raonimuzho

[raonimuzho]

Lessons and learnings coming up to the festival...

Today we sat around a distarkhan that was quickly assembled on the ground with bread, cheese, cake and crisps on top. Tea was prepared to wash away the dry of the tobacco on the tongue burning with the need to speak. We spoke of the festival, we planned the fashion show and discussed ways to bring in money. The conversation was excitable as everyone threw new and exciting ideas on the distarkhan gaining more and more hope in the possibilities of a festival designed to empower the systematically disempowered.

Then the conversation turned to another area where money complicates relations. Guilt consumed me as I was confronted with all the ways in which we had failed in our efforts to challenge the system. The system that deems it fit for young, highly capable bodies to lie on its streets without access even to a toilet. The system which prefers the prison complex to decent housing, and camps to social centres for trading skills and learning languages. We had offered homes, once a week we brought fruit and vegetables, once a week doctors visited their homes, three times a week people came to give French lessons, once a week we met to discuss immigration legal issues; and yet we had failed. We had failed because the system we stood against is bigger than us, we had failed because their struggles, which they were able to assess individually, were part of a larger and highly complex political and racial issues. We had failed because we had promised but could not hold on to arms that needed to cling on.

Yet I will not accept that what we are doing is wrong. I will not accept that opening homes to house the homeless is a failure when I know that despite all our best efforts, the system will not support our success.

It is so amazing to see the right group gather around, the ones most eager to gain something from the workshop. I entered at a most beautiful scene with Muzho leaning over Ehsan, and Amir sitting there in the corner, learning; with Parwiz sitting slightly afar, smiling. He is always so joyful and so full of life and yet when Muzho brought us together, he tensed up so much. I had spent the day being with Asef and he was here before my eyes in Parwiz. The responsibility of being an elder brother, despite not being the eldest, is so much that the body tenses up. Have you been shown love? I wonder if your body knows the touch of another and I reflect upon the manner in which I relate with all of you in my body that is so open to touch. My body that loves to be recognised in the brush of skin can only respond to the tension with gentle affirmation that I am here, brother!

It was an amazing workshop where we learnt to touch each other with intent but without intention of domination over the body. I touched his small body that became stiff. I moved the arm but with every move, no matter how small, he tensed further. I moved his leg and he got stiff. I did not know how to respond to the stiffness. Muzho was there to aid me, telling me I can just be present. I can just hold on. I held on to show that he is not alone. I held on to show that I am there.

My favourite brothers together and one who had for so long been a little sister. All there learning to love, trust, and hold on without judgement and without thought. We laughed at the other’s shortcomings, the other’s difference, the other’s weirdness, and we learnt that laughter is a tool to get over but it is also a tool not necessarily useful always implied. We learnt to let go. We learnt to take pride in our culture but not to see it as above criticism.

My eye kept twitching all day because I carried the stress of the day prior. I know it is from a place of love and trust that Elyaas emotionally unloaded unto me. However, I carried that load into the day and my eye twitched all day long. My hands shook. I think rather than a state of full consciousness in which I need my alert mind to create, I had palpitations. In the end, it is all done. Such is life. I must call the DJ again. Oh my god. Have I invited enough people? Would I get everything done in time? It is plenty of days. I can also relax. How can I relax?

Today I am sitting with Elyaas working on the film and already we have passed two arguments. The first because he tells me that the festival will not be good because it lacks clear leadership and the backing of a powerful organisation. The second because when I took him to get Chinese food, he advises me, jokingly, to be careful not to order mouse meat. I caught him on his racism and he called me a dictator because I had cut him off. I wanted to explain that I had no other choice but to cut him off because I have no tolerance for racism. I remind him that we, the Hazara people, were bullied for eating mouse meat, though obviously there is no truth in this. Still, he holds on, insists, telling me that I argue with him all the time and refuse to listen to him. I do not know how to explain to him that I listen but I cannot be forced to listen to what goes against my conscience. I often realise the patterns of my mother in me as I quickly shut down, criticise, point out the mistake then I show love and care. This is not the right way round. I know this. I should first encourage and then gently bring to realisation that what was said or done was not acceptable. How to accept the unacceptable?

Today was a great day of bonding as I asked questions that appear to me normal but instead of judging and commanding what people should be doing, I asked what concerns you. What happened between you friends. Why are you distressed? What happened to your brother? Can you show me a picture of your fiancé. I asked normal things and requested what is normal, not what is wrong and what must be fixed. I got normal answers. It is being with Muzho that is a real lesson as we break codes and also learn to make use of our time together. This is the hardest thing about living together, closeness.

He told me his brother is rotting in jail for a crime he did not commit and when a friend could have saved him from being hung with just a testimony that he refused then friendship is put into question. Friendship is valued so much that the family intervened saying if this is the kind of person you call friend then you put a shame on the word. I am not like this. I do not value so much anything because I am given to run.

manizha khaos

[raonimuzho]

the story of a

2nd July 00:30 theatre noute the night sky is gentle today. deep dark blue like the hands of my homeless friend ray in NYC. tonight's story is about a gemini boy named a. true to a gemini nature this boy is extremely charming, full of jokes, is able to process information quickly with not much patience :P. this boy was born, as a hazara boy in iran, where he got bullied a lot for being afghan. he told me that as a young boy he was constantly in fights and would always return home with scratches, bruises and blood running down his cheeks. as we were in his room, where he gifted me a beautiful brown leather jacket, he told me about the many fights that he would get himself into because he refused to let people trashtalk  him just because of his ethnicity. he told me that once he got stabbed when he was 9 years old because he stood up for himself. he said to me: “can u imagine, i was just 9 years old and i was stabbed in my stomach...” when his family came to germany, all of the family was given asylum but the family got torn apart and a and his other 5 siblings (including a little baby) were taken from the family and placed in shelters all far away from their family. when a was 16 he got into a fight with someone which ended him up in jail for three years. i don't know the details of this event. but he ended up in jail for three years for whatever happened that day. when he finally got released his status was revoked and the state was readying him for deportation to afghanistan, there where he hadn't had set foot even. a then fled germany for france and is now waiting to get his case positively confirmed.

this gemini boy called a has a beautiful heart, a heart so ready to give love and bring joy to others. in his room we spoke about the nature of gemini, about what lies on the other side of the jokey loving nature, the shadow face which can show itself suddenly and with much fervour. in his room he told me that he's bisexual and that he loves everyone who loves him, but he doesn't dare to really give his heart to anyone because he's afraid of what they'll find. in his room he told me how he didn't know for a long time how to think good thoughts about himself as the rage that was burning in him had saturated all of his cells. in his room he told me that by now he's done much good for others that he can believe that he can also be a good guy. true to a gemini nature this boy is filled with creative flow and urgency. he's a painter at heart and after i showed him some works from jean michel basquiat and i told him about the struggles that j.m.b had faced and how he used his paintings as a radical representation of the complexity of his experiences as a black man in the 90s NYC, this gemini boy called a, then ran away and started painting and came back with a painting that represented his time locked up in a metal cage of the industrial complex that's called prison, a la jean michel basquiat. 

by raoni muzho

[raonimuzho]

Lesson 1

We sat in a perfect circle on big cushions that we could not place under butts but lean under elbows as we lay on our sides. Thus we were lying like orientals, talking about the capacity of the young man who is able to learn at such rates that others are left marvelling. There we sat talking about embodiment, about the roles we play and the power in movement and sound.

The lesson begins thus. It does not need to take the conventional format by which we are ordered and constructed to understand life, learning, and value. It is all a theatre and the job of the theatre-maker is to unmask the theatre of life so that by looking at what lies beneath the mask, one can reclaim ones power from its domination.

We break power structures by which we exist if we are to recognise the words communicated in the body and the ways in which to use those words. These are the codes that maintain the perceivably indestructible hierarchy that categorises the social.

The class already begun because you explained about embodiment, movement and sound in relation to power expressed by the roles we play and those which we are expected to play, often the same, in society. Everything is a theatre so what happens if one chose to reject the role assigned and choose another? Here are two people in our midsts who choose to abandon the gender roles assigned to them in order to choose another. One puts himself in a position of open collaboration to share this privilege of choice so that it can be a tool for the benefit of those whose roles assign them suffering: The role assigned to the one who is considered an illegal migrant; an asylum seeker; a refugee. No single person is in a position of teaching in the vertical sense by which we understand learning but in the horizontal plane of the circle on the ground upon cushions misused. The circle is thus. We smoke and drink while we discuss what brought us to this space, what skills we bring and how these skills can be of use to tackle the theatre of absurd of the colonial legal regimes. The border regime, of course, is the pinnacle of the absurdity of this theatre since prison and border are two sides of the same coin. So here we bring the tools by which the codes can be learnt in order to challenge roles assigned and thus assume power, even in its single definition. There is no need to dominate but power in terms of domination has a singularly identifiable face. How to learn its expressions, when to apply them, how to problematise them, and when to reject them. These are tools of empowerment, tools for the revolution.

We were lying like orientals on our sides in a circle drinking wine and smoking cigarettes talking about the regime that rejects the capacity of a young man while the other man exclaims in determination, “You will have what is your right! You will study!” The young man sits there already in a lesson but one that takes a horizontal ground which will place all the tools at his disposal and his narrow, small eyes light up, knowing the value of this lesson. He says, “Bro! Das is so cool maan! I will learn!”

I know the lesson has already begun yet we wait to recognise its face most familiar to us. Why?

It is interesting to speak about choice and oppression because it varies the meaning of power in oneself. All I ever speak of these days… or perhaps always… is power. I learn the power of choice and the choice of power as I learn to recognise the theatre of my encounters with others. I speak about oppression and in the gaze that defines me I meet its naked face. I redefine it from the encounter I had come to accept as normal with man and white; with the police; with the law; with religion. See me now as I stand above the choking red body of the old man who the police in plain clothes as thieves in costume have pressed to the ground, one with elbow around his throat and another with knee upon chest. I am raging, shouting words in myriad languages but not the right one as I the only sense I understand at this very moment is the sense against ruthless bullying. I cannot tolerate. I will not watch quietly. No badge, no arm-band, no matter how red or how far thrust into my face by hands of how butch a man. No, I will not cower for I will not accept dirty killing. If you want to kill, kill with honour because the target of your rage, and this is where it must come from, is the source of the suffering of a thousand others. I cannot stand quietly by because the card shoved in my face entitles one to kill, especially when the purpose for doing so is to punish the poor, the desperate, the denied. It is the theatre that one can play to learn when to move, when to replace rage with fear, when to breathe and how to utilise the breath for effect.

It is the acceptance of theatre as fact that we have come to endure so much that goes against every moral by which society is formed on the sensual level.

When the encounter is to be had with all that we recognise as the body learning why then do we relegate learning only to the realm of the mind? I know it when my skin tingles the difference between an encounter of a sense by which I will form relations with another. I know it in the brush of the hair what my time to come will mean in terms of the way I am to be shaped by one and in turn to shape them. Oikeiosis is not of the mind. It can only be described but it cannot be explained. Only in feeling can we know. How can he say I am to learn feeling-thinking without knowing how much pride I take in my knowledge to feel? It is my greatest ghorur. In fact the only place where I am to recognise ghorur. What I never had. Everyone is telling me how to find the space in which they will finally accept me knowing that I am already accepted as I accept them.

I talk about feeling and simultaneously I talk about the ways in which my oppression has been formed by the manipulation of another who knew exactly how to maintain the power structures against which, in theory, I am always fighting and, in praxis, I am overworked. I speak to Muzho realising that we simply did not know the codes by which to explain our efforts as work so that value can be given in a globalised world that only knows value by man and white. Rich. Bourgie-ass! I say I cannot force the ass to drink water, only take him to it.

I want to reverse symbolic life and symbolic death but I can only do so if I learn first to assume and utilise the tools. I will fill no shoes of man and white. Rich. But I want the space that is rightfully mine. I know this is what I do the best. The best. Not better than anyone but the best. I was made for this.

The course already began in theory as we shared words and thereby passed on the codes but we dived into the depth of the ocean of praxis by sitting there in our queered forms, which caused confused looks and eyes suddenly growing wide in horror as they see that transition is change; and change is what made Muzho an exile from the family, ostensibly the only real link to ones identity with the land, with the culture, with the self. Had they not changed? What happens when they go home? Will their family also reject them? The sense of exile no body can understand better than them.

This is what I want to tell my brothers. I want to say take this course because I believe that nobody can understand exile better than you, the exiled, so I want you to see how another who is exiled from the only real link to their identity can refuse powerlessness?

A lion does not leave the jungle by choice. What means exile but the negation of choice? Yet here is one who still enjoys the power of choice even in exile. Is this not what you said to me? Did you not say that though they took your rights, they would not take your right to be happy because this is your choice. This was all you had. Did you not say this to me?

Brothers, how do these lies make you feel? Brothers, how does it feel knowing that you can but they will not let you? Brothers, how does it feel that I can shout at you for not doing when I am as aware as you are that you can but your wings are taken from you when you are asked to fly? Brothers, I know it is hard but I refuse to pity you. Brothers, I am learning even to remove pity from my gaze unto the ones surviving on our streets. Brothers, I see you as above the ones who have it easy and I know you should have it too but really because your strength lies on the ground, humbled, enrages me. Brothers, I love you, you know, but it is the responsibility that makes me able to shout at you because I know you can. Brothers, you can but you must be more resilient. You must walk and speak because this is the only way networks can be made because here is what they call a dog-eat-dog world of contacts. You will know its face as nepotism and this is the source. Brothers, so little is given you and you are expected to fight among one another over the little but I am telling you please find a way to rise in this world. Think of yourselves as able. Do not await the paper. Fuck their paper.

by manizha khaos

[raonimuzho]

celebrating Keti Koti in Paris

it's after midnight and i’m tired from a day full of expressions and deliberate learnings. i want to think about the sense of belonging and radical self-acceptance. yesterday i wrote this at 3 am: 

this class has already started

get with the lesson everybody

the lesson of "how to insist on engaging with questions that feel too big for what i can carry at the moment?" 

(and also as in haraway's word "how to stay with the trouble?")

to make myself available & of service to a belonging that makes me feel so out of place and right at place at the same time. 

the matter of language and the matter of lacking a language which binds and connects the emotional landscapes of one body to the other. 

the matter of language or lacking a language is the inevitability of estrangement. estrangement as codes slip under the finger and i can see & hear the pulling of the strings, each string ushered within lips who hope that in the lacking of language we find eshq in eachother's strange tongues.

the matter of being so out of place and so right at place at the same time. and the matter of a vigorous desire to belong to bodies, stories and voices whom i've been conditioned to also feel a deep kind of shame, rejection, pity and guilt towards. and as i look into the eyes of these men, the brown, the blue and grey of their eyes reflect such a turbulent complexity back to me. in the surface of their eyes i see the joy and suffering of their existence. in their eyes i see the immense courage and loneliness mastered through the learnings of the paths called "illegal" migration. their bodies carrying the dusts, the whimpers, the fears, the shivers, the jokes of the the borders. i want to become most sensible to the beauty in these men. and i want to put whispers of wondrous praise in their eyelashes and a gust of glorious laughter in their throats. this queer feeling of being right at place and so out of place at the same time.

by raoni muzho

[raonimuzho]

A LOVE SUPREME

7th june 2021 on microdose 

i don't want to go to paris and work with afghan men with the idea that they need me.i need them more than they need me. i need them to teach me radical self-acceptance. i need to hear their stories with a heart so monstrously open that their waters can run right into my waters, through me, but without guilt overtaking me. for too long guilt has been the mechanism of my doings and i'm sure with an economy based on guilt, an economy which rests on people being completely ashamed of their priviliges, the same shame which leads people to feel numbed and thus easily controllable by the forces of the hegemony. when one is numb one is not connected to their sense of self-hood, their sense of self-governance, their sense of freedom and embodied pleasure. 

so what I would love to share with the afghan men is delicious foods, i want them to teach me how to cook. i want them to tease me for my faggotness and i want to learn to take it. i want to learn to embrace my beauty through their teasings and to learn to not see their teasings as violence but rather as a prayer and praise of me. i want to become through their eyes, their words, their stories and preferably my slutty self would give all of my juices to them too.

i know i will be sexualised, i know i will be fetishised, i know these things but better their fetishisation and their sexualisation of me, which i will learn to not only take but also give back with the same humorous teasing winds, than the fetishisation and sexualisation that i've had to endure in the land of the white gaze. i need to learn how to love the monster within. how to make love with the monster within. 

i need to break with the internalised fear of afghan men. instead i want to become an afghan man. yes i said it. a man. but always in my own weird way. it's interesting how i always add a 'but' to it. that i don't dare to admit to myself that i'm becoming a man, a guy. what does it mean to be want to become a 'man/guy' in a time when the status of man/guy is being challenged (hallelu, finally!)? i will be always in front of these battles, because i want to help fight alongside my afghan sisters but i've come to realise through the years that my place in this fight is not as a woman. as a girl i had learnt too well how to hate myself, how to make myself constantly available to the needs of others instead of my own. as a girl i learned to view other girls as a constant threat to the men liking me. i learned from my mother and aunties to keep my head high, maghrour khoda bigi, urging me to keep my head high with pride. this performative act of maghrour meant that i had to make myself unattainable to other girls so that in that way i could have access to status.

  what an interesting thing to want to become a man/guy in a time when the status of man is falling. what i want to learn from these afghan boys and men is how to become one with full grace. 

i know they'll have fantasies about me just as much as i'll have my fantasies about them, but i'm able to respond to what feels not ok. i'm able to protect myself from whatever feels not ok. what i want is that my wet dreams become saturated with images of afghan boys and men in all shapes and colours. that when i dance that it's their lusting i see, and that i consent-fully coexist in their lusting gazes. that i'm part of the lusting as much as they are too. i need them more than they need me. i need to unlearn through their stories how whiteness and white supremacy has me hate my own kind. i need to unlearn through their gazes how beautiful afghan boys/men are. how capable of loving and being loved they are. i want to learn through them that there's a place for my afghan hazara trans male-ish self in this world. and i want to learn through their dirty jokes that it's a desirable one too!  that i'm desired because i'm able to see them in their full complex selves. i'm afraid too. i'm afraid that i will not be able to manage. manage what? not manage to deliver. to deliver what? to deliver a place where they can be in all safety, encouragement. i'm afraid that the muddiness and complexity they bring into space will scare me. why scare me? because i'm trained to go around solving people's problems and i'm afraid that their complexities will completely be beyond what i can offer. but there's nothing to solve, you just have to let it rock. to be present with whatever shows itself to me. just being present, simply being present. there's nothing to solve, just let it rock. 

by raoni muzho

[raonimuzho]

“remembering that i was a refugee”

31st may 2021

to speak about bordering yourself. the macro of border politics seeping into the micro of our daily lives without us being aware of it. which surveilled and controlled bodies at the borders must suffer for me to be able to tap into the privileges of the nation state? which bodies are used as disposable enough with the aim to experiment the strongest surveillance techniques and the harshest policing onto them, so that those who live safely within the confines of the border, safely within the center of the nation-state's security, behaving well within the constructs of the good citizen can be spared the experimentation..?or rather, those who live within the confines of the borders, they will experience a kind of policing which is highly advanced and developed as the state had many bodies to practice a deep process of humiliation and dehumanisation... 

Khosravi speaks about the performance of "the refugee", of how each asylum seeker is encouraged to perform the image of the poor refugee, the one who is completely deprived of their agency to tell their story as it matters to them but rather the one who has to perform poverty, being traumatised, serious and sad. permanent states in which the refugee is encrypted without any sense of self-hood. when the refugee enters a camp the refugee needs to leave behind their sense of self-hood, leaving behind their complex stories and they have to start embodying eternal human suffering. khosravi speaks about the internalisation of the shame by performing the "poor helpless and speechless refugee". he speaks about how representing the self as a victim not by choice but by force through systematic repetition of a particular image, strips the refugee from the specificity of their culture, history and place. it made me think about the solo i did for SNDO. how in that room filled by hundreds of gazes i told them how my mom always made sure that i remembered that i was a refugee. how she insisted on me not forgetting that i'm a refugee every time she felt  that my dreams were too wild or my representation too free. i wonder what in herself, in that internalisation of "the poor refugee", she encountered when she bounced against my wildness, my queerness?  i wonder how hard she worked to internalise an alienating and dehumanising story, a story through which she knew she could provide safety for herself and her kin? and i wonder when she became that story? and i wonder if she ripped herself knowingly from her own story and glued on herself the universal story of  a suffering refugee, in the hope that we would be spared the impoverishment of our own stories but when she encountered my rebelliousness it reminded her too much of something she had to bury for the sake of safety for her kin? 

my parents speak so little about their past lives. always when i would ask them about their livelihoods they brush it off with a gesture that should translate nonchalance, but the carelessness cannot hide the deep shame and guilt which holds power over them. i remember that even though we had gotten our citizenship my parents would warn us to not tell stories about pakistan, about the joy we felt living with our families, living in the fear that perhaps our status would get revoked if we shared our stories of joy and warmth. when i would tell my dutch friends about our time in pakistan, the beautiful memories i have, they would ask: "but why did you flee then?" the stories they heard did not fit within the universal image of the refugee and i would feel like we had cheated so i would immediately respond by justifying our flight with re-narrating again the suffering of the hazaras and re-telling the violence my dad had to endure because of his flat nose, split eyes and high cheekbones. it was the stories of suffering, humiliation and poverty that my dutch friends were seeking so that this narrative could justify the righteousness of European border control over black & brown bodies. perhaps if they managed to fit me well into the “refugee suffering” image, they didn't have to go home and feel bad and question their implicity in holding up a system which is dehumanising and take the right of asylum seekers away their full personhood?

by raoni muzho