This has been such a grey time. An oily blur of emotions, hardships, cycles of disbelief. I’ve been under a crushing wave, trying to not feel. Trying to be stone.
I’m now in a middle place: not numb, not enraged, just tender.
The Sun
My son is about to celebrate his first year on earth
I am shepherding a new life as I steer toward a new paradigm.
My family went into lockdown on Friday the 13th of March. In these two and a half weeks I’ve reached the conclusion that no matter how grumpy I get, the sun won’t stop shining. Sounds funny, but I’ve caught myself on a number of occasions grumbling about the sunny clear skies. Why won’t my surroundings mirror and comfort me exactly as I need them to? I see the buds bursting on the trees outside — spring flowers aren’t subject to our regulations nor do they bend to our desires.
I’m grateful to have become a mother this year. As a support my son to grow into his fullest self, to explore the world and make room for him to do so safely (who knew everything in my living room was a hazard to a small life?) I am pulled back from the thoughts of terror and uncertainty to the concrete and real. To watch him, all joy and pulsing life, I am witness to the cyclical nature of everything. Beginning, Middle, and End. The earth won’t stop turning toward the sun no matter how much we exert ourselves and create worlds that defy nature. My son won’t stop growing and dreaming because he can’t play outdoors.
During the huge shifts we are undergoing each one of us will inevitably face our inner voice - both the unconscious, unhealthy patterns of thought as well as the higher self.
Which one will you listen to? Which one will you breath life into?
My latest one-woman show and community building project, There is a Portal will continue. I am convening a fabulous pedagogical and community engagement team and in the fall, we will work across 5 freshmen seminar courses at Queens College to create networks of belonging across race/class/gender and across campus. How might a new student see their world and the possibilities it holds if welcomed into their educational journey through participatory storytelling, deep listening, and personal-political explorations of history? I’m eager for the question to unfold.
In 2003 I created a one-woman show to raise awareness and repair the damage that had been wrought in so many lives after 9/11. I’m pasting the text of my artist’s statement below. Just replace COVID 19 with 9/11.
Image by Gazelle Samizay
Whether it’s man-made crisis or natural rhythms, we are offered the opportunity to try again.
To move in a new way in order to create a new story.
We are being pulled through a portal toward the unknown.
We are being shown what is possible if we all move together - in the direction of healing and hope.
With love,
Kayhan
Passages
Looking Ahead
Around and In: Making New Work, Connecting with the Past
Back on Stage
Celebrating Spring
It's the day after Noruz, Persian New Year, celebrated by people all over West and South Asia and the diaspora. Here in NYC, I finally got my fire going after the blizzard and so many regressive changes since January put a freeze on things.
This is what's making me hopeful and what I'll be working on for the next stretch of time:
Art: Stedroy Cleghorne
The Path Home: multimedia story project bringing out voices of immigrants who got a pathway to citizenship during our nation's first and only legalization program in 1986.
We're creating a public engagement format to use the video in a dynamically structured setting where audience members can enter into a conversation with the stories of the past.
Want to see this come alive? We need support to fully build the model, test it with our community partners, and take it on the road. Contact me if you can help.
Photo: Marisol Diaz at Pepatian's Bronx Artist Showcase
Dialogue. We need it, lots of it. Reach out if there are ways I can help you structure, design, or facilitate community dialogues on pressing issues. Every group, organization, and space can do this. With a little attention and help you can grow beautiful new community connections.
Painting: Aliza Nisenbaum, on exhibit at Whitney Biennial
Myself and a group of Immigrant heritage women are creating a series of home learning circles to build mutual support networks for immigrant and refugee rights. We need help to get this off the ground. If you are interested, we'd love to hear from you.
May warmth and tenderness enter the little spaces inside you and heal what hurts.
May those spaces sprout flowers for the new day.
Back from the White House & Cambridge. Fall in NYC
After the whirlwind of fabulousness in D.C. I joined the team of the Anna Deavere Smith Pipeline Project to support the production of Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education!!
It is an extremely powerful and extraordinarily timely performance. Urgent and inspiring, it depicts the personal accounts of students, parents, teachers and administrators caught in America’s school-to-prison pipeline. Investigating a justice system that pushes minors from poor communities out of the classroom and into incarceration.
Kayhan Goes to the White House
On Wednesday, May 4th the White House is celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Artists and Storytellers who've "used unique channels and diverse platforms to tell powerful stories, increase awareness around key AAPI issues, and encourage diversity and inclusion in all sectors of society."
Guess who's going to D.C. next week?!
Monday, April 18, 2016
On Monday, April 18, while SCOTUS hears oral arguments in the case against immigration action, I'll moderate a discussion celebrating our undocumented heritage -- and launch my new project - Documented cIRCA 86: Immigration Reform Turns Thirty!
Spring Brings New Things
My newest project, Documented cIRCA 86: Immigration Reform Turns Thirty (cIRCA '86) is an oral history and multimedia public engagement project that celebrates the lives and accomplishments of immigrants who were legalized through the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986.
Exhibit Opens Sunday!
School's Out -- Learning is Forever
As spring turns to summer, students and teachers look forward to some free time and head space. I look forward to expanding and deepening my knowledge base. Outside of a formal school structure, we can learn and grow through all types of engagement with the world. My summer plans are all about that kind of life learning.
Since my last post in April, I've been consulting with the NYC Municipal Archives to help them develop educational and community engagement programming. I've been working to dynamize the archives as a space for dialogue, a place to engage, to connect the city with the world, as well as a educational space. I'd love to connect with people re-imagining archive spaces and doing similar work.
Coming up next on July 9, 2015: Resisting Reproductive Coercion -- a discussion on efforts to reform abusive sterilization practices in New York City in the late '70s and the impact of that campaign on the reproductive justice movement then, and now. I invite everyone to come and hear about a little known, but massively important, piece of the struggle for women's rights in NYC. We will also highlight innovative and powerful work happening today. Free and open to all. 5:30pm - 7:30pm.
RSVP to visitorcenter@records.nyc.gov
JULY 9, 2015 5:30pm - 7:30pm.
31 Chambers Street, NYC
RSVP to: visitorcenter@records.nyc.gov
PLEASE HELP ME SPREAD THE WORD
We also are offering a mini-grant for NYC teachers! Get access to exciting primary source documents from the Archives to use in your classroom! Send us an email by June 26th to participate. (see below)
Just so I don't forget that teaching and learning go hand in hand, I am part of two exciting fellowships this summer.
One as facilitator and the other as participant!
I am co-facilitating an Immigrant Women's Leadership Fellowship with The Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs. The brilliant Director of Language Access, Azi Khalili, has started this initiative to forward the U.N.'s Beijing +20 Platform for Women. We have gathered 15 visionary women leaders who will grow their thinking, develop their connections to each other, and build their power to make change on behalf of immigrant women and girls in NYC. I'll keep you posted on what happens, but email me if you have specific questions.
I am participating in the "Innovative Cultural Advocate" fellowship organized by the Caribbean Cultural Center and African Diaspora Institute. We had our introductory session last week and I am excited to engage with issues of equity and true cultural diversity in all levels of decision-making around arts and culture in NYC. We have some great readings and I'm getting to deepen my work around decolonizing culture and imagination.
As always, I want to hear from you. Send feedback, collaboration ideas, your news, anything!
Yes, Father's Day is coming up and that's my dad. He's been my champion my entire life. Thanks dad, I love you!
Falling Into Place
Isn’t that a funny phrase? Given the events in the past few months, I hear this phrase as: Falling. — Into Place. The past few months have felt like a sort of free fall, a shedding of outdated ideas, a rearranging of my life and schedule, and a re-prioritizing of what I want. Things fell away, and I am right where I need to be.
Play Reading and International Artists
Standing on the foundation created by the wonderful readings in London this past December, I am pleased to report that my play, Tree of Seeds, will have a reading in NYC next week!! Please come out to hear it, I’d love to connect with people interested in producing new voices, new stories, and non-traditional formats. Please come out to hear it, I’d love to connect with people interested in producing new voices, new stories, and non-traditional formats.
Bells and Whistles
I barely know it’s Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanza season here in India. After all, being a country where the majority of people are neither Christian nor Jewish the holidays are different. (I previously wrote a little about Diwali which just passed.) But yesterday I took a walk in the paper, wrapping and trimmings market in Bombay and got to see some Christmas fun.
Slow Motion Changes
I’ve come back from Afghanistan about 3 weeks ago, and in another 3 weeks I am heading off to India for 8 months on a Fulbright grant. I’ll be returning to the country of my birth and the adopted homeland of my people. It will be strange to be back in a place that is so familiar but so alien. It’s like meeting a celebrity in person. You recognize her, you’ve seen so often. However being here, face to face, makes you realize that you have no idea who this person is and she knows nothing about you.
How to value difference?
How do I talk about difference without putting a value judgment on it? If one thing is different than another, must one thing be better than the other? How can I value multiple experiences, approaches and perspectives while keeping a sense of self? Must I choose one as better so that I can hold on to something familiar? This project is different than the rest of my work in Afghanistan. I am not working directly with a theater group, I am working with media makers; writers, producers, researchers from Equal Access, Afghanistan. I am training them in methods of participatory storytelling for community engagement and social change
Eid Mubarak – Happy Eid
As I prepare to return to Kabul for a short project with the US Institute for Peace, I wanted to take the time to wish everyone a very happy Eid. May it be filled with closeness, kindness and a renewed hope for human liberation. May the best and brightest parts of your spirit shine. The end of Ramadan (marked by Eid) this year coincides with the Zoroastrian time of prayer and reflection for our dearly departed. The prayers we held at my parent’s home fell one week after the death anniversary of my maternal grandmother. As a girl growing up in India when she did, Dina Arjani was not to be educated past middle school, but her family relented after her insistence.
Note on Notes and Status Updates
I was sitting in a café with a dear friend asking her advice on a community education project I am working on. We’re imagining the question, “What does it mean to be a citizen in the 21st century?” and we’re thinking of how to implement informal “schools” to develop poor people’s critical thinking and leadership skills. (I speak of citizen with a small “c” as in an engaged community member not related to national borders.)