On Making Art During Fascism

Notes on LA fires, Wicked, Patrice Lumumba and the Soundtrack to the Coup d'etat

From the Tumblr @uglyfruit

A few years ago I started this Substack because I had no money. This was a common occurrence in my life, I had money until I didn’t. Perpetually it was “feast or famine”— no in-between, no immigrant caution. My father is a deeply generous man, and I learned young that giving to your friends, strangers, comrades, and lovers as much as possible was glorious. This devotion is spiritual to me, and over time I’ve become more cognizant that generosity is like a valve. One that has to be discerned and never misused.

I’ve been depressed recently because of the state of the world. I know what you’re thinking, we’re all depressed. And that should be true… I mean many white people apparently are not (or are but for the entirely opposite reasons) and the dissonance is just... well it’s so many things. It’s confronting to see how many people want to maintain blissful ignorance. It’s hard not to make a comparison to an Orwellian universe, the nation-state maybe always has been akin to 1984. When you’re young and reading about state surveillance it sounds so quaint, the dark universe that feels impossibly crude and out of reach... then true adulting is realizing that the “bad guys”… are all the people with power and wealth in the world. I do believe capitalism is a breeder of evil because it’s the breeder of greed. When greed enters the picture morality is obsolete and when humanity isn’t protected, we’ve lost the plot. How do we resist this calculated descent into fascism? The only way isn’t to slowly succumb to this authoritarianism… we can and we should push back. But, are we so neutralized by capitalism that we are incapable of taking a moral stand? Is this the future of the United States of America?

Two different people recently told me that academics don’t want to risk losing their jobs so they won’t take a moral stand on anything—especially not about Palestine. I gagged! My father is an academic and I’ve seen that man take nothing but stands (against outside authority, usually when it had to do with his own principled integrity) and maybe that emboldened me young to do the same thing. I like talking back, but only about things I believe in. It’s a bad quality that I have and I exercise it… a lot. It’s the wildcard I like to pull out, I will gladly and loudly speak my mind. People find me confrontational, I cause eruptions everywhere I go. This makes me volatile but maybe because we misread being polite as kindness but usually I think the kindest thing is to tell people the truth.

My sister, who is 42, has recently been accepting that she’s neurodivergent. It’s something that has been deeply clarifying to me as I witness her, and it’s healed our relationship greatly in the last few months. I am able to move with more care and compassion towards her, but I’m also able to see ourselves in a broader scope and through a disabled lens. In a way, we are all so close to disability that it’s truly humbling and astounding how the body and mind are their own teacher and they will speak, regardless of the time. We are all processing so many layers of being as we witness the decay of the planet and the continued genocides that ravage Sudan, Congo and Palestine. As my sister understands herself more deeply, within the framework of autism/ADHD, which makes space for her entirety, I am able to understand myself more deeply, as well. I realize how much care we need that we haven’t gotten having the childhoods we had and that despite loving each other very much, we have struggled to fully understand each other. But her neurodivergence diagnosis is making me understand her more, her disability has been insightful because it’s teaching me how to care for her better.

+

I often feel illegible. I write because it’s the only thing I know how to do. It brings me closer to being understood.

+

I watched Wicked recently and I realized that to talk about fascism so much of Hollywood talks in code. That’s the only way they know how to speak, through a gauze, in strangulation. Ironic that the word ‘gauze' is thought to come from the name Gaza, which was once a center for weaving, especially with silk. “As early as the 13th Century, intricately woven silk fabric made in Gaza was exported to Europe and the rest of the world.”

Anyway, I watched Wicked recently and I cried my bloody eyes out. I enjoyed the parallels between what’s currently unfolding in the USA and the image of a tiny mediocre Oz who has no power and can only siphon it through the magic he leeches, which means, like Elphaba, we have the power to not let our magic feed the machine, ya feel me. Not to be that bitch but Elphaba was highly relatable. My mother also hates me and always told me to shut up. I fucking hated my life as a teenager and I was sullen and suicidal and I wanted everybody to feel the weight of my sadness everywhere.

I also realized, while watching the film, that I had spent so much of my life in criticism by/from others, that I was always in expectation of someone’s bad judgment, someone’s bad faith feeling towards me. A pattern instigated by my mother, who was jealous of me and some part of her hated me. This has made me afraid to stand up for myself when it’s so easy to stand up for others. Yet, despite struggling to be seen as I truly am, to be liked, to be cared for by my own mother… I have always felt the power inside of me. It’s why I’ve achieved anything in my life. It’s why I write. Why I have a voice on the page. No one has ever been able to silence me though many people have tried very hard to.

Defying Gravity is a song for all the alt girls with integrity and repressed rage and sadness who have had to learn to sublimate all that untapped magic into something else, something mighty, so we wouldn’t self-destruct. It’s a spiritual art form to learn how to alchemize grief into literal magic. Elphaba is a ROLE MODEL.

And the way she does not give a fucking SHIT if you don’t like her—that gave me life! Let young kids see you don’t need to be liked to have value, to have worthiness, to have a voice, to stand up for what is right! In fact, you should do it despite what you will lose. Every time someone literally screamed in her face out of disgust… she was so unbothered. Like, mate, can you not? I loved how she remained principled, loving, kind and generous—the cruelty of others made her sharpen her instincts and trust herself more wisely. When she starts dancing and everyone just cackles… it was so relatable. My entire life came crashing down in front of me… all the times I’ve been myself but I’ve been misunderstood, laughed at, gossiped about. Her wickedness is because she refuses to conform. She refuses to be what you want her to be, she just is, she is complete in her fullness, in her sexuality, in her body, in her beauty (whether you appreciate it or not) and in her magic that she will use accordingly. It was the kind of representation I needed. My darkness, all the things I’ve experienced in my life, hasn’t hardened my heart it’s expanded it. That’s magic. To learn how to love despite people’s rage and ugliness, that’s magic! To keep going and to love no matter how many people hurt or betray you? That’s magic.

My literary agent dropped me recently so I’ve been going through another Saturnian moment of humility. I no longer fight or resist what lessons I get, everything is for my own good. I tell myself, like bitter medicine, I drink the black seed oil for my health. I praise Allah, I say thank you.

But not after I fucking whine and cry and feel sorry for myself for a little while and my God did I need to just tell everyone that asked me for the last two weeks, “How are you doing?” Well, I wanted to make it clear: “I am depressed. I am angry. I feel abandoned.” By the world. It wasn’t just the agent, it’s everything — my life, maybe? Sometimes, but less and less, when things are very bad or hard everything feels like it’s crashing down on me. Like every past thing: my mother, my childhood, all my sadness, my darkness. This time it was less like that, and I realized that I bounced back faster, but I still needed to grieve. I’ve been teaching a grief class for the last year — I know all about the grief stages now. So I take my time, I allow myself time. I just needed space to tell people how sad and terrible everything was.

I find that I am my most insufferable to others when I’m like this, so I’ve learned to hide my true darkness. I don’t reveal how depressed I can get, or am, because it’s just like tar to others, maybe it overwhelms them. Maybe it’s too much of a juxtaposition against my happy-go-lucky sensibility that I otherwise have and hold. But I am complex, I hold the multiple. Perhaps this dark part of me is a black hole, it becomes a void others can’t stand.

The fires is Los Angeles came three days before my birthday. By the time I turned 35 this year, LA was in a cloud of smoke. I had birthday reservations at the notorious Horses, I wanted something a bit lavish, and celebratory. I am, after all, a Capricorn Stellium, all in the 7th house… unfortunately, I must find a way to celebrate myself. My depression a lot of the time stems from not being able to truly afford the life I want, which isn’t that egregious, but it’s the life I’ve always felt I deserved. There’s an existential part of me that always chimes in here and asks what do anyone of us truly deserve? But, you feel me? I wanted to feel good. I wanted to eat and drink to my heart’s content. I wanted to be with my friends. I wanted to feel loved. And I did. It was glorious.

But days after that my asthma returned, after twenty years of being relatively dormant (even during the beginning of COVID) and I realized how shamelessly I’d forgotten that we are living through climate catastrophe. So I plummeted into a climate anxiety so deep that it’s been hard to pull myself out. For weeks I’ve just been depressed about the planet, even though I’ve known for years what we’re about to face… it’s just devastating. And the ceasefire? Well, it didn’t seize any fire within me. It just made me realize how discretionary life is to some people and how depraved humanity is to allow such slaughter. I am angry for how little people give a fuck about Palestinians, Congolese, Sudanese people — Black, Indigenous people of this planet, the people of the Global South, I’m incensed by how little people fucking care. And I see this in my community too — and this makes me angry, how little we truly actually give a shit about one another, how rarely we show up for each other, and how much we want in return for small acts of generosity.

I see others always give like a chess move. Not from their hearts. It’s always counted in some back channel. The scarcity with which people give astounds me. Especially people who have means! Rich people! People who have much more than the majority of us who can’t even fathom giving and that……………. FUCKING ENRAGES ME these days. And so I’m a problem lol. I feel like I’ve isolated so many friendships because everyone wants to make money and just do things that I find are morally compromising. Why am I so annoying I ask myself? Why am I so righteous? Why do I care so much? Maybe because this is my blood. I’m fulfilling what my ancestors did.

My paternal grandfather, Abdul Haque, was the son of a wealthy Bengali landowner. During his twenties, soon after getting his barrister degree, he became a Socialist and in the space of his life (he lived till he was 77) he abandoned and gave away all of his familial land. It’s something I found out about after his death, and something that was told me to me in frustration, not admiration. As I’ve gotten older, I have sometimes felt that way, frustrated that the life I want has to come from myself, the security I crave—monetarily or otherwise, has to come from me. I wasn’t just born into wealth or a particular kind of privilege that would allow me space to be a working artist, at the same time, I remember that this is my blood, actually. That Abdul wanted equality more than he wanted wealth or things for himself. He has affected all facets of my (and my family’s) life though I only met him a handful of times. He has affected how I give. I give because he gave first. I give because he showed me the way, he showed me it was safe to give everything you have and to know that what you have is enough.

Abdul was a humble man. I knew him to be a man who took long walks, who loved mishti and picked up flowers. I think about what it takes to forgo the life and wealth you were accustomed to and give that way, knowing that Allah will protect you. That you have nothing to want for but dhal bhat. He was a man of simple pleasures.

I like nice things which annoys me. I like nice things and that’s why I have no savings. As I was confronted by the reality that the fires might take everything in my home in Los Angeles, as any of the fires could have and any future fire might, I also realized… I wouldn’t have much that I could save if my home were to go up in flames. This feeling was followed by the impermanence of being and the fraught reality of being alive during this time. The current negotiation of life: Is this worth it? If not, then what is?

I can’t seem to find where I got this from.

I watched I’m Still Here a few weeks ago and felt winded in ways that Walter Salles has made me feel before; The Motorcycle Diaries, the film about the young Che Guevara (starring the imitable Gael Garcia Bernal) traveling across South America, the journey that would eventually radicalize him, was one of my favorite films of my teens. I’m Still Here is about Eunice Paiva, a mother coping with the forced disappearance of her husband, Rubens Paiva, during the military dictatorship in Brazil. Given what’s happening right now with the murder of journalists and writers in Gaza, the forced disappearances that happen under occupation every day, the reality felt ripe and heavy. Another way to show that engaging with fascism must happen head-on.

Writing in code isn’t always bad. More of us have to learn the enemy language but then we have to learn not to turn it on one another. I’m tired of the left eating itself. Recently I was telling my friend H that the problem with Marx is that he’s not easy to understand, which makes it harder for the masses to absorb him. We agreed that Lenin is more readable. If we want the people to rise up and demand more we must talk to them and give them what will move them. That isn’t always a didactic compendium, sometimes… and hear me out… it’s beauty and love and tenderness that move us? Shouldn’t the beauty of the world be enough to jolt people into protecting it? I want to make art that will reach the people, that will move them. This reminds me of what Todi Cade Bambara once said about making the revolution irresistible.

I also watched The Soundtrack of the Coup d’etat by Johan Grimonprez recently and well… it made me realize why art is one of the most powerful forms of education and communication.

How do I even do justice to this film? How do I even do justice to the subject of the film? The film is about Patrice Lumumba, the first elected Congolese leader who was assassinated by the United States and Belgian governments, in coordination with the United Nations. The film shows that the fucking dick wipe Dag Hammarskjöld (may he forever live in unrest) the former “Secretary General” of the UN didn’t protect Lumumba… and basically allowed his assassination and the rage I felt IN MY CHEST as I watched the last third of the film despite knowing exactly what was going to happen. It’s so pertinent to the times and what’s happening in the Congo right now that it almost feels like mandatory watching.

We should all care so much about Congo.

My father, who is also a Lumumbist, told me only a few months ago about the way Lumumba was murdered and though the film doesn’t go into detail you can understand how much Western governments loathed this man. Why? Because he wanted to make sure that the Congolese people would have access to their resources, he wanted to take his people out of the devastating and demonic ways that the Belgians had enslaved them, on their land, in servitude to the colonizer for perpetuity. Whiteness is a sick game. How are everyday people not completely at arms with their governments… this is what the West is built on. This extraction. This legalized murder. This legalized torture.

Do you condemn this? Do you oppose this? Be fucking for real.

Last year, when I was in Paris, I went to the Centre Pompidou and saw the Surrealism exhibit with my friends Clémence and Guillaume. I was moved by the works of Max Richter, Salvador Dali, the Algerian artist Baya and André Breton to name a few. All of these artists, in one way or another, resisted. It reminded me that art has always been a function to speak back, to speak out, to spit in the face of authority.

That’s the work we are being called to do right now. There’s a legacy here, let’s remember that when things get ugly outside we must make art that helps us move toward where we need to go. I need less lamentations and more imagination about the beautiful bounty of our Earth. We can’t liberate ourselves if we can’t liberate this Earth. Our liberation is tied to the liberation of land and water. It’s true liberation from capitalism. True liberation from greed. This is deeply entwined with both a free Congo and a free Palestine.

+

The revolution is going to happen with more sacrifice, but daily sacrifice. More space for friends, for your community, for your comrades, and more generosity in general.

Give more of your time, your energy, your resources. Push yourself to new boundaries. Learn skills that you can share with your community. Feed people, feed your friends. If you have money to give, give it to your local communities, do rent strike work or get to know the houseless folks that live around you. I’ve joined a mutual aid group and every month we choose a bunch of GoFundMes we want to donate to. I have less money than I’ve had in a while but I always buy my friends art. I always try to support the work of people and artists I admire. I become a paid subscriber to newsletters as often as I can, and I buy zines, books and all kinds of things to support comrades and orgs I trust. It’s hard out here. We need each other. What is revolutionary is how you live your life. Stop pontificating and just do good. Be good. Commit harder to the people around you. Stop lying, stop making excuses, stop talking shit. Just be a good person. It’s not hard.

And maybe that’s just it, maybe more people need to hear this: It’s rewarding to be kind. I have lost a lot to others but I’ve gained so much more. I have a full life despite living in these horrible times. I have my principles, I have my integrity.

That’s the lesson here. Elphaba doesn’t give a shit, she’s gonna fight fascists and stunt while wearing an ugly sorting hat! She can fly bitch, what can you do? Eunice Paiva was brave in the face of literal fascists killing her husband, even after she knew what happened to him, she became a professor and an Indigenous Rights defender. She sublimated her grief into working harder for others. Patrice Lumumba knew he was aggravating the West but he believed in the power of Pan-Africanism, the power of a Free Congo, and the power of the United States of Africa. It’s why he fought to his literal death for it. I salute him. It’s why Refaat Alareer stayed in Gaza, he stayed in his home, even knowing the Zionists would murder him. That’s not just courage—that’s purpose. That’s humanity.

May more of us have purpose. May many more of us be imbued with more humanity.

I always think of this, Fred Hampton was assassinated at 21, the rainbow coalition, unity, has always been more frightening to the oppressor than anything else because when we are unified… well, that’s when we can win.

We need each other. Never forget that. Make art that keeps that in mind. Make art that protects everybody. Make art that fights for a better world. We need you.

---

Hello, if you have been reading this newsletter for a few months I humbly ask you to consider becoming a paid subscriber. Currently, if you live in the Global North, my paid subscription is less than a latte with oat milk, it’s the price of a bundle of fruit (maybe tangerines and some apples) and probably closer to or comparable to most return tickets on your average public transport.

Becoming a paid subscriber allows me to write slowly and organize for free. It ensures me the capacity to take care of myself.

If you’d like more ways to support my work please consider buying any of my five published books: Survival Takes a Wild Imagination, Who Is Wellness For?, How To Cure A Ghost, Like A Bird or Being In Your Body.

Thank you, your support is everything.