There was an eerie, yet familiar feeling to handful of days before and after the presidential election. As the warm weather and autumn foliage lingered on a little longer than usual, I spent my free time walking and photographing. My thoughts kept returning to a seemingly surreal reality. A reality where people with radical mindsets had been encouraged by a rhetoric of bigotry, ignorance, and fear-mongering. It was as if I returned to an uncertain future and couldn’t comprehend how or why.
With the post-election reports of harassment and intimidation around the country, I couldn’t help but think about my own experiences after 9/11 and the basis of Tasveer, my graduate thesis project. Tasveer is from my perspective as an American, Muslim, and artist. It is an examination of the awkward reality of having a nationality, religion, and profession all somehow contradict one another.
Rather than focusing on the expected frustrations of airport background checks and security lines, one of the underlying concepts of Tasveer was how I was affected by random acts of ignorance; those unexpected sucker punches that hurt the most.
Like that one time in high school, when a girl I had known most of my life proclaimed that my college major would be “suicide bombing.” Or waking up to this message that I received over the summer:
I rarely engage with people that do or say things like this, as I am not outwardly confrontational. Instead, I often recreate hypothetical scenarios for expressing my anger. In reality though, it’s just not my personality. I don’t find arguing with ignorance to be productive, since it generally leads to dead-end conversations.
While these are the same streets I see everyday, the atmosphere just felt different. I saw images of frustration, aggression, cynicism, confusion, power and pain. My own state of mind overlapped with my vision and understandings of my surroundings.
I thought about the current young people that will have to deal with this new wave of ignorance. I thought about people like me that internalize these experiences, and don’t often share how it affects them. I thought about all the incidents that are never reported and simply shrugged off.
I thought about how these incidents force me to build up my own barriers and judgements of others, as a defense mechanism. I thought about how cycles of hate are created, and how sad it is that we seem to be moving backwards, rather than forward.
The photographs below serve as this stream of consciousness, in an attempt to articulate something that is hard for me to fully flesh out into words:
The title of this post is inspired by the song “Movin Backwards” by A Tribe Called Quest. It is from an album that has been on repeat quite a bit lately.