While listening to the sounds of the birds

It is a privilege to be able to escape into the written word, the spoken text, to disappear into the waves of their song.

In my last letter, I delivered a vague overview of the project I was working on at the time, a play entitled “Concessions: The Show. A Journey Through the Four Kingdoms of the Candy Realm.” The piece I wrote was a free-write; it was a bit scattered and feral, unpolished, but represented the state of mind that I often occupy, fueled by adrenaline, when mounting work that inspires me. I know it was likely incoherent, but I struggle to write in a coherent way about the work I’m doing in the real, tangible, physical, offline life. 

I know having a newsletter and somehow missing the opportunity for true self promotion would shock and disappoint my college entrepreneur professors, or those who subscribe to the notion that every creative person should run their practice like a private equity firm, polishing their promotion before their craft. I’ve considered it before; I have a business brain, but I rather enjoy bashing that part of my head against the wall, administering targeted CTE to the mercantile impulse.

When Converting was released, I conceived of going episode by episode, breaking down small moments, describing the choices made in different takes. I never did. After I completed Big Painting, and had it photographed, I wanted to write a piece doing a similar deep dive on how that project developed. But whenever the time has come to open this document and write, I have cast away the smart decisions in favor of disappearing into the page.

I place a high value on the sanctity of this medium as being separate from any other “work.” In the last piece, I wrote about coming to you not as a writer, but as an actor and guitarist and producer and playwright. I now recognize how stressful that was to me, to invade this space with other lives. It feels, somehow, like infidelity. I prefer each project, each version of myself that is created to accomplish a specific creative goal, to stand alone on islands separated by bodies of water, from where they can observe and call out to one another. I couldn’t really write in depth about a project that has already happened, because I am now a new person on a new island, with so much new scenery to observe. This newsletter is a place that I come to observe.

Every creative project or collaborative act in general is participated in by people living under certain weather conditions, hiking specific peaks or valleys, each with their own music playing in the background. I could describe to you a creative project in depth, but I find it so much more interesting to discuss the humidity, the topography, and to tell you what songs we heard on the radio on the way to rehearsal. 

What I can tell you about the play is that it was ambitious. It was a piece of theatre, written to be performed on one night, and never seen again. The show was about a Concessionist traveling through a magical realm of candy metaphors, guided by an omnipresent Candyman played by yours truly. The play included five dance numbers, for which I sang, played the electric guitar, box drum, and triangle. My character shatters the fourth wall with my first entrance onto the stage, wherein I deliver a four-page long monologue. There was extensive audience interaction, a mini-game, video components, many other actors and props and a long list of tech cues. There was heightened, absurd comedy, as well as scenes of deeply emotional, dense naturalism. And we only had a script for three weeks. It was obviously a dream come true.

To pull off such an ambitious project required a level of confidence that only managed to stray from pure delusion because of the immense amount of planning, effort, imagination, and experimentation that we employed every day we worked on the show. It required a constant practice of a mental feat: catching every doubt, or insecurity, and radically deciding it was surmountable. Saying yes instead of no, pivoting sharply towards the trail that takes you further up the mountain. Deciding in advance that anything and everything was possible, and then, when the show went up, realizing in real time that anything was, and anything is. The biggest surprise was that we had so much fun, every step of the way. That felt radical. 

Ever since the show, my brain now has practiced accepting a whole new set of assumptions: that if you can dream it, you can do it. It has been a radical response to insecurity, doubt and justifies the dual power of imagination combined with effort. I also can’t understate the fun we had. It felt like an antidote to the creeping feeling that capitalism has terminally infected every form of genuine self-expression, that those who want to create all might as well turn to start-ups instead of stand-up. Though that’s a bad example since those two things specifically attract very similar personality types.

The month we spent working intensely on the play was inspiring, and it happened against a bleak backdrop. If I were to describe the climate, the topography, the music that has been playing in the background during that life changing month and in the weeks since, I would be remiss to not discuss the sounds of bombs, chants, and cries, coming to my ears from my iPhone, or echoing through the streets of Los Angeles: the sounds of a massacre in Gaza. 

I apologize for the jarring pivot. But that is how life has felt, for me at least. A jarring pivot every minute, and a pivot, and a pivot, and a pivot. I am in the business of fun, of entertainment. I am also a brown man from the Metro-Detroit area, which houses one of the loudest, proudest, highest concentrations of people with living memory of life in Palestine. The Arab community that surrounded me growing up taught me how to laugh, how to dance, how to commune, celebrate, how to love my family and my neighborhood. Dearborn, Michigan, is a place I am proud to have a connection to that is so strong, that I didn’t even know of the pain that was held there until I left for college and began taking history classes.

To state it unambiguously: the occupation and genocide in Palestine by Israel is an immoral stain on humanity. The complicity and assent by Americans, or anyone around the world who claims moral character or basic intelligence, who moves through society acting like they know better than to endorse evil, is a disgrace to the very idea that learned people would ever keep the record of history. To watch as hellfire rains down on men, women, and children, poured by those with the audacity to not even try to lie convincingly about the intentions to do so has been a horrifying challenge to the very idea of goodness, of hope, and of faith. The assignment given to civilians in Gaza to die in the interest of the powers that be around the world is an abomination that condemns our political and economic leaders and the culture they foster further into the fires of shame and injustice where they had already been left to burn long ago. 

It is a reminder of the deep contrasts present in our world that must be compartmentalized to get through a day at the office. The collective wounds that have been bandaged with an uneven layer of gauze. Right now, I feel so freshly under the shadow of that global pandemic. I feel, once again, that I am witnessing the tearing of fragile seams that protected my idea of a world that was good. This week is Thanksgiving, a holiday that brings about widespread condemnation of the American colonial project, yet outside my window I watch the stealing of land, the genocide of a native population, everything I know to condemn, this instant in Gaza. 

There is a fear about saying the words “Free Palestine.” It is one of the only social issues that hasn’t been co-opted by a corporate agenda. You will not see a Pro-Palestinian slogan on a T-shirt in Target. The courage to call for the liberation of Palestine has been, for nearly the last century, the litmus test for true liberatory politics. The situation is clear and easy to understand after reading even a basic level of scholarship: the leveling of Gaza is part of a larger eradication movement that has the support of most Western nations and is funded largely by American tax dollars. It is an imperial project that we can witness in real time, discussed plainly by Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, Kwame Ture, and Angela Davis, to name only very few. The occupation of Palestine by Israel features many hallmark techniques that have been used in settler-colonial projects for the last few centuries, at least. It bears a striking similarity to the conquest of indigenous people that was undertaken by the United States. It is justified through the far right-government’s goal of creating an ethnostate for a group of people that have undergone significant persecution in their history. The inherent problem with the creation of ethnostates, no matter who they are created to indulge, will always be: What do you do with all the other people who live there? It resembles other historical phenomenon, like the Rwandan genocide, wherein a systemically oppressed minority group gained power in the region and used that power to enact a slaughter in return. 

It reminds me of the actions taken by my family’s home country of India. India, once a colony of Britain that had their wealth and culture stripped away to effectively become a large labor mill for the British empire, received their independence from the UK around the same time that the empire created the state of Israel. Part of this declaration of independence was the partition of India and Pakistan, which led to the displacement and death of millions of people, and solidified the creation of two nations with ethnonationalist ambitions. Now, India is led by a right-wing government that has the goal to make India an ethnostate with the military and economic prowess of a Western nation. The forces of global imperialism and militarism are the business of nation states. Military conquest allows for the strengthening of national business interests. The United States, along with every imperial power, will support militaristic actions that support their economic interests. Israel is a crucial investment that the United States makes, to have a firm ally in a region of the world that we need access to for crucial resources that contribute to our economic domination, like oil. In order to support this interest in claiming the resources of other regions, these militaristic governments must gain the assent of their citizens through rhetoric. 9/11 prompted the global “War on Terror”, which was used to justify several United States invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and resulted in a staggering loss of life. Since October 7th, the Palestinian loss of life has risen to nearly 15,000 people dead with a similar justification.

When back home with my family, I can watch news reports and new Bollywood releases with a pit in my stomach and see how India, for example, stokes a fear of terrorism in the population, and uses that fear to justify and support their military actions against countries with rival economic interests. It makes me cognizant of the role that I play in society as one of its entertainers. Creativity exists to represent truth and engage people in an empathetic practice, of course, but life in LA has shown me how extensively it is also created as a distraction, to gain capital, to pacify and sedate the population as well. At no point do I wish for my creative work to distract or sedate. 

I believe that artists should have a deep, vested interest in liberatory politics. Not that all art should be explicitly political, but that the power of a creative act to reflect what it feels like to live, and to communicate so deeply with other people no matter where they live, is a sacred and powerful tool of humanity that imperialism and fascism work tirelessly to extinguish for a reason. The ability to create comes either from a place of peace and liberation, or from a place of restlessness and a desire to affect hearts and minds. 

The forces that I write about constantly, that every artist I know talks about constantly: the capitalist system, the motive for profit, the impulse to take and take and take; the forces that make our lives hard, that gain their power from oppressing us, are the same forces that subjugate vulnerable people all around the world. Capitalism, imperialism, work to stifle creativity because art is often made by those with the freedom to dream, and it inspires others to do the same. As artists, as people, we have to believe in a world where every person has the freedom and safety to dream, to be inspired, to spend their life capturing and sharing the feeling of awe.

I am lucky to have that experience, to get to keep my head in the clouds and pursue art as a rejection of the forces that would seek to contain or stifle me. But those forces are violently at play around the world, disregarding the lives and freedom of other people in order to stamp out their dreams. 

When I advocate for engagement with the arts, it is with the hope that those who are critical about the art they consume will be critical of the rhetoric, and propaganda, of the figures on their television screen and what they say they believe in. Those who observe others who are different from them, with an open mind, will connect deeply to even the most abstract feelings and experiences of others, will recognize themselves in the characters of a story, or feel unity in splatters on canvas. Those who read the stories of our time, and the times before will be able to notice patterns, especially those regarding the wielding of power, and will recognize themselves in those who need protection and support the most. From there, more good things can happen. 

It is easy to use tragedy to perpetuate harm, and harder to use loss or heartbreak to become stronger and kinder, to be more fair, to seek justice. As artists, one of the many things we practice is how to turn tragedy into beauty, knowing that to commune, to watch people bare their souls brings us closer to one another. Our sorrow cannot remain dormant, it must fuel our responsibility to commune, to speak loudly, and to create in the interest of empathy. To do more that is not even creative, and especially not self serving, in the interest of empathy. That empathy is artistic, and it is political. It is the most powerful tool we have.

Doing that insane, ambitious play taught me that everything you imagine can come to exist in the world. If I can create work that comes from my imagination to then be seen by others, I can create a world around me that looks more like how I imagine it could be. Many of us can imagine a world without apartheid, colonization, occupation, and genocide. Many of us, who are smart and talented, courageous, hardworking, kind, who are good leaders, can imagine a better world. So it must become reality. It is inevitable. None of us are free, until we are all free. 

Free Palestine.