Mariyam's Moodboard by Mariyam Raza Haider

Hamraaz

mariyamrazahaider — 2023-05-26 05:42:34 UTC

If I were trying to make a name for myself, I wouldn’t use this one, and I’d focus more on being loud and clever. But then a part of me would be worried about getting fired or charged with sedition—and who wants to deal with that, especially for poems that may only end up being a rough draft? I’m only partly joking; remember, friends, these are dark times.

Ali Sethi

mariyamrazahaider — 2023-05-26 05:49:21 UTC

Two Hundred Poems Later, the No-Name Poet Tries to Explain

mariyamrazahaider — 2023-05-26 05:53:22 UTC

After the abrogation,
but before Shaheen Bagh–
the Ayodhya verdict was in the news,
we all sensed a deepening dark.
I think we were in Kolkata–
or maybe I have that wrong;
we were celebrating your love–
I wanted to write you a song.
It might have included lovers
holding hands under tube lights– 
maybe dust, or my father’s hair–
I tried, but it didn’t feel right.
My friend, I did not tell you,
but that was the day I decided
to learn how to sing of the dark times,
to banish the censors inside.

Bebaak Movie by Shazia Iqbal

mariyamrazahaider — 2023-05-26 05:57:55 UTC

"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness" - Alejandro Jodorowsky

Salman Toor

mariyamrazahaider — 2023-05-26 06:05:44 UTC

Why the song titles though?
Lightness. The works do have to do with queerness and immigration and race, and I just didn’t want to drown them with heaviness.

Salman Toor in conversation with Chitra Ganesh - Whitney Museum of American Art

mariyamrazahaider — 2023-05-26 06:13:14 UTC

"My work is based on memory, it's figurative and derived from personal fantasies about relationships that define the queer experience, empathy, art history and the perception of difference. It's also about self-love, about having fun, about the art of belonging to a community, while being an outsider, a student of culture, a foreigner, loving but also questioning the idea of American freedom."

...Negotiating family relationships in gendered conservative communities of origin, so these bodies move between recognisable types of people who live in western urban cultures and being unknown strangers from the developing world. Unlike in real life, in painting I like that I can bring these different people together, especially as someone who relates both as a familiar queer boy and a foreign brown man in a post 9/11 world." - Salman Toor

The Pop Song That’s Uniting India and Pakistan

mariyamrazahaider — 2023-05-26 06:14:24 UTC

Sethi began singing Qawwali and ghazals—lyrical poems—in his clear, young voice to impress his parents’ friends. “Song and protest were intertwined for me,” he said. He started to realize that, in a society with so many fault lines—along caste, class, and ideology—folk music made everyone feel welcome and accommodated. Traditional music felt like a safe place to express himself and to explore the dawning awareness of his own queerness.

How did Qawwals go off on mesmerizing riffs, weaving seemingly unplanned patterns of melody and rhythm? And how did they so elegantly address the yearning for an elusive or unreachable beloved—a theme that spoke to him powerfully as a queer person and also as a South Asian migrant in America? And, finally, how could they be so wild and free, which he secretly wanted to be, while remaining rigorous and rule-bound, as society dictated? It was a paradox that he sensed held some kind of key for him.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-pop-song-thats-uniting-india-and-pakistan

Returning home with new freedoms

mariyamrazahaider — 2023-05-26 06:24:23 UTC

I read this short biography of the poet, Tishani Doshi and her last words really left an impact. As she finishes writing about her beginnings as an artist, she notes how far she has come from her beginnings. Interestingly, she is living close to where she was born, but in a home away from her parents. Her words brought a sense of ease, as I sat with them in my parents' home - thinking how much has my freedom changed in this same home since the time I was raised here. I feel more free here than I've felt ever in the past. I like this freedom more than the other kinds of freedoms that this free country offers me.

mariyamrazahaider — 2023-05-26 12:06:33 UTC

Zee Music released a video of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s revolutionary poem Hum Dekhenge from the anti-Muslim film The Kashmir Files, the irony of which was not lost on social media users. Many even called out the producers for "theft". Especially since the film, starring Bollywood actor Anupam Kher, has been termed “the biggest lie of the century” and a work of “historical revisionism” due to its right-wing nature and storyline.