Afghan American Artists and Writers Association (AAAWA) announced today a grant award totaling $10,000 from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) to support the recovery of the nonprofit arts and culture sector. Following New York State’s historic investment for the arts, NYSCA has awarded $90 million since Spring 2022 to a record number of artists and organizations across the state.
AAAWA President Helena Zeweri said, “We are so excited to receive the support of NYSCA to expand our creative programs. This grant will be critical in supporting AAAWA’s operational costs and developing public programming at the crossroads of the arts and advocacy in New York.”
Governor Kathy Hochul said, “As a cultural capital of the world, New York State is strengthened by our expansive coverage of the arts across all 62 counties. This year’s historic commitment to the arts sector will spur our continuing recovery from the pandemic and set the course for a stronger future.”
NYSCA Executive Director Mara Manus said, “We are immensely grateful to Governor Hochul and the Legislature for their unprecedented investment of $240 million to support arts organizations across the state. New York State arts organizations such as the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association are the cornerstone of our vibrant arts economy. As crucial drivers of our health and vitality, we are grateful to the unwavering dedication of arts workers across the state.”
NYSCA Chair Katherine Nicholls said, “On behalf of the entire Council, I congratulate the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association on this grant award. Their creative work provides the benefits of the arts to both their community and all of New York. Arts organizations are essential, leading our tourism economy and fueling sectors such as hospitality, transit, and Main Streets across our state. “
About the New York State Council on the Arts
NYSCA preserves and advances the arts and culture that make New York State an exceptional place to live, work and visit. NYSCA upholds the right of all New Yorkers to experience the vital contributions the arts make to our communities, education, economic development, and quality of life. To support the ongoing recovery of the arts across New York State, NYSCA will award record funding in FY 2023, providing support across the full breadth of the arts.
NYSCA further advances New York’s creative culture by convening leaders in the field and providing organizational and professional development opportunities and informational resources. Created by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1960 and continued with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, NYSCA is an agency that is part of the Executive Branch. For more information on NYSCA, please visit http://www.arts.ny.gov, and follow NYSCA’s Facebook page, Twitter @NYSCArts and Instagram @NYSCouncilontheArts.
We stand in solidarity 80+ allied organizations alongside Afghans For a Better Tomorrow in advocating on behalf of the most vulnerable people in Afghanistan. We signed on to this letter addressed to President Biden and his administration to let him know how strongly we disagree with his disastrous move on Afghanistan’s frozen funds. #UnfreezeAfgFunds
After what has been a tumultuous year for our friends, loved ones, and community, please visit this link to view AAAWA’s 2021 end of year review, and resources for those who are still being impacted by the Afghanistan crisis. We appreciate your ongoing support and solidarity, and we continue to stand in solidarity with the people of Afghanistan.
In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal, the Taliban have taken every major city in Afghanistan as of Sunday, August 15, 2021. This is a death spell for many vulnerable communities. While we feel despair, we also recognize the possibilities for mobilization and solidarity in this current moment. And as we navigate to help our friends and family, we have compiled this resource list with a few action items that we urge you to consider and share widely.
Most urgently, we ask that you and us and all of us contact our representatives to ask that the quotas for refugees from Afghanistan to the US be increased to a level that can meet the demand. Many Americans are also offering their houses as safe havens for the refugees. We will update the list below as the situation changes on the ground and as we find new, accurate information.
Note: This is not an exhaustive or complete list of resources but ones that we at AAAWA are familiar with and rely on. However, these are good starting points and we hope to more intentionally amplify the work of diasporic and Afghanistan-based artists, activists, and writers in the coming months.
CONGRESSIONAL CALLS TO ACTION
Call your representatives using the suggested language compiled by Afghans For a Better Tomorrow and Alexandra Millatmal: bit.ly/call4AFG
The Refugee Processing Center (RPC), operated by the U.S Department of State (DOS) Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, Virginia USA, shares information and forms the for P-2 and SIV programs for Afghans: https://www.wrapsnet.org/
Hanifi, Shah Mahmoud. 2021. “Quandaries of the Afghan Nation.” In Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands. Crews, Robert and Shahzad Bashir, eds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
BOOKS:
Manchanda, Nivi. 2020. Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Osman, Wazhmah. 2020. Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists. Urbana (IL): University of Illinois Press.
Bose, Purnima. 2020. Intervention Narratives: Afghanistan, the United States, and the Global War on Terror. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Crews, Robert. 2015. Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
We at the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association join a number of Asian American and Asian American & Pacific Islander collectives throughout the country in condemning the countless number of violent attacks against Asian Americans over the past few months. Much has been said about the violence, including how it represents a symptom of a broader affliction this country suffers from–white supremacy, misogyny, the exploitation of women’s labor, and toxic masculinity–amplified through a gun-obsessed society.
In this statement, we first express our solidarity with the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. We also want to offer new dimensions to the conversation on anti-Asian violence that need to be more explicitly spotlighted. First, these attacks should not be read as ‘senseless’ violence as we have seen some news headlines depict them. They are very much rooted in racialized, misogynist, and capitalist logics of domination. By calling them ‘senseless’ we treat the perpetrators as those who do not live in a larger culture that glorifies violence against minorities through the usage of weapons and physical domination. Second, the violence against Asian Americans, especially the March shootings in Atlanta, cannot be disentangled from the history this country has of treating Asian women specifically as sexual commodities, which is tied to deeper histories of US imperialism in Asia and decades of representing Asian women as subjects that can and should be dominated within Western colonial sexual fantasies. Third, in emphasizing this and other attacks as only symptoms of white supremacy, we inadvertently ignore how white supremacy itself is a system of domination that inherently relies on racism, misogyny and capitalism to thrive. If we are to stand in true solidarity with Asian Americans, we need to also dismantle these systems as they all work together simultaneously to erode and in this case, literally destroy, the lives of BIPOC communities everyday.
We at AAAWA commit to continuing our educational and awareness-raising efforts around both the structural harms that we, the AAPI, and BIPOC communities at large confront through our public-facing programming in the months to come. We also, however, are committed, through art, writing, and scholarship to show the full and complex humanities of our communities, the full breadth of their lived experiences, so that we can continue to rehumanize those who have been denied their full humanity.
We have also enclosed a list of organizations that are actively working to promote the wellbeing of AAPI communities throughout the United States (see below).
We are so excited to co-sponsor these upcoming Nowruz events with Project Hajra! Please save the dates for our Nowruz program Thursday, March 18th from 4-5PM EST and Friday, March 19th 4-5:30PM EST.
✨To RSVP, please email projecthajra@gmail.com. Project Hajra will be sending the link several hours before the events.
Here is some more information about the program, so that you may prepare in a way that makes the best sense for you:
For Thursday: Please bring paper, pen, or anything that you’d like to use to either journal or draw.
For Friday: We are having a hunt for common nowruz items and all ages are welcome to play! Here are some items if you want to prepare for this hunt! This is a time to really be creative in finding the items that work for you! 🙂
Here is the information about the hunt:
The Haft Sin is a sofreh or table setting of symbolic items that we arrange in celebration of Nowruz. It is called Haft (7) Sin (for letter “س”) because it meant to have 7 special items that all begin with the Persian letter Sin. Each item has a symbolic meaning.
Items that start with Persian letter “س”:
Sabzeh (سبزه): [greens grown like sprouts] the symbol of rebirth and growth.
Samanu (سمنو): [Sweet Pudding] the symbol of power and strength.
Senjed (سنجد): [Persian olive] the symbol of love.
Somāq (سماق): [Spice] the symbol of sunrise.
Serkeh (سرکه): [vinegar] the symbol of patience.
Seeb (سیب): [Apple] the symbol of beauty.
Seer (سیر): [Garlic] the symbol of health and medicine.
Other items that start with Persian letter “س” and can be included:
Sonbol (سنبل): [Hyacinth flower] the symbol of spring’s arrival.
Sekkeh (سکه): [Gold coins] the symbol of wealth and prosperity.
Saat (ساعت): [Clock] the symbol of time.
Items that don’t start with “س” and can be included:
eggs (تخممرغ رنگی): the symbol of fertility.
mirror (آینه): the symbol of self-reflection.
candle (شمع): the symbol of enlightenment.
goldfish (ماهی قرمز): the symbol of life.
book (کتاب): the symbol of wisdom.
Additional accessibility notes from Project Hajra:
— We will be speaking in several different languages and will do our best to have consecutive interpretation, this is also an invitation to share in the language that makes the most sense for your heart! — Because of the multilingual space, we will not have transcriptions, but will have the scripted parts of our program up on slides and also in the chat. Our team went back and forth on how to be the best accessible that we can considering needs of multilingual space, this is what we settled on. — This is a cultural program, not a religious program, and all are welcome.
About Project Hajra
Project Hajra is a membership based, peer supported, and transformative justice initiative working out of our local AMEMSA (Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South/Central Asian) community in Queens, NYC. We began in 2011 in partnership with CONNECT-NYC to develop gender justice organizing programs by and for us.
March 2021-July 2021 Application Deadline: February 28, 2021
Join the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association (AAAWA) for a series of free monthly writing workshops in Spring/Summer 2021! Workshops will be taught by teaching artists from the Afghan diaspora.
The Project comes off the heels of AAAWA’s “Fragmented Futures: Afghanistan 100 Years Later” multimedia exhibit, which used Afghanistan’s centennial as a guiding theme to explore the ongoing consequences of foreign intervention and ran from 2019-2020 at the ReflectSpace Gallery in Glendale, CA.
Rooted in an anti-racist decolonial politics, the Afghan Literary Futures Project is designed to cultivate a unique literary space for Afghan Americans to study, create, and workshop Afghan diasporic writing in community. Over the course of the 5 months, we’ll poll participants on types of support they would like for their writing (i.e., publishing, zine-making, etc.). Each participant has the opportunity to grow in a group of 14 other emerging writers in a long-term creative community and meet with potential editors and mentors. While the workshops will be conducted primarily in English, we encourage multilingual expression. Prompts can be translated and workshop participants are encouraged to write in whichever language they choose and/or are most comfortable expressing in.
We encourage you to bring your whole self: there are no extensive writing or reading requirements.
WORKSHOP DATES There will be five workshops on the following dates from 2-4pm Eastern Time: March 28th, April 25th, May 30th, June 27th, July 31st. Please keep in mind that all events will be held remotely over Zoom, in Eastern Standard Time.
ELIGIBILITY The Project is open to emerging writers from across the Afghan diaspora, both inside and outside of the United States. All ethnicities, religions/spiritualities, and genders from within the Afghan diaspora are welcome.
Applicants will be notified on their application status in mid-March.
DEADLINE TO APPLY Sunday, February 28, 2021 at 11:59 pm EST
Thank you again for all who could join us on Friday, October 30, 2020 for Reimagining Queer Futures: Afghans and Art in the Diaspora. Below you will find some additional resources (including a zine) to support Queer Afghan American experiences:
Coming Out Muslim: Radical Acts of Love, a storytelling performance featuring Wazina Zondon and Terna Tilley-Gyado
On October 30, 2020, the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association (AAAWA) was proud to present Reimagining Queer Futures: Afghans and Art in the Diaspora, a virtual panel discussion featuring activists, writers, and artists on how creativity and the arts are being mobilized by the LGBTQ Afghan diaspora as a form of resistance and community-building.
Introductory Remarks:
Welcome everyone to today’s conversation, “Reimagining Queer Futures: Afghans and Art in the Diaspora,” hosted by the Afghan American Artists’ and Writers’ Association. My name is Helena Zeweri and I am a co-founding member of AAAWA. I’m currently an Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of Virginia and am very thankful to be able to offer some introductory remarks for what I’m sure will be an enriching discussion.
Thank you for taking the time to be here with us. Our conversation today is meant to address a topic that touches so many in the diaspora, but that has not been given enough attention, or at least thoughtful attention. As writer Arundhati Roy has noted, “there’s really no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.” At AAAWA, we are committed to foregrounding the experiences of the marginalized within our diaspora, those voices who have been silenced or rendered invisible both by our communities but also by the society we live in – in the United States. Our panel today, though, is not just about recognizing the difficulty of being queer in the Afghan diaspora , but also what it would mean to think about LGBTQ life as the starting point for generative and liberatory possibilities. Our panelists this afternoon are artists, writers, performers, activists, and scholars who are all undertaking creative projects not only for art’s sake, but also in order to imagine radically new futures for Afghans and the broader communities and environments in which they live.
Before we get this conversation under way, I want to situate where we are in time and space. I want to acknowledge that we are all zooming in from different places. For most of us, the places where we stand is on Indigenous land, and is most likely unceded territory. I would like to recognize the land upon which I am speaking today. I acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional custodians of the land of what is today known as Charlottesville, Virginia–the Monacan people, and pay my respect to their elders past and present. I trust and hope you will join me in doing your own silent acknowledgment yourself. Participating in this event from Charlottesville, I am reminded of the events of 2017, when white supremacists violently marched through the town chanting racist and xenophobic slogans. And I am reminded that while this was three years ago, so little seems to have changed on a national level since then–in fact, it seems that we are living in a time where multiple crises have come to a head–from public health, to climate change, to racial injustice, to homophobia and transphobia, to anti-immigrant xenophobia and everything in between. We are just four days away from what is one of if not the most important election in US history. At the same time, we are also reaching tail end of LGBTQ Pride Month. And as difficult as it is, we at AAAWA felt that it is exactly in this moment that creative and innovative thinking is needed the most. That is where queer futures comes in to play–it is within LGBTQ-run artistic, academic, and creative collectives and spaces that some of the most exciting and critical thinking is happening today. Our panelists are creators, artists, and performers who push the envelope through their work, but they have also been thinking about and more importantly, practicing, the kinds of liberatory possibilities that we need the benefit of in this moment. In short, our panelists exemplify the kinds of thinking and creativity that we need in this moment. This conversation, then, is about refusing the forces that silence queer voices and lives and what role artistic and creative expression can be in that discussion. At AAAWA are committed to elevating the Afghan diaspora, who embody intersectional identities. Our membership is constituted by those who are often at the crosshairs of anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, and queerphobic state policies and rhetoric, but who are also constantly resisting and refusing such regimes of hate, sometimes just by being collectively visible in public spaces. In this vein, the conversation today is also about how the arts has the potential to create more interdependent, equitable, and ethical ways of being in the world.
In the spirit of equity and inclusivity, then, we have decided to insert a blank panelist box. This box signifies a silent anonymous panelist to pay respect to queer and trans Afghans in both Afghanistan and the diaspora who cannot join us for reasons of safety and threats to their wellbeing. This box is a way to acknowledge their existence and humanity, and that we hold this space with them.
Panelist Bios:
Ahmad Qais Munhazim is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Troubling borders of academia, activism and art, Munhazim’s work focuses on everyday lived experiences of political violence and migration in the lives of queer and trans individuals. Munhazim, born and raised in Afghanistan and exiled currently in Philadelphia, identifies as genderqueer, Muslim and displaced. They hold a PhD in political science from the University of Minnesota and are the co-founder of Minnesota Caravan of Love, a queer and trans Muslim led community organizing group in the Twin Cities. (they/them)
Born in Western Australia to Afghan refugees, Bobuq Sayed is a freelance writer, artist and, formerly, an editor of Un Magazine and Archer Magazine. They have received fellowships and residencies from the Wheeler Centre, Firstdraft Gallery, Punctum, Kundiman, and VONA, and their work has been published and performed widely. Currently, Bobuq is a Michener fellow at the University of Miami’s MFA program where they are working on a novel. (they/them)
An Afghan raised in New York City, Wazina‘s storycollecting and storytelling work centers culture, collective memories and tradition. As an informal and undisciplined performer, Wazina is the co-writer and co-performer of Coming Out Muslim: Radical Acts of Love, a personal storytelling performance capturing the experience of being queer and Muslim alongside her creative counterpart and sister in spirituality, Terna Tilley-Gyado.
Wazina is a sexuality educator & trainer who focuses on intersectional identities, often speaking to issues related to Islam & sexuality. (they/she)
Moderator Bios:
Seelai Karzai is a poet, cultural organizer, and chocolate enthusiast from Queens, New York. She is a member of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association (AAAWA) and is a 2019 Poetry Foundation Incubator fellow, an initiative organized by the Poetry Foundation and Crescendo Literary for poets who engage with and serve their community through their creative practice. Seelai’s writing has appeared in Newtown Literary Journal and is forthcoming in an anthology of contemporary writing by Muslims from Red Hen Press. She is currently an MFA student at the University of Oregon. (she/her)
Wazhmah Osman is a writer, filmmaker, and activist. Currently she is an assistant professor in the Department of Media Studies and Production at Temple University. In her forthcoming book Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists, under contract with Illinois Press’ Geopolitics of Information Series, she analyzes the impact of international funding and cross-border media flows on the national politics of Afghanistan, the region, and beyond. Her critically acclaimed documentary, Postcards from Tora Bora, has screened in film festivals nationally and internationally. (she/her)
