Category: projects

The Honeymoon Suite

i am one of the judges at the rochester teen film festival and this year there was a film we just couldn’t agree on. it was interesting that the reaction to it was mostly split along gender lines – the men loved it and the women felt extremely disturbed by it. it’s called “the honeymoon suite.” the director is a high school senior.

the men totally loved the film. as soon as the screening was over they expressed their admiration for the writing, the editing, the acting, the twists and turns in the story. after 10-15 minutes of a discussion about the film’s maturity, i asked the question: wait a minute, was that a rape drug? i was told, yes, it was. it was incredible to me that a film about something as violent as rape was treated with such nonchalance. when the female judges expressed their disgust, they were told that the film had a positive resolution because the kid realizes how stupid he was being.

by creating nebulous boundaries between friendship, love and rape, we are confusing the very definition of rape – the forceful, violent penetration of another human being’s mind and body. the sweet, hand-holding romanticism of the resolution is problematic because the kid wasn’t just being “stupid”, he had deliberately drugged another human being in order to rape her, i.e. commit a terrible crime.

the complete passivity of the woman is disturbing. it’s the man’s decision to rape or not to rape. it all comes down to his conscience, or mood. i was told that we were experiencing the film from the man’s perspective. that’s exactly the problem with patriarchy: we’re supposed to accept that it’s a man’s world and anyone who disagrees with that reality is being a hysterical bore.

i was told: u’ll just have to get beyond ur feelings on this and recognize that it’s a good film. so interesting that such a remark was not made about any of the other films, even tho i had strong opinions about all of them. why is it that when it’s a feminist issue, a woman’s reaction is automatically classified as “emotional”?

if it were a man being drugged and potentially raped, perhaps the horror of rape would become real for other men. when it’s a woman, they simply see it as a date that could’ve gone wrong but had a “positive” outcome.

it seems to me that white men have a huge mental block when it comes to women’s issues, especially rape, this in spite of the propaganda about the misogynistic barbarism of the brown/black man. an eye opening experience.

Witness Palestine (Rochester)

the film schedule for the witness palestine film series has just been finalized. this is our second year. check out what’s going on in rochester by joining up on facebook!
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Film Schedule for 2013

5 Broken Cameras: Sun Sept 8 at 2pm, Little Theatre
The Law in these Parts: Mon Sept 9 at 6.45pm, Little Theatre
Jerusalem East Side Story and Follow the Money: Sun Sept 15 at 2pm, Little Theatre
The People and the Olive: Mon Sept 16 at 6.45pm, Little Theatre
Two-Sided Story: Sun Sept 22 at 2pm, Little Theatre
Going Against the Grain: Mon Sept 23 at 12.30pm, St John Fischer College

New Creation Theology Conference

Our paper proposal titled “Hospitality and Eschatology: An Interfaith Conversation” was accepted for the New Creation Conference at Northeastern Seminary in October. Will be working with the brilliant Rachel McGuire on this project. So exciting!

Here’s more about what we intend to explore:

“In this paper, the two presenters, from Christian and Muslim perspectives, propose to engage an ethic of hospitality as they dialogue about New Creation. Here we see hospitality, not as noblesse oblige, but as the art of negotiating power, with all of the risks that it entails. In a world where we struggle with greed, war, and environmental ruin, hospitality offers a way forward. Hospitality is the opposite of greed. It is an ancient community-oriented way of being where other people’s humanity must be acknowledged and valued. It seeks to move beyond zero sum ways of thinking, offering a scripturally and traditionally articulated path through fear to vulnerability and authentic relationship. We draw on rich resources in Islamic traditions where hospitality is sacrosanct, as well as Hebrew and Christian teachings. And we embark on this conversation with a foundational commitment to mutual respect and a deep desire for mutual well-being.”

media and popular culture

march 12, 2013: i was invited to speak about “media and popular culture” to high school students at the global citizenship conference at nazareth college today. i used photographs and videos to showcase the power of media in shaping our thinking. there were about 25 students in my class and they were sharp. we talked about latino stereotypes and the overwhelming reference to illegal immigration and they immediately threw NAFTA at me. they recognized iconic images representing the great depression, the civil rights movement, the vietnam war, and abu ghraib. i confronted them with two pictures of afghan women, one taken in 1985 (during the soviet occupation) and the other taken in 2010 (during the american occupation) and they were able to piece together the political messages they convey, ever so subtly. i showed them kiri davis’ “black doll, white doll” and some of jack shaheen’s “reel bad arabs.” they were totally with it. so what about the zoned out, self absorbed, barely literate american high school kid? just a media stereotype. trust me.

Steve McCurry, Sharbat Gula at Nasir Bagh refugee camp in Pakistan, 1985
Steve McCurry, Sharbat Gula at Nasir Bagh refugee camp in Pakistan, 1985
Jodi Bieber’s Bibi Aisha, 2010
Jodi Bieber’s Bibi Aisha, 2010

theatre journal complete!

finished my “theatre in england” journal yesterday! 25 reviews for 25 v different plays (shakespeare, harold pinter, bulgakov, martin crimp, alan bennett, chekov, alan ayckbourn, strindberg and many many more). it took me 2 months to write it but i’m pleased with the final result.

theatre journal - title page
theatre journal – title page

Honour crimes and Islamophobia

from the brilliant belen fernandez! went to this round table discussion at the university of rochester, armed with this article and sherene razack’s book!

my comments about the symposium on “honor crimes”: i didn’t have as much time as i would have liked but i talked about the islamophobic implications of using a loaded term like honor killings instead of locating such crimes w/i the realm of gender-based violence. also discussed the culturalist approach of understanding domestic violence in minority groups vs confronting racism and analyzing economic as well as political factors that keep certain communities oppressed. it’s good to remember that discrimination reinforces patriarchy.

last day in london

was interviewed by andrea gordon at TV apex studios in essex yesterday about my film work and activism. it was a lot of fun. in the evening we saw “the silence of the sea”, a powerful three character play about the awfulness of occupation and the doomed relationship between occupied and occupier (v true for nazi-occupied france but can people make the connection to current occupations in which they themselves are complicit?).

today “julius caesar” at the donmar (love the idea of an all female cast) and harold pinter’s “old times” with kristin scott thomas and rufus sewell. thank u to dr russell peck and his beautiful wife ruth for inviting me to be a part of this theater course. it was a once in a lifetime experience. this is professor peck’s last trip to london as a leader of this class. he’s been doing it for 23 yrs. we gave him a much deserved standing ovation (along with some chocolate cake). long live thought-provoking theater!

ruth peck, mara ahmed and russell peck
ruth peck, mara ahmed and russell peck

london!

off to london tomorrow for about 20 days, for a class in theater. can’t wait to see multi-media experimental plays along with some good old shakespeare and everything in between. will report soon, from across the pond.

theater in london
theater in london

The National Language – Granta Magazine

Uzma Aslam Khan: It’s Urdu poetry that I love best, more than Urdu prose. (And more than poetry in English, which, with a few exceptions, lacks the immediacy with which I feel poetry in Urdu.) If I had to single out one poet, it would have to be Faiz Ahmad Faiz. There’s no other artist who’s captured the range of human emotion more beautifully and heart-wrenchingly than Faiz. I still remember my first experience of not only listening to his poetry but actually understanding it, and this was while hearing his two oft-quoted poems ‘Hum dekhainge’ (‘We will see‘) and ‘Dashte tanhai me’ (‘In the Desert of Loneliness’) sung by the amazing Iqbal Bano. The songs were playing in our home in the 1980s, during General Zia’s military rule, and many of those present who were singing with Iqbal Bano were also crying. Later, my father asked if I understood the poems, the first of which was a fiery and optimistic call to change, the second of which was a lament of loss and separation. I felt I did understand them, but I let him explain that celebration and mourning, love and despair, in Pakistan, are two things that are never separated. If that was true in the eighties, it’s no less true today, possibly, it’s even truer, which is why Faiz continues to matter, continues to be remembered, and continues to make us sing and cry.
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Manto’s short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’ was my closest glimpse of the scars of Partition that my father never shared with us. His family came to Lahore in 1947 from a tiny village near Amritsar; his grandparents were beheaded before his mother’s eyes. I think he let his children see his past through reading ‘Toba Tek Singh’, a satirical account of the inmates of a mental asylum who have nowhere to go at Partition, but are forever left in limbo, between Pakistan and India.

The story made me deeply suspicious of easy categorization, particularly along ethnic and religious lines. It also made me understand that I come from a country that wasn’t shaped by those who migrated to it, like my parents, nor by the many indigenous tribes who’d lived there long before any one presumed to scratch lines across their land. Mine is the first generation of writers to be born in Pakistan, so, like my parents, I also carry the weight of beginning. The need to look in Pakistan’s looking-glass and know the slippery ghosts of my history has been imperative for me as a writer. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped hungering to know my place in these chaotic layers. It’s the hunger to make up for what was never said. It’s the terror of being left as voiceless as the inmates of the asylum.

More here.