Author: mara.ahmed

my khala, dureshewar aziz khan, passes away

our dear khalajaani, dureshewar aziz khan, has passed away. named after the beautiful princess durrusehvar sultan, daughter of the ottoman caliph abdulmejid, my khala was the star of a family of extraordinary people – writers, speakers, political activists, athletes, linguists, lovers of art and poetry but also sports and outdoor life. khalajaani excelled at her studies from early on. she graduated from medical school, became an OBGYN, and worked as a doctor for the pakistan army, attaining the rank of captain. this was back in the 1960s when women all over the world had not yet won some of the rights (however tenuous they might be) that we take for granted now. she married a dashing air force officer and lived an adventurous life, spending years in libya where her husband was posted and going on ski vacations at a PAF resort in the karakoram, the second-highest mountain range on earth. i still remember how their home in rawalpindi was filled with classical music and expressionist art. after we moved from brussels to islamabad, my mom and khala organized many fun excursions together. we would have picnics at lotus lake and climb trees that seemed as tall as hills. our moms were young, sporty, vibrant. the trips ended abruptly when khalajaani had to deal with a heartbreaking family tragedy. she did it with a reserve of strength, positivity, and intelligence that was nothing short of heroic. in middle age she became a psychiatrist perhaps to better heal herself and those around her. she wrote a book on the subject. in their 70s, my khala and khaloo made the courageous decision to move to the US, to be close to their only son. he was everything to them, and later his children became the heart of their existence. some years ago i remember khalajaani calling my mom. i picked up the phone and we began to talk. she asked me about my political and film work. i tried to be brief so as not to bore her but she asked a lot of questions. she shared her own ideas and then asked me what i thought. she considered my opinions carefully and even changed her mind at times. she was already ill and bedridden in those days, but her mind could still be as sharp as a tack. there was a lifetime of brilliance and intellectual curiosity to sustain it after all. may she rest in power. inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un.

[my khaloo is on the left, next to him is his friend, my attique mamoon, my khala is the beautiful young woman on the right, the one without glasses]

birthday fun continues

ice skating at brookfield place with my daughter last night (so grateful that it always comes back to me), dinner at PJ clarke’s, and then breakfast with rachel (my rochester fam) at two hands this morning followed by a short visit to codex, a wonderful little bookstore rachel took me to on bleecker street. i went to two museums – the national museum of the american indian which is minutes from my daughter’s apt and the brooklyn museum where i saw elizabeth catlett’s stunning work – more about that later.

a week of birthday wishes

dear friends and fam, thank u for the birthday wishes and sweet messages all day long yesterday. it was a pleasure and an honor – i am so grateful. the day ended with a yummy italian dinner with my dear husband and a beautiful bouquet of flowers delivered in the rain, sent by my equally beautiful daughter all the way from the city. i wish the same peace of mind, safety and simple joys of life to everyone all over the world, especially to all my friends in palestine <3

it’s my birthday tomorrow

it’s my birthday tomorrow. for all the murderous violence in this world and the devaluation of life (even the lives of children – our common future), i am grateful for the small community of friends i have on this planet – people who continue to fight for justice even when it’s inconvenient or painful, people whose hearts are always in the right place whatever absurdities might be floating around them, people whose moral clarity helps us see thru racist ideologies and imperial politics warped by greed and propaganda. so a big thank u to my community all over the world. if u think of me tomorrow, pls donate something (whatever u can) to the gaza municipality and to heal palestine.

in solidarity <3

Rendre les Juifs à l’Histoire ou la fin de l’innocence

Houria Bouteldja: The objective being to truly put an end to anti-Semitism or, more modestly, to take the shortest and quickest path to achieve this goal. To do this, we must put an end to the banishment of Jews from history and put an end to their sacralization. And to put it even more clearly, free them from their status as timeless victims and make them responsible for their choices, all their choices, and therefore for their existence. In short, reintegrate them into generic humanity by confronting them with their freedom, in the sense that Sartre gave to the word “freedom”. More here.

one day in nyc

was in nyc for just one day but got to see ‘walden’ with emmy rossum at the second stage theater, had dinner with arseniy (a dear friend from back home in rochester), spent time with my daughter, walked around battery park, and had palestinian food at ayat (the new location in manhattan) where the muhammarah is simply out of this world. walden is a play about the future, a time when climate catastrophe is being used as an excuse to colonize other planets and EAs (earth advocates) are seen as these bizarre people who continue to be invested in planet earth, oppose colonization and the destruction of indigenous life, suspect technology, stay away from screens, and are committed as a community to reducing their carbon footprint. there is a love triangle in the forefront of the story but the backdrop is hyper pertinent. out of all the emotions i felt throughout the play, the one that hit me hardest was when we witness some kind of dangerous geomagnetic storm that can damage humans, animals and plants. it felt too close. it was frightening.

Arts + Change Conference 2025

Thrilled to announce that I will be presenting virtually on Jan 23, 2025 (7pm) at the Arts + Change Conference organized by the University of Rochester Institute for the Performing Arts.

We will screen my short film, Return to Sender: Women of Color in Colonial Postcards & the Politics of Representation. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can catch this free online screening. I will introduce the film by breaking down some of its themes e.g. colonial representations and narrative control through images and culture. There will be time for Q & A of course:)

Please don’t forget to register for the conference and hope to see you in Jan!

The liberal white man

The liberal white man:

-chronically limited by his two-state-solution imagination, in full view of a holocaust
-speaks an all-lives-matter language of non-violence and neutrality
-reads Noam Chomsky but has zero exposure to Palestinian intellectual thought or activist positions
-centers himself and his frailties when faced with simple provocations (such as wanted posters that highlight people with institutional ties to an apartheid state)
-cries racism/ antisemitism if his ego, fears, and vast knowledge about the world are not prioritized
-believes with incredible sincerity that struggles for justice cannot be successful without his stamp of approval or that of his fellow liberal cohort

The liberal white man is MLK’s ‘white moderate’ and we should be done with his policing and pedantic talking down

Martin Luther King, Jr, 16 April 1963
Letter from Birmingham Jail:

‘First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”

Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.’

Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad

Last night I finished reading Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative.

The first section of the book is based on her speech for the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University in September 2023. It’s a speech that’s remarkably erudite, as Rashid Khalidi has said, with references to the work of Edward Said of course but also Aristotle, Freud, Kanafani, Wynter, Lindqvist, Darwish, Ferrante and many more. The tone is calm, analytical, cerebral. I felt immense joy reading it for I was privy to an extraordinary process of sculpting with words, carving ideas and connections ever so gently until a flawless shape is achieved.

From Between the Covers Podcast: ‘[Hammad] looks at the middle of narratives, at turning points, recognition scenes and epiphanies; which explores the intersection of aesthetics and ethics, words and actions, and the role of the writer in the political sphere; and which complicates the relationship between self and other, the familiar and the stranger.’

Certain paragraphs brought tears to my eyes, as there was a shock of recognition. For example this: ‘Rather than recognizing the stranger as familiar, and bringing a story to its close, Said asks us to recognize the familiar as stranger. He gestures at a way to dismantle the consoling fictions of fixed identity, which make it easier to herd into groups. This might be easier said than done, but it’s provocative—it points out how many narratives of self, when applied to a nation-state, might one day harden into self-centered intolerance. Narrative shape can comfort and guide our efforts, but we must eventually be ready to shape-shift, to be decentered, when the light of an other appears on the horizon in the project of human freedom, which remains undone.’

The speech was delivered a few days before October 7th, before the genocide. Earlier this year, in January 2024, Hammad wrote an afterword to the speech, which occupies a third of the book. The style of writing has changed, it’s now direct, urgent, political, based on numbers and dates. It’s full of questions. She sees the proximity of humanism to European colonialism and colonial violence. It’s as if Hammad has reached her own turning point, her own scene of recognition. I was choked with emotion as I read the last part of the book, I took many notes so I could re-read paragraphs like this:

‘In his essay on Shatila, [Jean] Genet speaks extensively of the beauty of the Palestinians, who remind him of the beauty of the Algerians when they rose against the French. He describes it as “a laughing insolence goaded by past unhappiness, systems and men responsible for unhappiness and shame, above all a laughing insolence which realizes that, freed of shame, growth is easy.” The Palestinians in Gaza are beautiful. The way they care for each other in the face of death puts the rest of us to shame. Wael Dahdouh, the Al Jazeera journalist who, when his family members were killed, kept on speaking to camera, stated recently with a calm and miraculous grace: “One day this war will stop, and those of us who remain will return and rebuild, and live again in these houses.”’

afshan noreen qureshi (1955 – 2024)

she was a hero to so many – women and children whose lives she transformed. she never said no to any woman who needed protection, help or encouragement. one of a kind, fearless, but also extraordinarily generous, a pioneer and indeed a changemaker. we will miss u dear afshan. our community will not be the same without u. may u rest in power and may god give strength to sohail bhai and the kids. inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un.

From Fatima Bhutto

Fatima Bhutto is a Pakistani writer and columnist whose analysis is very much on point. She was on Democracy Now! recently:

Well, Amy, I don’t think it’s an aberration that Trump won. I think it’s an aberration that he lost in 2020. And I think anyone looking at the American elections for the last year, even longer, could see very clearly that the Democrats were speaking to a hall of mirrors. They ran an incredibly weak and actually macabre campaign. To see Kamala Harris describe her politics as one of joy as she promised the most lethal military in the world, talking about women’s rights in America, essentially focusing those rights on the right to termination, while the rest of the world has watched women slaughtered in Gaza for 13 months straight. It’s very curious to think that they thought a winning strategy was Beyoncé and Taylor Swift was going to defeat — who? — Trump, who was speaking to people, who was speaking against wars. Whether we believe him or not, it was a marked difference from what Kamala Harris was saying and was not saying.

We’ve seen over the last year that 70% of those slaughtered in Gaza by Israel and, let’s also be clear, by America, because it’s American bombs and American diplomatic cover that allows this slaughter to continue unabated — 70% of those victims are women and children. We have watched children with their heads blown off. We have watched children with no surviving family members, finding themselves in hospital with limbs missing. Gaza has the largest cohort of child amputees in the world. And we have seen newborns left to die as Israel switches off electricity and fuel for hospitals.

So, for Kamala Harris to come out and talk repeatedly about abortion, and I say this as someone who is pro-choice, who has always been pro-choice, was not just macabre, but it’s obscene. It’s an absolute betrayal of feminism, because feminism is about liberation. It’s not about termination. And it’s about protecting women at their most vulnerable and at their most frightened. And there was no sign of that.

There was so much toxicity in Kamala Harris’s campaign. You know, I watched her laugh with Oprah as she spoke about shooting someone who might enter her house with a gun, and giggling and saying her PR team may not like that, but she would kill them. You don’t need to be a man to practice toxic masculinity, and you don’t need to be white to practice white supremacy, as we’ve seen very clearly from this election cycle. More here.