Riz Ahmed

 

Being in the -albeit virtual- presence of Riz Ahmed was unexpectedly heavy.

As someone who can easily be reduced to Muslim, Iraqi, Arab, Female, Bourgeois, labels are and have always been a straitjacket. Of course, I have had moments of luck because of them. I am still convinced that one of the reasons that I have been admitted to this university is because I was -and continue to be- the token Iraqi student.

Riz comfortingly told us, “The place that is the hardest for you to be is exactly the place you need to be.” Ironically, this advice was not very comforting. For some of us, all places are hard places to be. If not because of the ways in which you identify yourself, then for the ways in which others identify you. Where to begin the process of decolonization then? To this, Riz suggested that the best intervention we can make is the one in which only we can contribute. Where do all my subjectivities, which at times can be so imprisoning, provide something new? And, once liberated into a public sphere, what value do they hold, if at all?

Riz has absolutely no idea the impact he has had on me. I have seen celebrities in the flesh before, but Riz is not a celebrity. He could be my refugee cousin; he could be my orphaned cousin. And, he’s bringing those voices out. His lyrics are about my mother, they’re about my father, and those before them.

“Terminal 1, Terminal 5, think we’re termites, gonna terminate us”. I joke about having been stopped at 86% percents of the airports I ever visit. Riz captures the humour in these situations, and produces art. Recognizing the potential of beauty in those violent moments of inspection and interrogation is a gift to so many of us who are unable to speak our stories or find any humour in them.

Moreover, in the Swet Shop Boyz’ T5 song, they use instruments that are very popular in the Levantine region. In that sense, the duo create transnational alliances through music. Thus, as an audience member, I am not only passionate about their music, because their messages resonate with me. Instead, I am passionate about their music for its efforts at producing transnational associations. In addition, such a fusion of Levantine beats and Muslim Pakistani-Indian narratives allows audiences from different parts of the region to find more commonalities and opportunities for collaboration.

This transnational spirit does not end with T5. In their song, Zayn Malik, Riz raps, “Ba man ghaveh mikhori?” (Will you have coffee with me? in Persian) Again, we see the fusion of other languages in the region. No longer is it a diasporic artist only referencing their country of origin, but an artist that is truly trying to embody and weave together various aspects of the region together. Offering an opening, such inspired intersectional art production, propels me to look for Iranian rap artists or Levantine dabke music, rather than just push me towards mainstream Anglosaxon artwork.

In that sense, Riz embodies though his artwork and his responses an identity of multiplicities that is inspired and that inspires those from a spectrum of backgrounds, and one that is different from his own- such as myself. Of course, now we must ask: Can the privileged Anglosaxon find themselves in Riz’s music? Perhaps not, but this is a question for another blogpost.

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Tears streaming down my cheeks, all I could think as we cut our Skype call is that I want to go to bed exhausted and drained every night until I can find my own decolonization paths for  myself and others around me, all the while creating community and having fun.