met anyone in person but Basim, and I was slightly tripping that I was talking to everyone. I had a minor question about Sarmust and before I knew it, I was getting a 'Knock, Knock' joke.

“Uh, who’s there?” I hesitated, smiling to myself. I mean, who intros themselves with a knock, knock joke?

“Allah.”

“Allah, who?”

“Hahaha…” Omar laughed on the other end of the line. I rolled my eyes and laughed back.

+++

Eyad Zahra, film director of The Taqwacores, barged into the Oakland punk venue from behind the club where the barbeque had been set up. “Someone’s going to lead prayer out back! He’s going to do azaan right now! People are doing wudu in the bathroom!” We were hanging out inside the club, waiting for the punk show for the night to start. I looked outside; it was Maghrib time.

"No fucking way…!” Mike responded, jumping to his feet.

“Who is it?” I asked Eyad. I had a sneaking hunch.

“That kid, you know. Yousef is!” Eyad responded, knowingly. It figured. For the three years I’ve known Yousef, he was always the one who would call azaan no matter what the event - parties, bonfires, dance parties. We had bonded at a yuppie Muslim mixer where he had been wearing a Goldfinger shirt. He was the first guy to lead azaan, and the first guy to rock out in the pit. I’ve prayed behind him often and seen him pray everywhere.

I went out back to watch. Cardboard boxes were laid out flat next to a stack of crates that I can only presume had once held bottles of alcohol. Dogs were lounging around and a bunch of punks were smoking and drinking beer to the side. Smoke from the grill drifted over the graying blue sky as Yousef gave a beautiful azaan.

“I feel conflicted,” one of the Taqx guys said as Basim and I stood to the side watching people pray. “I feel like I should go pray.”

“Then go pray!” I said.

“But I have this beer.” He looked down sadly to his hand holding the beer.

“Go pray, man. Give me your beer. I’ll hold it for you.” Basim said reaching over and grabbing his glass.

Hands free of alcohol but with beer tainted breath, he jumped into the line on the cardboard box. With a quick hand raise to the ear, he joined the prayer.

It was like a scene out of the book. With one difference – this was unscripted and real.

+++

“This is going to be the first time that I see The Kominas perform,” I said to Mike, standing next to him at the Oakland show as the guys set up. I was in shock and ridiculously full of anticipation. The first time I had written about the band was over three years ago, and I’d been following the band ever since. It was a blog post where I declared my crush for the boys in The Kominas and how I would fight Ashwairya Rai in a wet sari for them. They had only performed on the east coast, or Pakistan. They had never made it this far west. That is until this very moment, on their first national tour bringing the band to Khalifornia.

“Oh yeah?” Mike responded. “How are you feeling right now?”

Of course Mike would ask that. He was after all the narrator of this Taqwacore space. I was feeling overwhelmed, excited and ecstatic. Speechless. “I don’t know what I’m feeling right now. It’s crazy.”

I couldn’t believe after all was said and done, it had taken me this long to see them finally on stage. I stood near the back, afraid that I was too old for some up front pit action. They hit the stage. And I was done. Just like that. I was once again the teenaged punk rocker with colored hair. I was a giddy youth once again. Needless to say, I didn’t stay on the outskirt of the pit for long. I jumped right on in.

Mike comes up to me a few songs later and stood directly in front of me. Without saying a word, he held up his sneaker and motioned that I should take my shoes off and do the same. We both looked down at me feet. I was wearing black flip flops. I looked back up to him and slowly nodded my head no. He responded slowly nodding yes. I knew it was the night before his wedding, and this was a sort of bachelor party send off, but I was a girl, and there was no way that I was going to stand on that punk floor in my bare feet. I looked back at my feet and made eye contact with him and nodded no emphatically. He shrugged back and went on to the next person. A few minutes later, shoes showered the stage, bouncing off of the band members as they cringed and continued to play. The moshpit turned into a loving mess as guys stood arm in arm, doing the can-can in their socks.

+++

“Pigs are haram! Pigs are haram!” Basim chanted into the mic. Soon everyone in the room was chanting. I followed the gaze of everyone in the room. There they were, four cops at the bar checking out the liquor license of the venue. In the middle of Sarmust's set. They checked the paperwork of the venue, but kept a sly eye on the band. Coincidence? I think not.

+++

We were in the banquet hall of an Indian restaurant in a strip mall somewhere in the middle of San Jose. The wedding hadn’t started yet and I was sitting on the groom’s side, next to Rasika – I was her plus one to the Taqwacore wedding of the year – and Faith Gobidas, who was the stylist for the movie. All the rest of the guys had disappeared, we had suspected to be involved in the wedding somehow. We were sitting there drinking our chai waiting for the wedding to begin when my phone rang. It was Siddhartha, former fellow blogger and fellow Taqx geek who had flown out for the wedding. I looked around, he was nowhere to be see.

“Where are you?” he asked me.

“I’m sitting at the table with Rasika and Faith. Why? Where are you? The wedding is about to start!” I responded with hushed urgency.

“I know! I’m in the back of the restaurant. Mike is asking, ‘where’s Taz?’ He’s saying that the wedding can’t start until you join his procession and walk out with him. Get the girls and get back here!” I was needless to say, giddy and shocked.

We walked to a back room and there was Mike, in a red pagli around his head and handsome cream colored kurta. Standing behind him were The Kominas, people from the movie, people who I’ve read about in his memoirs. He smiled when he saw me. “You’re one of my people! Get back there!” I joined the punk entourage posse next to Siddhartha. The dhol player started playing immediately and walked forward. Everyone else followed behind, Mike and his mother leading the crowd. Whooping and hollering to the beat of the drum, the colored hair punk posse procession let everyone at the wedding know that the groom’s side was a force to be reckon with. And somehow I was now one of them.

+++

The Taqx crew was outside of the wedding in the strip mall parking lot milling around my car. The food had been eaten, the cake had been cut, slide show had been shown. People were slowly filtering out. Imran Malik, drummer for The Kominas, and Prop Anon were taking turns riding around the parking lot on my skateboard, which I always kept in the trunk of my car. I wanted to skate while wearing my sari, which is why we were at the car. A few other people rolled over, but they were rolling a shopping cart around the parking lot, with someone sitting in the cart. Skateboards and shopping carts, how very Taqwacore.

Shahjehan Khan of The Kominas came out from inside and called us all over. “Hey,” he screamed out. “They’re calling us back in!” We walked over. “So they want us to do Qawalli. It’s kind of like a battle, the brides side will be on one side and Mike’s side on the other. And we’ll be singing off back and forth. Cool?” Omar started strumming his hand made hand held instrument, and the crew started humming a beat, with The Kominas leading the way. We walked into the restaurant like that, all eyes on us as the entourage went to where the bride’s girls were standing.

The ‘Qawalli-Off’ started with songs about the groom and bride respectively, and ventured into Bollywood songs. It didn’t go back and forth as much as it went who could sing louder and remember more words then the other team. It went back and forth like that for almost half an hour. At the end they were trying to figure out who won the Qawalli-Off. “Auntie, who do you think won?” Omar sweetly asked an elderly auntie that was sitting at the neighboring table watching the whole back and forth.

She gave a desi nod of approval and motioned to the groom’s side. “You guys did, of course.” Of course. The Kominas were singing on the groom’s side. It was no competition.

+++

Rasika and I rolled our longboard skateboards down the slight hill from the gas station to the Jack In the Box parking lot. We were somewhere off the I-5, somewhere between San Jose and Los Angeles in the dead of midday Central Valley heat. I had gained momentum and skidded the board to the stop. I looked over my shoulder. Rasika was rolling just behind. Up next to my parked car at the gas station Faith was hula hooping. Just beyond that Siddhartha was sitting back against the wall in some shade, sipping on iced coffee, watching it all.

It was a scene. If you know what I mean.

+++

Imran and I skated, beach to our right, Venice boardwalk to our left, Shahj and Faith left behind in our skating dust. It was afternoon bliss. Beach wind whipped our hair and the pavement was clean, oh so clean. I had brought my extra skateboard from home when I met up with The Kominas in Los Angeles. We stopped at the skate shop to oil the boards, and stopped at a t-shirt shop so that Imran could buy a Misfits shirt. He put it on, right then and there. We skated for a while, long while, long enough for me to get a heart shaped blister on my right foot.

Back at the car with an hour left before the guys had to be at that night’s venue to setup, we realized that something was amiss. Imran had lost his iPhone. An adventure ensued that included stoned blonde chicks next to where the phone was lost saying that a man in a guitar shirt and Viking gloves had taken the phone, to going to the Apple store and turning on the gps device of the phone, to trolling Third Street Santa Monica looking for a man on a bike in a guitar shirt and Viking gloves.

As I walked down Third Street, I saw him. He was sitting next to his bike, wearing a Hawaiian shirt covered in guitars and wearing BIKING gloves. He was talking to a homeless woman. I signaled to Imran and he walked over. “I think you might have my phone?” Imran asked. He did. No fight was had. Imran tried to reward the guy with money, but the man in the guitar shirt asked that the money be given to the homeless woman instead. Hugs were exchanged. We ran to my car and I raced through LA traffic to get the boys to the venue as fast as possible.

+++

The short scrawny black kid screamed like a little girl, with an echo that reverberated on the walls inside of the Ralphs. We all looked to see what the hell was going on. It was 1 am and Faith was at the checkout counter buying a huge jug of Chablis. We had gone to Ralphs looking for duct tape. The kid that had screamed was in line right behind Faith. Omar and I looked at each other trying to make sense of what the fuck was going on.

Tickling was the running gag of the night, and Basim had just run over to tickle Faith when the kid had let out the scream. He let out a sigh when he realized that Basim wasn’t coming over to him. “I thought you was gonna beat me up because of what I said to her. I was bout ready to call up my Daddy and tell him I was getting beat up in Ralphs.” He said this holding up his phone in his left hand, shaking. He let out a nervous laugh.

“What the fuck was that?” we asked Faith as we got in the car. “What did he say to you?”
Faith was cracking up. “He looked at the Chablis and said, ‘Yo pussie’s gonna get wet, your titties gonna come out tonight!’ And right then is when Basim came over to tickle me! The kid thought he was going to get beat!”

We laughed, and laughed and laughed. That catch phrase never got old. Though, it did make us look really dirty every time any of us said it for the rest of the tour.

+++

Omar, Basim, and Imran had eyes glazed over like mullah kids in a Kabbah gift shop. We were at a music store, guitars, mics and drums lined the walls. Basim had thrown a tipped over drum back at Imran during the set the night before and the skin had ripped. I took pictures like crazy. “Why are you taking so many pictures?” Omar asked with a teasing smile.

“Because…!” I responded. “I’m in the music store with Sarmust and The Kominas! This is crazy!” Sure, the boys may have been friends by then, and actually more like family, but I was still me, and prone to momentary lapses of fangurl geeking out.

+++

The dented “Stop” sign had “Lies” spray painted over it. It was behind a glass casing with a picture of Shahj and Basim placed just above it. It was very formal looking. We were at the Grammy Museum, a gorgeously curated three level exhibit with memorabilia from every significant musical genre. Including, The Taqwacores.

We all stood there stunned, silently staring at the exhibit. The Taqx crew was being trailed by a PR person to the museum, an LA Times reporter, and the documenting film crew with a video camera and boom mic. It was the first time I’d seen the media frenzy over The Kominas up close and personal. It was overwhelming, to say the least.

“Oh my god! Look at that!” Shahj exclaimed. He pointed to the space just below the stop sign. It was a piece on Rage Against the Machine. “That’s Tom Morollo’s HAT!” Indeed. Morollo’s faded salmon colored baseball cap was on display. So I guess, technically, that means The Kominas had one up on Rage Against the Machine, nah?

+++

It was 3am. The Muslim punks ordered matzo ball soup, knishes, and potato pancakes.

“How much does the bread, Challah, cost?” someone in the Taqx posse asked. I didn’t know who it was because I was shaking my head in shame.

We had brought the Muslim punks to Canter’s, the infamous Los Angeles 24 hours Jewish deli. The Los Angeles show earlier that night was odd – the space was glam with stark white pillars, shiny silver curtains and plastic looking with Hollywood people. The space was akin to what a Bollywood Vegas lounge stage might possibly look like. All the band needed was matching wide collared white suits. Instead, Basim lined his eyes with kohl. It was enough for glam effect to be had.

Muslim punks in the Jewish deli. Guess a little badmash should have been expected.

+++

I smelled sage smoke and heard loud drumming coming out of the space that the boys were supposed to be performing at for the Orange County show. I was nervous, because this was the show I had organized. I was afraid nothing was going to work out as planned.

I peaked in. Feather-not-dot Indians were tribal dancing in a circle in the room. I hadn’t been expecting that. We were in El Centro de Cultural de Mexico, and I had been warned, though the local kids often do punk shows in the space, that this particular early evening the space was being used for salsa dancing classes. I would be able to claim the space after. Salsa, pow wow, same diff, it seemed. The dancers cleared out in enough time for the show’s 10pm start but I like thinking about the merging of feather and dot Indians converging in that space.

The show was gritty and community space oriented. Most of the people in the crowd were the Chicano teen punks that were excited to see the “Musulman” punk band. They had a circle pit going in back. Arjun Ray, guitarist of The Kominas, the next morning stated in awe that it was the first time he had ever seen a circle pit at a Kominas show.

A long haired Native American guy that looked like he had smoked a fair share of peyote in his days, introduced himself to me in the hallway as the band performed their set. The guy was selling Native stuff, like patches or t-shirts that said, “Homeland Security; Fighting Terrorism since 1492.”

“Hey man… These guys are cool! They are real good!” the guy said in a doped up drawl. “I like how he’s playing without his shoes on. They are like US. It’s how the Natives do it. It brings you closer to the earth!” I nodded my head and smiled. He was pointing to how Basim was playing barefoot. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Basim was barefoot because the rest of the guys had thrown Basim’s shoes in a dumpster earlier in the tour. He was borrowing shoes along the way.

I found Basim later outside smoking and talking with the guy. I was glad the connection had been made. “Hey Taz! Do you know what this guy said?” Basim asked, motioning to the guy next to him. “He said Native Indians would put their hair up in Mohawks to bring them closer to the sun.” I smiled back. I thought about how the hawk could have possibly transitioned from native culture to punk culture. But in spaces like this one in Orange County, the merge wasn’t that farfetched.

I found out later that he was the same guy that started the circle pit at that night’s show.

+++

We tried to get Basim to pose for a picture with the mohawked cockatoo at the hookah bar on Anaheim's Gaza Strip that night. He tried dancing with the bird instead. We rushed him out before his finger could get bit off.

+++

“I was so scared!” Nyle Usmani said, his face that expression you get after riding a really scary roller coaster. Instead, we were sitting by the fountain at Yogurtland at midnight. Nyle, the undergrad-researcher-turned-hype man for The Kominas, had been running in circles bare feet in the fountain as Imran chased him. I was the referee.

“What’s he going to do, Nyle? It’s only Imran! It’s not like he’s going to eat you or beat you,” I implored, laughing till tears ran from my eyes. They kept running in circles in the fountain, and I kept refereeing until both Nyle and Basim fell in the fountain. Imran remained nimble-footed and dry. And then we hit the road to Austin, Texas.

+++

The Border Patrol peered into Johnny Quest. Pink streaked Imran was driving at the wheel, I with my fuchsia streaks, was sitting in the passenger seat and in the back seat with the multicolored purple and pink Mohawk you had Basim. Perfect, I thought to myself. Muslim colored hair punks getting questioned by Border Patrol. This is going to be fun. We weren’t even crossing the border, we were simply driving east on the I-10, somewhere between El Paso and Austin.

“Where are you going?” the Border Patrol man asked, suspiciously.

“Austin,” Imran replied.

“What are you doing there?”

“We’re playing. We’re in a band,” there was the subtlest hesitation in his voice as he said.

“Where are your instruments, then?” he searched, eyeing Basim in the back seat.

“They are in the other car behind us. They are a couple hours behind us.”

“We drove ahead,” Basim added loudly from the backseat.

“You. Where were you born?” he asked Basim.

“MANHATTAN. NEW YORK!” Basim screamed, or maybe he just said it really really loud, in an exaggerated New York accent. I looked down to try to keep from laughing.

The Border Patrol stepped back and let us by.

+++

We sat on the curb outside of the 7-11 in Austin, Texas at 2am. I was sitting between Imran and Basim as they ate 7-11 food. I think. I’m not quite sure, I was in a deep haze and my contacts were bleary. We had been driving for 24 hours straight and the boys had just waken me up. We were sitting with a couple of friends of the band from Houston, who were “hosting” the guys.

At that moment, a homeless dirty man started ambling in our direction. “Hey man,” he drunkenly stumbled. “Do you want some cigarettes?” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a box of cigarettes, still wrapped in plastic.

“Naw. That’s cool. Thanks,” Basim responded for all of us. “I don’t want to take cigarettes from you. You look like you’ll need them.”

“I got plenty,” the homeless guy responded. He reached into pockets and pulled out multiple wrapped cigarette boxes. He had at least five. “Well, then. Do you want a beer?” He starts pulling out cans of beers also from his pockets. It was a wonder to me how he was able to pack so many cigarettes and cans of beer on him. I cocked my head to the side, mesmerized by the interaction.

“No... Keep’ em.” Basim said.

I hadn’t been in Austin for that long, but I did know the homeless in Austin are really generous when it comes to beer and cigarettes. “Keep Austin Weird.” No doubt, no doubt.

+++

The Sunday night show in Austin was hot and muggy. I was frustrated from the day – I knew my time with the boys was about to end. But all my frustrations left when The Kominas hit the stage. Out of all five of the shows I had gone to, it was the only show that I let myself wild out like I was a teenager again. I bounced, I skanked, I screamed. A small core group of fans sang along to all the songs up front and danced like crazy, myself included. The top of my head was hot; I was wet from getting water dumped on me by Nyle; and I was completely out of breath by the show’s end. It was the smallest crowd of all the venues I’d been to with the band, but it was the most fun of them all. Omar played drums while playing the guitar and singing; Sean Padilla of Cocker Spaniel spontaneously jumped on stage to pick up on the bass guitar when Basim jumped in the crowd to sing; Prop Anon chipped his tooth; Basim kept getting electrocuted by the mic; and Nyle even jumped on the drums when Imran jumped off to sing.

And did I forget to mention? Kourash Poursalehi of Vote Hezbollah was there too. He sang the last song of the night. ‘Muhammad was a Punk Rocker’ – the lyrics written by Mike and found on the first page of The Taqwacores book. For that song, everyone stormed the stage.

A perfect punk rock send off, some might say.

+++

“MAPS suck!” I was tagging on the side of the trailer, highlighting my disdain for the Muslim American Princess types. The boys were packing up late after the Austin show, and I was alone on the road side of the trailer. As I was I was finishing the tagging the letter P, I felt a whoosh over my left should and a loud crash of rock on metal. A drive by had just been committed.

“What the fuck was that!?!” Omar screamed from behind the trailer. “Did they hit you?”

I nodded my head no. I was surprisingly unfazed.

“They can’t do that! Come on guys, let’s go!” Omar led the charge, chasing the car down the street. In his bare feet (he had been shoeless for the past few days). Imran and Basim joined Omar in the chase as Shahj stayed behind to video the whole event on his fancy new flip camera. Obviously, the guys didn’t get far on foot.

I bent down and found a large piece of twisted metal. It said, “Apple Bottom.” If it was a hate crime, I couldn’t tell if it was because I was Muslim, punk, or had no booty.

+++

“Who named you?” I asked the woman behind the counter at Whataburger in Austin at 2am. She was an African American woman, probably in her early twenties. Her name tag said, “Mecca Johnson.”

“I dunno,” she replied, with a slight southern twang. “I think my daddy named me.”

“Oh,” I said, nodding my head. I wondered what her father’s connection to Mecca was. And what symbolism resonated at this moment that our server was named ‘Mecca.’

Basim glanced over at her name tag and smiled. “You have a beautiful name,” he said warmly, twinkle in his eyes.

+++

I brought everyone breakfast the next day. Donuts and fried chicken. It was an absurd breakfast, but they were punk guys – to them it was the perfect combination.

We sat outside in front of Kourosh’s condo lazing about in the heat till it was time for them to go. Their next show was in Louisiana, eight hours away. With 1,500 miles between myself and home, I decided this is where we were to part ways. I had a long solo drive home. I hugged them all goodbye one by one, my heart cracking a little more with each hug I gave.

+++

With a blink of an eye, they were all gone. I was alone in Austin, Texas.

Under the weight of the hot Texas sun, I walked alone to my car and drove around aimlessly. But eventually, I pulled my car over to the side of the road and cried.

My Taqwacore pilgrimage had been completed. I had fallen in love with the Taqwacores and been accepted into the folds. I had found a family that knew me in a way that my own family never would, one that prayed, punked, and politicked together. In this space, I had the freedom to be myself, I had found myself, and I had let myself go, hopelessly and head over heels. I had punk rocked and prayed and loved moshed laughed skated cuddled rocked touched kissed and cried.

I couldn’t find words to explain what I had just experienced. It wasn’t just the story of following a band, or going on a book adventure. It was about love, punk, and punk drunk love. People who got you, really got you, and all that came with.

It was time to go home.

My life had been forever changed. I finally knew what it really meant to be Taqwacore.

My Mom, The Rock Singer

2009-08-22T19:57:00.000-07:00

Still riding the Taqwacore high from following The Kominas on tour through five city, I went into the kitchen to ask my mom a really important question.

"Mom. What was the name of your band?"

She gave me a weird look. She was arm deep in making iftari. Today was the first day of Ramadan and breaking fast was only half an hour away.

"Souls," she replied. She was slightly annoyed. I started digging through a drawer in the dining room. "What are you doing?"

"I'm looking for your pictures. I know I've seen a picture of you in the band before..." She knew I was on the path to get a story. Reluctantly, she humored me and let me pull the tale out of her.

Mom was repatriated from Pakistan in 1973 at the age of eighteen. My mother's family was able to jump on the next plane out from Lahore to Dhaka, as soon as my Nana was released from the concentration camp he had been held in for a year of his life. Our family is Bangladeshi. My Nana worked on the railway, and had been stationed in Lahore for six years at a training station. But none of that mattered when the 1971 Revolution happened. When the fight between for Bangladesh's independence began. Our East Pakistani family working and living in West Pakistan became Bangladeshi foreigners overnight. It became a war.

It was with this refugee mindset that my Mom returned to Bangladesh. She was the eldest of three daughters, and had finished the equivalent of high school in Pakistan. It wasn't home for her in Bangladesh though - she had spent her formative teenage years in Pakistan, and everything Bengali in her new land was foreign to her. To this day, her grasp of the Bangla language is weak, national identity confused. My mom's family had abandoned all their belongings in Lahore, having left with what they could carry in their suitcases on the plan and they had to start their lives over again from scratch in Chittagong.

Chittagong is where they moved in 1973. Chittagong is where the main offices of the railways were for Bangladesh. My Nana was transferred there after returning from Pakistan, and my mother started going to the local college, Chittagong University. My Nana eventually became the President of the railway system.

As with most college towns, this one had an underground music scene highlighting local music. My mom used to go to local shows, either with her sisters, sometimes with her parents. At the time, mom was a huge fan of The Beatles and Cat Stevens, the kind of classic rock that time period was known for. The local bands would mimic those sounds, but infused with local lyrics and beats. It was at one of these shows, a new local rock band called Souls, that she was asked to join the group on the mic for one song. They knew she had just come from Pakistan, so she knew some of the Punjabi songs from that region. They asked her to sing Mast Qalandar, a classic Qawalli song, totally impromptu and on the spot. Except when they performed it, they added a rock beat. It was a hit. They loved her.

Mom and my middle aunt stayed on to sing randomly with the band as a singer sporadically. She did it as she went to college. In 1976, Nana got re-stationed in Dhaka, and the whole family moved except for Mom. She couldn't transfer out of her college, so she stayed in the dorms. Eventually she graduated in 1977. She got an arranged marriage to my dad in 1978. She moved to the US to be with him in 1979. She was 23.

It was post-war rock - there was no album recorded, or tours established. It was just a bunch of crazy kids trying to make sense of a world during a war ravaged time through rock music.

"I just find it fascinating that you were in a rock band, Mom. Rock is all about anti-establishment and you had just gone through the independence war. It's so poignant."

"Well. It wasn't like we were rebelling against our parents. They would come to the shows too," she responded.

"That's not what i meant. What I mean is that Bangladesh was fighting the oppressor, the establishment is Pakistan, not your parents. Rock music is all about that. I just find it interesting that at that time in Bangladesh's life, you were using rock music to express yourself. It's so significant."

My mom walked around to the other side of the kitchen. "Well, music is an important part of our culture. It's how we express ourselves," she said, in a tone that reflected that I should obviously know this.

My mom never really talks about her rock days and she never sings anymore. I have vague memories of meeting other Bengali families in community centers where people would huddle around a harmonium and sing old Bangla songs. It was all very grassroots - potlucks, sheets spread on floor, hand written song books in faded Bangla scripts. The songs were classical, usually Tagore put to music. These days Bengali musical functions are more productions. They community hardly gets together for these old style singalong parties.

The band went on to become a huge pop sensation in Bangladesh. They went on to do over 5,000 shows and recorded six albums. They are still performing today. All the old members my mom knew in the band's inception have moved on. It took Souls ten years before putting out their first album. Mom was well rooted in California by then, wife in an arranged marriage with a baby girl to take care of (that would be me). The band became this huge success. They are still around, though all the members have probably rotated like the rock group Menudo. I remember once when I was probably eleven and visiting Bangladesh, Souls came on TV on one of those live novelty shows. "I used to be in that band," she said. I remember being shocked as a kid. Not my mom. She wouldn't go on stage and sing like that. As a kid we have these super hero constructed ideas of our parents and being in a rock band was just not how I saw my mom's identity.

Now I wonder if she regrets that her life wasn't more a part of that. Not remembered on the wikipedia site, or listed on an album.

If it was Punjabi songs that brought my mother on board with the Bangladeshi band, it's somewhat symbolic, I think of her mixed up ideas of national identity. Some would say Mast Qalandar is a song that cross all boundaries because of the subject matter. But considering the 1971 war stemmed from language rights movement, the freedom to speak Bangla, I find it particularly interesting that it was this Punjabi song that brought her into the world of rebellious rock music.

And it looks like Souls is still rocking out to Mast Qalandar.

Taqwa to the CORE. Hard core.

2008-12-24T21:54:00.000-08:00

It was like getting tossed into the fiercest mosh pit of your life. Chaotic, loud, messy and trashed, you stick your elbows out, knees high, and try to stick your neck out for a breathe of fresh air while sweaty bodies slam into you, violently. You don't know how or why anyone would voluntarily place themselves in such filth. At first, you are disgusted with survival mode but after a minute you discover the organized chaos of the pit. It goes counter clock wise and if you stay with the flow, you won't get touched. Everyone in the pit has a role and what had come across before as violence is really brotherly love of a fellow punker reaching out to keep you solidly in the mix. People dance arm in arm. People hug after violently slamming against each other. There's a system. A diversity of characters. A spiritually beautiful experience. Adrenaline high. Depth. Passion. Love. Spiritual. Organized chaos. The set ends and you find yourself standing alone in the middle of an empty pit, breathing hard, sweaty and high and you think to yourself, "That was fucking brilliant."

That is what reading The Taqwacores by Michael Muhammad Knight was like. EXACTLY. Like. That. Fucking punk rock.

I just finished reading the book and I have firmly decided that this book and it's timing in my life has slam danced it's way into one of my top ten life changing books. The book is set in Buffalo, New York in a punk rock house. Written in the first person, we follow the punk rock characters through the eyes of an orthodox studious Yusef who silently watches and slowly partakes in the the punk rockness of the house. Yusuf slowly gets "corrupt" or maybe really, he just challenges his ideas of Islam and is able to find what it means to be Muslim for himself.

This book isn't for everyone. The book literally drops you into the lives of punk rock Muslims where dialogues are hyper rich in slang and lingos indiciative of the intersections of the two worlds. As a Muslim punk myself, I found it annoying and difficult to read - I of knowing so many of the Muslim terms and nuances between the punk rock bands - but even I had to turn to google to figure out Islamic terms. It was like Clockwork Orange in it's language and I hated that book. As I moved forward in this book, I slowly started to enjoy the grit of the words, because it was the first time I was seeing a book that talked about mohawks (egg white not gel!), NOFX, and pits while also talking about jihad, hejabs, and peppering it all with "Allahu Alim." It was like the intersection of my two lives (though not to as extreme of a level). I realized that if you didn't "get" these two worlds, you would read this book and you'd enjoy it, but you really wouldn't "get" it the way it was meant to be "gotton." Thus, the book turns into this kinda secret language for the 'special' people and suddenly, makes sense. If you get it, then you really, really, get it. The language, the lifestyle, and the culture. That this is why this book started a movement, The Taqwacore movement, and how it was able to do it.

I myself am not a fan of character driven books. I enjoy plots, a Shakespearean storyline to books. It was annoying at first to read this book and have it eek out the boring lives of these kids. I kept waiting for the "thing" to happen, the plot to arrive. But it never did and about half way through the book I realized, "Oh shit. This is a character driven book." The book weaved in and out of the various characters and their Muslim and punk rock identities - with Yusef being the only character with any noticeable major character change. You had the straight edge hard core, the uber-feminist Hijabi, the activist political newbie chick, the gay Muslim punker, the whacked out homeless ADD kid, the philosophical stoner with the Quran, and of course, mohawked James Dean-ish Jehangir - the one all guys looked up to and all girls wanted and would fuck. With such a range of complex characters, a plot would have really made it a hard to follow the book. I understand that now, and as I got more and more engaged with the characters, it was as if each character has a piece of me in them. ALL of these characters were me. But what I really started appreciating was just how Knight peppered the book with Islamic myths and fables, and either demystified, strengthened or simply questioned them. He intertwined traditional stories into normal punk lives with complex empathetic characters and turned it all it's side. And that is what made it brilliant. He didn't need a plot - the characters could stand on their own.

****

Great book, you must be thinking, but why life changing?

As a Muslim blogger on a South Asian website, I am often the target of inane comments to all of my posts by the non-Muslims or the hyper-Muslims. Either I'm not blogging enough about Muslims, or I'm an Islamofascist. Regularly I get these comments (and I'll delete them if I have the energy to do so) but last month, in light of the Mumbai Massacre I received a particularly virulent comment to my 'Britz' post. It said, "I have been following your posts closely. There is a strong undercurrent of taqqiya. You never have sympathy for the victims of Islamic terrorism." There were two immediate thoughts, 1) what the hell is a taqqiya and what am I being accused of and 2) HOW the fuck could I be accused of being unsympathetic? A little research later, I learned that taqqiya is a term used for Muslims who hide they are Muslims in life saving situations. But the Right has embraced the term to accuse Muslims who are being deceptive in an effort to spread Islam in a devious way.

I was furious. The way I write is not deceptive. I'm not trying to be sneaky about how I write about Islam. I simply write about me. My struggles. My cultural Islam. My political Islam. My identity as a Muslim. And my kind of Islam. It's difficult enough that from the orthodox side of Islam we are pressured into believing that the Islam that we are supposed to follow is supposed to fit some rigid box. Now the people from below are attacking us because we don't fit their perceived notion of what Islam is and thus, we are being deceptive. It's BULLSHIT. How I choose to practice Islam (and write about it) is my personal choice. Don't misread my brand of practice as deception because it doesn't fall under your stupid ideas of what Islam praxis is supposed to be.

I read this book, The Taqwacores, soon after reading (halfway through) Reza Aslan's No god But God. Aslan's book goes into the stories and myths of Islam in a very historical demystifying-type context. Both knowledge banks together, I realize this -- Islam is a construct. You have the words of Allah that came down through the Quran, and you have everything else afterward - the structure put in place through the development of religion. When the prophet passed away, there had not been a structure set up on how Islam was supposed to be practiced without him to lead. It was left up to the followers (largely male) to create and develop that.The Islam we have today is built upon years and years of history. That is how we have Islam. Instead of completely dismantling Islam though, what The Taqwacores is able to do is say that yeah, as long as you believe in the shahadah - the phrase you have to say to become a Muslim - which says "there is no god but Allah and Muhammad (pbuh) is his prophet." Well as long as you say this and believe in this, than you are Muslim. Simple idea of belief. Everything else is allahu alim.

It's also not that the book encourages you to pick and choose what parts of Islam fits with your lifestyle, but it encourages knowledge. The characters all go into deep discussions on what is right and wrong, but instead of pushing for orthodoxy, every topic that is brought up is questioned. And perspective are shared that are outside of the mainstream ideas of Islam, such as Nation of Islam, Five Perecenters, or gay Muslims. It encourages a true breadth and depth of knowledge and lets you know that it's not just okay but encouraged to be yourself, find yourself in both Islam and punk. One doesn't have to abandon one to be a part of the other.

"Punk rock means deliberately bad music, deliberately bad clothing, deliberately bad language, and deliberately bad behavior. Means shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to every expectation society will have for you but still standing tall about it, loving who you are, and somehow forging a shared community with all the other fuck-ups.'

"Taqwacore is the application of this virtue to Islam. I was surrounded by deliberately bad Muslims but they loved Allah with a gonzo kind of passion that escaped sleepy brainless ritualism and the dumb fantasy-camp Islams claiming that our deen had some inherent moral superiority making the world rightfully ours...'

"There's no room in taqwacore for half-assed Muslims playing off as though they never miss a prayer...Be Muslim on your own term. Tell the world to eat a dick."
- Yusef in The Taqwacores (p212)

This book showed me that I could love Allah. And not have to abandon what it means to be me. Islam is a construct, but it's about how I choose to construct. All the rest...Allahu Alim. And that is how it changed my life.

And that commenter that accused me of taqqiya can go eat a dick.

Validated By Our New President Elect

2008-11-05T12:29:00.000-08:00

I got a text message from the front line. My front line was three hours behind that on the East Coast. It was 7:50 pm PST, and I was at the taco stall getting food for my volunteers, and of course, there was no buzz or excitement. I was in California, and this was just another day for the glacially slow taco maker. My volunteers were exit polling, not knocking on doors for Obama. I missed the buzz of being in the swing state, organizing as a community for a candidate. I was trying to rush the taco guy who was moving at glacial speed and I was afraid I would miss The Moment. And the moment came in a text message from SpamFriedRice, at the frontline in Tampa FL. Her text said, "They just called VA! We won!"

We won.

We actually won.

I grabbed what burritos he had made and stormed out of there. I got in my car and paused. And took a deep breathe. Obama's voice started singing to me from my phone, "Yes, we can! Yes, we can!" It was my ringtone that I had installed after the Vegas Primaries. I silenced it (I was driving), but the mental connection was made. I had installed the ringtone when Obama was the underdog, right after I had gone out to Vegas to help Obama beat Hilary Clinton back in February. I was shocked by how far we had come. I was shocked into silence.

But I knew he would win. For one reason only - in all my years of doing electoral campaign work, I had never seen a campaign like this. It was grassroots organizing at it's finest, the campaign was crisp, it was positive messaging, and the other side had fumbled badly numerous times in their campaign. I didn't always think Obama would win, but he had a slow and steady momentum like a frieght train, and while Clinton and McCain kept pestering around trying to trip Obama and drag him down, his momentum held him up and steady. So yeah, as a campaign person, and as an electoral organizer I knew that he would win. I knew he would win in a strictly 'wonky' kind of way.

But as me? As a woman of color? As the person that was inspired by his book? As a Muslim? As a person who sacrificed a career of $$ to instead give back to community? As a community organizer? As someone who had registered voters for Gore, and knocked on doors for Kerry? As someone who drove out to Vegas to fight for the underdog candidate in February? And as someone who was told I was silly for having the faith in Obama that I did? As that person? I find this unbelievable. I wanted him to win, and I needed him to win. And he won, and it is unbelievable.

And that's what brought me to tears on my long drive home at the end of an eighteen hour day at 11pm on Election Night. I thought about THIS post, on why I needed Obama to win. I needed him to win because he was like me, that someone like me could become President. That someone can make a life of fighting for social justice, that someone with values of critical race and grassroot values can win the hearts of the nation. That someone can run a campaign on positive messaging. That every vote matters, it really does and our fight for the right to vote for everyone was worth it. That electoral organizing works. That someone who has the same value system that I do has the support of over 63 million voters in this great nation of ours. That a person of color can have a position of power without being a token for it. That a second generation American, like me, can be a real American. I needed to know that prayers could be answered.

It was on that drive, that I realized, "Holy shit. I can have hope for myself again." I started crying because Obama getting elected as President of the United States gave me the ability to believe. In me. That I can do this. That someone with my value and belief system can win over the the hearts of America. That I can do this -- not presidency, but that I can keep doing this work as a fighter for social justice. THIS beautiful amazing work of giving back to the community. Because Obama, he is like me. In him, I see me. And if he could do it. Then. I can do it. He won, and he validated me. He made it ok for me, to believe in me.

His victory gave me permission to start dreaming in myself again.

Oh and that. I needed that so much. More than I ever realized. People like us, we are not allowed to dream like that. But finally, we can. I can.

"One brick at a time... this is just the beginning," Obama said last night. It's what I've been doing, creating change one person at a time. Hearing Obama saying it last night, made it ok for me to keep changing on...

Why I'm Voting Obama and Not for McCain

2008-09-21T00:43:00.001-07:00

My cousin recently asked me a question that made me think. She asked what were the top five reasons I was voting for Obama and what were the top five reasons I wasn't voting for McCain.

It was interesting to me because the big question I've been asked throughout this campaign cycle was why Obama and not Clinton. I know clearly the answer to that one, as I have written about previously. But why not McCain? Any why Obama now compared to McCain?

Well you asked. So here you go...

Why I'm Not Voting for McCain

5. The Tokenized Bridget - There was one major sticking point for me at the RNC, the parading and tokeninzing of Bridget McCain, the teenage Bangladeshi adopted daughter to the McCains. I do not really have a problem with white people adopting Bangladeshi orphans - at least that wasn't the issue I had this time around. What I had issues with was how Cindy McCain used Bridget's adoption story to reflect how the McCains were saviors and rescuers. Bridget was discovered - a word that is often used by colonizers discover 'new' lands. To read more on my thoughts on this topic you can check out my Letter to Bridget and the subsequent closing comment to the thread.

4. The Right to Choose - I haven't had an abortion. But if by some chance I do end up pregnant, I know here in the US, no matter what state I live in, I have the choice in what I choose to do with my body, in a safe manner. John McCain's stance is to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that made the right to an abortion a federal issue. Sure a president can't simply overturn a Supreme Court ruling, but if McCain was elected he has the chance to appoint the next Supreme Court judge, which currently leans conservative already. I believe this issue is too big to be demoted to a state's right issue - we need to protect the rights of women in EVERY state in this nation.

3. Healthcare for All - Healthcare in this nation is a privilege. And though those of us with union jobs with access to benefits can attain this privilege, there are millions of citizens, largely young adults or the blue collar workers that are unable to access healthcare services. McCain's healthcare only keeps in mind the buying into of plans and prioritizing familial units - his healthcare plan has a huge loophole - by privatizing healthcare he leaves out a plan for the people that work three part-time jobs, barely make a living wage, or even worse, people whose healthcare keep them from working a job. I should know, this is the case of my middle sister. Her lifelong chronic asthma kept her from excelling in school because she was sick so often, which is now keeping her from excelling in a career because her education is "sub-par." Her two jobs working as a temp employee and sandwich maker never included benefits, and now that she is 24, she has no healthcare. This past month her latest asthma attack kept her in bed for weeks on end, having her lose her only source of income, and my parents paying the costly medical bills for her chronic asthmatic condition. A condition that there is preventative medicine for, but none of which our family can afford since she has no insurance. It's a ridiculous cycle which McCain's plan has no solution for.

2. Palin is Idiotic - McCain's centered stance on policy issues forced him to pass on his first choice of veep of Lieberman and listen to the Republican powers that be (ahem, Karl Rove...) to pick an absolutely idiotic vice president. The party like her because she was conservative, a personality and woman. But underneath all the lipstick you will find an ugly bulldog. One who thinks that man walked the earths at the same time the dinosaurs did, one who wants to sue polar bears to take the bears off the endanger species list so that she can expand drilling into preserved lands, and the one who believes in an abstinence only education which obviously didn't work on her own 17-year old daughter. But teen pregnancy is okay if you are a Republican, just not if you are 17, living in poverty and turn to welfare for support. And like Matt Damon stated, If McCain is president, there's "a one in three chance he won't survive through his first term", leaving this idiotic person to run our nation. And that thought is incredibly scary.

1. I Like Nature and Hate Global Warming - The positive thing is the environment was brought up as a key issue in both conventions this year when in past elections the environment was never discussed. But "drill baby drill" is not my idea of environmental reform for the better. We have an energy crisis because over the umpteen years we keep creating environmental laws and mandates which private corporations simply chose to ignore and our government chose to turn a blind eye and not regulate. And though McCain in the past voted favorably on some environmental issues like against arctic drilling and acknowledges the reality of climate change (he really should give his veep a talking to on that issue), he's been abstaining on voting on anything favorably recently. Forget McCain's drilling to find energy, let's invest in Obama's clean energy for environmental reform for a long-term strategy. We can generate energy from wind and solar? We don't just have to drill? What a novel idea...

Why I'm Voting for Obama

5. The Economy, Stupid - Is anyone else finding it ironic that the Republican president is bailing out Wall Street and that our tax money (about $9,000 for every household in America) is going into this trillion dollar crisis? It's ironic you see because the Republicans are anti-big government intervention, but I can't help but see bailout is the rich man's term for "welfare." If McCain is elected, it will be more of the same from the Bush administration. But if Obama is elected people that are struggling will get a much needed tax cut and the economy will get the boost it needs. The graph here shows that Obama will only increases taxes for the top 1% of the population and it will provide the just needed economic boost this nation needs.

4.The Perpetual War - Obama has been against the war from the get go, as have I. But here we are, thousands dead, billions of dollars still pouring into Iraq and still no long term solution to an end. Last summer I read Imperial Life in the Emerald City which goes into the depths of the stream of failed policy efforts due to nepotism being prioritized ahead of actual skill sets. And all this craziness of poor policy foundation building for Iraq has led to an incredible money sucking mess. Obama would get us out of Iraq responsibly, and appoint all the right policy expertise that Iraq so desperately needs.

3. Universal Healthcare - Obama's healthcare plan would allow everyone to have access to healthcare. See my number three for why not to vote McCain.

2. Voting Rights Advocate - It's no surprise that I'm a big on voting rights for everyone, especially the Asian and Pacific Islander community. When Obama first started his law career it was in the realm of civil rights and voting rights, which I always kinda knew but never really delved into. But when Obama mentioned at the APIA Town Hall Forum that he considered himself a big voting rights advocate, it made me feel all mushy inside. No politician ever sees voting as a "right", but rather a tool that will get them elected into office no matter what it takes. Obama's supreme ethical standards when it comes to topics around voting are those that I also feel deeply passionate about. It was at the forum that he mentioned issues such as how asking voters for I.D. when voting is a bad move and how individual states need to implement better transparency for voting laws. Obama would end deceptive voting practices if elected. And that's something I am totally on board with.

1. He is Me - Dreams From My Father was a life changing book for me, for one reason only. In his biography, I saw me. I saw my passion for community organizing. I saw him entwining altruism in all he did, like I try. I saw a leader who understood my perspectives on racial justice. I saw a person of color trying to make a real systematic policy change in a white supremacist society. He is the child of a Muslim, like me. And as I've seen his campaign progress I am struck by two strong values he's running it with. The first is the value of grassroots - this need that power is built from the bottom up and every voice of every single person matters. It's this grassroots value that is getting my non-voting friends asking how they can help or my immigrant father making hundreds of calls on behalf of Obama. The second value is that of positive messaging. This positive message of hope and change has inspired the youth, the dispassionate, the hopeless in a way this nation was needing desperately.

I've said this before and I'll say it again - "I need him to win because I have made it my life mission to fight against social injustices. I have made a commitment to make this work my life, my passion my work... And I need him to win, because he has made it his life work to do the same thing too... If Obama wins, I know that I’ll have a future and that my life path was not futile. If Obama wins, it means that someone with a life mission committed to fight social injustices can become president. And that gives me hope for my future. And I need that. I need to believe that more than ever.....

I want him to win because I am selfish and because in Obama, I see a little bit of what I aspire to be. And I have to have hope for that future for me."

My Story on Hope and Change

2008-02-06T00:09:00.000-08:00

I had left fifteen pages of the South Asians for Obama call list on my family's dining table before I left for work. Super Tuesday was tomorrow, and I had plans to call South Asian voters to remind them to vote for Obama. I raced back home after work, so that I could make as many calls as possible before 9pm, and have my little sister help me out too. But someone had got to the list first. I looked through the call lists and saw notations marked on the sheet -- Muslim, Call Back—in my Dad's distinctively FOB handwriting. Three pages of it. I was stunned. In all my years of political organizing, my father, the quintessential Bangladeshi uncle had never taken part in any of the political activities of door knocking or phone banking that I had organized. Yet here he was, so inspired by Obama that he made over 50 calls this morning before he headed out to his blue collar job at Home Depot. My dad phone banked South Asian voters for Obama.

Huddled around the dining table, sister and I made rapid fire calls to Jayeshes, Hamids and Vikrams reminding them that tomorrow was Election Day. Some were nice, some were not, and almost all of them had voted by absentee earlier in the month. And every time someone said they were voting Obama, we high-fived each other. My dad came home from work at 8:30pm, and immediately we put him on the phones. “Call all your friends!” I implored.

He proceeded to call through his phone book of members of the Bangladeshi community. I would hear him as he sat in the living room making his calls. “Khalka vote dibeh?” Are you going to vote tomorrow? He’d ask his friends. “My daughter is making calls for Obama –“

“No, Abbu!” I whispered loudly. “YOU are making calls for Obama!”

“Oh…I am making calls for Obama,” he said into the phone. “I made them all day, and I’m voting for him tomorrow. I want you to vote for him too.” By 10pm, my family had made over 200 get out the vote calls on behalf of Barack Obama that day.

+++++++++

“Did you know that in 1991 a 31-year old lawyer registered 150,000 new African-American voters, changing Chicago's political landscape?” my friend sent me in a chat the other day. “His name was Barack Obama. Now, I have big plans for you.” I was shocked. 150,000 newly registered voters. As a youth voter advocate for a third of my life, I have registered my share of new voters. But I hardly registered 150,000. Maybe, in my total lifetime, I have registered 10,000 voters. Maybe if I’m being optimistic and including everything, it could maybe 15,000 over the past ten years. My efforts in the non-profit I started registered 2,500 voters alone in 2004. But to have registered 150,000 people, Obama had to have registered 411 voter EVERY DAY for ONE ENTIRE YEAR. That’s 17 newly registered voters an hour around the clock.

I don't want Barack Obama to win. I need Obama to win.

And I need him to win, because he is like me. An older, more efficient, better organized, more charismatic version, but all the same, in him, I see me. He registered voters, like me. He’s a community organizer, like me. He’s a writer, like me. He’s been fighting against social injustices since he was in college, like me. He dedicated his life to shifting the political paradigm of the nation one vote at a time. Like me. And I need him to win, because I need to believe that someone like me can win something like this. That someone like me, that looks, acts, and believes like me can be elected as a President.

I need to believe that someone with grassroots values in community organizing – organizing for the people by the people at the local level – can be the leader of this great nation. That we can have a White House with values outside of the Beltway Mentality. That we can have an activist president that works across partisanship lines. That someone who registered voters can also manage to lead a nation. That someone who practices Critical Race Theory in his daily work, will be able to bring these ideas of race into how the nation is run leading to the change that our nation desperately needs.

I need him to win to restore my faith in electoral politics. Because it’s been ten years of my career, and my faith in doing electoral work is sorely jaded. I need to believe that a leader that can bring my family together to the point of action – to the point of making calls together – can win this thing. That a campaign built on positive messaging of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ can move a nation into a movement. That a leader that can inspire a new generation of youth voters to mobilize to the polls in ballot breaking numbers can actually win an election. That the youth vote is a viable voting bloc. That our nation is not built on a two family dynasty as it has been since I’ve been 18. That my electoral work and my vote can actually count and make a difference. This I need to believe.

I need him to win because I have made it my life mission to fight against social injustices. I have made a commitment to make this work my life, my passion my work. I am in it for the long haul, and I will be sustainable doing this. And I need him to win, because he has made it his life work to do the same thing too. And as silly as it may sound, I think that if he won, if Obama became president, it would restore my faith. It would tell me that I didn’t pick the wrong career path. That I can do this for the long haul. If Obama wins, I know that I’ll have a future and that my life path was not futile. If Obama wins, it means that someone with a life mission committed to fight social injustices can become president. And that gives me hope for my future. And I need that. I need to believe that more than ever.

And yes, logically I picked Obama over Clinton because his book was better than Clinton’s. His politics, his values, his writing style in his book were more in line with mine then those in Personal History. But secretly, it’s not about his policy stance, or how he voted while in Senate. Secretly, I want him to win because I am selfish and because in Obama, I see a little bit of what I aspire to be. And I have to have hope for that future for me.

Taking a Gamble on Obama in Vegas

2008-01-23T01:10:00.000-08:00

Six am and the streets of Vegas are empty and dark, except for a spattering of cop cars pulling over drunk drivers. It’s desert cold and we are bundled up trying to get warm up with weak drive-thru coffee. Common’s song “A Dream” comes on the ipod. “I have a dream…” the Dr. says with Common beats over, wafting through the radio speakers. How appropriate, I thought to myself. We were had just crossed MLK Ave. on our way to our satellite office, and it was MLK weekend. And we? We were campaigning for Barack Obama, the first viable black candidate for president. It was Saturday morning of the Nevada primary caucus, and we were fighting to have our dream of Obama as our next president to become a reality.

Little did I know how classically ironic the day was about to get.

****

We rolled into Vegas 1am Thursday night. Caucus doors locked their doors at noon, giving us less than 48 hours to move. Every waking moment between Friday 8:00 am to Saturday at 10:00 am was spent hanging red white and blue “Stand for Change” door hangers on potential caucuser doors. My car had a system- one person would drive, the other two would run out and together we hung up 250 door hangers. If someone was in the driveway, I was dispatched to turn on the charm with the usually male voters in the driveway. At one house, there was this old black man, cute in that old loved to talk kind of way. He was a Republican, since Nixon he said. All the kids in the house were voting for Obama, but not him. He loved Obama, but didn’t think he would be able to lower the price of gasoline. He then whipped out a pocket full of gambling tickets from the local casino- “When I cash these in, I’ll have $6,000. I’ll have money. That’s why I’m Republican.” At least, that’s the gist of what he said.

The other man I talked to was up at 7am to fix the flat tire on his car. “So, if I go to the caucus, does that mean I have to go again?” he said.

“Yeah, this is the primaries. You are caucusing for your party’s presidential candidate…” I said.

“So I can’t just do it once and have it count?”

“Uh..no… you gotta go, and stand in a room representing your precinct to be physically counted.” He looked back at me with a blank look on his face…

“So I can’t just vote and be done?”

“Uh...” I looked back at him quizzically. It was hard enough to explain the voting process people. But to explain the Nevada caucusing process to a layman like him was just confusing. There was no simple way of educating this caucuser. “Just show up at this site by 11:30pm. And caucus for Obama.”

“Yeah. Ok. I like this guy. I’ll try.”

Friday night, after it got dark, hanging flyers was out of the question. So instead we made our way Chinatown. With a big posse of APIAs, we flyered in front of Ranch 99. It was cool- my success rate was minimal though and I secretly wished there were more South Asians that identified as APIA so that we could have gone to the Indian grocer instead.

At 8pm we started our calls. In the chiropractor’s office turned Obama satellite office, we sat on the masseuse table, whipped out our cell phones and proceeded through our call lists. It was a room of about ten APIA Californian women, all calling strangers on their personal cell phones. Someone once told me that girls that supported HRC were smart and cute, but those that supported Obama were slutty. Looking around the room though, I saw fierce and passionate for a movement -- two qualities I think are far more attractive than simply “smart and cute”.

The first page on my list was people in an old folk home- and they all picked up the phone. At the bottom of the list was a lone Republican – male, and 66. “You see,” he responded when I asked if he was caucusing, “I would, but it’s cold outside, and I don’t want to leave the building and I’ll get sick….”

“Actually sir,” I replied, “the caucusing is happening right in your building. Downstairs. You don’t even have to leave go outside.”

“Oh really? Oh. But. I like Obama, and I would caucus for him, but I’m a registered Republican. So I can’t.”

“Actually sir, you can. When you go downstairs tomorrow, you can re-register as a Democrat right then and there and support Obama.”

“Oh really? That sounds easy…I think I’ll be able to caucus then…” I hung up the phone with the biggest smile on my face. I had just swung a 66 yr old Republican male into caucusing for Obama. Suhweet.

We weren’t the only “Border Staters” supporting Obama efforts in Vegas. We met folks from all across the nation who had come to Vegas to support the campaign. It was fabulous to talk to all these out of state-ers. One woman in her 50s but with a tight ass body and a jacket with fur around her collar, sat down next to me the first day. “Where are you from, really from?” she asked intoxicatingly.

“Bangladesh,” I responded hesitantly, because I hate that question.

“Oh. My husband is Egyptian,” she said with this expensive drawl. “And you look just like my kids- beautiful.”

This other woman was from Arkansas- she had been moved by Obama when he spoke at the DNC in ’04. There was another kid from San Diego. Our posse had a college student from UC Davis. We picked up a stray graphic designer from SF who took a layover in Vegas to help the campaign. Border Staters were everywhere for Obama.

At 10:00 am on Saturday morning, with a “fired up, and ready to go” we were sent off to our caucus locations. We were hyper- in fact we had been hyper all weekend long for the campaign. I had gone with one of my best girls from LA – together our hyperness was on overdrive, and we would skip to our car screaming out, “Did you know Obama invented the internet and wifi?!?” The four of us in our car were going to observe at Clark High School. We had four precincts we were in charge of observing, and our roles seemed relatively simple- each candidate was allowed two observers per precinct. We were to help out Obama caucusers, the Obama precinct captains, and observe as bystanders. Two folks were assigned to help precinct captains, and the other two, me included, were designated runners.

We get to the high school by 10:30 and it is chaos. It was a big high school, and all the caucusing was going on inside the auditorium- or so we thought. There was after all, no signs directing us where to go. There were no tables set up, no signs labeling precinct tables. Or to be more exact, there were only two tables that were label in the auditorium. I tracked down the guy Democratic Party chair guy and hassled him for the locations of the precincts in the room. He was able to give me a list – a list that he kept personally scrawled on his clipboard – it was posted nowhere. 6393 was down the hall in the library, 5014 was in the corner, and about five of them were in the basketball gym in the other room. None of the tables were labeled. And 6031? Even though I was told to monitor it, this guy said it didn’t exist. This proved problematic when in a couple of hours later, a women was looking for precinct number 6031. Dems recommendation? Re-register her at another precinct just so that she could be counted in the caucus.

She wasn’t the only one that didn’t know where to go. In fact, since nothing was posted, everyone walked into the gym not knowing where to go. People would line up at tables for precincts other than their own, to only go to the front of the line and realize they were in the wrong one. Others didn’t even know what precinct they were officially at- and there was not ONE map posted in the entire place of the neighborhoods. This woman in a white sweater standing in the middle of the hall became the makeshift map person. Any time someone didn’t know what precinct they were in- we sent them to stand in line for the woman. Her line was long.

No precinct maps on the wall, and poor labeling of precinct caucusing locations within the school, creates absolute chaos. And absolute chaos feeds into party politics. For instance, all the Democratic officials representing the precincts (CA version of poll workers) were wearing bright yellow Clinton shirts. This of course, is bad. They would then yell at Obama people for hanging our signs up, even though we were completely within our means. And then there was the cranky ass bitch at 5014, which had the privilege of having its own room. This woman with the AFSCME lanyard, look at us skeptically as we walked in the room. We had a box of Obama stuff we were told to leave in the room as soon as we got there. This woman yelled at us to get out of the room. We told her, that each candidate was allowed two observers to set things up. “No! That’s illegal! Get out of my room! Get out of the school! I’m calling the cops on you!” She chased us out. She left me alone because I had the authority of one that carries a clipboard, but she got it in her head that my APIA girl friend had to leave the school. Throughout the caucusing period, I would look over my shoulder and see the woman physically chasing her outside the building and threatening to call the cops. Even though HRC, Edwards and Obama reps told the cranky white women that my friend had every right to be there, she still insisted that she be kicked out of the building. Of course, there was a table of HRC stuff laid out on a table at 5014.

I took the job on as a runner – as a voting rights advocate I couldn’t believe the extent of voter suppression the party used upon itself. I would go back and forth trying to find people that looked lost and directing the in the right direction. Spanish speakers had no translators, and were told they could throw away their ballots. People were told they could leave after they signed in- which is not possible in the caucusing process where you had to be physically counted. People ran out of voter registration forms, and at another precinct an HRC person grabbed the whole stack of completed voter reg forms and said, “I’ll take care of these.” The caucusing is a counting process where you have to be at least 17 yr old to participate. Folks inflated their count by including kids, or observers. Precinct 6401 was a mess – and HRC precinct captains got into a fist fight with the Obama captain and forced him to quit and leave. Which of course means, that HRC ended up running the whole precinct, so it’s no surprise when it went Clinton. This old man with an oxygen tank slowly walked in- he was obviously an Obama person. An HRC person said that he didn’t need to be there to have his voice counted, that he could leave. He said that no, he would stay. I stopped an old man wearing an Edwards sticker as he walked out at noon – “Sir, they close the doors at noon! If you leave now, you won’t be able to caucus!”

“Fine then. This is bullshit,” he responded as he stormed out.

Others stories came through from other observers. This one guy was out front of a precinct location selling Obama shirts. “Hey, man. Can I get a free shirt? HRC was giving out free shirts,” a black man asked him.

“No… These shirts are for sale. You can buy one,” he said. “Why are you going to support Clinton anyway?”

“Cuz she paid me,” the guy said. “$25.” That’s right. HRC bought votes.

This other observer was at a precinct where they had a Spanish translator. “We are here to select the democratic nominee for the Democratic Party,” recited the precinct captain off of a letter that she was supposed to read before caucusing. The translator in Spanish proceeded to say, “We are here to vote for Clinton.” The HRC Border Stater observers spoke up – you can’t do that, they told her. I guess the in-state folks didn’t see the problem in it.

Caucussing is meant to be a community process- after everyone is counted the first time, caucusers have the option to talk to people supporting other candidates to win them over and bring them over to their side. This is done mainly because it takes 15% of the total number of caucuses to count to have a viable candidate. This led to some volatile situations. The good is when precinct 6394 just needed one more to make obama a viable candidate. They went over to talk to an Edwards supporter and convinced him to come over to Obama’s side. That was the good.

Jason was wearing a Vote or Die shirt when he walked in. I immediately walked over to him, gave him an Obama sticker and walked him over to the part of the gym representing his precinct. Later on during the caucusing, a HRC representative came over and tried to convince Jason that Clinton was better then Obama. “Hell no, I am not voting for a Clinton again. When Clintons’ were in office, blacks were incarcerated at the highest rate!” he said. The woman’s flippant response? “Well, if you don’t do anything wrong….” Yeah. She said that.

I walked over to precinct 6401 which had a sizable number of people, about 130. There was a group of about 10 Edwards supporters sitting in a corner and they were not enough to be viable. Time to broker. “Obama folks. Come talk to them. You have five minutes.” This one black woman started talking about the various issues which drew her to Obama and I decided to stay silent and watch from the sidelines – I was after all the outsider. This one fat white woman stood up out of the Edwards bunch. “I read this e-mail on the internet, and it said that Obama swore on the Quran. And I’m a Christian. And I just don’t know if I’m supposed to believe that. Because we can’t have someone like that in office.” My blood started to boil, but I stayed quiet.

“No, no, that’s just a smear campaign,” a culinary worker/obama supporter responded. Everyone else nodded sympathetically.

Another Edwards supporter up front spoke up. “What does it matter? This is politics. Not religion. I’m a Jew. And I’m going to pick someone based on if their politics are good. Not on religion.”

“But we don’t want another 9/11 to happen. If he gets elected, he’ll be on the inside.”

My jaw dropped. My fists clenched. And I about jumped over everyone to bash her head in, but, figured I would be then called a terrorist and instead, stormed out of the room. I’m an outsider- can’t get involved, I repeated to myself. In the corner I sat fuming at this woman’s comment. What did it matter if it was a smear campaign – so what if he swore on the Quran? Did she know that there was a Muslim standing right there when she said that? How would she feel if someone had said that about the bible in front of her? If- no, when I run for office, does this mean I have to deal with this kind of bigoted bullshit WITHIN the party – bullshit normally reserved for Republican rhetoric? I stormed back in the room to give her a piece of my mind. I looked around but the caucusing had finished and I didn’t find her. But I did find the Jewish woman. “Thank you.” I said. I really appreciated that you spoke up. I’m Muslim and when I run for office I’m going to put my hand on the Quran to be sworn in.”

“Oh, honey. I always speak up,” she said.

As the caucuses slowly wrapped up, people filtered out of the high school. But there was one precinct that remained lively with Obama chants, and several alignments. Precinct 6403 had enough for nine delegates. But the problem was, even after the brokering of non-viable caucusers, they were tied. Four for Obama, and four for Clinton. So how did they decide who would get the delegate? They whipped out a fresh deck of Hilary Clinton faced cards, and they drew cards. That’s right. Best out of three. Obama rep would pick, and then a Clinton rep would pick. Of course, it was a deck o cards with the HRC face on it- who do you think the delegate went for? It figures that this is the process in a state like Nevada. In ties in Iowa, they simply flip a coin.

By the day’s end, we were shell shocked. We went to Paradise Cantina and just waited as the results came in. They projected HRC as the winner, which was no surprise to me consider they were running the messy caucuses and it worked to their advantage. But things looked up when word got out the Obama had won more NV delegate seats the Clinton. This made me skeptical of the media even more – not only did they not report any of the caucus mess, but they skewed media so it was favoring HRC when I knew that from the inside there was so much more to the story. Things also looked up when I bumped into four of my friends – Electoral Friends – that I hadn’t seen since the last presidential election season. It was kind of cool to see friends aligned and working together for the same candidate.

As a voter organizer for the past nine years, I was stunned by the downright dirtiness involved in the Democratic caucus of Nevada. I never thought the party would sink so low as to advocate for voter suppression of their own people. It was ironic, because MLK was such a big proponent of the Voting Rights Act, and it was during his time that Bloody Sunday happened – the march in Montgomery Alabama where hundreds of blacks were beaten for marching for their right to vote. On this MLK weekend, of all weekends, where we were caucusing for a black man to be president no less, I observed the most rampant voter suppression and intimidation of my long career.

Usually I’m far more private with my allegiance to candidates- I’ve been a non-partisan advocate for my entire career. But after seeing the activities of this weekend, I just felt like I had to speak out. When I first picked Obama as my candidate over the summer, I went through a “scientific” process. I read Obama’s Dreams From My Father, and Clinton’s Personal History. Obama’s book inspired me – it inspired me as a writer, as an organizer, and as a person of color. In his book, I saw me, and my values of organizing, faith, and altruism. He wasn’t just inspiring, but in him I saw everything I was trying to achieve in my life. Clinton’s book I couldn’t even finish. Sure, it reflected her skill set, but it lacked passion and I couldn’t relate to her values. But essentially, I did believe that both would make great candidates, I just felt for Obama more.

After this weekend, I’ve developed a deep passion to get Obama into office. His campaign was run on the ground with values, and his supporters were adamant about his perspective of the issues. People like my dad, who never would have got involved in campaigns before, were excited and getting involved. The dirtiest on the ground campaign tactics I saw came from the HRC camp. I believe that voter suppression and intimidation to win is about as low as it can get to win. Using Islam as a smear tactic is wrong. Both of them together really light’s my fire to make sure that we don’t get another Clinton into office. The Clinton supporters couldn’t even come up with why they were voting for her, except for her viability in beating a Republican. Seeing the shit that went down in Vegas really enlightened me to how serious of a fight this is and how important it is that we win.

****

One of the last things I did to mark the momentous Vegas weekend before I left was to buy a souvenir shirt. It has a picture of Obama on front, and it says, ‘He’s black and I’m proud.’ I bought it from a South Central Angeleno dreadlocked man that had driven out for the caucus. “Oh girl, you look so good in my shirt. Let me take a picture of you.” I stood there for the picture. “Girl. You must be LA. Cuz you just posed like an LA girl.” I looked down and sure enough, I had my thumbs hooked in my jean pockets like Tyra on a Sports Illustrated cover. That’s right, I’m an LA girl. And here in LA we have fourteen days left until Super Tuesday. I’m going to wear my shirt, and wear it proud. I’m going to do everything I can to organize my peers, family, and friends to vote for Obama.

Because as the girl friend of mine that went with me to Vegas said when I asked her why she was supporting Obama, “I believe in a change for movement.”

As do I. As do I…

Spreading Democracy

2007-06-13T23:14:00.000-07:00

For those who don't know, I've been addicted to an online YouTube documentary, Hometown Baghdad. I enjoy the ADD format of the films -- there's a new one, every few days, only about 3-5 minutes long. This series follows the life of these 20-something Iraqis living in Baghdad under the American regime. I stumbled upon it and was sucked in. I pulled an all-nighter watching the all the videos that had been posted on the site that night.

The series is coming to a close- they just launched film #37 of 38 "One of Thousands" this week, and it is by far the most moving as of yet. I've felt like crying a few time watching this series, and today was no exception.

If you don't watch of the rest of the series, fine. But you must see this episode. Maybe it made the most impact because I've been following the series, and feel a connection with the characters. I would suggest watching the series in order. BUT, if you can't. WATCH THIS EPISODE.

This goes out to all the Americans that think that we are in Iraq spreading democracy. I can't tell you how many people I canvassed in Florida stated that as their reason for voting for Bush in 2004. Does this look like Americans spreading democracy to you?

It breaks my heart.

We Love You. We Hate You.

2007-06-01T22:04:00.000-07:00

I've been doing some research, and I came across some fascinating articles with interesting titles in the archives of the LA Times. I've been going in chronological order since turn of century for this history of browns in Los Angeles.

JUDGE SCALPS HINDU.; Makes East Indian Doff His Bright Yellow Turban in Court--Pate Bald as Marble. Feb 17, 1914

Another Queer Chapter Written in the Love Affairs of Founder of East Indian Cult. Apr 2, 1914

BATCH REVOLT IN CALIFORNIA.; Uprising in India Planned at Sacramento Last Year; Har Dayal, Leader, a Former Professor at Stanford; Full Story of Plot Made Public in Calcutta. Jun 16, 1915

HINDU RAILROAD IS DISJOINTED.; ALLEGED CONDUCTOR OF THE SMUGGLING LINE CAUGHT; Confessions of Captured East Indians Reveal an "Underground"System by Which They are said to Have Made Way into this Countryat High Cost. Nov 24, 1915

EAST INDIAN ARRAIGNED.; Prosecution of Mohammedan for Contraband-running Said to be First Case of Its Kind in History of Immigration Service. Mar 17, 1916

OIL FOUND TO CURE LEPROSY; Imported From India, It is Said to do Marvels; Boston Physician Asserts He Cured Two Cases; Medicine is Product of East Indian Plum Tree. Jul 11, 1920

NONCO-OPERATION WILL WIN, GANDHI DECLARES.; Leader of Remarkable East Indian Movement Explains Demands for America's Benefit. PLAN WILL WIN, SAYS GANDHI. Mar 5, 1922

TRIP FROM INDIA IS FUTILE; Student Makes Mistake of Going to Mexico on Way to Michigan University; Can't Enter Now Oct 19, 1924

PASADENANS STIRRED BY ELOPEMENT; Senorita Duenas Married to Reputed East Indian Count Dec 12, 1924

Swami Buys Swanky Automobile Dec 6, 1925

FOREIGN STUDENTS HIGH BORN; Notalde Hindu and Japanese at U.S.C. Jan 15, 1930.

GANDHI'S SALT REVOLT WIDENS; Another of His Sons field on Sedition Charge Nationalist Leader Remains Free from Molestation Women Greet Him Singing Revolutionary Songs Apr 10, 1930

Ardent Love Making Laid to Asserted Fake Hindu May 1, 1930

LEGACY TANGLE ENDS IN SUICIDE; Woman Divorces Hindu to Obtain Money Inheritance Withheld Due to Other Bars Body Found in Apartment Following Shooting May 5, 1930

HINDU'S MURDER MAY BE SMUGGLING LINK Mar 13, 1931.

WITNESS SWEARS BY ALLAH HE CAN'T TELL MARIHUANA Nov 18, 1931

Did Hindu Do Sucha Deed?Dec 1, 1931

HINDU 'MESSIAH' LANDS IN EAST; Shri Meher Baba to Conduct Campaign in America Indian Coming to Hollywood and May Enter Films Long Silence to Be Broken With World Message May 20, 1932.

HINDU FOUND HANGED IN SACRAMENTO AREA Sep 27, 1932

HINDU WARNING TO WOMEN Nov 29, 1932

DANCER WEDS HINDU PRINCE; Husband to Open Film Studio in India Jan 7, 1933

NEWS OF THE SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY; HINDU MURDER RING QUIZ BEGUN latest Killing Charged to Political Cult Fresno Prosecutor Asserts Death Decrees Enforced Holtville Case Held Part of Reign of Terror Jun 14, 1933

NEWS OF THE SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY; HINDU MURDER RING QUIZ BEGUN latest Killing Charged to Political Cult Fresno Prosecutor Asserts Death Decrees Enforced Holtville Case Held Part of Reign of Terror Jun 14, 1933

NATIVE SONS URGE ALIENS SENT HOME; Organization Discusses Immigration Problems at Ukiah Convention May 23, 1934

Revisiting

2007-05-03T00:09:00.000-07:00

Since the publication Falling Star Magazine listed this blog's URL in my byline, I decided that maybe I should think about revisiting this blog. It'll be monthly at best, but I'll be sure to make a better effort to cross-post my favorite words on this space.

And pray for the best.

God - The Policy Solution

2007-05-02T23:40:00.001-07:00

“Good morning. How are you doing?”

“Fine. Thank you.” Cringe. Why did you respond, dumbass? I thought, mentally kicking myself for being a by-product of polite society. I was standing at the bus stop milling around waiting for the bus to campus. This guy, this old white preachy guy, was approaching anyone that would look his way and hand them a booklet titled “Awake!” On this overcast morning, I was wearing wide shady glasses and doing everything possible to keep away from his gaze. Alas, I wasn’t successful.

“Can I give you a pamphlet?”

“No thank you.”

“It’s free.”

“I’m not going to read it. Save it for someone else.”

“Don’t you care about homelessness?”

I looked at his magazine. The cover was a colored photograph of the slums. “Yes. I’m going to a class on housing policies right now.”

His eyes light up. “And why do you think we have homelessness?” he asked in a patronizing ‘I’m a white man preaching to the lesser’ or ‘I’m a grown-up teaching a naive youth’ tone, take your pick. Though in my opinion, his tone had an element of both.

I almost blurted out, “Institutionalized White Oppression!” but I put the brakes on my mouth. Instead I replied, “It’s because of the system that we live in.”

“That’s right!” He responded. I almost felt like I deserved a Scooby Snack. A Jesus-embossed Scooby Snack. “And what do you think is the solution to homelessness?”

I gave an incredulous look. In my mind I thought of how we need to do away with Skid Row, we need to have a minimum living wage, there should be more systems in place to provide more transitional services, a welfare system for those incapable of working in society, and more affordable housing. Before I had a chance to share my solution to fixing homelessness, I was interrupted.

“God.”

God?!?!?!?!?

“Uhhh…” I respond. “Yes, god will help us create systematic reform.”

“Here. Take a booklet.”

“No!” I started to walk away, as the bus had arrived. “And why don’t you help people like them out instead?” I pointed to the homeless Muslim couple sleeping behind the bus bench. And walked up on to the bus.

The Muslim homeless couple. I know they were Muslim because the woman was wearing her head covered. They looked Arab, and in their 60s. Wrinkled and elder. This was the third time they had been at this corner. A couple of days ago they were across the street, but they had been at this corner for the past 24 hours. The first time I saw them, I almost tripped over the woman as I got out of the bus. It had been dark and I glanced down after the almost trip to see that she had a mini-grill as her source of heat. This morning I had a little more time to check out their interim home. The man was sitting on a sleeping bag, and they were flanked by two laundry carts full of their worldly goods. They had just finished their breakfast—the remnants of empty Coffee Bean cups and a canister with the Quaker Oats man was in front of them. The woman got up and started to reorganize her stuff. Out of her bundles, she pulled out a short broom and started sweeping the sidewalk in front of their belongs completely surrounded by graduate students waiting for the bus. As she swept, she had a pleasant look on her face. I wondered what could she be thinking and how she could manage to live on the streets and still maintain a pleasant look on her face. I wondered how strong of a woman she must be that under adversity, she is still able to maintain routine and create for herself a home. She glanced up. Our eyes met. She looked upon me kindly and I tentatively smiled at her. She went back to sweeping.

It was at that moment that our antagonist had made an appearance. In fact, our Evangelic Leafleter had circled around the bus stop bench and was on the other side with his stack of fliers and was waiting, yes, WAITING, on the sidewalk right next to the woman sweeping the sidewalk. Picture it: the man waited while the homeless woman swept the sidewalk which he would later walk on. He barely acknowledged her presence, if not for the mere fact that he couldn’t walk on the sidewalk as she swept. He did not hand them a flier. He did not talk to the homeless couple. He ignored their existence.

It was after he leapt over their home, that he attempted to be evangelical to me in the dialogue stated above.

Maybe that’s why I was shrouded in doubt from the get go when he started preaching. How could this man preach the woes of homelessness when there was a homeless lucid couple directly in front of him. It couldn’t have been the language barrier, because after all, he was approaching all the Chinese-speaking international students with no diffidence. Maybe it’s the skeptic in me that says, “he didn’t talk to them because she was wearing hijab.” He didn’t help because he knew they were Muslim. Maybe that’s a bit presumptuous. But the way I see it, a godly person who talks about homelessness, no matter what religion, should prioritize kindness to the homeless people in front of him instead of handing out pamphlets on homelessness AROUND the homeless people, no matter what religion. The utter obviousness that he ignored the couple because they were the “other” kind of homeless just filled me with the taste of absurdity.

Don’t hand out pamphlets- do something. And don’t expect God to do it for you. Maybe it’s the religion I was brought up with, but isn’t it blasphemous to use His name, and homelessness issues to preach, when really God would want you to prioritize helping the homeless people first?

As I came home on the bus later that evening I started questioning my own hypocrisy. If he was a hypocrite for preaching god through homelessness issues and ignoring the homeless couple, did that make me a hypocrite too? Was I a hypocrite for going to learn homelessness issues and yet I did nothing to assist this homeless couple? Was it even worse since it was a Muslim homeless couple, with a language barrier from a Arab country? I know now after these two years of schooling how much harder it must be to be homeless for this demographics- how existing interventions don’t have the resources to deal with the cultural and language barriers. Isn’t that what my mission in life is, to decrease the disparity in resources to justice for MY people?

I promised myself that this time, THIS time, I would not be that Other. If they were at the bus stop when I got off, I should say Salaam and converse with them. See if I could find culturally appropriate shelter. Find a mosque that would help to find them a translator. I could not let myself be as hypocritical as the Evangelical Leafleter. That it is not just a subject I’m learning in school, but reality, with real people. Real people. I’m not a hypocrite, because I care. I care about real people and their real injustices. Don't I? Shouldn't I?

Regretfully, when I got off the bus, they had moved on to a different location. They were no longer there.