Circus Amok, Climate Change and Random Acts of Kindness

I've never really loved the circus. I think too hard about abused animals and exploited people. But yesterday I went to Circus Amok in Sunset Park and saw amazing feats of acrobatics, strength, and good old slapstick that redeemed this particular art of performance in my ever-critical eyes.

Yes, that is a ladder on her chin.

Jennifer Miller, a professor of Performance Studies at Pratt Institute, founded a sociopolitically-conscious, ingenious, aesthetically exhilarating circus in 1989. It is open to the public and operates on donations from the crowd. In this show it is the bearded lady who leads a troupe of nimble misfits to the beat of a live band that roams around the park collecting children before the show.

In honor of the People's Climate March the spectacle was themed around a plot to save the world from corporate corruption. A rich, evil, executive wants to cut off the tops of mountains for his financial benefit. He attempts to bribe a tax official with money, rent security and a garden but then the goddesses get involved.

And they save the day, with the help of some bees.

 

All the people danced.

That was yesterday. Today I was unable to go to the Climate Change march in order to do some school work which will surely influence my choices in regards to Raw Fiction's curriculum. Jackie Wang anyone? If you have not read this scholar you must. Prisons and institutionalized racism ingrained in society going right back to the roots of European entitlement to safe spaces and the justified annihilation of First Nations. Woven into a tapestry that analyzes scenes from Occupy Baltimore to the neglect of "non"-innocent people of color in the industrial prison complex to the benefit of the Middle Class of all races.

Even though I didn't make it to the march, I patched in via live stream thanks to Amy Goodman. Angelique Kidjo singing a cappella was certainly the highlight but the role of Peru and the voices of the indigenous was most compelling. Lima in December people.

I also met up with an old friend this weekend. A reunion from my MSF days. Ebola is the topic. Since March. How is it that only one organization (never mind governments) is credited for responding well (or at all) to this increasingly devastating international health crisis? We also did the old "girlfriend" (sometimes I speak hetero) catchup and wonderfully ignored the drunk skeevy dudes (I promise you women, if you ignore them for long enough, don't engage for a second, don't shake hands, they'll go away… eventually. And then you can get back to your convo) and then a random act of kindness happened. A woman came up to me just before we left, "Is your name Zahra?" She asked. I kind of looked around expecting a joke from a friend. I said, "Yes." She produced my wallet. Lost in the ladies' room. She had looked at the photo on my license and even though I've chopped off all my hair she was still able to find me. How thoughtful. POC bar allies.

I dedicate this post to the freaks: Thoughtfulness, Compassion, Intellect, Kindness.

Creative Cacophonies and other bits of Chaos

It is my third week of classes and my inbox is overflowing. Readings and fundraisers, gatherings and conferences and a title for a tumblr that is yet to be decided. I love my cohort, their ideas and enthusiasms but I have to make choices.

If I was to participate in everything, if I was to even read all of the emails I've received I wouldn't be able to focus on my schoolwork - primary, or my project - second primary. I also need to get a job.

I interviewed for the position of assistant teaching artist with a youth org yesterday. They asked me about Raw Fiction. Somehow, my stock answer got caught in my throat and I felt a little bit nervous. It's always strange to define Raw Fiction, at once so abstract yet a concrete collaborative action that happened. And will happen again. To define Raw Fiction is as hard for me as it is to tell people about myself. Perhaps because Raw Fiction is me, but simultaneously I have no control over what will happen to it as the world witnesses, manipulates (positively) and interprets it, so Raw Fiction is malleable. As am I. Ha, that would be a funny thing to say in an interview.

This is just a quick post, to clarify for myself, and encourage anyone else who might be feeling pulled in too many exciting directions, that self-preservations relies on knowing one's own limits and being able to stay within them.

My limits are full time grad school, Raw Fiction planning and part-time job. If I get one that I can enjoy and learn from. If not then I can just put extra energy into school. We are here to learn: raw: read and write.

Gallery Days, Juve Nights, and a meeting at the Pratt Center

Yesterday was Friday, August 29. It was the last day of my first week as a student at Pratt and the first day of intensity as a student and project director. It was quite fun.

The Hetrick-Martin Institute had an art show yesterday afternoon. This represented my first recruitment opportunity. It also provided the impetus necessary to finalize the recruitment section of my website and create flyers. The event was a great opportunity to meet HMI staff, interact with youth and spread the word of Raw Fiction. Even more than that, the event was great.

Every year, at the end of the summer HMI throws a gallery event to showcase the creative talent of their youth. This was the third year of the annual event called Inner Visions. Held in a basement room of well-known community meeting center, Judson Memorial Church at Washington Square Park, youth, staff and supportive community members filled the space with enthusiastic energy.

Here's a small sampling of the visual talent:

Unfortunately, I always get nervous taking photos in public and feel I did little justice to the creative sampling of talent of HMI youth. It's an organization I'll follow up with. Do presentations if possible. Establish a connection. I have a friend who works there but she might not always be there as she's just started in her own MFA writing program. To close the event there were performances. Dancers, actors, poets and singers. I couldn't help but cry when one young person shared their own sadness at not being able to find the right time to tell their mother about performing in drag, a hobby that brings much joy. Stories like that ram home the importance of a space like HMI. A space where youth get to be themselves, their true inner selves, without fear.

Before heading off to the Gallery I had a quick meeting with Christian and our contact at the Pratt Center to sign off on paperwork and meet face to face. We'll check in again in January to let them know of our progress and then I assume when the project is all over. This reminds me though, I have to send a follow up email about the dispersal of funds. It's a good thing I registered Raw Fiction, or StreetStall Publishing in fact, as a business. Being on the books can help jump over hurdles. I do get a lot of junk mail, especially from U-Line and credit card companies, but you never know when it will come in handy. Also makes filing taxes seem more legitimate.

Then Christian and I sat down at Pillow Cafe on Myrtle, a bit of a nostalgic venue for me, and talked about ghosts on the internet and other practical matters. Perhaps I'll read that legendary title, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

No it does remind me though, I don't think I diligently logged my syllabus for Raw Fiction 2013. There was Sandra Cisneros and James Baldwin, excellent examples of fine writers who live(d) engaged lives with their communities. Zora Neale Hurston and Irvine Welsh as examples of writers who capture language in its spoken, or oppressed, forms. Bessie Head connecting to the land and bringing up issues of exile. Edwidge Danticat's tragic epistolary short story that opens Krik Krak, a refugee on a boat who left his lover behind, letters they never expect the other to receive. I showed a video about the crime of US rice in Haiti, crippling local food economies - the team really appreciated that. Sadaat Hasan Manto's brilliant story about the residents of a mental institution being displaced at the partition of Indian and Pakistan. The absurdity of the world. An exposure to a variety of ideas and styles. That's what Raw Fiction's curriculum is all about. Toni Morrison's essay on Moby Dick that challenges traditional, or white heterosexual male, literary criticism that is blind to a tradition of white heterosexual male critique of racist structures in the American psyche. Audre Lorde's poetry. Asian American writers from an anthology I found - I remember a very explicit gay piece I found and one of the team couldn't let the speaker's voice be male when the writer was. She did the same with Lorde's poetry. She wasn't homophobic, she'd just never been given gay literature and her mind had trouble adjusting, it was easier for her imagination to shift the gender of the writer, a writer could easily pretend to be another sex before a writer could easily be gay. I threw books at them and told them to read whatever struck their fancy. I gave them Vonnegut. I never found the right Sherman Alexie story but I gave them Leslie Marmon Silko. I started with America and moved into international works.

It will be impossible to give this new group of youth nearly as much as the last time. This time I'll give them a different facilitator each meeting.

I went back to the Copy Shop on E4th Street to get the pages I'd already copied of the flyer cut into squares. The owner of the shop remembered me. It's been at least a year and a half since I've been there. What a sweetheart. Then to Judson Memorial Church. Then to a reading in Brooklyn.

I was skeptical about this reading at a bar in Bed Stuy. What kind of bar was it going to be? One of those trendy new bars with an elitist owner and deliberate decor that emphasizes what great taste the interior designer has? One of those bars that's shutting down businesses that have been in the neighborhood for decades who are shuttering up because of the pressure of rising rents and the reticence for all the monied newcomers to patronize a place owned and staffed by locals. It wasn't one of those bars. But it was certainly that scene. I don't think I've been in such a predominantly white space in New York City in years, or in ever. But the bar was Tip Top Bar & Grill. The bartenders, bouncer and chef were all African Americans in their 60s, or perhaps 70s. It's a stronghold against the onslaught of money that is infiltrating the formerly known as terrifying Bedford Stuyvesant. So this series brought Brooklyn's young wealth to this bar. And perhaps they'll go back - but probably not, they're safe in numbers, when they can take over a place, but as a couple or trio, would they really go back to an unpretentious black bar because it plays great music and feels real comfortable? And be the minority? I don't know. It is irrelevant because that's not why I went out last night. I went out to support one of my professors. Rachel Levitsky. And it was worth it. She performed a collaboration. Two speakers with a video. His voice like Thom Yorke's on Fitter Happier, her's a little less robotic. The video - a montage of conformity with references to Monsanto and suburbia. [See comments for additional information.]

I didn't get home very late but it's Labor Day weekend and I live on Eastern Parkway. Juve was happening in my bedroom, or at least that's what it sounded like. It took me a couple of sleepless hours before I thought to shut my window and turn on the air conditioner. That did the trick of drowning out external noise, but then there was the noise of the air conditioner to prevent sleep. Somehow I still woke up before 7am this morning. I'll probably go grocery shopping at the Farmer's Market, make a huge brunch and then take a long nap so I can read my assignments for the coming week.

To do:
Space - seems like my first choice isn't going to pan out.
Follow up with Pratt Center
Follow up with HMI
Follow up with members of my cohort interested in collaborating
Get my hands on Pedagogy of the Oppressed … but then is that something I want to read more than the history of Oakland Community Schools.

Something I tell the youth I work with: "Question everything, even the material that I give to you."

Before & After & From Now On Is Never Enough

Tonight's title is a play on words. On Thursday, August 28 the MFA in Writing program at Pratt Institute is throwing a kickoff reading and party called Now Before and After is Not Enough, the words boldly falling across the huge poster-flyers. It sounds relevant to activism and art. All that is not narrow spills over into the category(ies) of activism and art.

I have returned from a summer of rest and reflection in the Catskills to a hectic city with pressing academic, economic and family concerns. School starts this week, I need to find a job, I need to get on top of all my Raw Fiction administrative tasks and I lost two uncles in the first two weeks of this month.

Two brothers who couldn't have been more different. The artist and the activist. The actor and the macho. The model and the revolutionary. This year I will be running Raw Fiction in memory of my father's brothers with an understanding that being black and gay or black and militant during the Civil Rights Era were equally radical lifestyles that opened doors allowing my out queerness and disabling censure and censors around my voice.

As I enter a second round of Raw Fiction I am thinking about art as activism and activism as art.

I am also thinking about losses. The loss of field trips, the loss of individual mentorships, and the skimmed-down schedule.

And then I must think about gains. This year I have the chance to focus on curriculum while engaging in coursework theorizing radical pedagogies.

The first group of youth helped me establish the image of Raw Fiction. They told me what they valued most about the concept and they also designed the logo and website and created the first publication.

This year I want to focus on youth concerns - and obviously it will be a limited opinion poll as I'm recruiting four youth. But these four young New Yorkers will help me identify and establish Raw Fiction's community concerns, as will my Pratt cohort and professors.

To Do
Recruitment and confirmation of space

And we're back . . .

Raw Fiction is back.

Last year, with no funding and no energy to rally either participants or monies, I let the project slip into a term of indefinite hibernation while I applied to grad school and fantasized about selfish acts of reading and writing in an institution in a city where I was a stranger with zero feelings of immediate and urgent responsibility to my community.

However, the only school that accepted me is Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, a mile from where I live. Not exactly the great escape I'd imagined, albeit the best fit. Pratt's program is staffed by radical thinkers and experimental writers. It also is community-centric, deconstructs the traditional workshop by creating a weekly studio space and deconstructs traditional literature courses by providing individual mentorships with faculty members. It was the only program that I found particularly exciting (other than Brown's, which did kindly place me on the wait list). The day after I emailed Christian Hawkey, the program coordinator, to confirm my matriculation he contacted me with a grant opportunity of up to $10,000 for a community project under the guidelines of the Taconic Fellowship. Said guidelines stipulated that any project that met the goals of the fellowship could apply. Those goals are, and I quote, "to expose more disciplines to community development work and to support Pratt Institute’s commitment to collaboration, inter-disciplinary projects, and service learning opportunities." Raw Fiction does that, I thought.

The part where Raw Fiction had to be slightly re-imagined was under the section called Evaluation Criteria. The panel of Pratt Center and Pratt Institute judges were looking for projects that addressed this:

Significance: Does the study address an important problem or question in the field of community development or sustainable practice? Does it build upon prior findings? How does it advance

the practice of community development or sustainable practice? What will be the impact of this project on future practice?

Christian, the faculty mentor on this student community project, put that part in writing. It will be interesting to enter that world of space, development aesthetic in writing with youth. It will also be interesting to replace the original project mentor, Tanisha Christie, with Christian. [But Tanisha, if you're reading this, you'll always be my mentor and Raw Fiction's first.]

One of the most important parts of Raw Fiction is to create a project in which the mentors and workshop facilitators (a.k.a. the adults), along with the reading materials, represent people from across the spectrum of race and ethnicity, i.e. people from across the spectrum of perspective. I don't imagine that will be too hard to come by at Pratt, or that an understanding for that psychological visual would be hard to come by.

Either way, I'm excited about the new challenges, new design, new aesthetic, new material and new chapter for Raw Fiction (and me).

Now that I've started this new blog, which will serve as a transparent, public record of Raw Fiction 2.0, it's time to update the website and shutdown my fiscal sponsor account.

We'll be back with more at the end of August, when I return from a personal, DIY, summer retreat.