This week, I spent a lot of time sourcing domestic items for my upcoming Close to Home exhibition installation at the Queens Museum (it’s modeled after my Cairo apartment), painting a new series I’m debuting for the show, and meeting with my curator Hitomi, Aaron – the head preparator, and Hayley – the Registrar at the museum. Let me tell you… teamwork makes the dream work! I don’t know how I would have made it to my studio this week if it wasn’t for the Education department at the museum hosting a winter camp for my boys to participate in during their week off at school. If you are a parent, let me know how you manage when the kids are off but you ain’t. That I was able to continue working in the studio this week was a miracle for me, alhumdulilah.
In one of my meetings this week, I shared that a lot of my work and it’s connections read best when you understand the context of my personal story and that I was raised by parents who are converts to Islam and Afro-Caribbean immigrants to the United States. I’ve always been interested in history and archives in particular because they can challenge dominant narratives; and as a Black Muslim woman whose parents are Caribbean immigrants I’m aware of how those narratives marginalize me and my community. As new Muslims, my family didn’t have ingrained Islamic traditions that we practiced because we were learning them through our rituals, observing others, taking what we thought was beneficial and leaving the rest alone, in order to create a new Black Muslim culture from our everyday expressions at home and in our communities.
As Caribbean immigrants, we were holding onto traditions and preserving them in our food, stories, music, dance, and even our attitudes towards life. This duality – creating new traditions, and preserving an old one, taught me that we have a choice in what we bring forth from the past and that what we do now is going to set the framework for what our future generations will think and do. We are responsible for creating our own legacy together. The books that you might want read about us and my community to gain deeper insights into Black American Muslims are being written right now and in the near future inshaAllah. The Black Islam syllabus chronicles many of the resources available and I encourage you to dig into it. My work as an artist is part of the vital effort to uncover and write our own story.
There is a difference when someone chooses to share their story within the context of community. There is safety and care in community, as opposed to spectatorship or investigation. I’m constantly interested in the perspective of the subject – and what we have to say about ourselves. One of my ongoing interests that drew me to the World’s Fair archives is that it was an opportunity for newly decolonized African and Caribbean countries to tell their own stories in their own way. This same interest is what drove me to create As the Veil Turns so my elders could share their stories with me, with others like me, and to speak for ourselves within the context of our community and for others to bear witness as well. You can read my previous blog post about my work with archives.