*recorded at the Navajo headwaters in Colorado on June 10, 2021
ZANG e SULH was written for an event convened by the Asian American Writers Workshop in collaboration with my dear friend Sham-E-Ali Nayeem back in May. We were asked to respond to the question: what role do writers and poets play in helping us find our way in a time of genocide? You can find a replay of the event and reading at the link, which has valuable information for those seeking to understand the ongoing crisis in India where caste oppressed, indigenous and religiously marginalized peoples are suffering under state sanctioned violence.
This piece is a response to that call and an artifact suspended across multiple timelines since I wrote it. You’ll find some context and a dedication further down in the post, but I hope you take a moment of pause and listen / follow along the script I made for the reading. Beyond that, you’ll find a bit of context and a dedication at the end.
CONTEXT
As an Afghan-American woman sitting in the liminal space amidst multiple fluidities, it is a labor of love that I parse through prisms to contribute heartily to trans-national movement building, archiving as a practice of witnessing + cultural perpetuity, and holding space in the invisible and unseen realms for the grief of my people and the shared experiences of suffering around the world.
Within two days of troops pulling out of Afghanistan in August 2021, a Wikipedia page rapidly and tackily went live about “The Fall of Kabul,” detailing very starkly how the Afghan government was handed over to terrorists in the name of “peace.” Far before and since then, ethnic and religious minorities (Hazara, Sufi, Sikh, Shia) have been openly massacred by this travesty of a regime.
Women were and are blocked from being able to go to school and engage in their professions. As sole providers, widows are effectively cut off from feeding themselves, their children and often times their extended families. According to Genocide Watch in 2020, Afghanistan registered at stage 9: Extermination on their “10 Stages of Genocide” index.
I spoke to a marine veteran earlier this year who had spent some time in Afghanistan. When I asked him about what he thought, he confidently replied, “It’s genocide.” While he had some stories that held the complexity of the military presence in Afghanistan (much needed irrigation and local infrastructure projects they aided in), when we got to his explanation of the “Death Blossom,” I had to pause. This slang term arose during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars wherein armed soldiers, in response to low-level enemy fire, indiscriminately spray fire in a video-game style 360 degree ring, destroying everything and anyone in their path.
In that pause, I squirmed past the parts of me that wanted to know more and the parts that have had enough knowing. We both sat silent in too many memories and an eerie sense of shared loss.
For so much of my life, I was silent about the farce of this war (out of fear of public backlash, out of duty to my family, because I was a child and didn’t know better) and suddenly I have to locate my truth again. Not the sugar coated or watered down one, but the raw and honest one.
~
As part of a final presentation for my Spiritual Ecology leadership program last year, I wrote:
I was a month into resignation when our first week in class started. I was in the fall of my career, the fall of my homeland, the falling of time into pieces, the falling of spirit into a cave, the simmering of bones in the marrow of a dying culture. I could not and cannot leave this space without the right questions.
In that fracture of chronologies where we witnessed…the second exodus of Afghans in my mother’s lifetime, another severe earthquake hit Haiti, another coup in Sudan, another hurricane in Louisiana, the continued forced migration of people in Central America, a continued crisis for Rohingya refugees, a continued call to free Palestine, the flooding of Pakistan wherein TEN million children alone are in dire need, a shattered Puerto Rico and Florida, the greusome slaughtering of dear Mahsa (Jina) Amini, and on and on…I ask—why is it that we are caught in these time loops, these doldrums wherein atrocities repeat themselves?
How many martyrs does it take to sustain a revolution?
~
When Sham-E-Ali called me months ago with news of what was happening in India, I heard myself in her voice. I was back in August’s haze of confusion where I was greiving, looking for answers, hearing an unavoidable call to step up, enraged. She sat with me in my fall, and this poem and reading is just one offering in return while I continue to uncover these questions and attempt some answering.
It is wild how many of us have had to have these conversations and confrontations in our lives, especially in the last couple years. Now that I’m re-entering the work world, I am witnessing the vast delta between people wanting to change the world from a place of control and those who know in their bones that change is the world. It’s a bonafied truth that not many people understand the lived experience of constant catastrophe, and this is why the stewards and guardians of these movements must come from these lived experiences, and what I also consider “inherited” experiences. This isn’t a diversity or inclusion strategy, this is a design strategy informed by our experiences in this life and those that have been bestowed upon us through our genetic code. The world was designed this way and we can design ourselves out of it.
We must design through an equitable and nuanced lens. How do we contest the religious extremism of certain countries while contesting the genocide of people of that faith in another country? How do we build enduring alliances through ephemeral technologies of organizing and convening?
We are entering the fierceness of ever-present change, and those who have surrendered to it, studied it and expanded their flux capacity, are the ones who must non-sequitur us forward!
I use that phrase, non-sequitur, because I personally feel most free when I don’t make logical sense or sequence. Or perhaps it’s that I can’t be coded by the hegemonic paradigm very easily. It’s not about being absurd as much as it is a radical evasion.
~
Albert Camus (dad of absurdity) wrote in the time of Mao, Stalin and Hitler:
No doubt the rebel demands a certain freedom for himself; but in no circumstances does he demand, if he is consistent, the right to destroy the person and freedom of someone else. He degrades no one. The freedom which he demands he claims for everybody; that which he rejects he forbids all others to exercise. He is not simply a slave opposing his master but a man opposing the world of master and slave.
(The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt)
It is important for me to situate myself alongside the global struggle for liberation (for people and mother earth) very literally and not just in words. While language and visual expression have an immense role in this, practice and presence are essential co-conspirators. I have spent the last 14 months of sabbatical in practice and presence with my immediate surroundings as much as possible—this was the assignment. I have called upon family who are generous with love and forgiving with pain when this has felt overwhelming. I am searching for the peace I called out with this ZANG! And when I find it, I will do everything in my power to share it.
POST-SCRIPT, A DEDICATION
As an aside, I avoided returning to this site, this account, this particular post over the last few months.
On the second night of a month long fellowship in the Southwest this summer, I began drafting this post in a home with 13 other strangers who were meeting for the first time. In my corner on the back patio, I was ruminating on the event’s name “Our Existence is a Rebellion.”
My phone rang in the middle of writing this and was asked if I could speak somewhere quietly.
I was not prepared to hear the unthinkable…that my perfectly healthy uncle, who is like a father to me, passed on to the other side. My knees buckled under me in disbelief, in a ball on the floor…I couldn’t accept it and still kind of can’t. I quietly ran outside to the park across the street, cried and heaved into the grass not knowing what to do—I was in another state preparing for an early drive to Ghost Ranch the next morning and a mostly off-grid month. I abandoned this draft and through a sequence of radically care-full conversations, I decided to proceed through the program.
I had promised writing on this platform throughout my fellowship, but I accepted the time in the program as a sacred spiritual journey that required my full presence and attention. I transparently told the group I was having a difficult family event back home and that my tenderness may be felt…the room nodded with open hearts.
My uncle was a chemical engineer who recently retired from the Environmental Protection Agency, but he was also a historian, an archivist and so much more. He was a humble, devotional man. He held American bureaucracy on his back for the entire family—doing people’s taxes, divorce papers, navigating the healthcare system, reviewing job applications, filling out voter registrations, collecting money to send back to Afghanistan, you name it. I can’t describe the feeling of losing a node like him in such a close-knit network of relatives. It’s tragic to lose one of the few wisdom keepers and storytellers we have left in our family. His departure from his incomplete work and this world shattered my heart and it was also intensely activating.
I spent the summer quietly with family, and now I am here with you today a changing person.
Earlier today I was with my mother at an appointment, and I suddenly felt the gravity of her broken heart. He was like a brother to her. It’s one thing to hear her headlines around the heart ache, it’s another for it to suddenly make sense in my body. So I smothered her in love, caresses, called upon Sham-E-Ali for a same-day reiki session (to which she immediately obliged), and mama is now sleeping soundly to soft ragas playing in the living room where I sit. Our story is a saga for another time, but today was a miracle.
Even in the midst of erasure and suffering, we find ways of showing up for each other across boundaries. We acknowledge the privilege it is to simply be alive, and the profundity of our capacity for love and resilience.
Someone in a conference I was tuning into last year described the experience of losing her child as not just heart break, but “heart breaking open.” As someone who has experienced much heart burying in this life, I can’t un-hear this phrase. It gives permission for there to be life after death, love after loss.
In sharing this stream (with a radical evasion of editing), I hope to convey that I’m attuning to strategies within personal, cultural and societal loss that allow us to break open to vibrant life-after-death possibilities. This is the hope, and an island I am floating on with my praxis.
<3 This recording and written text is dedicated to my uncle, Faridoon Ferhut, my Khala jaan and three cousins <3
~announcements
If you’d like to hear more about the process for ZANG e SULH, my praxis in general, or more about the Afghan diasporic experience, I’ll be involved in a webinar on Emergent Archives of Diasporic Memory next Thursday October 20th at UC Berkeley’s BAMPFA.
On Monday, there will be a global student day of action for Iran and Afghanistan. This one will be at Berkeley, but you can check this instagram page for further info.
I gave a talk on creativity and the science of spirituality last month at a show called “Marrow: Spiritual Observation” organized by students at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The gallery space resides within a Baptist church and people from the congregation were in attendance as well. While the recording isn’t available quite yet, I’m sharing this because it was a very meaningful space to be in with students and community members, and I hope for more opportunities to engage in community like this again <3
My calendar is open for the month of November with limited spots to touch base, offer guidance, chat collaborations/consulting or any other inquiry:
~As always, I’m grateful to hold real estate in your inbox~