Sergio Hernández’s cartoons invoke familiar images of Americana, with a twist of social consciousness and shades of Chicano youth culture. So in his whimsical spoofs of classic American icons like Mount Rushmore, the political subtext jumps into the foreground.
Sergio Hernández
In this mini-documentary by Latinopia, Hernández talks about his coming of age as an artist, his involvement with the Los Angeles-based magazine Con Safos, and using ink to draw out his struggles with the duality of being Chicano American. But in the end, for the political cartoonist, there really is just one American story… and countless ways of telling it.
*** First 100 guests receive a free pro-migrant poster ***
On May 3, CultureStrike coordinator Favianna Rodriguez is teaming up with other creative minds for UndocuNation: An artistic response to the Immigration Crisis. With talks, food, revelry and rabble-rousing, the event offers “an evening of culture jamming, visual art, and performances addressing the devastating consequences of our country’s broken immigration system.”
Sponsored by CultureStrike, Center for New Community, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), UndocuNation will use various media platforms to raise consciousness about the struggle for immigrant rights: music, installation art, readings and personal testimony--all “working to shift the national imagination on race, migration, and what ‘America’ should look like.” The event will take place at the YBCA Forum on May 3, 6pm, 701 Mission Street in San Francisco.
The event announcement puts artists at the vanguard of a massive and often ignored human rights struggle:
“2011 was a devastating year for immigrants. Once again, President Obama and his Administration Congress failed to administer relief to the estimated 12 million undocumented women, men, youth and children living in this country. On the contrary, they broke records by deporting over 1,000,000 migrants. Various anti-migrant laws were enacted in states like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Utah. Alabama managed to come up with a law that far surpassed the evilness of Arizona’s SB 1070.
“Despite the fact that politicians tried to make it a living hell for undocumented immigrants in this country, loads of young folks came out of the shadows as undocumented and unafraid, giving the immigration movement that push of energy that it needed to challenge these laws and demand justice .
“The anti-immigrant movement continues to scapegoat immigrants for social, economic and environmental problems. ‘UndocuNation: an artistic response to the Anti-Immigrant Movement’ intends to encourage inclusive and artistic dialogue on the intersection of race, migration and art.”
The program will feature innovators and change makers like hip hop historian Jeff Chang, author Daniel Alarcón, and the conscious comedians of Laughter Against the Machine. A full list of artists and performers is below.
Janine Brito started doing standup comedy in St. Louis and is now a rising star on the San Francisco scene. A sarcastic, snarky smart bomb of comedy funk straight from the 80’s, Janine has been featured in the SF Chronicle and The SF Weekly called her “a mean lesbian”. But she’s pretty sure that they meant it in a good way.
Nato Green, a San Francisco native and former union organizer, was named The SF Weekly’s Best Comedian of 2010 for putting on “legendary” shows that keep audiences “doubled over.” Nato is the creator of Iron Comic, the Iron Chefspoofing hit comedy game show that packed houses at SF Sketchfest four years in a row and the Bridgetown Comedy Festival 2010 and 2011.
Julio Salgado’s activist artwork has become the staple of the DREAM Act movement. His status as an undocumented, queer artivist has fueled the contents of his illustrations, which depict key individuals and moments in the DREAM Act movement. Along with Jesus Iñiguez, Fernando Romero and Deisy Hernandez, Salgado co-founded DreamersAdrift.com. The website aims to re-claim the narrative being about undocumented folks via music, poetry, writing, videos and art.
Jesús Iñiguez is a spoken-word reciter, slam poetry writer, hip-hop rhymer, full-time LOVER and forever a freedom fighter. AND, when time permits, a DREAMhead essayist very fond of wordplay. Also a videographer, photographer, and learner not afraid to err. Co-founder of Dreamers Adrift.
Oriana Bolden makes movies, screen prints and an occasional news outlet post/article. The majority of her work is about people trying to get free. Swing by www.projectprojecting.com to see what she is up to at any given moment.
Walidah Imarisha is a writer, organizer, educator and performance poet. She is one half of the poetic duo Good Sista/Bad Sista. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including the hip hop anthology Total Chaos. Walidah has facilitated poetry and journalism workshops third grade to twelfth, in schools, community centers, youth detention facilities, and women’s prisons.
Daniel Alarcón is the author of two story collections, a graphic novel, and Lost City Radio, winner of the 2009 International Literature Prize given by the House of World Culture in Berlin. He is Contributing Editor to Granta, and was recently named one of The New Yorker’s “20 under Forty.” Alarcón is co-founder and Executive Producer of Radio Ambulante, a transnational Spanish language storytelling podcast, which launched 2012.
Sean San José works as the Program Director of Theatre for Intersection for the Arts and resident theatre company Campo Santo. For Intersection he works with long term resident companies Campo Santo, the Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project, the Living Word Project (Youth Speaks’ theatre company), Felonious and host of composers, visual artists, and community groups.
Favianna Rodriguez is a visionary artist on a mission: To create profound and lasting change in the world. In 2009, Rodriguez co-founded Presente.org, a U.S.-based, nationwide organization dedicated to the political empowerment of Latinos.
Yosimar Reyes, a Two-Spirit Poet/Activist Based out of San Jose,CA. He has been featured in the documentary 2nd Verse: the Rebirth of Poetry, and published in Mariposas: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry (Floricanto Press). His words have open up concerts for Carlos Santana in his latest endeavor Architects of a New Dawn. He is currently touring his self-published chapbook For Colored Boys Who Speak Softly.
Cloee Cooper organizes with the Center for New Community to expose and resist nativism. Since 2010, she has worked with people in more than 15 states to target organizations with ties to white nationalism. She produced documentary films on resistance to the anti-immigrant movement including “A Look Inside SB1070”, “Bernard’s Story”, and “Undivided” and is a regular contributor on imagine2050.net.
DJ Sloe-Poke 1) doesn’t mess around with any of the artsy stuff, 2) you won’t hear him tactlessly scratching and 3) he goes to a club to rock it. He has opened for shows as diverse as Mos Def, David Lee Roth, Yellowman & Jaguares. It really doesn’t matter who or what genre Sloe Poke is spinning for — he always has the perfect mix.
Imin Yeh works in the medium of woodcuts, screen prints, and downloadable craft projects to create large-scale installations and interactive artworks. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and has had recent exhibitions at SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Jose Museum of Art, Incline Gallery, and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery.
In a stunning rejection of celebrated author Ana Castillo’s offer to read and speak with Tucson high school students next week, Tucson Unified School District administrators added a new chapter to the nation’s most troubling censorship crackdown and dismissed any overtures for healing in the torn community.
A widely sought speaker on the national lecture circuit, the renowned poet and novelist, whose beloved stories are read throughout schools in Tucson and Arizona, had offered to waive her honorarium and travel to Tucson on her own dime, as part of a special effort to bring “healing to all sides.”
According to Tucson High School literature teacher Curtis Acosta, whose now outlawed Mexican American literature courses drew praise on CNN for their healing role in the aftermath of the tragic Tucson shooting last year, TUSD Assistant Superintendent Abel Morado turned down Castillo’s extraordinary opportunity over concerns that the national media would accompany the author.
Despite the fact that the New York Times recently profiled author Matt de la Peña’s visit to Tucson High School, Morado applied a different standard to Castillo and her host teacher Acosta, a former Mexican American Studies teacher under unparalleled scrutiny and district/state surveillance. Last week, in fact, according to a Tucson High student that preferred to remain anonymous, Arizona Department of Education representatives made an unannounced visit to former Mexican American Studies classrooms, “looking over people’s shoulders” and largely disrupting study with comments and note-taking.
Acosta called the denial of the author’s visit “odd and hypocritical due to the exact similarities to Mr. de la Peña’s visit, I am not sure how the situation is any different except for the fact that I was a former MAS teacher asking for permission, since I am sure that Dr. Castillo being Chicana could not be the reason. Certainly TUSD isn’t going down the route of banning women writers.”
Author of several celebrated novels, among other acclaimed collections of poetry, essays and stories, and a well-known artist, Castillo also earned a doctorate in American Studies. Former Tucson novelist Barbara Kingsolver wrote in the LA Times that Castillo’s So Far From God novel ranked alongside the work of Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez and was “delightful.”
In an email response to the TUSD debacle, Castillo noted:
My own world as a child opened through my love of reading. The greatest void was never finding books remotely reflecting my life, culture or experiences. I always tell young writers and poets I don’t care what you read just read, read, read. Read what you love and read out of your comfort zone. This is how our minds grow and how we connect with the world. Humanity has much more in common than not. I will add that with my last novel (The Guardians, Random House, 2008) a story that deals with the disappearance of a man crossing without papers, I have experienced ongoing antagonism. I believe that people fixed on their prejudices and political agendas resisted the humanity in the story.
“Castillo’s importance to Latina letters cannot be overstated,” publisher and poet Bryce Milligan noted, whose fellow author Carmen Tafolla was recently appointed San Antonio’s poet laureate. Castillo’s “poetry,” according to Milligan, “often seems more about healing those very wounds that invigorate her fiction.”
In a reign of censorship and blatant racism carried out by TUSD superintendent John Pedicone, TUSD’s extraordinary purge of Mexican American literature, on the other hand, has turned the once vibrant literary town into an Orwellian mess. Along with the nationally denounced confiscation and banishment of Mexican American literature and history textbooks, TUSD officials also attempted to derail the annual Cesar Chavez March, fired Mexican American Studies director Sean Arce at a nearly 3-hour school board meeting where an array of speakers spoke on his behalf and the importance of respecting the city’s diverse literature and heritages.
In fact, in the face of TUSD’s latest crackdown, the Tucson community rallied in support of Castillo’s unique offer.
Acosta noted:
I am pleased to say that where TUSD failed to appreciate the opportunity for an American Book Award winning writer to teach and share her own writing expertise with our students, our community has not faltered. Save Ethnic Studies, Tucson-Pima Public Libraries, Casa Libre, Antigone Books, and other community members have been busy creating a wonderful literary experience for our students and all of Tucson for Cinco de Mayo weekend.On Friday May 4, students will get to meet with Dr. Castillo privately receive books paid for by local sponsors. This will be followed by a free public reading and Q & A at 6:30pm with Ana Castillo at the John Valenzuela Youth Center 1550 South 6th Avenue, South Tucson.
Save Ethnic Studies will be having a private reception at 8:30pm that evening following the reading to raise funds for our continued legal challenge of HB2281 and to revive Mexican American Studies.
On Cinco de Mayo, there will be another opportunity for people interested in supporting Mexican American Studies, the lawsuit, and the student-plaintiffs. We will be having a casual breakfast and meet-and-greet with Ana Castillo from 9am-10:30am at Raices Taller before Dr. Castillo presents a private workshop for students and teachers who have been sponsored by donors for a three hour writing experience focusing on memoirs of school days.
This is an affirmation that TUSD has it wrong and that this community is firmly behind MAS and there should be no shame in our history, our culture, our stories, or our writers and artists.
“Once innocence — an all too-brief state of being, if such a one exists — encounters experience, it is transformed,” Castillo wrote in her short story collection Loverboys. “If that transformation is understood, it becomes knowledge. And if that knowledge is employed, then it becomes wisdom.”
Perhaps TUSD will one day embrace such wisdom instead of fear and censorship for their own students and community.
Earlier this year, Huffington Post’s Voto Latino project profiled CultureStrike coordinator Favianna Rodriguez. Here’s the article, and you can follow Favianna’s latest projects on her blog. We’ll also be tracking her latest event, UndocuNation, at CultureStrike in the coming days. Stay tuned.
I don’t know how she does it. For real, Favianna Rodriguez does it all. The self-described nomadic artist and organizer is a printmaker, digital artist, activist, speaker and writer. Peep her blog, it’s dope.
She co-founded Tumi’s Design, Oakland’s only bilingual design studio dedicated to human rights projects, the Eastside Arts Alliance and a political screen-printing collective called Taller Tupac Amaru. She weaves the world’s grassroots struggles together using a color palette you want to wear; her portfolio reading like a pictorial history book on social justice.
Raised by strict parents who immigrated to the U.S. from Lima, Peru, Favianna, 33, graduated from high school with honors and went on to U.C. Berkeley to pursue a career in medicine, engineering or architecture. Inspired by a mentor who believes we’re all lifelong students with the ability to learn even outside of the classroom, she dropped out of college at 20 to dedicate her life to art. In essence, the decision, educated us all.
Favianna’s latest feat is helping organize CultureStrike, the first coalition of artists, writers, and filmmakers working to expose the negative effects of SB 1070. She spent four days in Arizona with CultureStrike seeing, firsthand, the impact of a failed immigration policy.
Here, she shares five things she learned in Arizona.
1. I saw migrant workers shackled and imprisoned in mass numbers and realized their story needs to be publicized.
2. I learned that jailing immigrants is a tremendously profitable market. Private prison corporations are behind a lot of the hateful laws that criminalize immigrants.
3. Artists and writers have the ability to greatly impact culture--the realm of ideas, images and stories that help people make sense of the world. History proves that when culture changes, politics follow.
4. I learned that artists and writers often don’t think about the status quo. Artists are visionary and think in ways that go far beyond policy. This is the most exciting part of my work as I organize fellow creatives around a pro-migrant agenda.
5. I saw the innovative cultural work that artists south of the border are doing around the militarization of the border. This was tremendously inspiring.
Check out the video below to learn more about CultureStrike.
Favianna Rodriguez is working on a 60-page graphic novel called Ghosts of the River, which humanizes migration, border enforcement, deportation, detention and anti-immigrant violence. Click here to help make the novel a reality and support a great cause.
Nadia Muhammad of AltMuslimah revisits the harrowing case of Shaima Alawadi, and examines some deep questions that force Muslim American communities to look both inward and outward in seeking justice and solidarity.
The perplexing circumstances surrounding the brutal murder of a young mother, Shaima Alawadi, has had the Muslim American community abuzz recently. As her daughter purportedly found Alawadi’s body with a note stating, “go back to your country, you terrorist,” many rushed to label the incident as a ‘hate crime,’ even attempting to demonstrate a link between her death and that of Trayvon Martin, the 17 year old shot by neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman.
Those attempting to link both cases claim both deaths were the result of racial or religious bigotry and point to the historical “culture of fear” surrounding African American men in this country that may have impacted Zimmerman’s attitudes and actions towards Martin. Since we also have a developing culture of fear surrounding Middle Eastern American and Muslim men it seems logical to these commentators to assume that Alawadi’s death was the result of someone else’s bigoted attitude towards Muslims.
Though the evidence for the culture of fear surrounding African American and Middle Eastern American men is well documented, attempting to exemplify this theory through linking these cases is potentially faulty on two counts – 1) it neglects to take into consideration Zimmerman’s history of violence as an indicator that he probably would have acted as he did regardless of Martin’s race, and 2) it neglects to take into consideration the questionable nature of Alawadi’s daughter’s claims and actions, as well as the increasingly likely possibility that Alawadi’s death was the result of a familial dispute.
The latter has turned into a major point of contention for the American Muslim community. If we acknowledge the likely possibility that Alawadi’s death was part of a familial dispute does that mean our valid claims of anti-Muslim attacks or hate crimes will not be taken seriously? And moreover, will we be expected, once again, to accept communal responsibility for a person committing violence who happens to share our faith?
The fact is, more than a third of American women murdered each year are killed by a person known intimately. This is regardless of race, ethnicity or religion. According to several governmental and organizational studies these numbers increase, however, to over fifty percent when we examine cases of immigrant women murdered.
On the other hand, according to an FBI report released last year, crimes of anti-Muslim bias account for about 13% of all religiously biased hate crimes. Furthermore, the Council on American Islamic Relations reports that in 2009, under 6% of its total complaints were allegations of verbal and physical threat or violence.
This means that even if we were to double the numbers for Islamophobic violence against Muslims, to account for the cases that may have gone unreported or been misclassified, statistically a Muslim woman of an immigrant family in the United States is more likely to be killed by a member of her family than to be attacked by a stranger for being Muslim.
This is not to correlate such a possibility to her religious beliefs or even to her being an immigrant, as violence on the domestic front can be due to a host of socioeconomic factors, cultural gender expectations, educational and language barriers, or even arbitrary familial disputes. This is not even to claim that such statistics prove that Alawadi’s death was definitively due to a member of her family. But it is to point out there are legitimate alternative possibilities that are more plausible than a random hate crime, so the question arises – why are we solely focused on proving a statistical anomaly, especially when there is increasing case evidence pointing to the contrary? And how will we, as a community, address alternative outcomes?
Larry Wilmore of The Daily Show facetiously pointed out in regards to the controversy surrounding Martin’s death, “Since the court of public opinion is the only one who would take [the case], everyone feels the need to jump in and condemn or defend George Zimmerman. To some, he was a victim of the media, to others, “Elmer Fudd hunting down black people —Somehow the death of a 17 year old got turned into a chance to score ideological points.”
We are doing the same with Alawadi. And we are doing a disservice to both.
Alawadi’s death hit home for a lot of Muslim Americans. The possibility of her death being the result of hatred towards our shared faith represents our worst fear. And in the current political climate of “anti-Shariah” legislations and governmental surveillance programs targeting Muslim communities it is no surprise that so many are on edge. But we need to move beyond catchy campaigns about “hoodies and hijabs” in order to discuss the racial and religious tensions that exist in our country in an appropriate context. There is no shortage of cases to direct those discussions. Exploiting a woman’s death, however, trying to prove a point with only selective evidence is self-defeating.
We need to be prepared to seek justice for Alawadi and Martin regardless of the circumstances surrounding their deaths. With Martin we know the killer and can demand justice be served in accordance with the law. But I fear that with Alawadi, if the theoretical ‘hate crime’ link between her and Martin cannot be maintained she will become just another woman, another statistic abandoned by the Muslim American civil-rights community.
Nadia S. Mohammad. is a graduate of Loyola University Chicago School of Law and is an Associate Editor for AltMuslimah.
Image: Muslim American Society (muslimamericansociety.org)
Wajahat Ali (playwright, humorist, lawyer, altmuslim contributing editor, and activist, who co-authored the Center for American Progress’s report “Fear, Inc.” on the Islamophobia network) gave his first khutbah at Duke University at invitation by Imam Abdullah T. Antepli. Check out the text of his khutbah below. View the video of his khutbah at the end of the text:
Wajahat Ali’s Khutbah, Friday, March 16, 2012, Duke University
Allah commands the believers in the Quran: “And be steadfast in patience, for verily Allah will not suffer the reward of the righteous to perish. (11:115)”
Today, I wanted to talk about the state of Ahl al Amreeka.
You must have heard of Ahl al America, right?
The people of America? The new tribe of America?
Us.
Everyone here who identifies as both an American and a Muslim – you are members of Ahl al America.
Some would say we are the lucky ones, the blessed ones, the fortunate ones to be living in a democracy, a nation of opportunity, a country of liberties and freedoms.
But, many others, including perhaps most among us today, would ask if we, the Ahl al America, are indeed the blessed tribe, the fortunate tribe, the tribe of opportunity – then why are we in so much pain? Why are we forced to endure so much hardship, so much suffering, so much fear, prejudice, humiliation and uncertainty?
We are currently enduring one of the worst recessions of this nation’s history. There is unemployment and lack of job security. The wealth disparity between the rich and the poor is at its largest, with no signs of receding. Families have lost their homes, and many of us here are in danger of losing our homes or our parents’ homes.
College tuitions are skyrocketing, and college loans seem insurmountable. Crazy new diseases are rampant – there’s cancer and heart disease. There are floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis. And wars — can’t forget wars. We are a nation obsessed with wars, immersed in two major ones as we speak.
How do we, the Ahl al Amreeka, endure it?
Especially when Muslim is the most toxic brand name in America and Islam is about as popular as bubonic plague? How do we endure the pain?
Allah has given us two spiritual weapons of choice, and it’s up to us if we want to employ them: sabr and shukr. The prophets and scholars say sabr and shukr also happen to be the two keys that will unlock the gates of heaven; without them, you might not have celestial accommodations.
Sabr – patience, to patiently endure … the hardships, the failures, the disappointments, the bitterness, the crushed dreams, the slanders and the humiliation.
As mentioned, Allah has commanded sabr in the Qur’an: “And be steadfast in patience, for
verily Allah will not suffer the reward of the righteous to perish. (11:115)”
He adds: “But give glad tidings to those who patiently persevere. Those who say, when afflicted with calamity, ‘To Allah we belong, and to Him is our return.’ They are those on whom descend blessings from their Lord, and mercy. They are the ones who receive guidance. (2:155-157)”
So, there’s sabr.
And there’s also shukr — gratitude. To have thankfulness, appreciation, wonderment, joy and contentment despite all the chaos, the noise and the negative baggage of life.
Allah commands the believers in the Surat Al-Baqarah [verse 152]: “So remember Me; I will remember you. And be grateful to Me and do not deny Me.”
And Allah gives us signs in the Qur’an — the stories of the prophets, those who are innocent and beloved to God, but still forced to endure tremendous suffering despite or in spite of their piety:
Prophet Yusuf (Joseph), who was thrown in the well, by his brothers no less, and later falsely imprisoned due to no fault of his own.
Ayoob (Job), whose only crime was that he was a great man and a great prophet who loved his Creator and followed His every command. And what was his prize? He was tormented with
physical hardship, deformity and public humiliation.
Ibrahim (Abraham) who was a friend of Allah, forced to endure the fire and suffer years without
offspring.
The verse commanding patience is from chapter 11, entitled Surat al Hud, named after the Prophet Hud, whose own people, the people of ‘Ad, rejected his message, mocked him and exiled him.
And, of course, we can’t forget to mention the tremendous ordeals and struggles of habiballah, Prophet Muhammad (saws), the beloved of Allah who also wasexiled from his homeland, betrayed by his tribe, hunted down, mocked, and endlessly ridiculed.
They endured all their hardships and trials with sabr, and throughout it all they had shukr.
And all of them received a massive ROI (return on investment) in the deen and the dunya.
Joseph became the vizier of the pharaoh, the most powerful man at that time. Job’s health and prosperity
miraculously returned, even better than before. Ibrahim survived the fire and is now seen as the father of all the major monotheistic religions. Hud was quite literally the last man standing. And Prophet Muhammad? Well, we know that story.
Allah fulfilled His promise.
But, it seems having sabr and shukr is not enough, because these two recipes also require hope. It’s
a necessary ingredient –hopethat things will get better; hope that Allah will create a way out of the most impossible situations. And, in even in this bleak situation, it behooves us to exhale, take a step back and look at what other communities have endured and continue to endure.
Look at the community members of the Prophet, peace be upon him – exiled and hunted, many times tortured and killed. Look at Muslims in the 13th century facing the destructive Mongol hordes, which lay to waste every city they encountered, pillaging and murdering with abandon. Everyone believed it would be the end of Islam.
Look at Muslims in 15th century Spain — imprisoned, tortured, killed and then exiled along with the Jews as a result of the Spanish Inquisition. And, how about Muslims and Americans right here, right now? Forget looking to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Sudan, just drive around lower income neighborhoods to see the despair and hardship your neighbors are facing and enduring?
It also benefits us to look at the sabr, shukr and hope of the companions.
Out oflove for his Prophet, Ali volunteered to lie in the Prophet’s bed in his stead, allowing the Prophet to escape since assassins were plotting to kill him that very same night as he slept in his bed. Ali survived the night, and later said it was the best night’s sleep he ever had.
Or, how about the loveof companion Abu Bakr? He escorted the Prophet Muhammad and hid with him in the cave as assassins were in hot pursuit. All that separated them from certain death was a flimsy cobweb of a spider. And speaking of love — despite all the adversity and hardship, look at the love the Prophet Muhammad had for his community. He said to his believers, “Each and everyone one of you is a shepherd, and each and every one of you is responsible for his flock”
This flock includes our family and our fiends, but it also includes our neighbors and our community members.
Look at how the Prophet loved his Creator, how he loved his companions, how he loved his community and prayed for them until the end, always, asking Allah to bestow mercy on the “ummati, ummati, ummati. (my community, my community, my community)”
And look how he showed love to his neighbors and his enemies. They, who used to throw trash at him; slander him to his face; insult him; harass him, his family, his allies and his followers; they even exiled
him.
And what was his response?
Most of the times, his response was simply a smile; other times his response was a dua’a (a prayer) to Allah to guide his enemies on the straight path; often times his response was to simply ignore the
noise and simply walk forward.
But don’t be confused or mistaken, the Prophet ignoring them was not an example of inaction. In fact, it was a response — an elegant response. He was also proactive. He engaged in dialogue, in treaties, and he invested in relationships. Imagine – returning to Mecca and forgiving those very same people whom you know killed your family members, your companions and also tried to kill you?
Imagine walking amongst those whom you know still loathe you, but without ever compromising your personal character or moral integrity? Despite the pain, the Prophet still exercised love.
You might be thinking right now: OK, awesome, Wajahat. Great – sabr, shukr, hope and love. Wonderful. Got it. Faaaan-tastic. Thanks for that. Reallyhelps me in my life and all my problems. You know problems? Real tangible problems?
Because you’re expecting me to have sabr and shukr while I’m dealing with loans, bills, stress, potential foreclosures, and my crazy family, which is just the icing on the cake on top of all this insane Islamophobia?
And you say sabr? Patience? The only patience I know is the excellent Guns N’ Roses song from the ‘80’s. The only sabr I know is a light saber, and the last time I packed a plastic light saber I had to spend two hours getting grilled by TSA security.
Oh, and you’re saying don’t fear, right? Even though this entire nation is drowning in an ocean of fear – fear of immigrants, fear of our neighbors, fear of people with multisyllabic last names, fear of people with “Hussein” in their middle name, fear of, well, people like ME.
Oh, and you’re saying invest in hope?In that dangerous commodity known as hope? Just like the companions of the Prophet? Well, I don’t have an Ali who will sleep in my bed to protect me. I have Abid who will come over my apartment at 2 a.m., sleep in my bed without my permission, and leave it smelling like four-day old Desi food. I don’t have an Abu Bakr. I have Abdullah who invites himself over, eats all mom’s food, plays my PS3 and has cobwebs around him at all times b/c he doesn’t take a shower. Those are my companions.
Oh, and love?
Love my neighbors and my enemies? Here’s what my neighbors think of me; me who has tried his whole life to be a good man, a good Muslim, a good American and a good neighbor: They think I’m a radical stealth jihadist who wants to create Caliphornia and make them submit to the Sharia. They think I want replace McDonalds arches with minarets, force the statue of liberty to wear a burqah, and slaughter Porky Pig.
Oh, and you want me to love Allah and His Prophet?
Great, I do so publicly, and what happens? I get surveillance by local and federal law enforcement. My kids at school are now bullied for being Muslim. My local mosque, which has been around for 30 years, is now being protested. And my elected officials are raising money and votes by saying they’re going to implement loyalty oaths against me to test if I’m America-holic enough.
They don’t see me as a neighbor, or as a friend. They see me as a suspect.
And you’re saying I should still have sabr, shukr, hope and love? Despite all the fear and the hate and the pain? You’re saying to still love Allah, and his messenger, and his creations? You still want me to love them? That’s what you’re saying?
Yes.
That’s exactly what I’m saying.
Because we can take it. Because we can endure it. Because we can and will rise above it. It’s a promise by Allah, and verily Allah always keeps his promise. “Allah does not burden a soul beyond that it can bear … (Qur’an, 2:286 )”
Anything and everything you are facing as an individual, as a community, as a nation, you, me, we – we can take it. We can and will endure it. It will not break us. Your test, our test as Ahl al Amreeka, is not a new one. This story has happened before, many, many times. We’re simply the characters this time around.
But, we can take it. And we’re supposed to take it. Because Allah says this is all part of the course:
He says, “And We shall certainly test you, until We know those of you who strive their utmost (for God) and who are the steadfast; and We shall test your reported mettle. (Qur’an 47:31)”
That’s mettle: m-e-t-t-l-e — it means your strength, your vigor.
And you can deny Allah, and you can deny having faith in Allah. But you can’t deny the Prophet Muhammad. He was here. He lived. He suffered. He endured it. He rose above it. And, he is a model for us; a reflection, a daily guide on how to lead our lives through hardship.
Look at how he thought of his Creator, how he thought of his neighbors, how he thought of his community throughout all the pain. And, Allah promises us that he loves us. In fact, the Prophet is the
beloved of Allah. And as we see, time and time again, with love there always comes pain.
Love and pain. They go hand in hand. Always.
And some might say, “Wow! Awesome. So, Allah is a sadist! Great! Interesting way of showing love, God! Thanks for asking us to be masochists!”
Well, that’s one way of looking at it.
But another perspective — an Islamic perspective, a spiritual perspective — suggests this is merely a way of Allah testing our mettle (our resolve, our strength, our vigor.)
And speaking of metal: m-e-t-a-l. How does one produce metal from its ore? By subjecting it to fire. Through the process of smelting. It endures the fire, only to come out stronger at the end.
So, this adversity and troubled times is a way of refining the Ahl al Amreeka, of sharpening us, of honing our spiritual light sabers, of purifying us, of evolving us through a gauntlet of pain and struggle, so that we emerge harder, better, faster, stronger.
And the end result is not perfection. We won’t be perfect. And we are not perfect. We are not meant to be perfect. We are fallible. Muslims suffer needlessly in their ridiculous romantic quest to achieve some sort of intangible perfection. Especially MSA kids, they are often so hard on themselves.
I know. I was one of them.
It’s good to remember a quote from Hadrat Ali: “Do not be so hard on yourself lest you break but do not be so soft, lest you be squeezed.” So, I hope you learn first and foremost to forgive yourselves for
being human; humans who make mistakes time to time. Just like our neighbors, some of them who are making some pretty big mistakes concerning Muslims right now.
And it’s time we, as a Muslim community, allow ourselves to forgive ourselves for being human; and, it’s also time for us to learn to love ourselves again in a spiritually healthy way. Because, we need
individuals to be spiritually healthy, because spiritually healthy individuals create spiritually healthy communities, which in turn creates a spiritually healthy nation, God willing.
And remember this: A strong spirit can always sustain a weak body. But a weakened spirit will not endure, even it is housed in the strongest of bodies. Right now, it seems that Ahl al Amreeka has a weakened body, but I assure you we have all the spiritual ingredients to fuel our spiritual light sabers to restore us to our strong, vibrant spirit. So, may we have sabr, shukr, hope, and the audacity to love – in spite of the pain – so we can truly emerge as the Ahl al Amreeka we’re meant to be.
May Allah forgive us for our sins – the ones we’ve done knowingly and unknowingly; may he envelop us in His mercy, and may keep us on the straight path.
Astaghfirullah rabbi min kulli zambin
Astaghfirullah rabbi min kulli zambin
Astaghfirullah rabbi min kulli zambin
Part Two
Allhamdu lillah
Alhamdu lillahi wassalatu ‘ala Rasulillahi wa ‘ala aalihi wa sahbihi wa man wala.
Allow me to be ambitious and to expand on themes of the first half of the khutbah. I’ll share a little secret with you. I’m going to tell you the key ingredients most great artists have: 1) love and 2) pain.
These are some of the most – if not the most – powerful emotions and feelings a human can experience. When it comes down to it, love and pain generally inspire most art, really. Most rock songs are about having a crush on a girl, or breaking up with a girl, right?
Arguably, the greatest contributors to American culture and art are Africans Americans and Jewish Americans. We all know their history – tremendous suffering, genocide, pain, humiliation, degradations. But also love – love for life, for honor, for family, for traditions, for one another.
It’s no wonder those emotions exploded – figuratively – and were unleashed through artistic enterprises that allowed them to create something completely new, mixing together their respective history, culture and identity but infusing it with an original Amreekan flavor.
In fact, look at Rumi and his poetry. His “Mathnavi”: His epic volume of poetry written in Farsi. Rumi is the bestselling poet in America today. He outsells Frost and Dickinson. He was born 850 years ago. And, he was Muslim. He was born in Afghanistan and then moving to Turkey following the Mongol invasion. He was a supreme lover of Allah and his Prophet.
Don’t let people fool you: Rumi was a devout, practicing Muslim; a scholar, a jurist, a teacher –and only later, an artist and poet. And yet his intense burninglove for the Divine and for lovers of the Divine caused him tremendous pain; almost unbearable suffering and personal turmoil.
Especially his love for his friend and mentor Shams-i-Tabriz. When Shams suddenly left one day, there was a void in Rumi. There was a pang. There was an immense pain that had to be quenched. Why? Because lovers hate being separated. You want to be near your beloved. For some that’s the dunya (the world), but for the lucky few, that means Allah and the deen (the spiritual world.)
So due to his love for the Divine and for his love of those who are beloved to the Divine, and due to his pain of being separated from his beloved, Rumi was inspired to unleash the floodgates of emotions, which resulted in the best-selling poetry of today. Something originally Islamic has now elegantly fused itself with the cultural fabric of America, and the poetry of a Muslim man who lived 800 years ago now heals hearts, brings joy, unites lovers, gives us Facebook quotes and inspires spiritual contentment for millions around the world.
And, even in the past 10 years we, American Muslims, the Ahl al Amreeka, have seen a figurative explosion of creativity. I believe we are witnessing a renaissance — one that is unique for the world and this nation; one that is created by individuals who are both American and Muslim –YOU, who have endured and continue to endure.
Members of a tribe that is messy but resilient – much like America. We have entrepreneurs, engineers, architects, doctors, philanthropists, stand-up comedians, journalists, academics and even imams. This is a volatile time, but an exciting time –one that is ripe for a renaissance; a rebirth.
And speaking of creation and artistry – let’s not forget the original artist – Allah (swt).
Look. Look around you at the diversity of Allah’s creation. There’s black, white, Yemeni, Desi, Egyptian, Syrian, and even miscellaneous, right here in this room — in Amreeka. From the Qur’an: “Verily, he made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other, not that ye may despise (each other).”
Reflect on His design and artistry. Just take a moment to check out His brush strokes. He wasn’t painting with one color, and definitely not in one style. And then what does He do with all these different colors?
He splashes them on a blank canvas called Amreeka. A-mer-eeka. America. The land that is our home. The messy melting pot of the universe with colors splashed all around – but nonetheless there’s still poetry to the chaos. And all of this was inspired by Allah’s love for his creation. And you forget that
we, despite all our differences, are part of the same tribe. We’re Muslim, and we’re American.
Whether you want to admit it or not, you can’t escape it. We all belong, equally, to the same tribe, a new tribe, the tribe of “Ahl Al America” – The people of Amreeka.
So, it’s our duty to Allah, to ourselves, our community and our neighbors, as shepherds – as Prophet Muhammad mentioned was our role — to start building here. Start investing here. Start painting here — even in present times of distress and chaos and turmoil and pain. Because we have all the spiritual ingredients and colors given to us by the Lead Painter – we have an inventory consisting of sabr, shukr, hope and love.
So, may we as individuals and as a community create our masterpiece here for everyone and anyone to benefit from and see. So, that when it’s all done, and when it’s time for us to hang up our paintbrush, that we may proudly show off our creations and say with dignity and honor – this here, this was created by one from the Ahl al America!
So, may we love Allah like the prophet loved Allah.
May we love the prophet like his companions loved him.
And may we, the Ahl al Amreeka, be the shepherds of our greater community. May we love our neighbors, our community, our friends, our enemies, and especially ourselves– even though it may be painful from time to time.
I have tremendous shukr that you had the sabr to endure my first khutbah. Thank you.
Title Insurance and Trust Company (Los Angeles) Collection, Regional History Center, Univ. of Southern California
Aside from the injustices in Arizona, i.e., the scraping of a highly successful education program, the evident war against Mexicans, and the nullification of the U.S Constitution, I was seduced to the struggle by David A. Morales’ “Three Sonoran” blogs in the TucsonCitizen.
His crusade against the white business cabal that runs the City of Tucson resembled the epic battle of David and Goliath, making enemies of those in power. It was this fight that is the real reason that he was fired from the Citizen, forcing him to begin his own site, www.threesonorans.com.
A 19th Century U.S and Mexico historian I got hooked on the issue of urban renewal (AKA people removal). I got interested in the subject in the late 1970s when I began to microfilming articles on Mexican Americans in the EastsideSun (Boyle Heights). I was attracted to the Sun because I wanted to piece together the relations between the progressive Mexican and Jewish communities.
Jewish Americans, once the dominant group in the Heights, did not become a minority there until the 1950s. Mexicans were greatly influenced by left leaning Jews and they joined organizations such as Henry Wallace’s American Independent Party (1948).
Members of both groups graduated from Roosevelt High School where they formed friendships. Two prominent Roosevelt alumni are Judge Harry Pregerson who serves the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and former Ambassador to Mexico Dr. Julian Nava.
The Jewish community left many landmarks. Hollenbeck Park was a replica of German Tiergartens – built by German Jews. Many former synagogues such as la Casa Del Mexicano have become public spaces.
While microfilming the Sun’s articles, I had long conversations with its publisher, Joe Kovner, who although he had moved to the Fairfax area had strong ties to Boyle Heights. Kovner led an incessant war to preserve Boyle Heights. He did not want it to meet the same fate as Bunker Hill and Chavez Ravine where the Committee of 25, the Los Angeles Times and their gaggle of elected officials joined to “develop” these areas for their own profit. Kovner called it a war on the poor.
The articles opened up a new world for me; they inspired me to microfilm articles in the Belvedere Citizen that serviced the unincorporated area of East Los Angeles. I then made research notes on articles on 5 x 8 cards. They were included as a timeline in the second half of a manuscript. I synthesized the Citizen and Sun articles year by year beginning in 1934 and ending in 1975.
UCLA published Community Under Siege: A Chronicle of Chicanos East of the Los Angeles River, 1945-1975, in 1984. It was one of my least popular books; nevertheless heavily used by urban planners and graduate students studying the city.
After this point, my research turned to urban spaces. I found that Los Angeles shared a history of real estate foreclosures and the bulldozing of entire communities. So-called elites under the leadership of the Los Angeles Times and other media sold the notion that they were “developing” the city much the same as Wall Street banks and the corporate elite today claim that they are “job creators.”
I found similar patterns in Tucson, El Paso and Chicago. In L.A. they were led by the Committee of 25 that even today operate in a different form. Real Estate lawyers led by ex-mayor Richard Riordan have made fortunes in buying public real estate. Riordan along with developer Eli Broad control local politicos from the mayor to board members of the Los Angeles Unified Schools.
Riordan is the king of privatizers. As mayor he wanted to privatize the City’s main library. Today he is attempting to privatize the schools. In a heated exchange I asked him whether he wanted to make Olvera Street another MacDonald’s; he answered yes just so it went to the highest bidders. Broad, a billionaire is his closest ally.
In Chicago the Daly Machine was the developers’ and bankers’ dream. In the windy city what was not being renewed was being gentrified. If it was not accomplished under the cover of the law, entire housing projects were burned out – all in the name of progress.
In the 1980s and 90s I wrote for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and the Los AngelesTimes. In the aftermath of Community Under Siege, I naturally wrote many articles about the notion of community and issues related to urban space, i.e., immigrants, the cultural pimping of Olvera Street and museums, racism and sexism on the campuses, the building of a prison in East Los Angeles, the building of a gas pipeline under Boyle Heights – events showing a profound disrespect for Latinos.
The profits in development of urban space and the schools are humungous: service contracts, building of public utilities lines, roads, construction – all of which are approved by governing boards and commissions.
In the 90s at Riordan’s behest Superintendent of Schools Ruben Zacarias was removed. Latino elected officials in their majority supported Zacarias. However, there were powerful Latinos who defected.
On April 2, 1990 in an op-ed column in the Los Angeles Times titled “History Is People,” I wrote:
News that a small group of preservationists seeks to transform Olvera Street from a Mexican marketplace into a multi-ethnic museum should outrage Latinos. After all, the plaza area has been inhabited by Mexicans since 1781, when a dozen or so peasants, mostly from the Mexican states of Sinaloa and Sonora, founded the Pueblo of Los Angeles. Spending time on Olvera Street is thus a trip through tradition.
From 1900-1930, bulldozers virtually cleared the civic center of all else that was Mexican, mostly family homes. Then, Christine Sterling and members of the city’s social and economic elite moved, in the late ’20s, to save and preserve Olvera as a symbol of Los Angeles’ Mexican heritage. The street was little more than an alley. Like the Avila adobe, which had been condemned, its days were numbered.
At first, Olvera was part of California’s “Fantasy Heritage”-a tourist trap. But over the years, its people reintegrated it with the plaza and Our Lady Queen of the Angels, the city’s oldest church. Mexicans and other Latinos began returning to Los Angeles’ Bethlehem. Today, Olvera Street is where many of us go to celebrate our holidays or to enjoy the oldest remnant of the Mexican heritage in the center of the city.
Certainly, a tradition worth preserving, right?
Jeane Poole, curator of El Pueblo Historic Park, has embraced Olvera Street’s dilapidated buildings-mostly stucco and red brick-rather than its traditions and people. It’s no secret that she believes the Mexican presence on Olvera Street so overwhelming that the contributions of the Chinese, the Italians and other neighborhood ethnic groups to the city’s development have been eclipsed. To dilute the Mexican presence, she has advocated that restoration of Olvera Street spotlight the architecture of its buildings. Toward this end, she has enlisted the support of architectural historians.
For 12 years, Poole and her gaggle of Anglo historians have been plotting to impose their Mexican-less vision of Olvera Street. Their opportunity for success came when administration of El Pueblo Park passed from state to the city Recreation and Parks Commission. Eager to renovate, the commissioners put together a proposal. Since they and the Recreation and Parks Dept. lack the expertise to make historical recommendations, Peter Snell, an architectural historian, was paid to make some. Snell is a close friend of Poole and has acted as a consultant for El Pueblo Park.
The commission’s proposal calls for Olvera Street to be renovated and its history interpreted in conformity with the architecture of the “Prime Historic Period” of 1920-1932. Why 1920-1932? Why not 1880-1910? For one thing, the latter would involve tearing down what constitutes today’s Chinatown to make way for reconstruction of Sonora Town.
In any case, historians will tell you that “Prime Historic Periods” are convenient covers for diluting the influence of unwanted groups. In the case of Olvera Street: No Mexicans Wanted.
What the commissioners and the building-oriented historians are forgetting is that, like it or not, if it had not been for the Mexican marketplace, there would be no preservation debate, since there would be no buildings to preserve. Before Mexican merchants moved in, many of Poole’s “Prime Historic” buildings were slated for demolition-the preferred people-remover technique in the ’30s. But when the alley became a thriving marketplace, those dilapidated stucco and red-brick buildings that Poole now waxes poetic over were saved.
History is made by people, not by buildings. The Latino hegemony in the plaza area is a reminder that Mexicans, here long before the Gringo, are not aliens. Put a plaque on those buildings to indicate that they are proud examples of the Poole’s “Prime Historic Period.” As for Olvera Street, the plaza area and its people, they are too alive to be turned into a musty museum built by Poole and Associates
Without getting into too much detail, when I decided to support the effort to preserve Tucson’s Mexican American history, I encountered the same history of pillage as in LA. Where had the people gone that once lived in the adobes? Where were the communities?
I had reviewed University of Arizona Professor Lydia R, Otero’s book proposal “La Calle: Spatial Conflictsand Urban Renewal in a Southwest City,” for the UA Press. It was a major contribution to the field of study.
It was, however, the Three Sonorans that took that history to the level of struggle. Morales’ passion reminded me of Joe Kovner as well as Ernesto Galarza’s applied scholarship. Galarza often spoke of his role in preserving Alviso in San Jose, California. For Galarza, Alviso represented the struggle of the Mexican American urban poor to preserve community, which to him meant the preservation of a historical memory which gave residents the knowledge to check the monopolistic tendencies of the urban elites. Galarza said that without a historical memory Mexicans were vulnerable to the robber barons, developers who manipulated the historical narrative.
Observing and knowing the historical processes, I applied these experiences to Tucson. The parallels are obvious. They answered the question as to why SALC opposes Mexican American Studies. They explain the extreme measures that it is taking to wipe out the Mexcan’s historical memory.
There is a lot of money involved; the stakes are high. It goes beyond real estate. It is racial in nature because it uses race to justify its actions. The cabal exploits the fact that Mexicans are the majority of the school population and that they are becoming the majority of Tucson residents to raise fears.
This tactic depends on eliminating Sean Arce, the MAS teachers and Morales. They remember the words of Lalo Guerrero’s “Barrio Viejo:”
Viejo barrio, old neighborhood,
There’s only leveled spaces
where once there were houses,
where once people lived.
There are only ruins
of the happy homes
of the joyous families,
of these folks that I loved…
As Galarza once said, a people constantly on the move do not form communities. That is why historical memory is so important to preserving space. Barrios should not be for sale and when they are developed it should be for the benefit of the community and not elites such as the Committee of 25 or the Southern Arizona Leadership Council.
In light of the recent controversy over the New York City Police Department’s rampant, intrusive surveillance of Muslim communities, and the growing campaign against racial profiling in law enforcement, it’s worth stepping back and examining the elements of popular culture that shape our definitions of Otherness, and the legal and moral boundaries mainstream society draws between foreigner and citizen. In this essay, Daniel Tutt at altmuslim looks at the specter of “terror” through the lens of television.
When television portrays the war on terrorism, more than 67 percent of the time, the enemy is white, according to a recent study by the Norman Lear Center at USC. At first glance this seems odd. Isn’t the war on terror a war against extremist Muslims? Aren’t Muslims mostly brown-skinned?
The war on terrorism, both on television, and in real life, defies our immediate assumptions. The Washington Post recently revealed that a Muslim convert is heading up the CIA’s counter terrorism unit and that this person (his identity is anonymous) was instrumental in hunting down Osama bin-Laden.
But, in our popular imagination, we don’t like our enemies to be complex, and the genre of terrorism television knows this all too well.
The grandiose black-and-white good vs. evil plot lines seem to hit a more visceral tone. But the latest hit TV series on terrorism, Showtime’s Homeland, presents a picture of terrorism and the role of Islam within the war on terror that not only feels like it’s lifting from the daily news feed, but it taps into the complexity of our present moment, urging us to look deeply at who our enemy really is.
At first glance, the show’s story line seems difficult to base an entire series around: A Marine returns home, traumatized after being held captive for eight years in Iraq by an Al Qaeda cell, only to be faced with the pressure of serving as the poster boy for military heroism. Sargent Nick Brody (played by Damian Lewis) is deeply conflicted about his time in Iraq, and for half the first season he is surveilled by CIA Agent Carrie Matheson (played by Claire Danes) and her mentor at the CIA, Saul Berenson, played by Mandy Patinkin. Following an insider tip and a whole lot of intuition, Mattheson goes to any length to prove that Brody is not the war hero celebrity the media is making him out to be, but has actually been secretly turned to Al Qaeda’s ideology while in captivity in Iraq.
Mattheson suffers from a mental disorder, which she keeps secret to the CIA, and blames herself for 9/11. Since returning from Iraq, where she was also traumatized, her singular obsession is to take down Abu Nazir, Al Qaeda’s most elusive international terrorist. Like her television predecessor Keifer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer in 24, Mattheson is forced to cross ethical lines frequently. But her superiors support her cowboy ways, earning her the ability to almost mystically predict Abu Nazir’s next move. The implicit message of both Homeland and 24 (which earned its stripes as the quintessential post-9/11 terrorism fighting show) is thus similar: Only through transgressing the institutional inertia of the status quo and going above the law, can the bad guys be brought to justice in the war on terror.
The creators and co-producers of Homeland, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, have based the show off of an Israeli series Hatufim (English translation: Abducted), created by Gideon Raff. Gordon also produced “24.” But of course, the genre that Homeland taps into goes back much farther than 24. The real origin of Homeland is in the Cold War era film, The Manchurian Candidate, where an American veteran of the Korean War returns home having been brainwashed and subconsciously lured into serving as a secret puppet of the Communists.
Although, as Lewis points out in a recent interview, Homeland is different than The Manchurian Candidate in one primary way: Sargent Brody is not “brainwashed” by the enemy and is in continuously conflicted and ambivalent about his allegiance to Abu Nazir and Al Qaeda.
Homeland revolves around two points of tension: Has Abu Nazir really turned Brody to his cause while he was in captivity, or are Mattheson’s premonitions totally off base?
The second point of tension revolves around Brody’s conversion to Islam. Lewis claims that Brody’s conversion to Islam serves as the most important detail of the show. In the same interview as cited above, Lewis commented: “In a time of need, I had actually chosen to be a Muslim. We did discuss the immediate assumptions about that: ‘Oh my God, this guy wants to blow us up. Why else would a Marine have converted?’”
Yet Homeland mostly separates Brody’s conversion to Islam from Abu Nazir’s wicked Al Qaeda ideology. By presenting another religious minority through the lapsed Jewish character of Saul Berenson, the show throws even more grey matter into the religious dimension to terrorism. When Brody admits to Carrie that he has converted to Islam, he says, “Well, they didn’t have many Bibles over there. Don’t you think you’d turn to religion if you had to face what I faced?”
All of this goes to imply that the writers desired to make a clear point: Islam is not necessarily synonymous with terrorism. This nuance defies counter terrorism theories such as the conveyor belt theory of radicalization that argues identification with Islam solidifies ones commitment to the radical cause.
Another major facet of our conventional understanding of the war on terrorism is challenged in Homeland, and this point may be the most significant and radical of all. The ideology of the enemy is not a monochrome, black-and-white view of the world. Abu Nazir is almost made into a human at times. Like bin Laden, Nazir favors large scale attacks and dramatic acts of terror, yet by the end of season one, we are left to assume that part of his strategy with Brody (we learn that Brody is indeed working for Nazir by the end of season one) is to infiltrate the inner halls of power by propping Brody up to serve as a congressman. This represents not simply a desire to extinguish all Americans wherever you find them, but a long term strategy.
Nazir’s character represents a post Osama bin Laden Al Qaeda. He is one part Anwar Awlaki, in his understanding of American culture, and one part Osama bin Laden in his grandiosity of acts and smooth operational leadership. We see him largely through the gaze of Sargent Brody, and we find that Brody’s primary motivation for following Nazir is because he witnessed the murder of Nazir’s son, Iesa (Arabic for Jesus). Iesa’s murder by secret drone strike serves as the primary motivation for Brody’s allegiance to Nazir. This sounds all too familiar, think the Times Square bomber, Faizal Shahazad, who admitted to being radicalized in large part out of anger and frustration over drone strikes that were killing Muslims in South Asia.
Brody cites the strike on Iesa’s school, which he witnessed, as the primary motivation for his failed suicide mission in the last episode of season one. His horror over the memory of the attack recurs in nightmares, and Nazir exploits Brody’s anger over the cover up of the attack that killed his son Iesa. No one knows about the attack, and somehow Nazir and Brody know that the vice president is responsible for keeping it secret, which is why he becomes their primary target.
Brody is thus painted more as a political radical than a religious zealot. With this crucial nuance, the writers of Homeland have hit on one of the more neglected truths of radicalization in the name of Islam — that is most often looks more like a political movement than a religious movement. This is a change in the framing of the enemy that challenges us to re-conceptualize the nature of this enemy and the deep internal motivations behind terrorism.
Beyond Brody’s temptation with the cause of Nazir and the pain over Iesa’s death, we discover an even deeper driver to his radical cause in the second to last episode. In prep for a major act that is revealed in the last episode, Brody brings the family to Gettysburg, where he recounts in passionate detail the heroism of an everyday high school teacher who led his men into a suicide charge on the enemy, which turned the favor of the Union forces in the larger battle. Channeling such an iconic American battle as Gettysburg for the cause of Al Qaeda seems far-fetched, but the writers are up to something more than that.
The implicit message presented is that the modern warrior lacks access to an authentic cause that he can attach his desire for something greater than himself to. Critics might call this relativistic, as in, how can one ever find the cause of Al Qaeda just, but I think that misses a more complex point. Brody’s battle is also within. Homeland resonates with all of us because Brody is a lot like all of us, searching for something bigger than ourselves.
Like Plato reminds us, we must be careful out there, because everyone we meet is fighting a hard battle.
Daniel Tutt is an activist, writer, and Ph.D. candidate in philosophy and communication at the European Graduate School. His research and activism concentrates on Muslims in America, Islamophobia, and inter-religious dialogue. In philosophy, he works in the continental and psychoanalytic traditions where his work looks at ethics and political theory.
The Librotraficante movement to smuggle “banned books” into Tucson, Arizona, has hardly been a secret operation. The caravan of “wet books” has received nationwide media attention as one of the boldest protests yet against local school authorities’ efforts to squelch ethnic studies programs and remove progressive and radical works from the classroom.
The caravan first set off from Houston, Texas, on Monday, March 12, loaded with about “400 doses of mind-altering prose,” in the words of Tony Diaz, coordinator of the campaign.
Last week, we caught up with the caravan en route from San Antonio and spoke to Diaz, a longtime activist and author of the 1998 novel The Aztec Love God. In this edited interview, he talks with fellow writer Erasmo Guerra, about the challenges of taking politics on the road, writing, and fatherhood.
Erasmo Guerra: You must’ve had some kind of permit for this?
Tony Diaz: Permits? We don’t need no stinking permits. (Laughs.) It dawned on us that, “Hey, maybe we’ll be asked to leave?” But, y’know, let’s just do it and worry about it until we get asked to take our “wet books” off the Alamo Plaza. But I’ll be honest, as we got closer it’s like, “What the hell is this gonna be like?” Instantly, we set up a little reading room. It’s these four bookshelves that are portable that define the space and then it’s the loudspeaker at the center point and—boom—here we are. It’s guerilla theater. A part of me was like, I dare them to come to tell us to go. Here we have people promoting books, art, literature, history. And here we have the state rep. It is brazen. But we’re firm, we’re on the side of justice and history and I really think even the ghosts there were in sympathy. There was an electricity running through the air that was empowering us and emboldening us. We were blowing it up loud.
EG: When you guys were making your shout out against banned books, were there other groups who latched on and made a case for their issues?
TD: It still blows my mind how few people know what’s going on. So even at the press conference-slash-guerilla reading, people were stopping and they were like stunned. “No way.” “I can’t believe that.” People are shocked by what is on the list. And I think what’s really powerful about our experience in San Antonio is la gente, when they find out, they get mad. I don’t care what level of society they represent, what level of education they have, they get mad.
Yesterday, at the teach-in, there was a vato—a dad. He’s got a gold chain on, all tattooed up, and he’s got his kids there. Three girls. One boy. He’s in the audience listening. We’re talking about how to use the books in the class and why it’s important. This vato comes in and he’s shaking his head. And another thing: I’m learning from other folks, too. We’ve got to hear what the kids have to say. We’ve got to hear what the gente has to say. So we kinda made the last part an open mic of testimonios and poetry. People are going up and I go up to him, “Would you like to say some words? It’d really be huge.” He goes okay, “I will.” He goes up and he opened up his heart for us. He said that when he was a kid he figured he’d wind up in jail. Or working the street. And for him at 38 it might be too late. But he wants his kids to get the Chicano history he never had. He was on the verge of tears. We were on the verge of tears. Here were are—poets and writers around us—and there, delivered by the Aztec Muse, a manifestation of what’s at stake. Another touching moment—one young man who comes up to talk, he’s on the caravan now.
EG: It’s such a struggle between doing the writing and serving the community. But what happens to the writer self? Does it take a backseat?
TD: We’ve been planning this thing with our crew for about a month and a half. And one Saturday I had a list of things to do but it was my son’s birthday. AWP was going on. So the question was, “Are you guys gonna go to Chicago to promote this?” But, y’know, what am I talking about saving kids in Tucson if I don’t save my little boy here at home? So I’m like, y’know what, I’ve got to take a stand here. Put this little boy first. I took the day off to enjoy my little boy’s birthday party. But I do think we’re defining the new role of writer-activist. We need to do that for other writers, but still do the writing and make time for it. None of us can empower other people without walking the walk. So it is vital to keep writing.
Erasmo Guerra is a New York-based freelance writer and the author of the nonfiction collection Once More to the River: Family Snapshots of Growing Up, Getting Out and Going Back.
Jimmy Santiago Baca’s voice has soared across borders and reached the highest circles of critical acclaim. But about half of his life has been spent in the grip of the state, wending through a broken public school system and later, a prison sentence. So the author and poet wasn’t surprised when “banned in Tucson” was recently added to his list of literary distinctions; he and other authors were targeted in Arizona’s crackdown on ethnic studies programs that promote socially conscious texts. As part of our Saving Ethnic Studies series, he recently spoke with CultureStrike’s Michelle Chen about creativity and activism, and the real meaning of ethnic studies–the empowerment of youth to reclaim their histories and their communities. Here’s an edited version of the dialogue.
Michelle Chen: How does it feel to be part of the “banned books” list in Tucson? When you look at the titles that were banned, can you speculate on any specific reasons that these works were targeted?
Jimmy Santiago Baca: I did prison time in Aiona–almost six years, so I’ve been censored there for a long time in more ways than one. [My work] was targeted because of a fear-based politico. They fear the written word–its ability to empower the reader and writer.
MC: Do you think that if you had participated in an ethnic studies-type program in your youth, your life would have turned out very differently?
JB: Literature changed by life by giving me a reflection of the possibilities for me in this world. I did participate in ethnic studies as a kid–just that the classroom was jail and the teachers were vatos locos.
MC: How so?
JB: Basically, I learned about the legacy of the Mestizos, the Chicano people in particular, by listening to the old school vatos locos from the barrio. A lot of them would put tattoos on their bodies, from the Mayans, from the Aztecs, from the Mixtecas. And I would ask them, ‘What does that mean?’ And they would say, ‘Oh, this is the sun calendar from the Aztecas, and this is what it means.’ And a lot of them had been given history carried word to word, mouth to mouth, about the Tijerina raid, about the land grants, about the injustice of this society, about the inequities of prison [and] judicial system, taking so many Chicanos to prison at such a prime age. And they were first-hand observations. These people had experienced it in their families.
So I was getting ethnic studies on where we came from, the roots of our people, what was happening in contemporary times and what they expected in the future. So I was getting the best schooling I could possibly get, not from textbooks, but from lived experience….
MC: Do you think students have the same access to those cultural learning opportunities today in their communities, or has that fallen away?
JB: The schools are a disaster. You cannot go in with a glass of water and hope to cure leprosy. It just won’t work. Schools are a disaster. They need to dismantle the whole thing ‘cause it’s based on corrupt fundamentals like how much money can I make off of textbooks, and how many students can we run through those turnstyles so we can make the money on the other end. The whole idea is wrong. Everyone’s afraid of talking about it. And even us, as writers–we have a tendency to simplify things… [by] going to what symbolizes, in a metaphorical fashion, what we’re trying to say with words…
I think the system is corrupt in and out. So learning and teaching has to be done by the community. It has to be led by the parents. And they have to make a presence at every turn in the road. They have to be there….
I do a lot of prison work. If you stand there long enough, and you listen to these young adults, they know what they’re saying. So we to get out of their ways. There’s too much of, ‘How important I am because I’ve got 23 books and won a National Book Award and blah, blah, blah’… I get out of the way. I let these young prisoners, who are experiencing the oppression first hand, speak to me and tell me what they need. And then I go from there.
MC: Does more need to be done on the side of public schooling to prevent people from having to go to prison to get a good education?
JB: It doesn’t take a real genius to figure out that if a kid goes to school starving, and if he leaves a house where parents are doing drugs or they’re fighting and screaming and stuff… [that kid will] try to find somebody that’s going to give them some affection. And what we’ve branded those groups as is ‘gangs.’ Since the police and the government officials have to justify huge amounts of money, massive amounts of money, for guns and new cars and new jails, and everything, they have to put the fear into the public, and say, ‘Yeah, these gangs, they’re gonna burn our houses down… We have to do something.’ So these kids are really the target for the most ferocious assault by the police ever. And it’s getting worse and worse and worse and worse.
And that’s why drugs have such great popularity in this country. Because we know instinctively what’s right and what’s wrong. And in order for us to survive on a day-to-day basis without going mad, we have to dull our sensibilities to the injustice, we have to. We know the schools are just nothing but moneymaking machines for the rich. We know that. We know we’re sacrificing our children. We know that. So why don’t we step in and stop the machine? Because we’ve become powerless. Education has not stepped in to fortify our morality. we have become powerless and that’s exactly what the system wants. It can only work if we’re cowards.
JB: Unfortunately what happens in any situation like Tucson, where it hits the newspapers and it hits the TV’s , is we look for spokespeople to speak. And those particular spokespeople… always have an agenda. So whatever agenda they want to push, they push. Now in a case like mine… on a day-to-day basis [I’m faced] with censorship every single day. I mean, I can go to a university and speak and there’ll be people who walk out because I’m an ex-convict…. So the Tucson thing is nothing. You know, I look at it, I kind of shrug and say, ‘Well, what else is new, you know? It’s just the same old thing. I’ve experienced it every single day of my life.
MC: Will the public attention to this issue now have a lasting impact, or do you fear it will eventually just fade out?
JB: After it’s all said and done in about four, five weeks, we’ll forget about it. [But] it’s really the people. It’s how many people will they motivate to go out into community and really change their lifestyles and start contributing to the community? The question is, ‘Will this change your lifestyle?’… I would assume that everyone’s going to go back to what they were doing, except for the kids. It’s going to change their lives, it has already changed it….
I was institutionalized for 25 years, from the age I was five to the age of thirty; the state in one form or another had me in “secure settings” [or] behind bars for 25 years. And I’ve been free for 26 years, which is fabulous. I’ve been free more than I have been confined, you know?
So, coming from that type of perspective: I have sat in secure settings way too many times, and read the headlines about censorship, and read the headlines about police killings and read the headlines about how school’s not working. You know what? Twenty-five years, I’ve wondered ‘Where’s the community involvement? Where is it? And the brief flashes of headlines and stuff like that, whoever speaks first goes right back, retreating into anonymity… And the officials come out and take it out on us for protesting, you know? Things just never change. It has to change through the community. It has to.
