Category: self-authored

santa fe

our little place in santa fe, a city that’s all earth-colored adobes. much more traffic than easygoing albuquerque. first thing we did was order food from jambo cafe. my husband got jerk chicken with rice & beans and fried plantains. i got a moroccan lamb stew cooked w chickpeas, raisins, apricots, and sweet potatoes, topped with a delicious ginger dried fruit chutney. amazing.

santafe #newmexico #jambocafe

old town albuquerque

walked around old town albuquerque this afternoon. we saw the san felipe de neri church and i visited lots of small art galleries and gift shops. there was an entire store dedicated to ‘breaking bad.’ found this bear claw ring at the silver artichoke. the woman who helped me told me her sister, betty hawthorne, who lives on a navajo reservation designed the ring. with a sleeping beauty turquoise and mediterranean coral, the ring protects one. love it.

mexican artist lola alvarez bravo

discovered the work of mexican artist lola alvarez bravo. loved how she captured scenes from rural indigenous mexican life, such as ‘burial at yalalag’ and ‘shark hunters’ in acapulco. her photographic portraits of frida kahlo are also full of nuance and delicate detail. she was one of the few mexican artists who experimented with photomontage (‘the dream of the drowned’) at the time. she was born in lagos de moreno in 1907.

lolaalvarezbravo #mexicanart #mexicanartist #rurallife #indigenousmexico #photography #photomontage

breakfast at burque bakehouse

our casita in the morning. a beautiful sign outside that i just discovered today. long line at @burquebakehouse, just a minute’s walk away, where we got coffee, their famous double-baked almond croissants and cruffins – croissants shaped like muffins filled with boston cream and topped with chocolate. sat under our tree, listening to local birdsongs, and had breakfast. decadence.

albuquerque #newmexico #burquebakehouse #lovelymorning

tahar rahim in ‘the serpent’

when i first saw tahar rahim in jacques audiard’s ‘a prophet,’ i knew we had struck gold. an actor of immense power and intensity. i thought he would be all over hollywood in no time, but he wasn’t. incomprehensible. glad things are changing. he was in ‘the mauritanian,’ a role for which he’s garnered praise. but he’s even more masterful (and completely in his element) in ‘the serpent’ (netflix). a disturbing character, performed deliciously. rahim is the son of algerian immigrants from oran, who settled in the eastern part of france. with all the islamophobic, racist grotesquerie going on in france, it does the heart good to see him come into his own as one of the most charismatic actors in the world.

vaccination done

got my second dose of the pfizer vaccine at jones beach today. not a bad place to get shots:) huge parking lots, large makeshift tents, the national guard guiding traffic and making everything go smoothly, nurses giving people shots inside their cars (u never step out of ur vehicle), people looking out for u while u wait 15 min to make sure u don’t have a reaction, and then u drive away. they have the capacity to vaccinate 5000 people per day. and then there’s the atlantic ocean. grateful.

Twenty Years Since 9/11: An Activist Filmmaker’s Take

Although I’ve written for the Socialist Worker, Mondoweiss, Counterpunch, Mason Street and other publications, I had never written for an academic journal before. The wonderful Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt changed all that when she asked me to be part of a segment she was curating for South Asian Review, for the upcoming 20th Anniversary of 9/11. The full print issue, with essays by Mohamad Junaid, Deepa Kumar, Maimuna Islam and myself, will be out in December.

Here is my piece, written from the perspective of an activist filmmaker and someone who tries to unpack Islamophobia. I so appreciate Reshmi’s curation (her excellent introduction is here) and her willingness to open up the conversation and hear from culture-makers. I enjoyed working on this short piece even though citations are a killer:) It’s almost 20 years since 9/11…

“I became an activist in the run-up to the war on Iraq. The Bush administration’s battle cry was transparently depraved and indifferent to facts or anti-war protests. Mainstream media became obsessed with Islam and Muslims even before the War on Terror hit its stride. They dispensed images and soundbites surreal in their exaggerated reincarnations, ripped from their political contexts, and glued to the air we were breathing. It became hard to read the news or negotiate a cultural milieu choked by anti-Muslim bigotry.” More here.

haseena moin (1941-2021)

pakistani playwright and screenwriter haseena moin has passed away. tv shows she wrote like ‘tanhayiaan’ and ‘dhoop kinaray’ will always be a part of my childhood (and that of an entire generation of pakistanis). although i didn’t like some of the detours in her writing and most of the comic relief, i appreciated the strong and complex female protagonists she created. that a woman who was born in 1941 was one of the most popular, enduring, and beloved scriptwriters and storytellers in pakistan at a time when there was only one tv channel and no internet, tells one how much power she commanded. many of her lines and characters figured prominently in popular culture and opened people’s eyes to women who were independent, funny, eccentric and in charge of their narratives. feels like the end of an era. may she rest in peace.