Author: mara.ahmed

walking in nyc late at night

love walking in ny. walked from time square to lincoln center and back again. the trees were doing something beautiful, their fluorescent yellow leaves illuminating a dense smoky sky. met these beauties along 9th avenue, close to fordham. and then there was the metropolitan opera, mammoth, richly chandeliered, grand. filled with matthew au coin’s muscular music and eurydice’s tragic story. i wished for more tender, delicate music at times. i was most moved by her relationship with her father (rather than w orpheus). her father, her shade, her tree, the one who made a room for her out of string in the coldness of the underworld, the one who taught her how to speak again with endless love and patience after she forgot the language and memories of the living. i want to write a story about eurydice too.

#treesarelife #treesarebeautiful #nyc #newyorksky #nightsky #eurydice #metopera #metropolitanopera #lincolncenter #longwalks #music #magic

mourning beauty

we had to cut down this silver maple today. it broke my heart. some of its branches were already dead and the trunk was highly compromised, so i was told it was a safety issue. still, when the tree climber began to cut it down this morning, i had the strong urge to run outside and stop him. i wish i knew of some ceremony, to thank the tree for 100s of years of beauty and shade. it feels momentous. so much history disappeared in a few hours. what a huge, gaping loss. for us but also for its companion silver maples.

“nothing does it justice. at approximately 60 feet high and 222 inches in circumference, measured at 4.5 feet off the ground, the enormous silver maple in setauket is one of the few of its kind that remembers a time potentially up to the revolutionary period or even further back.”

[see the white car in the bottom corner for some perspective on the tremendous height of this beautiful tree]

#silvermaple #setauket #setauketny #treesarelife #treesarebeautiful #treesaresacred #mourningloss #mourningbeauty

a juror for the south asian film festival of montreal

this fall, i was honored to be one of the jurors for the south asian film festival of montreal, and i got to see some powerful documentaries. one of them is called ‘the ice cream sellers’ by bangladeshi filmmaker sohel rahman. it follows two children in a rohingya refugee camp in bangladesh, and tells the stories of many of its uprooted residents. the opening shots create this sharp contrast between the stunning beauty of the fields and hills in bangladesh and the destitution of people who have witnessed hideous violence. the film’s cinematography is beautiful. its quiet, long shots allow us to take in the immensity of the situation. it’s not manipulative, with no music or fancy editing. rather it’s a sobering ethnographic portrait of royingya refugees. the film is raw, truthful, moving.

the little boy, ayas, at the center of the film (the ice cream seller), seems much older than his years. there is a sadness and anger in him. he and asia, his sister, are deeply traumatized by what they have experienced and by the absence of their father. genocide does not just affect those who are exterminated, it produces ongoing generational trauma.

the festival ends on november 28th so there are still a few days left to watch a large number of new films, many of them for free. google south asian film festival of montreal.

the long goodbye

‘the long goodbye’ with riz ahmed is a short film but so incredibly hard to watch. as he says: “it feels clear to me that this does very much feel grounded in reality, the reality of people’s fears, the reality of where we’re at…” the sequence of events shown in the film is already a reality in palestine, kashmir, india, china, burma and many other parts of the world. this is where we’re at.

google the long goodbye short film riz ahmed. it’s free to watch online including on youtube and vimeo.

To be in a time of war

“The US military is never anywhere to protect human life, it is there to protect its interests. It couches its militarism in the language of the protection of human life while worsening/creating conditions that destroy human life. That’s the history of American interventionism.” (Sana Saeed)

i didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to say this on veterans day, while being bombarded with patriotism and pictures of people in military fatigues, but there’s nothing noble about war (especially its present incarnation). the power differentials between people and countries are so obscene that war is nothing more than theft, slaughter and genocide. we talk about white privilege and structural hierarchies within american society, but seem not to recognize those same inequalities when they apply to people outside the US. being american is also a kind of supremacy, a violent imperial blindness to the pain and suffering of others. i saw a disturbing discussion on fb where activists were trying to distance the police from the military, saying it’s ok to defund the police but without the military the US would be a sitting target. wow. don’t they realize white people feel the same way about the need for policing? that without it they would be open to the violence and criminality of people of color? they believe that white safety can only be guaranteed thru the oppression and harsh control of black and brown people. we can’t fight for our own liberation while justifying the killing and exploitation of other human beings. it doesn’t work that way.

here is a tribute to the great lebanese american poet, essayist, and visual artist etel adnan, who just passed away: “To Be in a Time of War”: An Homage to Etel Adnan (1925-2021)

from “to be in a time of war” by fady joudah:

To bomb, eliminate
a country, blow up a civilization, destroy the living.
To exit from one idea to enter another.
To admire the light,
bless the spring.
To consider the present time as sheer lead.
To create terror, that’s war.
To wallow in cruelty, conquest. To burn. To kill. To torture.
To humiliate: that’s war…

Etel Adnan in Shifting the Silence

You know, sunsets are violently beautiful, I would say that they are so by definition, but there are lights, not even colorful in the habitual sense, lights elemental, mercurial, silvery, sulfurous, copper-made, that make us stop, then lose balance, make us open our arms not knowing what else to do, arrest us as if struck by lightning, a soft lightning, a welcome one. I wait for those lights, I know some of you do too, wherever you are, I mean when you are standing by an ocean, alone, within the calmness of your spirit. Be planetary.
—Etel Adnan in Shifting the Silence

sadequain and i – part two

as soon as we saw him, we knew who he was. there were three of us walking together, three young teenagers braving the world of art, barely beginning to gain a footing in simple art techniques. we tried to be discreet but we were gawking.

he saw us and (shockingly) invited us to open the gate and join him in his garden. he caught sight of our sketchbooks and asked us if we were art students. we talked to him for a while, telling him about our art classes, and then one of the girls asked for his autograph. he offered to draw something for each of us. we couldn’t believe it! this was 4 years before he passed away (at 57) so he was an international star, an art giant, a legend.

we opened our sketchbooks and offered him a pen. with a few elegant lines he drew beautiful faces and signed his name. my turn came last. fearless as i was in those days, i asked for more. i said, pls write my name too, so it’s for me specifically, not just a random work of art. he complied graciously and asked me for the spelling of my name.

here u see it, in this sketch from 1983. my given name is mahrukh, which is farsi for face as beautiful as the moon (for people who live in hot countries, the moon means coolness, love and beauty in a way that’s hard to understand here).

in conclusion, sadequain’s lofty socialist values and magnanimity were real. i experienced his humility and generosity firsthand and i will always treasure the gift of this brief intersection of our lives.

#sadequain #sadequainart #islamabad #art #artclasses #sketching #oilpainting #pakistan #calligraphy #islamicart #murals #storytelling #storytime

sadequain and i – part one

in the great storytelling tradition of the wonderful shahram khosravi, here is a story about sadequain and i.

i think that it would be appropriate to say that sadequain (1930-1987) is to pakistan what diego rivera is to mexico. maybe even more. an iconic calligrapher and muralist, he was part of an islamic arts movement which emerged in north africa and parts of asia in the 1950s.

in this movement, “artists rejected western art concepts, and instead searched for a new visual language that reflected their own culture and heritage.” for calligraphy, it became a kind of renaissance.

not interested in “decorating the drawing rooms of the rich and powerful,” sadequain gave away innumerable paintings to friends and admirers, and painted mammoth allegorical murals in public spaces with titles like ‘the saga of labor,’ a tribute to the working class people of pakistan. a prolific painter and poet, sadequain also wrote “hundreds of rubaiyat in the style of omar khayyam.”

it just so happened that sadequain lived in islamabad, a few houses down the street from my high school.

once over summer break, i decided to take art classes close to my school. they were organized by the pakistan national council of the arts and proved to be spectacular. some of pakistan’s foremost artists came to teach us, we learned to sketch and paint with oils, we had live models who helped us capture the human body on paper and canvas, and we went on day trips to draw en plein air.

after one such trip, we were walking back to the studio when we spotted sadequain. he was sitting in his garden, wearing a crisp white kurta, enjoying a restful summer eve, a cup of tea in hand.

second part of story coming soon. [sadequain’s portrait by TJ bhatti + his calligraphy at lahore museum]

#sadequain #sadequainart #islamabad #art #artclasses #sketching #oilpainting #pakistan #calligraphy #islamicart #murals #storytelling #storytime

malala’s marriage

so i believe in marriage. when it works, it can be a beautiful thing. i wish malala all the best on her nikah. may she and asser malik truly form a vibrant and powerful partnership. the reason i’m posting this is because of the mean comments i’ve seen on twitter. people keep posting a snippet from an interview in which she questioned the necessity for marriage (when at university) and then went on to say how people grow and change all the time. so, yeah, exactly. also, she’s not too young. 24 is an ok age to make such a decision. finally, all the talk about an unwanted arranged marriage is preposterous. this is the girl who went to school even when some armed men decreed otherwise and got shot in the head for being too independent. u really think she can be railroaded into a marriage she doesn’t want? seriously? makes me think how at the end of the day, in spite of her fame and personal history, in spite of the relationship she has with her parents which is well documented, in spite of her obvious intelligence and education, when it comes down to it, she’s just a muslim girl. so the same old, tired, islamophobic tropes must be applied to her reflexively. marriage is always a gamble, whether u marry someone at 24 or 30 or live with them for years before tying the knot. we all do our best and i wish malala success and happiness in the decision she’s taken.

#malalayousafzai #malala #marriage #marriagecanbebeautiful #muslimwomenarepowerful #fuckislamophobia

rifqa by muhammed el kurd

cannot wait to read ‘rifqa,’ muhammed el kurd’s book of poetry, named after his grandmother rifqa. this is how susan abulhawa reviewed it:

“The words that Mohammed assembles in his poems aren’t pulled from books or dictionaries. They are snatched from clouds, excised from his bones, excavated from Jerusalem’s fabled tales and the inscriptions on her storied stones, plucked from the creases in tank treads and history’s smoke. There is rage in this book—piercing, defiant, inspiring rage that ebbs and returns, and settles in blank spaces that push words far apart on the page.

Unlike the lightness of the word rifqa, this book is heavy, weighed with 103 years of Rifqa’s life as a refugee warrior, a woman of infinite final words—which Mohammed calls punchlines—of a matriarch’s expansive love, a colonized indigenous people’s anguished longing to breathe, and a globalizing irreverence rising from what is muted, buried, razed, and painted over.”

You can watch my films online

Friends, I am delighted to share that in addition to ‘The Muslims I Know’ and ‘Pakistan One on One,’ you can also watch my third film online.

‘A Thin Wall’ (2015) is shot on both sides of the border, in India and Pakistan. Produced by myself and my friend, filmmaker Surbhi Dewan, it tells personal stories of the 1947 Partition. Surbhi and I interviewed our families and friends in order to capture their stories of loss and rupture, and their longing for home in what became another country.

Writer Namrata Joshi says about A Thin Wall: ‘Without intending to do so, the film makes one go beyond ruminating on the “us” and “them” narrative of 1947, when one country was torn apart to create two independent nations, forcing us to look at the fissures that continue to form and deepen more than 70 years later. The talk of “organised violence” and “systematic ethnic cleansing” back then reverberates in the present. It makes you wonder about the ghosts of the past mutating into newer entities of hatred, still using people as pawns. The film may not be about it, yet it makes the viewer confront this pervasive reality indirectly.’

The film is a collage of poetry, prose and images about the Partition by artists and writers such as John Siddique, Uzma Aslam Khan, Ajay Bhardwaj, and Asim Rafiqui.

With gorgeous animation by Gayane Bagdasarian and music by acclaimed singer songwriters Zeshan Bagewadi, Hassan Zaman and Nivedhan Singh.

Pls watch and support activist filmmaking! If you live in the US, Canada or UK, watch A Thin Wall on Amazon. Everywhere else, watch on Vimeo.